Luke the Evangelist

• 1. Introduction

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  Luke the Evangelist is credited with 27.5 percent of the New Testament, the largest contribution from any single author. That share is spread across two books, the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles, which scholars treat as one work and call Luke-Acts. Yet the gospel itself never names its writer.

  In the centuries after those books began to circulate, a remarkable biography gathered around the name Luke. He became a physician, a companion of the Apostle Paul, a painter of holy images, a martyr, and a saint claimed by many trades.

  Three questions run through the story. Who was this man, and where did he come from? What evidence ties his name to these books, and how well do they hold up as history? And when scientists tested the bones that churches have venerated as his, what did they find?

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• 2. Companion of Paul

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  Luke's name first turns up in Philemon 24, tucked into a list of greetings from Paul's circle. Colossians 4:14 adds a little more: "Our dear friend Luke, the doctor, and Demas send greetings." The word for doctor comes from a Greek term meaning one who heals. Colossians and 2 Timothy 4:11 are both classed as deutero-Pauline letters, a label for writings whose authorship by Paul is questioned.

  The best clue to his movements is a single small word. If Luke wrote Acts, then the narrator excludes himself from those who witnessed Jesus' ministry. But he keeps saying "we" when describing Paul's missions, which suggests he was present.

  In Acts 16:10 the narrator meets Paul at Troas and crosses with him to Macedonia. He is then left behind for some time in Philippi. Around 52AD he rejoins Paul there, according to Acts 20:6, for the return toward Syria and Jerusalem. He stays at Paul's side on the perilous journey that begins in Acts 27:1 and leads to Italy.

  Rome is where the trail ends. The last chapter of Acts includes the line "And when we came to Rome..." in Acts 28:16. Near the end of Paul's life, 2 Timothy 4:11 reports: "Only Luke is with me." According to some accounts, Luke also had a hand in writing the Epistle to the Hebrews.

  Later writers filled in more. Epiphanius, in his Panarion 51.11, counted Luke among the Seventy Apostles. John Chrysostom thought the unnamed "brother" praised in 2 Corinthians 8:18 was either Luke or Barnabas.

  As for his death, a "fairly early and widespread tradition" says he died at the age of 84 in Boeotia. The author who cites that tradition, Butler in 1991, gives no source for it.

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• 3. A Greek Education

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  Antioch, a Hellenistic city of ancient Syria, is where many scholars place Luke, picturing a physician born into a Greek family. Other scholars and theologians suspect he was a Hellenic Jew instead.

  Colossians 4:11 holds the main clue. Paul names three co-workers and says: "These are the only Jews among my co-workers for the kingdom of God, and they have proved a comfort to me." Luke is named a few verses later, outside that group. Commentators have traditionally concluded that he was a gentile, which would make him the only New Testament writer clearly identifiable as non-Jewish.

  That reading is not the only one. The phrase "of the circumcision" could just as easily separate Christians who strictly kept Jewish ritual from those who did not. Some scholars therefore see Luke as a Hellenized Jew.

  Isaiah 49:6 shows why the question stays open. The theology of Luke-Acts has long been read as a gentile Christian writing for gentiles. But the work stresses the scriptural roots of the mission to gentiles, and that emphasis leads some scholars to think its audience mixed Jewish and gentile Christians.

  The quality of the Greek is less disputed. It marks the author as one of the most highly educated writers in the New Testament. He alludes to or quotes Homer, Aesop, Epimenides, Euripides, Plato, Thucydides and Aratus, which shows he knew the actual texts. Most likely he met them as a boy in the standard Hellenistic school curriculum used for centuries across the eastern Mediterranean.

  One name on that reading list, Thucydides, would later become the yardstick against which Luke himself was measured.

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• 4. The Evidence for Luke

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  Irenaeus, writing around AD 180, ascribed the Gospel of Luke to Luke. So does the Muratorian fragment, a Latin manuscript of the 7th century that is thought to be a copy of a Greek text as old as AD 170. The earliest surviving manuscript of the gospel, Papyrus 75, dates to around AD 200 and also names him. Jerome and Eusebius later reaffirmed the attribution.

  The text itself is more cautious than the tradition. The gospel does not claim to come from an eyewitness. It says instead that it depends on eyewitnesses and on information handed down.

  Ehrman presses on the contrast with Acts. From its sixteenth chapter, the narrator implies he travelled with Paul, and Ehrman concludes that Acts is therefore a forgery. A lack of conclusive evidence about the author's identity has kept the debate alive among both secular and religious scholars.

  Other readers point to what the author does say. In most translations he describes investigating the events he reports. He also writes to a named recipient, Theophilus.

  That claim of investigation is exactly what historians have tested ever since.

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• 5. Luke the Historian

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  Luke 1:1-4 is the preface that tells readers they are holding history, and most scholars place Luke-Acts in the tradition of Greek historiography. Agreement ends there. Some historians regard Luke as highly accurate, while others take a sharper critical view.

  The archaeologist William Mitchell Ramsay was impressed by Luke's accurate descriptions of towns, cities and islands, and by his correct use of official titles. He wrote that "Luke is a historian of the first rank" and that he "should be placed along with the very greatest of historians."

  Edward Musgrave Blaiklock, a professor of classics at Auckland University, went further and compared Luke to Thucydides. "For accuracy of detail, and for evocation of atmosphere, Luke stands, in fact, with Thucydides," he wrote. He added that "It was the spadework of archaeology which first revealed the truth." The New Testament scholar Colin Hemer has also advanced the understanding of how historical and accurate Luke's writings are.

  Luke Timothy Johnson offers a middle position. He argues that Luke's account was "selected and shaped to suit his apologetic interests, not in defiance of but in conformity to ancient standards of historiography." Richard Heard agrees, tracing historical weaknesses to the author's "special objects in writing and to the limitations of his sources of information."

  Modern historians raise a different objection. Post-Enlightenment historians work with methodological naturalism, so a narrative full of angels and demons troubles them as a source. Mark Powell goes further: "it is doubtful whether the writing of history was ever Luke's intent. Luke wrote to proclaim, to persuade, and to interpret."

  Robert M. Grant points to statistical improbabilities, such as the sizable crowd Peter addresses in Acts 4:4. He also notes that Luke has Gamaliel mention Theudas and Judas in the wrong order. By his account Theudas rebelled about a decade after Gamaliel spoke, though others hotly dispute that this is an error.

  Brent Landau asks how a gospel can be believable about minor events yet implausible about a major one. He suggests Luke set the birth of Jesus against an imagined act of worldwide domination by a Roman emperor who was himself called "savior" and "son of God." For an ancient historian in the footsteps of Thucydides, Landau writes, that procedure would have been perfectly acceptable.

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• 6. Luke in Art

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  Ezekiel 1:10 and Revelation 4:7 both mention an ox, and that creature became Luke's emblem. Paintings, evangelist portraits and church mosaics often show him with an ox, usually winged. Sometimes only the animal appears, especially in groupings of all four evangelists. One explanation reads: "St Luke is suggested by the ox, a sacrificial animal, because his Gospel stresses the sacrificial nature of Christ's ministry and opens with Zechariah performing his priestly duties."

  From the 8th century, Christian tradition also names Luke as the first icon painter. He is said to have painted the Virgin Mary and Child, above all the Hodegetria image in Constantinople, which is now lost. Tradition also credits him with portraits of Saints Peter and Paul, and with illustrating a gospel book with a full cycle of miniatures.

  From the 11th century, several surviving paintings were venerated as his own work. They include the Black Madonna of Czestochowa, Our Lady of Vladimir and Madonna del Rosario.

  Painters took the claim to heart. The late medieval Guilds of Saint Luke gathered and protected artists in many European cities, especially in Flanders. The Academy of Saint Luke in Rome was imitated in other European cities during the 16th century. The tradition is common in Eastern Orthodoxy, and the Saint Thomas Christians of India say they still hold one of the icons Luke painted, brought to India by Saint Thomas.

  The art critic A. I. Uspensky has a blunt response. He writes that the icons attributed to Luke's brush have a fully Byzantine character that was established only in the 5th-6th centuries.

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• 7. Saint and Martyr

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  Paopi 22 is the day on which the Coptic Orthodox Church commemorates Luke's martyrdom. Tradition says he was hanged from an olive tree, though some believe he died otherwise. The Eastern Orthodox Church honors him as a hieromartyr, meaning a martyr who was also clergy.

  The 18th of October is his feast day in the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of England. Eastern Orthodox churches keep the same date by the Gregorian calendar and the 31st of October by the Julian calendar.

  Major denominations venerate him as Saint Luke the Evangelist. He is patron saint of artists, physicians, bachelors, notaries, butchers and brewers, among others.

  The Eastern Orthodox calendar gives him more days than any other church. The 4th of January is the Synaxis of the Seventy Apostles. On the 22nd of April, and again on the 10th of September, he is grouped with Nathanael, Clement and Apelles of Heraklion. Greek sources add a twist: they say the Saint Luke, or Loukias, in that feast was someone other than the Evangelist.

  Two moveable feasts honor him with local saints. The Synaxis of All Saints of Achaia falls on the Sunday before the 30th of November. The Synaxis of All Saints of Boeotia falls on the last Saturday of May.

  The 20th of June marks a different event. Relics of Luke, Andrew and Thomas, found around 960, were carried into the Church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople under Emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus, led by Patriarch Polyeuctus.

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• 8. The Bones of Luke

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  Nikephoros Kallistos Xanthopoulos, a Greek historian of the 14th century, placed Luke's tomb in Thebes. He and others held that the relics were moved to Constantinople in the year 357.

  The later journey of the relics is told as a tale of purchase and dowry. Despot George of Serbia purportedly bought them from the Ottoman sultan Murad II for 30,000 gold coins. After the Ottoman conquest of Bosnia, the kingdom's last queen, Mary, George's granddaughter, sold them to the Venetian Republic. She had brought them from Serbia as her dowry.

  In 1992 the Greek Orthodox Metropolitan Ieronymos of Thebes and Livadeia asked Bishop Antonio Mattiazzo of Padua for "a significant fragment of the relics of St. Luke to be placed on the site where the holy tomb of the Evangelist is located and venerated today." Ieronymos later became Archbishop Ieronymos II of Athens and All Greece.

  The request set off a scientific investigation in Padua. It combined archaeological analysis of the tomb in Thebes and the reliquary in Padua, anatomical study of the remains, carbon-14 dating, and a comparison with the purported skull in Prague. The results pointed to an individual of Syrian descent who died between AD 72 and AD 416.

  The Bishop of Padua then gave Ieronymos the rib closest to Luke's heart, to be kept at the tomb in Thebes. Luke's relics are now divided in three places. The body lies in the Abbey of Santa Giustina in Padua, the skull is in St. Vitus Cathedral in Prague, and the rib rests in the Holy Church of Luke the Evangelist in Thebes.

  A genetic comparison used modern samples from Syria and Greece, plus Anatolian samples already in the literature. It rejected the hypothesis that the body belonged to a Greek rather than a Syrian. But an origin in the area of modern Turkey was only insignificantly less likely than a Syrian one. The researchers concluded that the evidence fits a Syrian origin, but also fits a replacement of the body in Constantinople.

  The study's best estimate placed the man near the year 300, though it admitted a large margin of error.

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