Book of Luke

The Gospel according to St. Luke, the third of the four Gospels and the longest, is the account its author says he composed after careful investigation, in order, for a single reader named Theophilus; the Church has received it from the earliest witnesses as the work of St. Luke, the physician and traveling companion of St. Paul, who wrote its sequel, the Acts of the Apostles.

For Inquirers

The Gospel of Luke starts by telling you how it was made. Its author says that a number of people have already tried to write down what happened, that he has gone back over everything carefully from the beginning, and that he is now setting it out in order, for a friend named Theophilus, so that his friend can be sure of the things he was taught.[^lk1] It is a little like opening a letter from a doctor, which is what tradition says he was, who wants you to know that he checked his facts. "Gospel" means "good news," and what follows is the good news told as a life: Jesus before His birth, in His childhood, in His teaching and healing, in His death, and on the day He is taken up into heaven.

What makes this telling feel different is how wide and how warm it is. It begins with incense smoke in the Temple and an old priest struck speechless, goes on to a young girl who says yes to an angel and then sings, and passes through shepherds in a field and an old man holding a baby in his arms. Then, in stories found only in this book, Jesus describes a foreigner who stops for a stranger beaten and left by the road, and a father who sees his ruined son far off and runs down the road to meet him; and on the first Easter afternoon two heartbroken travelers walk seven miles beside a man they take for a stranger.[^lk-special] Again and again the people at the center of Luke's stories are shepherds, tax collectors, women, foreigners, the sick, and the lost, which is why readers have long thought of this as the Gospel of the outsider, though some scholars ask who counted as an outsider in the first place.[^jant-intro]

Christians since the second century have said that the man who wrote it was Luke, a companion of the apostle Paul, and that he wrote a second volume, the Acts of the Apostles, to carry the story on.[^mur] Believers and scholars answer some questions about the book differently, such as whether the name Luke is more than a tradition, how Luke gathered his material, when he wrote, and how much of the Gospel is memory and how much is arrangement, and they often agree on more than the arguments make it sound. What does not change from one reading to the next is the shape of the thing. It opens in the Temple with an angel and closes in the Temple with the disciples "continually… praising and blessing God."[^lk24-53]

Overview

Luke is the third of the four Gospels, twenty-four chapters long, and the longest of them. It opens with a single carefully constructed sentence of preface that names its purpose, its method, and its reader (Luke 1.1-4).[^lk1][^ow-gospel]
The text never names its author. The Church's tradition ascribes it to Luke, "the beloved physician" and fellow worker of Paul (Colossians 4.14; Philemon 1.24; 2 Timothy 4.11); the Orthodox Study Bible says that by birth he was a Gentile from Antioch.[^col][^osb-intro]
It is the first volume of a two-volume work. The Acts of the Apostles begins by looking back to "the first book I wrote, Theophilus," and the Gospel's last scene, the Ascension, becomes the first scene of Acts (Acts 1.1-2; Luke 24.50-51; Acts 1.9).[^acts1]
It stands third in the order in which Origen, Augustine, Jerome, St. Athanasius, and the Synod of Laodicea give the Gospels, though the Church's lectionary reads it in a season of its own.[^origen-mt][^aug-hg2][^lists][^lectionary]
Its shape is a preface (1:1–4); the births of John and Jesus, with the songs of Mary, Zechariah, and Simeon (1:5–2:52); the preparation, baptism, genealogy, and temptation (3:1–4:13); the ministry in Galilee beginning at Nazareth (4:14–9:50); the long journey toward Jerusalem that the Jewish Annotated New Testament marks as running from 9:51 and as substantially unique to Luke; and then Jerusalem, the Passion, the Resurrection, and the Ascension (chapters 19–24).[^lk-shape][^jant-intro]
Its central themes, as the Orthodox Study Bible lays them out, are the universality of the gospel ("a light for revelation to the nations," Luke 2.32), prayer, the work of the Holy Spirit, and the Lord's mercy toward sinners; to these the Jewish Annotated New Testament adds Luke's attention to women, the poor, the sick, and Gentiles, and Luke 24.27 gives the book its way of reading Scripture, with the risen Christ opening "all the Scriptures" to His disciples.[^osb-intro][^jant-intro][^behr55]
Among the Gospels it is the one that stops to describe its own making, the only one addressed to a named individual, and, in the Orthodox Study Bible's words, one that "dates biblical events by reference to secular history" (Luke 2.1-2; Luke 3.1). In the Church's tradition of iconography Luke is the ox or calf, the sacrificial and priestly creature of the four, though the sources do not assign the other three creatures alike (the Orthodox Church in America gives Matthew the man and Mark the lion, and Augustine gives them the other way round); in its liturgical memory he is also the iconographer of the Theotokos.[^osb-intro][^oca-gospels][^aug-hg6][^ow-apostle]

Summary

Luke begins in the Jerusalem Temple, where the priest Zacharias is struck dumb by Gabriel's announcement that his aged and barren wife Elizabeth will bear a son who will go before the Lord, and six months later the same angel appears in Nazareth to the virgin Mary, who answers, "Behold, the servant of the Lord; let it be done to me according to your word," then goes in haste to Elizabeth, and breaks into the song the Church calls the Magnificat. John is born and Zacharias, loosed from his silence, prophesies; then, in the days of Caesar Augustus, Jesus is born in Bethlehem and laid in a manger, shepherds are told that a Savior has been born to them, and, on the fortieth day,[^forty] He is carried into the Temple, where Simeon and Anna recognize Him, and Simeon tells Mary that a sword will pierce her own soul. At twelve He is found in the Temple "sitting in the middle of the teachers," and goes home to Nazareth in obedience. After the Baptist's preaching, dated with care to the fifteenth year of Tiberius, Jesus is baptized, tempted, and returns to Galilee in the power of the Spirit, preaches His first sermon at Nazareth from Isaiah's scroll (to the good news of the poor, release for captives, and sight for the blind), and is nearly thrown off the cliff by His own townspeople. He calls fishermen and a tax collector, heals, forgives a sinful woman in the house of Simon the Pharisee, is accompanied by women who support Him from their means, and sends out first the Twelve and then seventy others. At the center of the book, "when the days were near that he should be taken up," He sets His face toward Jerusalem, and along the way the Gospel gathers what only it records: the Samaritan who showed mercy, Martha and Mary, the friend at midnight, the rich fool, the barren fig tree, the lost coin, and the lost son, the unjust steward, the rich man and Lazarus, the ten lepers, the widow and the judge, the Pharisee and the tax collector, and Zacchaeus up his sycamore tree, "for the Son of Man came to seek and to save that which was lost." In Jerusalem He teaches in the Temple, foretells the city's desolation, and keeps the Passover with His disciples, giving them bread and the cup as His body and the new covenant in His blood; in Gethsemane He prays in agony, is betrayed with a kiss, is denied by Peter, who weeps when the Lord turns and looks at him, is sent from Pilate to Herod and back, and is crucified between two criminals, praying "Father, forgive them," promising Paradise to the one who asks to be remembered, and committing His spirit into the Father's hands. On the first day of the week the women find the tomb empty; that same afternoon the risen Lord walks to Emmaus with two disciples, explains Moses and all the prophets to them, and is known in the breaking of the bread; He appears in the upper room, eats broiled fish to show He is no spirit, opens their minds to understand the Scriptures, commands that repentance and forgiveness be preached in His name to all the nations beginning from Jerusalem, and, leading them out as far as Bethany, blesses them and is carried up into heaven, and they return to Jerusalem with great joy.[^lk-summary]

Author, Source, and Intention

Luke is a Gospel that lets the reader watch its author at work. He tells us that he was not among the first witnesses, that he had predecessors, that he checked, that he arranged, and that he had someone in mind as he wrote. Everything the Church has said about the book therefore has two kinds of support: what the earliest Christians reported about who wrote it, and what the preface and the Gospel itself show of its habits and its reader.

Who wrote it

The Gospel itself gives no name, and the New Testament's testimony to Luke comes from Paul's letters. In the greetings at the end of Colossians Paul writes, "Luke the beloved physician and Demas greet you," and in the short letter to Philemon he numbers "Mark, Aristarchus, Demas, and Luke" among his "fellow workers"; in his second letter to Timothy, written from prison with others gone elsewhere, he says simply, "Only Luke is with me" (Colossians 4.14; Philemon 1.24; 2 Timothy 4.11).[^col] St. John Chrysostom, preaching on the Colossians verse, remarks that the word "beloved" is "no small praise… to be beloved of Paul," and on the last verse that Luke "adhered to him inseparably."[^chrys-col12][^chrys-2tim10]

Acts, which opens with the words "The first book I wrote, Theophilus," tells much of its story in the first person plural: "immediately we sought to go out to Macedonia," "We sailed away from Philippi," "When we entered into Rome" (Acts 1.1; Acts 16.10; Acts 20.6; Acts 28.16).[^acts-we]

Eusebius takes the "we" to be Luke's. Luke, "of Antiochian parentage and a physician by profession," he writes, was "especially intimate with Paul and well acquainted with the rest of the apostles," and of the two books he left, the Gospel rests on what eyewitnesses delivered to him, while Acts he "composed not from the accounts of others, but from what he had seen himself."[^eus-3-4]

One of the earliest explicit statements about the Third Gospel's origin comes from a list of the New Testament books drawn up at Rome around AD 170, the Muratorian Fragment. In Bruce Metzger's translation it says: "The third book of the Gospel is that according to Luke. Luke, the well-known physician, after the ascension of Christ, when Paul had taken with him as one zealous for the law, composed it in his own name, according to [the general] belief. Yet he himself had not seen the Lord in the flesh; and therefore, as he was able to ascertain events, so indeed he begins to tell the story from the birth of John."[^mur] The translator warns that the Latin is in a wretched state and offers several alternative renderings of the clause about Paul, so the sentence cannot bear much weight in detail. What it plainly says is that Rome in the second century knew the Gospel as Luke's, knew him as a physician, and knew that he was not an eyewitness.

A few years later, St. Irenaeus, writing against the Gnostics, set the four evangelists in order. In the translation OrthodoxBridge quotes (Richardson's), he says: "Matthew among the Hebrews issued a Writing of the gospel in their own tongue, while Peter and Paul were preaching the gospel at Rome and founding the Church. After their decease Mark, the disciple and interpreter of Peter, also handed down to us in writing what Peter had preached. Then Luke, the follower of Paul, recorded in a book of the gospel as it was preached by him."[^iren-bridge] His first book shows how he named the work, for there he speaks of "the Gospel which is according to Luke," which Marcion had mutilated.[^iren-i27]

Tertullian, arguing against that same Marcion, works out what the Pauline link means for the Gospel's authority. Luke, he says, "was not an apostle, but only an apostolic man; not a master, but a disciple"; yet "even Luke's form of the Gospel men usually ascribe to Paul," and he adds that "it may well seem that the works which disciples publish belong to their masters."[^tert-iv2] The idea recurs in the East. Origen of Alexandria, listing the four Gospels as he had received them by tradition, places Luke third, "the Gospel commended by Paul, which he composed for the converts from the Gentiles."[^origen-mt] "Commended by Paul" is the phrase of 2 Corinthians 8:18, "the brother whose praise in the Good News is known throughout all the assemblies" (2 Corinthians 8.18), and the Fathers took that verse, with some hesitation, to point at Luke.

Chrysostom, commenting on the verse, reports honestly that "some indeed say, Luke, because of the history which he wrote, but some, Barnabas," while in his opening homily on Acts he takes it for granted that Paul "gives the Corinthians a charge concerning him" and that when Paul writes of "the Gospel which you received" he "means the Gospel of this Luke."[^chrys-2cor18][^chrys-acts1] Eusebius reports that "they say" Paul meant Luke's Gospel whenever he wrote "according to my Gospel," and St. Jerome repeats that "some suppose" so.[^eus-3-4][^jerome-dvi]

In On Illustrious Men Jerome sums up what the fourth century believed: Luke was "a physician of Antioch… not unskilled in the Greek language," an adherent of Paul and "companion of all his journeying"; he wrote the Gospel and a second volume whose history runs "to the second year of Paul's sojourn at Rome," from which Jerome concludes that Acts was composed in that city; and of the Gospel's sources Jerome says that Luke "was taught the gospel history by the apostle Paul who was not with the Lord in the flesh, but also by other apostles… So he wrote the gospel as he had heard it, but composed the Acts of the Apostles as he himself had seen."

Jerome's entry also rejects the Acts of Paul and Thecla as apocryphal, since the "inseparable companion of the apostle" could hardly have been ignorant of such a story, and reports that Luke's bones were carried to Constantinople in the twentieth year of Constantius.[^jerome-dvi]

Clement of Alexandria went further and made Luke Paul's literary hand: as Eusebius reports him, Clement held that Luke "carefully translated" the Epistle to the Hebrews for the Greeks, which would explain why that epistle and Acts share the same coloring of style.[^clem-heb]

Later hagiography fills in what became of him, and its testimony should be set beside the early evidence with its weight stated. The Church's synaxarion for October 18 says that Luke was a native of Antioch and a physician "enlightened in the Greek medical arts," that he was one of the Seventy sent out by the Lord himself (Luke 10.1), that he and Cleopas were the two travelers on the road to Emmaus, that after the deaths of Peter and Paul he preached in Achaia, Libya, Egypt, and the Thebaid, and that he died a martyr at Thebes; OrthodoxWiki, drawing on the same lives, adds that his two books were dedicated to "Theophilus, the governor of Achaia," that he was eighty-four when he was hanged from an olive tree at Thebes in Boeotia, and that his relics went to Constantinople in 357.[^oca-life][^ow-apostle] A spurious list of the apostles and disciples ascribed to Hippolytus puts Luke among the Seventy too, but says that he and Mark were among those who fell away at the saying about eating the flesh of the Son of Man and were brought back, Luke by Paul, and that Luke ended "crucified on an olive tree."[^ps-hipp] The Orthodox Church in America, introducing the Gospels, passes on the tradition that the unnamed disciple on the road to Emmaus was Luke himself (Emmaus).[^oca-gospels] These accounts are not all of one mind, and they pull against the earliest evidence at one point: the Gospel's own preface places its author among those who received the story from "eyewitnesses and servants of the word," and the Muratorian Fragment says outright that he had not seen the Lord in the flesh, while Jerome has him taught by Paul and "other apostles" and writing the Gospel "as he had heard it." The later lives do not reconcile the two, and so the later lives are best received as the Church's pious memory, honoring Luke as one of the Seventy in her calendar, while the authorship of the Gospel rests on the earlier testimony just reviewed.

The synaxarion says that tradition credits Luke with painting the first icons of the Mother of God, and that when she saw them she said, "Let the grace of Him Who was born of Me and My mercy be with these Icons"; OrthodoxWiki names the first of them as the Hodigitria and adds portraits of Peter and Paul.[^oca-life][^ow-apostle] The tradition appears in the Church's hymnography and lives, and it is a natural expression of the way the Orthodox think about Icons and the incarnation: the Evangelist who wrote the most about Mary is imagined drawing her face as well. But none of the early writers cited here (Irenaeus, Tertullian, Origen, Eusebius, Jerome, Chrysostom) says anything of it, and it rests on hagiographic sources rather than on a patristic witness, so it is offered here as pious tradition and not as evidence about the Gospel.

What lies behind it

Luke tells us in his first sentence what lies behind his Gospel, and the sentence is worth reading slowly:

Since many have undertaken to set in order a narrative concerning those matters which have been fulfilled among us, even as those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word delivered them to us, it seemed good to me also, having traced the course of all things accurately from the first, to write to you in order, most excellent Theophilus; that you might know the certainty concerning the things in which you were instructed.[^lk1]

First stand the eyewitnesses and "servants of the word," who "delivered" the story. Second stand the "many" who have "undertaken to set in order a narrative," so that Luke is not the first to write. Third stands Luke himself, who "traced the course of all things accurately from the first," and whose contribution is to write "in order." The Jewish Annotated New Testament notes that the whole preface is a single Greek sentence in the manner of Hellenistic historical prefaces, and concludes that the author was not an eyewitness and "not only utilized earlier sources but also sought to correct them."[^jant-intro] Eusebius, who reads the preface with Luke's own interests in view, says that Luke "feeling the necessity of freeing us from their uncertain opinions," gave "an accurate account of those events in regard to which he had learned the full truth," helped by "his intimacy and his stay with Paul."[^eus-3-24]

Chrysostom, opening his homilies on Acts, draws out why the eyewitnesses are named at all. "In matter of belief," he says, "the very thing that gives one a right to be believed, is the having learned from eyewitnesses." He goes on to ask the objection an inquirer might raise: is this then only a question of history, with which the Holy Spirit has nothing to do? "Not so," he answers; if those who delivered the account were eyewitnesses and servants of the word, "what he says, is theirs," and Luke's inspiration is shown by the miracles that still take place and by Paul's praise.[^chrys-acts1] Chrysostom thus reads the preface as a claim about method that does not compete with Luke's inspiration. Athanasius, in the fourth century, treats it as a pattern to imitate. When he came to list the books of the canon in his Festal Letter for 367, he chose to "adopt… the pattern of Luke the Evangelist" and wrote his own preface in Luke's words, "Forasmuch as some have taken in hand… it seemed good to me also."[^athan-39] Bruce observes the same echo.[^bruce-athan]

From the Pauline side, there is the core of what Paul himself says he "received" and "delivered first of all," that Christ died, was buried, and was raised according to the Scriptures (1 Corinthians 15.3-4), which is the substance of every Gospel; and the ancient testimony we have seen has Luke learning from Paul and the other apostles. From the Marian side, the Orthodox Church in America reports that "traditionally, the source for these events recorded by Saint Luke is considered to be Mary, the mother of Christ," and the synaxarion points to the two places where Luke says she "kept all these sayings" in her heart (Luke 2.19; Luke 2.51).[^oca-gospels][^oca-life] That the infancy narrative came from her is a tradition and not a statement in the text, but it is a natural reading of a Gospel in which the reader is twice told what Mary treasured. Fr. John Behr, for whom the whole story is told backward from the Passion, adds that the infancy narratives of Matthew and Luke "are already told as a proclamation of the gospel."[^behr124]

The Orthodox Study Bible says that "most scholars believe he used Mark as a source," and the Jewish Annotated New Testament lists as his probable sources Mark, a written collection of sayings called Q (the beatitudes and the Lord's Prayer being its examples), independent material called L (it names the first two chapters), and his own commentary; it notes that Luke leaves out two stretches of Mark's Gospel (Mark 6:45–8:26 and 9:41–10:12) and that he shares a few things with John, such as the story of Martha and Mary and the notice that Satan entered Judas.[^osb-intro][^jant-intro] St. Augustine of Hippo, by contrast, understood Luke to have written third, after Matthew and Mark, and to have been busy with a different aspect of Christ: Matthew with the royal lineage, Luke "rather with the priestly lineage and character of the Lord."[^aug-hg2] The Orthodox Church in America calls the exact relation of the Synoptics "an ongoing debate among scriptural scholars," and nothing cited here treats their order as a point of dogma.[^oca-gospels]

Jerome calls Luke "not unskilled in the Greek language," and the Jewish Annotated New Testament finds that the style ranges "from the elegant Greek of the prologue" to an evocation of the Septuagint in the first two chapters, which casts the births of John and Jesus "in the cadences of Israel's Scriptures."[^jerome-dvi][^jant-intro] The Magnificat is built on the prayer of Hannah, the Benedictus on the familiar blessings of the Tanakh (1 Samuel 25:32; 1 Kings 1:48; 8:15), and Luke's habit of dating events by the empire, as at Luke 2.1-2 and Luke 3.1-2, is, in the Orthodox Study Bible's word, that of an "historian."[^jant-canticles][^osb-intro] Even the details of vocabulary show a writer thinking about his readers: the Jewish Annotated New Testament notes that Luke avoids an Aramaic word such as "Gethsemane" where Matthew and Mark use it.[^jant-gethsemane]

Why it was written

Luke names his reader. The name Theophilus means "friend of God" or "beloved of God," and the Jewish Annotated New Testament says that whether Theophilus was a real person or an ideal reader "cannot be determined," though the verb for "instructed" is the one from which "catechism" comes, so that the reader likely already knew something of the Scriptures and of the story of Jesus.[^jant-intro] The Orthodox Study Bible says that this is the only Gospel addressed to an individual, and that Luke wrote "to reassure Theophilus, a Gentile and a new believer, that God was still at work in the Christian community founded by Jesus."[^osb-intro] The hagiographic tradition makes him the governor of Achaia.[^ow-apostle] Chrysostom is struck by what it means to write a whole Gospel for one person: "the benevolent and Apostolic feelings of the writer," he says, are shown in "that for the sake of a single individual he took such pains as to write for him an entire Gospel," as one who had heard Christ say that it is not the will of the Father that one of these little ones should perish (Matthew 18.14).[^chrys-acts1]

The audience beyond Theophilus is the Gentile Church. Origen says Luke composed his Gospel "for the converts from the Gentiles," and Chrysostom, setting Luke's genealogy beside Matthew's, says that "Luke, as discoursing to all in general, traces up the account higher, going on even to Adam," where Matthew, writing for Hebrews, begins with Abraham (Luke 3.38).[^origen-mt][^chrys-mt1] Augustine finds a different reason for Luke's choice of ancestry: by carrying the line back through David's son Nathan, who was no king, Luke follows "the line of those who were not kings" and shows the priestly character of Christ, as also in his opening with the priest Zacharias and in his notice of Mary's kinship to Elizabeth the daughter of Aaron.[^aug-hg2][^aug-hg3] The two explanations fit together. A Gospel for the nations that begins its genealogy at "the son of God" and a Gospel whose first scene is a priest offering incense are the same book seen from two sides.

The purpose he states is "that you might know the certainty" of what had been taught (Luke 1.4). In practice Luke gives his reader that certainty by showing the story's two anchors: the history of the empire in which it happened, and Scripture, in which it was foretold. The first anchor is the dated beginning of the ministry. The second is the program of the Gospel in the synagogue at Nazareth, where Jesus reads from Isaiah, "He has anointed me to preach good news to the poor," and says, "Today, this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing" (Luke 4.18; Luke 4.21), and above all the scene on the road to Emmaus, where the risen Lord, "beginning from Moses and from all the prophets," explains "in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself" (Luke 24.27). Behr calls this last the Gospel's "hermeneutic, the principle of interpretation, taught by the risen Christ," and he sets it beside Matthew's prophecy-and-fulfilment and Mark's opening citation of Isaiah as the way each of the four proclaims the Passion through the Old Testament.[^behr55][^behr21]

What the book wants its reader to see in that Scripture is mercy. The Orthodox Church in America remarks on Luke's "record of Christ's great concern for the poor and for the sinful," and lists the Publican and the Pharisee, the Prodigal Son, and Lazarus and the rich man among the parables found in this Gospel alone; the Orthodox Study Bible sends the reader to a string of passages about sinners (the call of Peter, the sinful woman, the Samaritan village, the Good Samaritan, Zacchaeus, the thief on the cross).[^oca-gospels][^osb-intro] One verse, spoken at Zacchaeus's house, states the errand in a line: "the Son of Man came to seek and to save that which was lost" (Luke 19.10).[^zacch] The Church has built Lent's approach on three of these parables: the Sundays of Zacchaeus, the Publican and the Pharisee, and the Prodigal Son, in which, as the synaxarion puts it, the Gospel calls us "to 'come to ourselves'" and make "the journey of return to God."[^triodion]

St. Cyril of Jerusalem, teaching catechumens about the Spirit, leads them through Luke's opening chapters as through a procession: the Spirit "came upon the Holy Virgin Mary" (Luke 1.35); the Spirit "wrought in Elisabeth"; the Spirit filled Zacharias, who "prophesied"; and the Spirit revealed to just Symeon "that he should not see death, till he had seen the Lord's Christ."[^cyril17] The Orthodox Study Bible counts the Spirit's activity among the Gospel's major subthemes ("Mary is 'overshadowed'… Jesus conducts His ministry in the fullness of the Spirit"), and the Gospel closes on the promise of "power from on high" (Luke 24.49), which Acts takes up at Pentecost.[^osb-intro]

The two volumes are meant to be read together. Chrysostom asks why Luke "did not make one book of it, to send to one man Theophilus, but has divided it into two subjects," and answers: "For clearness, and to give the brother a pause for rest. Besides, the two treatises are distinct in their subject-matter."[^chrys-acts1] The Gospel stops at the Ascension from Bethany, and Acts starts it again from the Mount of Olives (Luke 24.50-51; Acts 1.9; compare The Ascension of Christ), and the commission is the same in both: "repentance and remission of sins should be preached in his name to all the nations, beginning at Jerusalem" (Luke 24.47), and "you will be witnesses to me in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the uttermost parts of the earth" (Acts 1.8). Brevard Childs, from the standpoint of canonical criticism, counts as a "major canonical issue" the way the canon has "sever[ed] the original linkage of Luke's two-volume work into two parts," with Luke placed among the four Gospels and Acts placed after them.[^childs-53]

The synaxarion says the Gospel was written in Rome about 62–63, under Paul's guidance; the Orthodox Study Bible says "probably… either from Greece or from Asia Minor in AD 70–80"; OrthodoxWiki notes that accounts place it around 60 or around 80; and the Jewish Annotated New Testament, which holds the author to be a Gentile writing to a Gentile audience, says "late first or early second century."[^oca-life][^osb-intro][^ow-apostle][^jant-intro] The argument turns on what is made of Jesus's words about Jerusalem, and it is taken up under the heading of controversy below.

Manuscripts and the text

No autograph of Luke survives, any more than of any other New Testament book. The earliest evidence is on papyrus. Bruce reports that the Bodmer papyrus P75, from the late second or early third century, is a codex of Luke and John (and was probably, when complete, a codex of the fourfold Gospel), and that the Chester Beatty papyrus P45, from the early third century, is the earliest surviving codex to contain portions of all four Gospels and which also contains Acts, an unusual collocation since Acts more commonly traveled with the catholic epistles.[^bruce-p75] Then come the great fourth- and fifth-century codices: OrthodoxWiki describes Codex Sinaiticus as a fourth-century uncial written between 330 and 350, Codex Vaticanus as slightly older, and Codex Alexandrinus as a fifth-century manuscript of the Septuagint and New Testament.[^ow-codices] Textual critics sort the later witnesses into an Alexandrian type (second to fourth centuries, including Vaticanus and Sinaiticus, behind most modern translations), a Western type, and a Byzantine type, which supplied Erasmus's textus receptus and makes up about ninety-five percent of manuscripts.[^course-textcrit]

Luke carries a number of readings that divide the witnesses, and the ones that matter most are those where a modern critical text and the Church's received text differ in what they print and where the Fathers can be asked. The apparatus of the NRSV, as the Jewish Annotated New Testament prints it, lists the following. At Luke 22.43-44 it flags that "other ancient authorities lack verses 43 and 44" (the strengthening angel and the sweat like great drops of blood), at Luke 23.34 that some "lack the sentence" "Father, forgive them," at Luke 22.19–20 that some lack "in whole or in part" the second half of the words over the bread and the words over the cup, and in the resurrection chapter that some lack Luke 24.12 (Peter at the tomb), the words "He is not here, but has risen" (Luke 24.6), Luke 24.40, and, in the Ascension, "and was carried up into heaven" and "worshiped him" (Luke 24.51-52). It records that at Luke 3.22 a reading of the voice from heaven is "You are my Son, today I have begotten you," that at Luke 10.1 other authorities read "seventy-two," that at Luke 2.14 the angels' song has a variant ("peace, goodwill among people"), and that in the Lord's Prayer at Luke 11.2-4 some authorities read "Our Father in heaven," a few read "Your Holy Spirit come upon us and cleanse us," and others add "Your will be done, on earth as in heaven."[^jant-apparatus] The World English Bible quoted throughout this entry, like the New King James text of the Orthodox Study Bible, prints most of these longer readings: it has the angel and the bloody sweat, "Father, forgive them," the seventy, and a long Lord's Prayer with "Our Father in heaven" and "May your will be done on earth, as it is in heaven."[^lk-wording]

The bloody sweat shows the Fathers speaking on both sides. Justin Martyr, in the second century, quotes it from "the memoirs… drawn up by His apostles and those who followed them": "His sweat fell down like drops of blood while He was praying."[^justin103] Tatian's Diatessaron, which wove the four Gospels together after Justin's martyrdom in AD 165,[^bruce-diat] includes both the angel "encouraging him" and the sweat, which became "like a stream of blood."[^diat48]

On the other side St. Hilary of Poitiers, in the fourth century, is blunt: "in many manuscripts, both Latin and Greek, nothing is said of the angel's coming or the Bloody Sweat. But while we suspend judgment, whether this is an omission, where it is wanting, or an interpolation, where it is found (for the discordance of the copies leaves the question uncertain), let not the heretics encourage themselves that herein lies a confirmation of His weakness."[^hilary]

What drove both the verse's defenders and its doubters was the same worry. Chrysostom, who uses the passage, says the sweat and the angel and "a thousand sure signs of fear" are there "lest any one should affirm the words to be feigned," so that no one can say that Christ only acted His agony; and St. John of Damascus lists "the agony with the bloody sweat, the succour at the hands of angels because of the weakness of the nature" among the natural and innocent passions Christ took on with the whole of our nature.[^chrys-mt83][^jdam] St. Augustine hears it as the voice of the whole Church: the drops of blood that "streamed down from His whole Body" are "the suffering of martyrs from the whole Church."[^aug-ps141] So the lines were read, and defended, in the East and West from the second century, while a careful bishop in the fourth century knew that some copies lacked them.

"Father, forgive them" has a similar standing. The Diatessaron has it; the Apostolic Constitutions has the Lord crying it "with a loud voice" before He commended His spirit; Chrysostom, citing it, goes on to say that the Lord "made the persecutor Paul, an Apostle"; and Augustine holds it up for all who despair of pardon, since for the very ones who shed Christ's blood He prayed.[^diat52][^ac-v][^chrys-1cor32][^aug-tr31] The Orthodox Study Bible prints the verse,[^osb-readings] and it is one more place where the sources cited here show the line in use from early on, while the apparatus shows that some witnesses lack it.

At Luke 3.22, Justin, in the Dialogue, has the voice at the Jordan say, as Psalm 2 does, "You are My Son: this day have I begotten You" (he does not name Luke), and Methodius, in his Banquet of the Ten Virgins, quotes the voice to Christ at His baptism the same way and then explains it carefully: "Thou art" signifies that He was declared Son "unconditionally, and without regard to time," while "this day have I begotten thee" signifies "that He who was before unknown should be made known."[^justin88][^methodius] Methodius's explanation shows that the wording could be read with a settled sense; the WEB and the Orthodox Study Bible print "In you I am well pleased."

The number of the Seventy is another place where the readings differ. The NRSV and some manuscripts read "seventy-two" at Luke 10.1, a number that fits the Jewish Annotated New Testament's note on the verse, which sends the reader to Genesis 10, where the Septuagint lists seventy-two names; the Orthodox Study Bible prints "seventy" and its sidebar speaks of the Seventy, but OrthodoxWiki records that St. John of Damascus, in the Octoechos, sings of "the seventy-two."[^seventy] The Church sings both numbers. Another Luke text, Luke 9.10, shows scribal variation at work, where copies read "a city called Bethsaida," "a village called Bethsaida," "a deserted place," and "a deserted place belonging to a city called Bethsaida."[^course-lecture]

The sources cited here say little about a policy of the Church toward these questions. The Byzantine type "predominate[s]" and is "ongoing in the church," the Orthodox Study Bible prints the fuller readings, the Fathers' own copies sometimes disagreed (Hilary says so), and Jerome describes correcting the Latin Gospels against early Greek manuscripts in precisely this spirit.[^course-textcrit][^jerome-pref] Nothing cited here states an Orthodox position on critical editions, and the matter is left as the practice it is.

Translations

The Gospels circulated in more languages than Greek almost from the first, and Luke was in them. Latin versions of the Scriptures existed by the second century, according to OrthodoxWiki, with references to them in Tertullian and Cyprian, though they were thought crude and provincial; Hilary's remark about "many manuscripts, both Latin and Greek" shows that copies in both languages already disagreed with one another by the fourth century.[^ow-vulgate][^hilary] Pope Damasus, according to OrthodoxWiki in 382, commissioned Jerome to produce a standard text, and Jerome began with the Gospels, "to be taken in the following order, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John," revised by comparison with early Greek manuscripts, a revision that slowly replaced the Old Latin and became the Vulgate, the official text of the Roman Church until 1979 in its Clementine form.[^jerome-pref][^ow-vulgate]

In the Syriac-speaking East the Gospels first circulated in a harmony. Tatian's Diatessaron opens with John's prologue and then goes directly to Luke's account of the birth of John (Luke 1:5–80), and it was the preferred edition of the Gospels for more than two hundred years in many Syriac-speaking churches until pressure from bishops in the early fifth century moved them to the separated Gospels of the Peshitta; Ephrem the Syrian wrote a commentary on it.[^bruce-diat] OrthodoxWiki credits Rabbula of Edessa with the Peshitta.[^ow-rabbula] The Gothic Bible of Wulfila, of which fragments survive in the Codex Argenteus at Uppsala, and the Old Church Slavonic of Saints Cyril and Methodius carried Luke to the Goths and Slavs.[^ow-ulfilas][^ow-cm]

English translation begins with the Anglo-Saxon Gospels (the Wessex Gospels, about 990), and runs through Wycliffe (1382), Coverdale (1538), and the Authorised Version (1611); later versions include the Douay-Rheims, the Revised Version (1885), the American Standard Version (1901), the Revised Standard Version (1946) and its successors the NRSV (1989; updated 2023), the New King James Version used in the Orthodox Study Bible, and a range of dynamic-equivalence and paraphrase versions.[^course-english][^ow-osb] Translations differ both in philosophy (formal correspondence, dynamic equivalence, paraphrase) and in the manuscript tradition each rests on, the textus receptus or Byzantine text on one side and the critical texts on the other. The Scripture quoted in this entry is the public-domain World English Bible; the NRSV apparatus is that of the Jewish Annotated New Testament.

Controversy and Contestation

The first dispute is the plainest: who wrote the book. The Jewish Annotated New Testament states the case against the tradition with care. "Neither the Gospel nor Acts… claims Lukan authorship," its introduction says, and "sufficient distinctions between the portrait of Paul provided in his authentic epistles and his depiction in Acts call into question the author's personal familiarity with the apostle." The author "was not an eyewitness," used earlier sources, and in its judgment was a Gentile writing for a mainly Gentile audience "sometime in the late first or early second century."[^jant-intro]

The Church's answer begins by conceding what is true in this. The Gospel does not name its author, and the tradition does not make Luke an eyewitness; the preface says he was not, and the Muratorian Fragment says so. The answer then weighs the testimony the way an ancient historian would. By about AD 170 Rome knew the Gospel as Luke's and as a physician's work (the Muratorian Fragment); Irenaeus calls him the follower of Paul and Tertullian an apostolic man; Origen reports the same from the East; and no rival name for the author appears in any source cited here.[^mur][^iren-bridge][^tert-iv2][^origen-mt] Tertullian, arguing against Marcion, argues from date: the Gospel is Marcion's raw material, and "emendation never precedes the fault," so that Luke's text must be older than the heretic who cut it.[^tert-iv4] As for the portrait of Paul in Acts, the nearest answer in the sources is Jerome's, that Luke "composed the Acts of the Apostles as he himself had seen," and Eusebius's, that Luke was "especially intimate with Paul."[^jerome-dvi][^eus-3-4] The Jewish Annotated New Testament presses the difference between that portrait and Paul's own letters, and the sources cited here do not compare the two in detail.

The date divides along the same line, and it turns on the Lord's words over Jerusalem. In Luke 19.42-44 He says that "your enemies will throw up a barricade against you, surround you… and will dash you and your children within you to the ground," and in Luke 21.20 that "when you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, then know that its desolation is at hand." The Jewish Annotated New Testament notes that the first passage "likely reflects knowledge of Jerusalem's destruction in 70 ce," and on the second sends the reader back to the same note.[^jant-19] A critic who reads them so dates the Gospel after 70. Eusebius reads the same sentences, in his account of the fall of Jerusalem, as the proof that the Lord "by divine power saw them beforehand as if they were already present, and wept and mourned": he quotes the lament over the city, "If you had known, even you, in this day…," and "When you shall see Jerusalem compassed with armies, then know that the desolation thereof is near," and asks whether anyone who compares the Saviour's words with the historian's account can fail to wonder.[^eus-3-7] The wording is the same on both readings: the Jewish Annotated New Testament takes it to reflect knowledge of the destruction, and Eusebius takes it to show the Lord's foresight. Jerome adds a datable detail from the other side of the work: Acts ends in "the second year of Paul's sojourn at Rome," and Jerome infers from this that it was composed there, which puts the writing of Acts within Paul's own lifetime.[^jerome-dvi]

Luke's reliability as a historian is the dispute the author himself invited. The Orthodox Study Bible notes with approval that Luke "dates biblical events by reference to secular history."[^osb-intro] The Jewish Annotated New Testament presses on exactly those dates. The census at Luke 2.1-2 "is not externally attested," it says; Josephus reports a census under Quirinius in 6 CE, not during Herod's reign; and Luke's picture of Jewish practice is "sometimes erroneously presented," with Luke 2.22 as its example.[^jant-census] The Fathers cited here do not take up Josephus's date, but they appeal to records. Justin tells the emperor that Christ was born in Bethlehem "as you can ascertain also from the registers of the taxing made under Cyrenius," and in the Dialogue places Joseph's journey "on the occasion of the first census which was taken in Judæa, under Cyrenius"; Tertullian says that "there is historical proof that at this very time a census had been taken in Judæa by Sentius Saturninus."[^justin-apol34][^tert-iv19] The two Fathers name different governors, Cyrenius and Saturninus, and nothing cited here reconciles them. The sources cited here do not resolve the difficulty, and a reader who wants it settled will have to look elsewhere.

The genealogies raise a smaller and older difficulty. Luke carries the line through Nathan to Adam, with seventy-seven names, and gives Joseph's father as Heli, where Matthew goes through Solomon and names Jacob (Luke 3.23; Luke 3.38).[^jant-genealogy] The Fathers' answers are two. Augustine explains the difference by the two characters of Christ, king and priest: Matthew follows the royal succession, and Luke "the line of those who were not kings," with David and Nathan as the common ground.[^aug-hg2][^aug-hg3] Julius Africanus, whom Jerome records as having written on this very discrepancy, explained it by a levirate marriage in which Joseph was by nature the son of one man and by law the son of another, while confessing that the explanation lacked testimony.[^africanus] Fr. John Behr speaks plainly about the wider problem. Apart from the fact of the crucifixion, he says, the four Gospels contain "irresolvable discrepancies," from the cleansing of the Temple to whether the cock crowed once (as in Matthew, Luke, and John) or twice (Mark), and some early Christians took them as divinely placed stumbling blocks that direct attention to the theological level of the Gospels.[^behr42]

The relation of Luke to the other Gospels is the Synoptic Problem at its most intricate. The Jewish Annotated New Testament says that Luke's sources "likely included" Mark and Q, with material of his own; OrthodoxWiki gives the Two-Source, Four-Source, and Farrer proposals (the last of which keeps Mark's priority but does away with Q by having Luke use Matthew), and notes that Augustine's view, that Mark drew on Matthew and Luke used both, "remained unchallenged until the late eighteenth century," and that the later hypotheses have not reached "any common resolution or agreement."[^jant-intro][^ow-gospels][^ow-syn] Luke's distinctive features make him the pivot of the argument: the travel section that the Jewish Annotated New Testament says is "inserted into the Markan scheme," the omission of two long Markan passages, and the shared material with Matthew that Q is meant to explain. The Orthodox Church in America describes the Synoptics as "most probably interrelated textually in some way, exactly how being an ongoing debate among scriptural scholars," and Chrysostom, who held that the four wrote "not at the same times, nor in the same places, neither after having met together," found the discordance in small matters to be "a very great evidence of their truth," and so read the Gospels as independent witnesses and not as links in a literary chain.[^oca-gospels][^chrys-mt1]

Luke's account of the Jews and of Judaism is one of the most contested subjects in the modern reading of the book. The Jewish Annotated New Testament presents it as complex. On the one hand, Luke places Jesus "in a vibrant Jewish environment of faithful Jews engaged in faithful Jewish practice" (a priest at the altar, circumcisions, a family at the Passover), and the traditional picture of Jesus as friend of the "marginal" needs to ask "marginal to what?", for Jewish women had freedom of travel and funds of their own, and children, the sick, and the poor were embedded in networks of care. On the other, the same Gospel shows the synagogue as a place of violence (Luke 4.28-29), "engages in scathing caricatures of Pharisees," and in the second volume accuses "the entire house of Israel" of the crucifixion and ends with Paul announcing that the Gentiles "will listen"; its plausible reading of the two volumes is that Jesus is the fulfillment of God's plan and the church the true heir of Moses and the Prophets, "while presenting non-Christian Jews as hypocritical, intolerant, and violent."[^jant-intro]

The article on the Pharisees points out that Luke never mentions Pharisees in the passion narrative, shows them hosting Jesus at table, and mentions Pharisees among believers in Acts 15:5, while also showing them as hostile in the early chapters.[^jant-pharisee] The same volume cautions against reading the elder brother of the Prodigal Son as "the recalcitrant Pharisee," since, if the elder brother is the Pharisee, "the parable necessarily sees the Pharisees as heirs to God's promises (15.31)."[^jant-prodigal]

The Church's own reading of these texts, as the sources cited here show it, runs through repentance. The Orthodox Church in America's synaxarion for the Sunday of the Publican and the Pharisee, which opens the Lenten Triodion, tells us not to "criticize [the Pharisee] for being faithful": "his sin was in looking down on the Publican," and the lesson is that "we possess neither the Pharisee's religious piety, nor the Publican's repentance."[^triodion]

On the cross Luke's Jesus prays for those who crucify Him, and the Fathers cited here read that prayer as mercy that reached particular people. Augustine says that for some of them it bore fruit, since "this very way turned out to the good of many of them, who were afterwards filled with remorse for wickedness, and believed on Christ," and Chrysostom lists, among those the Lord rescued from enmity, the thief and Paul the persecutor.[^aug-tr53][^chrys-1cor32] None of this answers the Jewish Annotated New Testament's historical reading of the book's rhetoric; it describes how the Church has been taught to hear the words.

Marcion shows how a heresy could take Luke as its own. The Fathers describe a man who made the Third Gospel the core of his Bible. Irenaeus says that Marcion "mutilates the Gospel which is according to Luke, removing all that is written respecting the generation of the Lord, and setting aside a great deal of the teaching of the Lord, in which the Lord is recorded as most dearly confessing that the Maker of this universe is His Father," and "furnish[ed] them not with the Gospel, but merely a fragment of it."[^iren-i27] Tertullian adds that Marcion "ascribes no author to his Gospel" and that it began, "In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius," with Christ coming down to Capernaum "from the heaven of the Creator."[^tert-iv2][^tert-iv7] Bruce, from the modern scholarly side, sums up what Marcion cut: the birth of John, the birth of Jesus, the baptism, the genealogy, the temptation in which Jesus quotes Deuteronomy, the Nazareth sermon claiming the fulfillment of prophecy, "the old is good," the mention of Jesus's mother and brothers, and the description of Zacchaeus as a son of Abraham; he notes that Marcion's Lord's Prayer read "Let thy Holy Spirit come on us and cleanse us" for "Thy kingdom come."[^bruce-marcion] OrthodoxWiki's article on the Gospels reports that Marcion "removed those parts of Luke that he considered too Jewish," and its article on Marcion says that his Christology was Docetic.[^ow-gospels][^ow-marcion]

Marcion's side, put at its strongest, is not foolish. As his opponents and Bruce report him, he read Paul's quarrel in Galatians with those who "pervert the gospel," concluded that the apostles' own Gospels could not be trusted, and held that a Gospel linked to Paul alone, purged of the interpolations of "judaizing scribes," was the true one.[^bruce-marcion] A modern version of that doubt appears in the Jewish Annotated New Testament, which reports that "some scholars suggest that the first two chapters are additions, created in the early second century and designed… to counter the arguments of Marcion," and Bruce, noting that Marcion's text may have lacked those chapters (a "Proto-Luke"), records that others went further and made the canonical Luke an expansion of Marcion's Gospel or Luke-Acts a reaction to it.[^jant-intro][^bruce-marcion]

Against this, Tertullian's argument from priority, that "that is evidently more true which is earlier" and that the Gospel of Luke has "stood its ground" in the apostolic churches "from its very first publication," while Marcion's is "not known to most people, and to none whatever is it known without being at the same time condemned," is the main reply in the sources cited here; so is his observation that Marcion's whole case against the "interpolations" presupposes a text that already contained them.[^tert-iv4][^tert-iv5] The Church's other evidence is the Diatessaron, which Bruce reports began, after John's prologue, with Luke 1:5–80, and which Tatian made after Justin's martyrdom in 165, and Irenaeus's report that Marcion removed the Lord's generation from the book. Both witnesses come after Marcion, and the Father who says Marcion cut already holds the longer text, which is why Bruce can report that some have read the order the other way; the Fathers' answer is that the longer text was the Church's own from the first.[^bruce-diat2][^iren-i27]

The Fathers also record how the Arians drew on Luke. Athanasius, answering them, takes up two verses. At Luke 10.22, "All things have been delivered to me by my Father," the Arians argued that if all things were delivered to the Son there was a time when He did not have them, and Athanasius answers that the text "refers not to the eternal Word but to the Incarnate." At Luke 2.52, "Jesus increased in wisdom and stature," the Arians asked how He could be the Father's own Wisdom and increase; Athanasius replies that "not Wisdom, as Wisdom, advanced in respect of Itself; but the manhood advanced in Wisdom, transcending by degrees human nature, and being deified."[^athan-10-22][^athan-2-52] Against the opposite error of the Docetists, who held that Christ only seemed to have a body, the Church used Luke's resurrection scene, in which the Lord shows His hands and feet and says, "a spirit doesn't have flesh and bones, as you see that I have," and eats a piece of fish (Luke 24.39-43); Cyril of Jerusalem and John of Damascus both cite it, and the bloody sweat and the angel of Gethsemane were defended in the same cause.[^cyril14][^jdam-res][^hilary]

Doubts about particular passages and traditions, finally, belong to the Church's own ancient record. Hilary suspended judgment over the angel and the sweat; Clement was reported to say that Luke had translated Hebrews; and Jerome set aside the Acts of Paul and Thecla because Luke, Paul's "inseparable companion," could hardly have been the only one ignorant of such a story.[^hilary][^clem-heb][^jerome-dvi]

Methods of Criticism

Scholars have approached Luke the way a conservator approaches a painting that has been varnished and retouched over many centuries: they have asked what the original colors were, what pigments and sketches lay beneath, what the painter changed as he worked, what workshop and patron produced it, and what the finished composition means as a whole. Each approach has produced claims about this Gospel, and each has had its own reception among Orthodox writers. Over against all of them stands the way the Fathers themselves read.

Textual criticism asks what Luke wrote. Its claims about this book are those of the preceding section: that Luke carries several disputed readings of real weight, the bloody sweat, the prayer for forgiveness on the cross, the second half of the Supper narrative, the Resurrection and Ascension phrases at the end, and that the NRSV apparatus flags each of them.[^jant-apparatus] The discipline is called "low" criticism within historical-critical schools, and it comes before translation.[^course-textcrit] Orthodox reception, in the sources cited here, is practical: the Orthodox Study Bible prints the longer readings,[^osb-readings] the Fathers compared copies and noticed where they differed (Hilary, Jerome), the Church's hymns use both "seventy" and "seventy-two," and no source cited here states a policy on critical editions.[^hilary][^jerome-pref][^seventy]

Source criticism asks what written materials lie behind the Gospel and is the discipline that has made Luke the pivot of the Synoptic Problem. It claims, on the strength of the verses Luke shares with Matthew but not with Mark, a lost document of sayings (Q), and, on the verses found in Luke alone, a source or sources of his own (L), including the infancy narratives; it observes that Luke leaves out Mark 6:45–8:26 and 9:41–10:12.[^jant-intro] The standard models are the Two-Document, Farrer, and "Two Gospel" models; against Augustine's view (that Mark abbreviated Matthew), it is argued that Mark's account is usually the longer where they overlap, and one critique holds that source criticism "has reached its natural end" and "should take into account more oral tradition."[^course-lecture] Orthodox reception is cautious. The Orthodox Church in America calls the matter an "ongoing debate"; OrthodoxWiki lists the hypotheses without endorsing one; Chrysostom reasons from four independent witnesses rather than from a lost source; and Augustine's Luke, the third evangelist with a priestly aim and no abbreviator, is an early source-critical theory in its own right.[^oca-gospels][^ow-syn][^aug-hg2]

Form criticism looks at the small units, the sayings, parables, and canticles, that circulated by word of mouth before they were set in order, and asks what situation in the early Church shaped them. For Luke the unit-level claims are the parables that only he records,[^lk-special] and it has been remarked that "there are parables in Luke that most likely circulated outside of the text, and was then 'framed' into the text," while the method is also called "completely hypothetical, since we don't have anything that isn't text from that period."[^course-lecture] Brevard Childs, from a canonical standpoint, argues that reconstructed stages of tradition are largely hypothetical and that no historical community ever heard the material in the forms the schemata suppose.[^childs-hyp] McGuckin, writing as an Orthodox historian, grants that recent study can distinguish the forms of the first Aramaic preaching from the more Greek forms of the second apostolic age, but insists that Orthodoxy sees "no great chasm" between Jesus's teaching and its transmission, and that Luke's preface and Papias's "living and abiding voice" show the early Church valued the spoken word.[^mcguckin-28][^lk1]

Redaction criticism asks what an evangelist has done with the material he took over, and its claims about Luke are pointed. The Jewish Annotated New Testament observes that Luke avoids the Aramaic "Gethsemane," that in Gethsemane he spares the disciples by saying they slept "because of grief," and that he omits two long sections of Mark; and it is observed that where Mark places the confession at Caesarea Philippi, Luke "does not specify" the place and instead emphasizes Jesus praying.[^jant-gethsemane][^course-lecture] The Orthodox Study Bible's list of the Gospel's emphases (prayer, the Spirit, sinners) is a kind of redaction criticism in plain words.[^osb-intro] The Fathers had their own versions of the method before it had a name. Chrysostom notes that Luke calls his first book a "treatise" in Acts, "accounting the title of Gospel to be too great for him," and Augustine reads Luke's selection of ancestry and scenes as aimed at Christ's priesthood.[^chrys-acts1][^aug-hg3] Orthodox reception turns on the assumption underneath. In the examples above the method sets Luke beside Mark and reads each difference as the evangelist's own choice, and Behr and Childs warn that a historical-critical search for the "original" meaning of an ancient text can lose sight of what the text now says to the Church.[^behr12][^childs-49]

Historical-critical and social-scientific study sets the Gospel in the world that produced it. For Luke its principal claims, from the Jewish Annotated New Testament, are a Gentile author writing in the late first or early second century to a mainly Gentile audience, a lightly informed view of Jewish practice, and a social picture in which women, the poor, and the sick are embedded in Judaism's networks of care, with the Gospel's sharp words against Pharisees and priests resembling those of "the biblical prophets and the Qumran writings" but now "embedded in a text directed primarily to Gentiles."[^jant-intro] The Orthodox Study Bible accepts a Gentile Christian audience and a date after 70 while keeping the book's pastoral purpose in view.[^osb-intro] Where the method becomes reconstruction the Orthodox response is wary. McGuckin cautions that the sparse and controverted detail of the Church's first generation has produced "a flourishing of speculation passing off as history," and Behr observes that the historical approach of modernity asks what the text meant rather than what it means.[^mcguckin-29][^behr12]

Narrative, literary, and canonical approaches read the Gospel in the shape the Church received it. For Luke they begin with the frame: the book opens with a priest at the altar of incense and ends with the disciples "continually in the temple" (Luke 1.8-11; Luke 24.53); it has been remarked that Luke "begins and ends in the Temple" and reads it as "an honoring of the ancient tradition, rather than a doing away."[^lk24-53][^course-lecture] They continue with the long journey to Jerusalem and the final chapter's reading of the Scriptures, which Behr takes as Luke's way of showing how the Passion is read through the Old Testament.[^behr55] Childs adds two canonical cautions that bear directly on Luke: a construal of a book's structure "which in fact eliminates portions of the book should be viewed with suspicion (cf. Luke 1–2)," a caution that bears on the theory that the infancy chapters are a later addition; and the canon's severing of Luke from Acts is itself a question the canonical reader must ask.[^childs-49][^childs-53] The Church's liturgical use is the canonical shaping of the book: Luke is read over nineteen weeks beginning after the Elevation of the Cross in what the Church calls the "Lukan Jump," a placement OrthodoxWiki explains by the Conception of the Forerunner on September 23, which only Luke records (Luke 1:5–24); the Magnificat is sung at Sunday Matins as the Song of the Mother of God, and Simeon's words, the Nunc Dimittis, are part of Vespers.[^lectionary][^anastasis-mat][^anastasis-vespers][^course-canonical]

Patristic reading was itself textual and scholarly, and it rests on the four senses: the literal, which is never abandoned, and the allegorical or typological, the tropological or moral, and the anagogical or mystical.[^course-lecture] Luke's parables gave the Fathers material for the second and third senses. For Clement of Alexandria the Good Samaritan is the Saviour: "Who else can it be but the Saviour Himself? Or who more than He has pitied us… He it is that poured wine on our wounded souls," and St. Gregory the Theologian, listing the paradoxes of Christ, says that He "is called a Samaritan and a demoniac — but He saves him that came down from Jerusalem and fell among thieves."[^clem-rich][^greg-or29] Augustine reads the man who went down from Jerusalem to Jericho as one who "descended from immortality to mortality," the Samaritan who set him upon his beast as Christ upon His flesh, and the inn as the Church.[^aug-ps126] Augustine builds his Harmony on the assumption that the evangelists were each inspired and not ignorant of one another, and Jerome records the Eusebian lists that show which passages occur in more than one Gospel.[^aug-hg2][^jerome-pref] St. Vincent of Lérins gives the Church's reason for reading Scripture with the Church: "owing to the depth of Holy Scripture, all do not accept it in one and the same sense," so the rule for understanding the prophets and apostles must be framed "in accordance with the standard of Ecclesiastical and Catholic interpretation."[^vincent] The Church reads the Third Gospel through nineteen weeks of her liturgical year as the account of a physician-historian who traced everything "accurately from the first," as the Gospel in which the risen Lord "opened the Scriptures" to His disciples and was known in the breaking of bread, and as the first volume of a work whose second half, the Acts of the Apostles and the story of Pentecost and the mission of the Church, begins where this one ends, with the Lord's ascent into heaven and the blessing of His disciples.[^behr21][^lectionary]

Sources

[^lk1]: Luke 1.1-4 (WEB). [^lk-special]: Luke 1.5-25; Luke 1.26-38; Luke 1.46-55; Luke 2.8-20; Luke 2.25-35; Luke 10.30-37; Luke 15.11-32; Luke 24.13-35 (WEB; The Orthodox Study Bible for the distance in 24.13); Orthodox Church in America, "Gospels" (Saint Luke); Levine and Brettler, eds, The Jewish Annotated New Testament, 123 (essay and note on Luke 10). [^lk24-53]: Luke 24.53 (WEB); compare Luke 1.8-11. [^ow-gospel]: OrthodoxWiki, "Gospel of Luke." [^col]: Colossians 4.14 (WEB); Philemon 1.24; 2 Timothy 4.11. [^forty]: Anastasis, February 2 (The Meeting of the Lord); compare Luke 2.22-24; The Meeting of the Lord.

[^osb-readings]: The Orthodox Study Bible, Luke 22, 23, and 10; Luke 22.43-44; Luke 23.34; Luke 10.1.

[^osb-intro]: The Orthodox Study Bible, introduction to Luke. [^acts1]: Acts 1.1-2 (WEB); Luke 24.50-51; Acts 1.9. [^origen-mt]: Origen of Alexandria, Commentary on Matthew, bk. 1, preface (ANF vol. 10). [^aug-hg2]: St. Augustine of Hippo, Harmony of the Gospels 1.2.3–4. [^lists]: St. Athanasius, Festal Letter 39; Synod of Laodicea; Jerome, Preface to the Four Gospels. [^lectionary]: OrthodoxWiki, "Lectionary." [^lk-shape]: Luke 1–Luke 24 (WEB); Luke 4.14; Luke 9.51; Levine and Brettler, eds, The Jewish Annotated New Testament, note on Luke 9.51–19.27, and introduction to Luke. [^jant-intro]: Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler, eds, The Jewish Annotated New Testament, "The Gospel according to Luke" (introduction by Amy-Jill Levine), 96–97, and notes on Luke 1.1–4. [^behr55]: John Behr, The Mystery of Christ: Life in Death (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir's Seminary Press, 2006), 55. [^oca-gospels]: Orthodox Church in America, "Gospels" (Saint Luke). [^aug-hg6]: Augustine, Harmony of the Gospels 1.6.9; Orthodox Church in America, "Gospels"; OrthodoxWiki, "Apostle Luke." [^lk-summary]: Luke 1–Luke 24 (WEB), including Luke 1.38; Luke 2.34-35; Luke 2.46; Luke 3.1; Luke 4.14-30; Luke 5.27-29; Luke 7.36-50; Luke 8.1-3; Luke 9.51; Luke 10.1; Luke 10.30-42; Luke 15; Luke 16.19-31; Luke 17.11-19; Luke 18.1-14; Luke 19.1-10; Luke 21.20-24; Luke 22.19-20; Luke 22.42-44; Luke 22.61-62; Luke 23.6-12; Luke 23.34; Luke 23.43; Luke 23.46; Luke 24.13-53. [^chrys-col12]: St. John Chrysostom, Homilies on Colossians, Hom. 12 (on Col 4:14). [^chrys-2tim10]: Chrysostom, Homilies on Second Timothy, Hom. 10 (on 4:11). [^acts-we]: Acts 16.10 (WEB); Acts 20.6; Acts 28.16; Acts 21.17; Acts 27.1. [^eus-3-4]: Eusebius of Caesarea, Church History 3.4.7–8 (NPNF). [^mur]: Muratorian Fragment (c. 170), lines 2–8 (Metzger translation; the Latin text is badly damaged and the clause about Paul is conjectural). [^iren-bridge]: St. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.1.1 (Richardson translation, as quoted in OrthodoxBridge, "Contra Sola Scriptura, Part 2 of 4"; quoted at second hand). [^iren-i27]: Irenaeus, Against Heresies 1.27.2. [^tert-iv2]: Tertullian, Against Marcion 4.2, 4.5. [^chrys-2cor18]: Chrysostom, Homilies on Second Corinthians, Hom. 18 (on 8:18); 2 Corinthians 8.18 (WEB). [^chrys-acts1]: Chrysostom, Homilies on the Acts of the Apostles, Hom. 1. [^jerome-dvi]: St. Jerome, On Illustrious Men (De viris illustribus) 7. [^clem-heb]: Clement of Alexandria, Hypotyposes, as reported by Eusebius, Church History; compare Eusebius, Church History 3.38.2. [^oca-life]: Orthodox Church in America, Life of the Apostle and Evangelist Luke (October 18 and April 22), with the troparion (Tone 2). [^ow-apostle]: OrthodoxWiki, "Apostle Luke"; see also OrthodoxWiki, "Ikon." [^ps-hipp]: Pseudo-Hippolytus, On the Apostles and Disciples, list of the Seventy, nos. 14–15 (ANF; pseudonymous). [^athan-39]: St. Athanasius, Festal Letter 39 §3. [^bruce-athan]: F. F. Bruce, The Canon of Scripture (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1988), section on Athanasius. [^behr124]: Behr, The Mystery of Christ, 124; see also 116. [^jant-canticles]: Levine and Brettler, eds, The Jewish Annotated New Testament, notes on Luke 1.46–56 and 1.67–79. [^jant-gethsemane]: Levine and Brettler, eds, The Jewish Annotated New Testament, note on Luke 22.39–46. [^eus-3-24]: Eusebius, Church History 3.24.15. [^chrys-mt1]: Chrysostom, Homilies on Matthew, Hom. 1. [^aug-hg3]: Augustine, Harmony of the Gospels 1.3.5–6. [^zacch]: Luke 19.10 (WEB); compare Luke 15.1-2; Luke 15.24. [^triodion]: Orthodox Church in America, synaxarion lives for the Sunday of Zacchaeus, the Sunday of the Publican and the Pharisee, and the Sunday of the Prodigal Son. [^cyril17]: St. Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lectures 17.6–7. [^childs-53]: Brevard S. Childs, The New Testament as Canon (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985), 49–53. [^bruce-p75]: Bruce, The Canon of Scripture, 128. [^ow-codices]: OrthodoxWiki, "Codex Sinaiticus"; "Codex Vaticanus"; "Codex Alexandrinus." [^course-textcrit]: Course discussion notes, Gospels and Acts; course lecture notes, Gospels and Acts. [^jant-apparatus]: Levine and Brettler, eds, The Jewish Annotated New Testament (NRSV text and textual notes): Luke 22.43–44 (145); 23.34 (148); 22.19b–20 (144); 24.12; 24.6; 24.36; 24.40; 24.51–52 (149–50); 3.22; 10.1; 2.14; 11.2–4. [^lk-wording]: Luke 22.43-44; Luke 23.34; Luke 10.1; Luke 11.2; Luke 3.22 (WEB); The Orthodox Study Bible (NKJV), Luke 22, 23, and 10. [^justin103]: St. Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho 103. [^diat48]: Tatian, Diatessaron, sections 1, 48, and 52 (Arabic text, ANF); Bruce, The Canon of Scripture, on the date. [^hilary]: St. Hilary of Poitiers, On the Trinity 10.40–41. [^chrys-mt83]: Chrysostom, Homilies on Matthew, Hom. 83. [^jdam]: St. John of Damascus, Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith 3.20. [^aug-ps141]: Augustine, Expositions on the Psalms, Ps. 141 §2. [^ac-v]: Apostolic Constitutions 5. [^chrys-1cor32]: Chrysostom, Homilies on First Corinthians, Hom. 32. [^aug-tr31]: Augustine, Tractates on the Gospel of John, Tractate 31. [^justin88]: Justin, Dialogue with Trypho 88; the connection to the variant at Luke 3.22 is that of the Jewish Annotated New Testament's apparatus. [^methodius]: St. Methodius of Olympus, Banquet of the Ten Virgins, Discourse 8, ch. 9. [^seventy]: Luke 10.1 (WEB); Levine and Brettler, eds, The Jewish Annotated New Testament, note on Luke 10.1–12; OrthodoxWiki, "Seventy Apostles"; The Orthodox Study Bible, Luke 10, sidebar "The Seventy." [^course-lecture]: Course lecture notes, Gospels and Acts, classes 1–4; on Luke 9.10. [^jerome-pref]: Jerome, Preface to the Four Gospels (to Pope Damasus). [^ow-vulgate]: OrthodoxWiki, "Vulgate." [^bruce-diat]: Bruce, The Canon of Scripture, 126–28. [^bruce-diat2]: Bruce, The Canon of Scripture, 126. [^ow-rabbula]: OrthodoxWiki, "Rabbula of Edessa." [^ow-ulfilas]: OrthodoxWiki, "Ulfilas." [^ow-cm]: OrthodoxWiki, "Cyril and Methodius." [^course-english]: Course discussion notes, Gospels and Acts. [^ow-osb]: OrthodoxWiki, "Orthodox Study Bible." [^tert-iv4]: Tertullian, Against Marcion 4.4. [^tert-iv5]: Tertullian, Against Marcion 4.5. [^jant-19]: Levine and Brettler, eds, The Jewish Annotated New Testament, notes on Luke 19.41–44 and 21.20–24. [^eus-3-7]: Eusebius, Church History 3.7.4–7; compare Luke 19.41-44; Luke 21.20-24. [^jant-census]: Levine and Brettler, eds, The Jewish Annotated New Testament, note on Luke 2.1–7, and introduction to Luke. [^justin-apol34]: Justin, First Apology 34; Dialogue with Trypho 78. [^tert-iv19]: Tertullian, Against Marcion 4.19. [^jant-genealogy]: Levine and Brettler, eds, The Jewish Annotated New Testament, note on Luke 3.23–38. [^africanus]: Julius Africanus, on the genealogies of Matthew and Luke (Letter to Aristides, noticed in Jerome, On Illustrious Men). [^behr42]: Behr, The Mystery of Christ, 42. [^ow-gospels]: OrthodoxWiki, "Gospels." [^ow-syn]: OrthodoxWiki, "Synoptic gospels." [^jant-pharisee]: Levine and Brettler, eds, The Jewish Annotated New Testament, "Pharisees in Luke (Lk 5.17–39)," 110. [^jant-prodigal]: Levine and Brettler, eds, The Jewish Annotated New Testament, "Parable of the Prodigal Son (Lk 15.11–32)," 133. [^aug-tr53]: Augustine, Tractates on the Gospel of John, Tractate 53. [^tert-iv7]: Tertullian, Against Marcion 4.7. [^bruce-marcion]: Bruce, The Canon of Scripture, 137–38, with n. 8. [^ow-marcion]: OrthodoxWiki, "Marcion"; "Marcionism." [^athan-10-22]: St. Athanasius, On Luke 10:22 and Matthew 11:27 §1. [^athan-2-52]: Athanasius, Four Discourses Against the Arians, Discourse 3, §§26, 51–53. [^cyril14]: Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lectures 14. [^jdam-res]: John of Damascus, Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith 4.13. [^diat52]: Tatian, Diatessaron, section 52 (Arabic text, ANF). [^childs-hyp]: Childs, The New Testament as Canon; cited in course discussion notes, Gospels and Acts. [^mcguckin-28]: John Anthony McGuckin, The Eastern Orthodox Church: A New History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020), 27–28; Eusebius, Church History 3.39.3. [^behr12]: Behr, The Mystery of Christ, 12–13. [^childs-49]: Childs, The New Testament as Canon, 49–50. [^mcguckin-29]: McGuckin, The Eastern Orthodox Church, 28–29. [^anastasis-mat]: Anastasis: The Services of Holy Week and Pascha, trans. Archimandrite Ephrem Lash, Sunday Matins; OrthodoxWiki, "Magnificat"; "Biblical Odes"; Luke 1.46–55; Luke 1.68–79. [^anastasis-vespers]: Anastasis, Vespers for Sundays and feasts; February 2 service; compare Luke 2.29-32; The Meeting of the Lord. [^course-canonical]: Course discussion notes, Gospels and Acts. [^clem-rich]: Clement of Alexandria, Who Is the Rich Man That Shall Be Saved? 29. [^greg-or29]: St. Gregory the Theologian, Oration 29 (Third Theological Oration) §20. [^aug-ps126]: Augustine, Expositions on the Psalms, Ps. 126 §11; Ps. 89. [^vincent]: St. Vincent of Lérins, Commonitory 2 [5]. [^behr21]: Behr, The Mystery of Christ, 21; Luke 24.25-27.