Theopedia

Luke

Overview

Luke was the author of both the Gospel of Luke and Acts of the Apostles. Ancient testimony unanimously credits both books to him: a Gentile physician who travelled with Paul for much of his missionary career and remained with him through his Roman imprisonment.1 Unlike Matthew, Peter, or John, Luke was not himself an eyewitness of Jesus’s earthly ministry. He based his account instead on careful investigation among those who were, a method he describes in his own preface.2

Life and Ministry

Luke enters the New Testament narrative by name only three times, each in a list of Paul’s companions near the end of one of Paul’s letters: Paul calls him “the beloved physician” among those greeting the church at Colossae (Col. 4:14), names him as one of the few who remained with him during his final imprisonment (2 Tim. 4:11), and lists him among his “fellow workers” in the letter to Philemon (Philem. 24). From the way Col. 4:14 sets Luke apart from those Paul has just called “the only men of the circumcision,” Barrows infers that Luke was a Gentile rather than a Jew by birth, the only New Testament author of whom this is true.1

The fuller shape of Luke’s ministry with Paul appears in Acts itself, where the narrative periodically shifts from third person into first-person plural, “we,” without ever naming the narrator. The first such shift falls at Acts 16:10, as Paul crosses from Troas into Macedonia, and the “we” sections recur, with interruptions, through the rest of the book, including the final voyage to Rome. Barrows reads this, alongside the letters that place a companion named Luke with Paul at that same stage of his career, as Luke’s own signature within his narrative: he was present for the passages written in the first person, and relied on others’ reports for the rest.1

Ancient tradition, reported by Eusebius and Jerome, held that Luke was by birth a Syrian of Antioch, and a separate strand of the same tradition, also traced to Jerome, that he had first been a proselyte to Judaism before his conversion to Christianity.3 Barrows treats other legendary material about Luke beyond these two traditions as not worth repeating.3

Theological Contribution

Luke describes his own method and purpose in his gospel’s opening address to Theophilus: he did not witness Jesus’s ministry himself, but wrote after having “carefully investigated everything from the beginning” from those “who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word” (Luke 1:1-3), setting out the results “in order” rather than as loose, disconnected reports.4 Kruger argues that this language deliberately echoes the description of apostolic qualification in Acts 1:22 and 6:4, presenting Luke not as an outside investigator piecing together secondhand rumor but as someone who had himself been trained within the apostolic circle he was reporting on.5

Across his Gospel and Acts, Luke develops several theological emphases at length: Jesus’s compassion for social and religious outsiders, the universal scope of salvation reaching beyond Israel to the nations, and the active work of the Holy Spirit in both Jesus’s ministry and the early church’s expansion. Luke’s stated method was to write “in order,” and while his order is not always strict chronological sequence, both of his books are structured as connected, continuous narratives rather than topical collections of sayings and episodes.4

Historical Significance

In the mid-second century, the heretical teacher Marcion circulated his own version of Luke’s gospel, cut down to remove its first two chapters, including Jesus’s genealogy back through Abraham and David, and altered elsewhere to fit Marcion’s rejection of the Old Testament’s God. Barrows calls Marcion’s gospel “a mutilated copy of Luke’s gospel,” not an independent composition.6 The wider response to Marcion’s “false and mutilated canon” pushed the churches of the later second century to define and defend the true apostolic writings more explicitly than before.7 That response presupposes that Luke’s gospel already held a settled, recognized place among those writings.

The early church also connected Luke’s gospel with Paul’s own authority: Kruger reports a tradition preserved by Eusebius “that Paul was actually accustomed to quote from Luke’s gospel,” and argues that 1 Timothy 5:18, which cites a saying found only at Luke 10:7 alongside a citation of Deuteronomy, already treats Luke’s gospel as Scripture on par with the Old Testament within the first century.8 If that reading holds, Luke’s writing was received as authoritative apostolic testimony early, well before the councils and lists that later codified the New Testament canon.

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Elijah Porter Barrows, Companion to the Bible (New York: American Tract Society, 1867), 431-432. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  2. Barrows, 432. ↩

  3. Barrows, 432: “Tradition represents him to have been by birth a Syrian of Antioch (Eusebius, Hist. Eccl., 3. 4; Jerome, Preface to Matt., and elsewhere), and a Jewish proselyte (Jerome, Quest. on Gen., chap. 46); and it adds various other legends which are not worth repeating.” ↩ ↩2

  4. Barrows, 432-433. ↩ ↩2

  5. Michael J. Kruger, The Question of Canon: Challenging the Status Quo in the New Testament Debate (Nottingham: Apollos, 2013), 141, 143. ↩

  6. Barrows, 49: “His gospel, called by the ancients the gospel of Marcion, is admitted to have been a mutilated copy of Luke’s gospel.” ↩

  7. Barrows, 397: “They set themselves at once to define and defend the true apostolic writings as well against Marcion’s false and mutilated canon…” ↩

  8. Michael J. Kruger, Canon Revisited: Establishing the Origins and Authority of the New Testament Books (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2012), chap. 6, “The Corporate Reception of the Canon: The Emergence of a Canonical Core”: “there is a regular connection between Paul and Luke’s Gospel in the writings of the early church fathers. Eusebius even mentions an early tradition that ‘Paul was actually accustomed to quote from Luke’s gospel.’” ↩