Luke

(first century)

   Historian, Missionary and Saint.

   According to Irenaeus and Tertullian, Luke was the author of the Third Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles. He seems to have accompanied St Paul on some of his missionary journeys (since the pronoun used is ‘we’) and, according to the Epistle to the Colossians, he was a physician. According to good Church tradition, he was a Gentile and a member of the Church at Antioch. Later tradition has it that he died unmarried at the age of eighty-four; that he was a painter who painted a portrait of the Virgin Mary and that he was one of the unnamed disciples to whom the risen Jesus appeared on the road to Emmaus. From the internal evidence of Luke and Acts, the author was a careful historian, who wrote in idiomatic Greek and who insisted that the salvation offered in Christ was available to everyone – Gentile as well as Jew, woman as well as man, the outcast as well as the Pharisee. It is from the Third Gospel that we have the stories of the miraculous births of both John the baptist and Jesus, the visit of the shepherds and Jesus’s encounter with the wise men of the Temple at the age of twelve.

   C.K. Barrett, Luke the Historian in Recent Study (1961);

   B.M. Metzger and M.D. Coogan (eds), The Oxford Companion to the Bible (1993).