Luke the Evangelist

Anyone asking who was Luke the Evangelist runs quickly into a familiar problem of ancient biography: the man behind two of the most read books ever written left almost nothing about himself. The New Testament never records his birthplace, his parents, or his education. The earliest external witness, a late second century document known as the Anti-Marcionite Prologue to the Gospel of Luke, states that he was a Syrian from Antioch, a physician by profession, and that he remained unmarried and childless ^[1]. Antioch on the Orontes was then the third largest city of the Roman Empire, a Greek-speaking hub where one of the first mixed communities of Jewish and Gentile Christians took root, so the tradition is at least geographically plausible ^[2].

His name, Loukas in Greek, is probably a short form of a Latin name such as Lucius or Lucanus. Most scholars conclude from the polished Greek of the works attributed to him, and from the way he explains Palestinian customs for outsiders, that he was a Gentile, or possibly a Gentile convert to Judaism, rather than a Jew by birth ^[3]. If that reading is correct, Luke would be the only non-Jewish author represented in the New Testament, a detail that has shaped how readers understand his interest in outsiders, foreigners, and the poor.

The apostle Paul supplies the one contemporary personal note. In the letter to the Colossians he sends greetings from "Luke, the beloved physician" ^[4]. That single phrase became the seed of an entire tradition. In 1882 the scholar William Kirk Hobart argued that the vocabulary of Luke and Acts betrayed specialist medical training, though later research by Henry Cadbury showed the same language was common among educated Greek writers generally, so the medical claim now rests on Paul's remark and early tradition rather than on linguistic proof ^[3].

Luke enters the historical record, if the traditional identification holds, through an odd feature of the Acts of the Apostles: the so-called "we" passages. At several points the narrative shifts without warning from third person to first person plural, beginning at Troas around the year 49 or 50, when Paul crossed from Asia Minor into Macedonia ^[5]. The most natural reading, accepted by writers from Irenaeus of Lyon in the late second century onward, is that the author himself joined Paul's travelling party at those moments ^[1].

Following the "we" sections, Luke sailed with Paul to Philippi, where he may have remained for some years, then rejoined the apostle on his final journey to Jerusalem, travelled with him on the storm-wrecked voyage to Rome described in Acts 27, and stayed through the shipwreck at Malta ^[5]. Paul's letters corroborate the companionship. Besides the greeting in Colossians, the letter to Philemon lists Luke among Paul's fellow workers, and the second letter to Timothy, written in the voice of a prisoner awaiting death, contains the stark sentence "only Luke is with me" ^[4].

Whether or not every detail of this itinerary is recoverable, the portrait that emerges is of a loyal associate who accompanied Paul through imprisonment and hardship rather than a distant admirer. Irenaeus, writing around 180 CE, called Luke "the follower of Paul" and stated plainly that he set down in a book the gospel that Paul preached ^[1]. That statement is the earliest surviving attribution of the third Gospel to Luke by name.

Any account of Luke the Evangelist achievements begins with the two-volume work scholars call Luke-Acts. The Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles are addressed to the same patron, a certain Theophilus, share a common style and vocabulary, and were almost certainly composed by one hand, most likely between about 80 and 90 CE ^[3]. Taken together they run to roughly 27 percent of the New Testament, making their author, whoever he was, the largest single contributor to the Christian scriptures ^[2].

The Gospel opens with a formal Greek preface in which the writer explains his method: he has followed everything closely from the beginning, drawn on eyewitness testimony and earlier written accounts, and set out to compose an orderly narrative ^[5]. That historian's self-presentation is unique among the four Gospels. Luke alone preserves the parables of the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son, the fullest account of the nativity, the story of the shepherds at Bethlehem, and the encounter on the road to Emmaus. His Gospel gives unusual prominence to women, to Samaritans, to tax collectors, and to the poor, and it contains the canticles later woven into Christian worship as the Magnificat, the Benedictus, and the Nunc Dimittis ^[2].

Acts, the second volume, is the only continuous narrative of the church's first three decades that survives from antiquity. It carries the story from the resurrection appearances in Jerusalem to Paul's arrival in Rome around 60 CE, and without it historians would know almost nothing about figures such as Stephen, Philip, or the council of Jerusalem ^[3]. Classical scholars have long noted the accuracy of its incidental details: the archaeologist William Ramsay, who began his fieldwork in Asia Minor expecting to discredit Acts, concluded instead that its author ranked among the trustworthy historians of the ancient world in matters of titles, offices, and local geography ^[6].

Among the standard Luke the Evangelist facts repeated for centuries is that he practiced medicine, and the claim has better early support than most legends about the evangelists. Paul's description of him as a physician dates from within Luke's own lifetime, and Eusebius of Caesarea, writing his church history in the early fourth century, repeats that Luke was by profession a doctor from Antioch ^[7]. Readers have often connected the vocation with the Gospel's texture: its interest in healing stories and its compassion for the sick and marginalized fit comfortably with a medical sensibility, even if they cannot prove one.

The tradition that Luke was also a painter arrived much later. It first appears clearly in the sixth century, and by the Byzantine period it had hardened into the belief that Luke painted the Virgin Mary from life, producing the first Christian icon ^[8]. Several famous images, including the Salus Populi Romani in the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome and the Black Madonna of Częstochowa in Poland, were later attributed to his hand, attributions that art historians reject on dating grounds but that reveal how deeply the legend took hold ^[8].

However unhistorical, the painter tradition had real consequences. During the Middle Ages and Renaissance, guilds of painters across Europe organized themselves under his patronage, most famously the Guilds of Saint Luke in Antwerp, Florence, and the Netherlands, to which artists such as Rogier van der Weyden and Vermeer belonged ^[8]. Rogier's panel of around 1435 to 1440, Saint Luke Drawing the Virgin, now in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, turned the legend itself into one of the defining images of the artist's craft ^[8]. In this indirect way a first century writer became the patron saint of painters, physicians, surgeons, and, in modern times, of artists generally.

After Paul's death in Rome, probably in the mid 60s CE, Luke disappears from contemporary sources, and the story of his final decades depends on traditions of varying age and reliability. The Anti-Marcionite Prologue reports that he served the Lord without distraction, never married, and died at the age of 84 in Boeotia, the central Greek region whose chief city was Thebes, "full of the Holy Spirit" ^[1]. Later Greek tradition fixed the place as Thebes itself and generally held that he died peacefully, though some medieval accounts claimed he was martyred by hanging from an olive tree ^[2].

A tomb venerated as Luke's stood at Thebes from an early date. In 357 CE the emperor Constantius II had relics believed to be the evangelist's transferred from Thebes to the newly built Church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople, one of the first recorded translations of a saint's remains in Christian history ^[7]. Centuries later the body was moved again, reaching Padua in Italy, where a marble sarcophagus in the Basilica of Santa Giustina has held the relics since the Middle Ages, while the skull was taken to Prague by the emperor Charles IV in the fourteenth century ^[9].

In 1998 the Greek Orthodox metropolitan of Thebes asked for a portion of the relics to be returned, prompting a scientific examination of the Padua remains. Radiocarbon and DNA analysis, published in 2001 by a team led by the geneticist Guido Barbujani, found the body belonged to a man who died between roughly 72 and 416 CE and whose genetic profile was more consistent with Syrian than with Greek origin, results compatible with the tradition, though not proof of it ^[10]. A rib from the skeleton was subsequently sent to Thebes and placed beside the ancient empty tomb.

Few ancient writers shaped later imagination as thoroughly as Luke. Christmas as most of the world pictures it, with the census journey to Bethlehem, the manger, and the angels appearing to shepherds, comes almost entirely from the second chapter of his Gospel ^[2]. Phrases he wrote, including "good Samaritan" and "prodigal son", passed into everyday speech far beyond religious contexts. In Christian art he is symbolized by the winged ox or calf, one of the four living creatures of Ezekiel and Revelation, usually explained by the sacrificial themes that open his Gospel ^[2].

The churches honor him as Saint Luke the Evangelist, with a feast day of 18 October in the Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Anglican, and Lutheran calendars ^[2]. He is invoked as patron of physicians and surgeons, of painters and sculptors, and of the cities of Padua and Thebes, and hospitals and medical societies across the world carry his name.

Modern scholarship debates how much of the tradition can bear historical weight. Many critical scholars regard Luke-Acts as the work of an anonymous, well-educated Greek-speaking Christian of the late first century and treat the identification with Paul's physician companion as an early but unverifiable inference; others defend the traditional authorship on the strength of the "we" passages and the unanimous ancient testimony ^[3]. What no serious reader disputes is the achievement itself. Whoever composed any Luke the Evangelist biography must reckon with a writer who preserved much of what the world knows about the beginnings of Christianity, and who did so with a literary skill that Renan once summed up by calling the third Gospel the most beautiful book in existence ^[3].