The Gospel of Luke — The Evangelist of Mercy and Its Journey to Canon

Part of the series: The New Testament Canon—How 27 Books Survived the Ancient Gauntlet

The Gospel of Luke is the longest book in the New Testament, and together with its sequel, the Acts of the Apostles, it forms the single largest contribution any one author made to the Christian canon — roughly a quarter of the whole.⁠¹ It is the Gospel that gave the Church the Magnificat and the Benedictus, the parable of the Prodigal Son and the parable of the Good Samaritan, the shepherds at the manger and the two disciples on the road to Emmaus. It is the only Gospel written, by the ancient consensus, by a Gentile; the only one whose author also wrote the story of the early Church; and, in a strange irony of history, the one Gospel a second-century heretic thought he could improve by cutting it down.

That last fact is the hinge of Luke’s story. Around the year 144, a shipowner from Pontus named Marcion arrived in Rome, assembled the first fixed list of Christian Scripture the world had ever seen, and placed at its center a single, abridged Gospel — a shortened Luke stripped of everything that tied Jesus to the God of Israel. The orthodox response to that mutilation did as much as any council to push the Church toward defining, and defending, the fourfold Gospel it already possessed. Luke, the Gospel a heretic tried to hijack, became one of the reasons the Church learned to say precisely which books were hers.

This post examines how that Gospel came to be written, who its author was, when and where he wrote, what makes his portrait of Jesus distinct, and how a book that was never seriously doubted nonetheless sat at the heart of the ancient canon debate. Along the way it takes up the questions a careful modern reader will ask — about the “we” passages of Acts, the physician’s vocabulary, the date, and the sources — and it closes with what the Gospel of mercy has meant for Catholic faith and worship.

A Gospel written by “the beloved physician”

Like the other three Gospels, Luke is anonymous. The author never gives his name; the title “According to Luke” is a superscription added in the second century, not part of the original text. Everything the tradition claims about the man rests on external testimony and on the internal evidence of the book itself.

The New Testament’s three glimpses of Luke

The name Luke appears exactly three times in the New Testament, and never in a Gospel. All three are in letters attributed to Paul, written from or about imprisonment. In Colossians, Paul sends greetings from “Luke the beloved physician” alongside Demas.⁠² In the letter to Philemon, Luke is listed among Paul’s “co-workers.” And in the Second Letter to Timothy, at the loneliest moment of the Pauline correspondence, comes the line that fixed Luke in Christian memory: “Luke is the only one with me.”⁠³ These are the only threads. The single word that made Luke a physician for all subsequent tradition — the Greek iatros — occurs in Colossians alone, and the New American Bible’s own note observes that Luke is “only here described as a medical doctor.”⁠⁴

The witness of the second century

The identification of these three greetings with the author of the Third Gospel is not something the New Testament states; it is what the early Church concluded, and it did so with unusual consistency. The earliest clear witness is Irenaeus of Lyons, writing around 180. In Against Heresies he sets the four evangelists side by side and writes, in the translation of the Ante-Nicene Fathers, “Luke also, the companion of Paul, recorded in a book the Gospel preached by him.”⁠⁵

The Muratorian Fragment, an acephalous list of Scripture usually dated to the late second century, is more expansive. It calls Luke “the third book of the Gospel” and says: “Luke, the well-known physician… wrote in his own name… after the ascension of Christ, and when Paul had associated him with himself… Nor did he himself see the Lord in the flesh.”⁠⁶ Here already are the two claims that would define the tradition: Luke was a physician, and he was Paul’s associate rather than an eyewitness of Jesus.

A Latin prologue to the Gospel, once called “anti-Marcionite” and traditionally read as a late second-century text, adds biographical color: Luke was “a Syrian of Antioch… a physician by profession,” a disciple of the apostles who followed Paul, unmarried and childless, who died at eighty-four in Boeotia.⁠⁷ Eusebius of Caesarea, writing his Ecclesiastical History around 325, gathered the tradition into its classic form: “Luke, who was of Antiochian parentage and a physician by profession, and who was especially intimate with Paul… has left us, in two inspired books, proofs of that spiritual healing art which he learned from them. One of these books is the Gospel… The other book is the Acts of the Apostles.”⁠⁸ Jerome, near the end of the fourth century, essentially restated Eusebius, adding the tradition that Luke’s relics were later translated to Constantinople.⁠⁹

The “we” passages

The ancient writers did not simply assert that Luke traveled with Paul; they pointed to a peculiar feature of Acts. In four sections, the narrative slips from the third person into the first person plural — “we sought passage to Macedonia,” “we sailed from Philippi.” These “we” passages (Acts 16:10–17; 20:5–15; 21:1–18; 27:1–28:16) read as the eyewitness testimony of a companion who was present at those particular moments and absent at others.⁠¹⁰ Irenaeus already made the argument explicitly: “that this Luke was inseparable from Paul, and his fellow-labourer in the Gospel, he himself clearly evinces,” and Irenaeus then quotes the “we” sections one after another as proof.⁠¹¹

Modern scholarship reads the same data with more caution. The New American Bible’s note at Acts 16:10 lays out the options fairly: some scholars take the “we” as a real travel companion’s memory, others as a literary device, and the note itself judges that “the realism of the narrative… lends weight to the argument that the ‘we’ includes Luke or another companion of Paul whose data Luke used as a source.”⁠¹² Three broad readings compete: that the author was himself present (the traditional view); that he incorporated an eyewitness “we-source” he did not write; and that the first person was a stylistic convention of ancient sea-voyage narrative, a proposal associated with Vernon Robbins and contested by Colin Hemer, Stanley Porter, and others.⁠¹³

Did a doctor write it?

For a time in the late nineteenth century, it seemed the vocabulary of Luke and Acts might settle the question. In 1882 an Irish scholar, William Kirk Hobart, published The Medical Language of St. Luke, arguing that some four hundred words and phrases in the two books were the technical vocabulary of Greek physicians such as Hippocrates and Galen, and that this proved a doctor had written them.⁠¹⁴ The thesis was popular until Henry Cadbury, in his 1919 Harvard study The Style and Literary Method of Luke, dismantled it: nearly all of Hobart’s “medical” terms turn up in the ordinary literary Greek of the Septuagint, Josephus, Lucian, and Plutarch, none of them physicians. The vocabulary proves an educated Hellenistic writer, not a doctor.⁠¹⁵ Cadbury’s demonstration is decisive on its own terms, and it is worth stating precisely what it does and does not show. It shows that the language cannot prove the author was a physician. It does not show that he was not one. The medical hypothesis is neither confirmed nor refuted by the text; it is simply not carried by the vocabulary, and it stands or falls with the wider tradition.

Why some scholars doubt the tradition

The modern doubts about Lukan authorship rarely turn on the Gospel at all. They turn on Acts — specifically, on whether the portrait of Paul in Acts can have come from a close companion. The classic statement of the case is Philipp Vielhauer’s 1950 essay “On the ‘Paulinism’ of Acts,” which argued that the theology of Acts diverges from the genuine Pauline letters on four points: its positive natural theology (the Areopagus speech), its treatment of the Law, its more “primitive” Christology, and its deferral of the imminent end. If the author’s Paul is not the Paul of the epistles, Vielhauer reasoned, the author was probably not Paul’s traveling companion.⁠¹⁶ Werner Kümmel and Ernst Haenchen pressed the point from different angles, treating the “we” as a source or a literary device rather than a signature.⁠¹⁷

Against them stand scholars who defend the tradition in qualified form. Joseph Fitzmyer, whose two-volume Anchor Bible commentary is the standard English work on Luke, accepted that Luke was a sometime companion of Paul on the later journeys and probably a physician, while granting that he did not know Paul’s letters and that his theology differs from Paul’s. I. Howard Marshall, Darrell Bock, and Colin Hemer likewise hold the traditional attribution, treating the medical-language evidence as corroborative at most.⁠¹⁸ The honest summary is that the external tradition is early, unanimous, and specific, while the internal objections are real but inconclusive — and that both sides are arguing, in the end, about the same handful of chapters in Acts.

The most literary book in the New Testament

Whoever wrote the Third Gospel was the best writer among the evangelists. Luke alone opens with a formal literary preface, a single balanced Greek sentence addressed to a patron:

Since many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the events that have been fulfilled among us, just as those who were eyewitnesses from the beginning and ministers of the word have handed them down to us, I too have decided, after investigating everything accurately anew, to write it down in an orderly sequence for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may realize the certainty of the teachings you have received.⁠¹⁹

This is the vocabulary and cadence of a Hellenistic author self-consciously joining the world of Greek letters. Loveday Alexander, in a careful study of the preface, argued that its closest parallels are not the grand classical historians like Thucydides but the prefaces of Greek scientific and technical manuals — medicine, engineering, astronomy — the working prose of an educated professional.⁠²⁰ Having written that sentence, Luke does something remarkable: at 1:5 he shifts registers entirely, dropping into the Septuagintal Greek of the Old Testament for the infancy narrative, so that the annunciation and the Magnificat read like a continuation of the stories of Hannah and Samuel.⁠²¹ He can write like a Greek historian and like a Hebrew prophet, and he chooses his register to fit his matter. The result is the longest Gospel and, with Acts, the largest single-author block of the New Testament — a little over a quarter of it by length.⁠²²

How Luke built his Gospel

Luke tells us in his own first sentence that “many have undertaken to compile a narrative” before him. He was, by his own account, a redactor of earlier sources, and the identification of those sources is the substance of the Synoptic Problem.

On the dominant solution, the Two-Source Hypothesis, Luke drew on two written sources and a body of material unique to himself. The first source is the Gospel of Mark, which supplies the narrative backbone; roughly a third of Luke is Markan, and Luke reproduces something on the order of half of Mark, though every such figure is an approximation that varies with the method of counting.⁠²³ The second is the hypothetical sayings source known as Q, the material Luke shares with Matthew but not with Mark. The third is Luke’s own special tradition, conventionally labeled “L” — and it is here that the Gospel’s most beloved passages live: the infancy narrative, the Good Samaritan, the Prodigal Son, Zacchaeus, the rich fool, the penitent thief, and the road to Emmaus.⁠²⁴

Two structural features mark Luke’s handling of his sources. He passes over a long block of Mark — the so-called Great Omission of Mark 6:45–8:26 — leaving no parallel to it.⁠²⁵ And he builds a vast central section, the travel narrative of roughly Luke 9:51 to 19:27, in which Jesus makes his long journey to Jerusalem and most of the special Lukan material is gathered.⁠²⁶ Not every scholar accepts Q. The Farrer–Goulder–Goodacre hypothesis dispenses with it entirely, holding that Luke used Mark and Matthew directly; the older Griesbach or Two-Gospel hypothesis, revived by William Farmer, reverses the order and makes Mark the last and shortest of the three.⁠²⁷ But on any of these models, Luke is a careful editor working with predecessors, exactly as he claims.

When and where Luke wrote

The dating of Luke is bound to the dating of Acts, because Acts refers back to “the first book” addressed to Theophilus; the Gospel must be at least as early as its sequel.⁠²⁸ The majority of scholars place the Gospel around 80 to 90, after Mark and after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70, which they detect behind Luke’s version of Jesus’ prophecy of the city “surrounded by armies.” Fitzmyer, Raymond Brown, François Bovon, and Kümmel all cluster in this range.⁠²⁹

A vigorous minority argues for a date before 70. Their strongest card is the way Acts ends: abruptly, with Paul under house arrest in Rome around the year 62, narrating neither Paul’s death, nor the Neronian persecution, nor the fall of Jerusalem — silences most naturally explained if Luke was writing before those events happened. John A. T. Robinson built his Redating the New Testament partly on this argument; Adolf von Harnack moved toward an early date late in his career; Colin Hemer marshaled the case in detail.⁠³⁰ At the other end, a smaller group dates Luke–Acts into the early second century, either because they detect the author’s use of Josephus (whose Antiquities appeared in 93–94) or because they read the work as a response to Marcion; Richard Pervo and Joseph Tyson are the leading representatives.⁠³¹ The provenance is even less certain than the date. The ancient tradition points to Antioch and to Achaia; the internal evidence points to a Gentile-Christian audience and a Gentile patron in Theophilus, whose name means “friend of God.” None of these can be established with confidence.⁠³²

The theology of the Gospel of mercy

If Matthew is the Gospel of the Church and Mark the Gospel of the cross, Luke is the Gospel of mercy — of the outsider brought in, the lost one found, the poor lifted up. Its distinctive themes are woven so tightly into its special material that to lose the L passages would be to lose the Lukan Jesus.

Salvation history

Luke thinks in terms of time and geography. Hans Conzelmann, in his influential 1954 study Die Mitte der Zeit — “the middle of time” — argued that Luke replaced the early Church’s expectation of an imminent end with a scheme of salvation history unfolding in three epochs: the age of Israel and the Law, the age of Jesus at the center, and the age of the Church.⁠³³ Whether or not one accepts Conzelmann’s framework in detail, the instinct behind it is sound: Luke’s Gospel moves relentlessly toward Jerusalem and ends where it began, in the Temple, while Acts carries the message from Jerusalem outward to Rome. And Luke marks the arrival of salvation with a favorite word, “today” — today a savior has been born, today this Scripture is fulfilled, today salvation has come to this house, today you will be with me in Paradise.

The Gentiles and the reversal of fortunes

Luke’s universalism is structural. Where Matthew traces Jesus’ genealogy back to Abraham, the father of the Jewish people, Luke traces it back past Abraham to “the son of Adam, the son of God” — to the father of the whole human race.⁠³⁴ The aged Simeon, taking the infant Jesus in his arms, hails him as “a light for revelation to the Gentiles.” The Good Samaritan, the hero of Luke’s most famous parable, is a despised outsider who does what the priest and Levite would not.⁠³⁵

Bound up with this reach toward the outsider is a sustained concern for the poor and a theology of reversal. It sounds first in the Magnificat, Mary’s song, where God “has thrown down the rulers from their thrones but lifted up the lowly” and “the hungry he has filled with good things; the rich he has sent away empty.”⁠³⁶ It returns in Luke’s version of the Beatitudes, where blessings on the poor and hungry are paired with woes on the rich and full, and in parables found only in Luke: the rich man who ignores the beggar Lazarus, and the tax collector Zacchaeus, who gives half his goods to the poor.⁠³⁷

Women, the Spirit, and prayer

Luke gives women a prominence unmatched in the other Gospels. Elizabeth, Mary, and Anna dominate the opening chapters; the widow of Nain, the sinful woman who anoints Jesus’ feet, Mary and Martha, and the women who followed Jesus and provided for him — Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Susanna — all appear in material largely proper to Luke.⁠³⁸ The Holy Spirit, too, is more prominent in Luke than in Matthew or Mark, filling John the Baptist in the womb, descending on Jesus at his baptism, driving and empowering his ministry, and preparing the reader for the Spirit’s outpouring in Acts.⁠³⁹ And Luke is the Gospel of prayer: he shows Jesus praying at every hinge of the story — at his baptism, before choosing the Twelve, before Peter’s confession, at the Transfiguration, in Gethsemane — and he alone preserves the parables of the persistent widow and of the Pharisee and the tax collector.⁠⁴⁰

Joy and the finding of the lost

Over all of this hangs a mood of joy. The word runs from the announcement of “good news of great joy” to the shepherds, through the rejoicing over each recovered sinner, to the disciples returning to Jerusalem “with great joy” at the Gospel’s close. It reaches its height in Luke 15, the chapter of the lost and found — the lost sheep, and then two parables Luke alone preserves, the lost coin and the lost son. The father who runs to meet the prodigal, throwing a feast because “your brother was dead and has come to life again; he was lost and has been found,” is the image around which the whole Gospel of mercy turns.⁠⁴¹

Marcion and the making of the canon

The most consequential episode in Luke’s early history was an attempt to destroy part of it. Around 140, Marcion of Sinope came to Rome with a radical theology: the God of the Old Testament, the Creator, was a lesser and inferior deity, distinct from the good and alien God revealed by Jesus. To fit that theology, Marcion needed a Scripture purged of Judaism, and he built one. His canon — the first fixed Christian canon known to history — consisted of a single Gospel and ten letters of Paul, with no Old Testament and no other Gospels. The single Gospel was a shortened Luke, stripped of the infancy narrative and of the passages that most clearly bind Jesus to the Creator. When Marcion’s teaching was rejected and he broke with the Roman church, in the autumn of 144, that mutilated Luke went out into the world as the Scripture of a rival Church.⁠⁴²

The dominant scholarly view, given classic form by Adolf von Harnack, is that Marcion edited canonical Luke, and that his provocation did as much as anything to spur the wider Church to define its own, larger canon. A revisionist minority — Jason BeDuhn arguing for a shared earlier source behind both, Matthias Klinghardt for the priority of Marcion’s Gospel — has challenged the direction of dependence, but the majority still holds that the Evangelion is a later abridgment of Luke.⁠⁴³ That is certainly how the Fathers saw it, and their answer to Marcion is one of the great arguments for the antiquity of the Gospels. Tertullian, in the fourth book of Against Marcion, appealed to the rule of time: “the authority lies with that which shall be found to be more ancient,” for “truth” must “precede error.” Luke’s Gospel, he insisted, “has come down to us in like integrity until the sacrilegious treatment of Marcion. In short, when Marcion laid hands on it, it then became diverse and hostile to the Gospels of the apostles.”⁠⁴⁴ Irenaeus said the same more bluntly: Marcion “mutilates the Gospel which is according to Luke,” and anyone who sets Luke aside “will… manifestly reject that Gospel of which he claims to be a disciple.”⁠⁴⁵

It was in the very same passage where he defended Luke against Marcion that Irenaeus gave the Church its most enduring argument for exactly four Gospels — no more, no fewer. “Since there are four zones of the world… and four principal winds,” he wrote, so the Church has “four pillars.” He matched each Gospel to one of the four living creatures of Ezekiel and Revelation, and to Luke he assigned the calf, or ox: “that according to Luke, taking up his priestly character, commenced with Zacharias the priest offering sacrifice to God. For now was made ready the fatted calf.”⁠⁴⁶ The winged ox has been Luke’s emblem ever since. Later writers rearranged the other three creatures — Jerome’s scheme, which assigns the man to Matthew, the lion to Mark, the ox to Luke, and the eagle to John, became standard in Western art — but on one point every Father agreed: the ox belongs to Luke, and for the same reason. His is the Gospel that opens in the Temple, with a priest at the altar of sacrifice.⁠⁴⁷

Canonical status — never in doubt

For all its centrality to the Marcion controversy, Luke itself was never in serious dispute among orthodox Christians. Eusebius placed the four Gospels at the head of the homologoumena, the “acknowledged” books that no one questioned. The Muratorian Fragment lists Luke as “the third book of the Gospel.” Every early canonical list — Irenaeus, Origen, Eusebius, Athanasius’ Festal Letter of 367, the African councils of the late fourth century — includes it without hesitation. Unlike Hebrews, James, 2 Peter, or Revelation, Luke faced no regional rejection and no sustained doubt.⁠⁴⁸

The manuscript tradition is correspondingly strong. Papyrus 75, the Bodmer papyrus of Luke and John usually dated around 175 to 225, preserves most of Luke and stands textually very close to the great fourth-century Codex Vaticanus — an agreement that overturned the older theory that Vaticanus represented a smoothed later recension, and showed that its text already existed around 200.⁠⁴⁹ One genuine text-critical puzzle attaches to Luke: the “Western non-interpolations,” a set of shorter readings, mostly in the resurrection chapters, that Westcott and Hort judged original against the longer majority text. The most important is the longer form of the words of institution at Luke 22:19b–20. The discovery of Papyrus 75, which contains the longer reading, tipped the evidence back toward the fuller text, and modern critical editions now print most of these passages, some in brackets.⁠⁵⁰

Luke and the Catholic faith

No Gospel has shaped Catholic piety more directly than Luke, and nowhere is this clearer than in devotion to the Virgin Mary. The two halves of the Hail Mary are both drawn from Luke’s first chapter: the angel’s greeting, “Hail, favored one! The Lord is with you” (which the Vulgate and the liturgy render “full of grace”), and Elizabeth’s cry at the Visitation, “Most blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb.”⁠⁵¹ The Catechism builds its commentary on the Hail Mary directly on these verses, and it reads the Greek word behind the greeting, kecharitomene, as the Scriptural seed of a great doctrine: because Mary is “full of grace,” the Church came to confess that she was “redeemed from the moment of her conception” — the dogma of the Immaculate Conception.⁠⁵² Mary’s answer to the angel — “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord. May it be done to me according to your word” — became for the Fathers the hinge of salvation, the obedience that undid the disobedience of Eve. As the Catechism puts it, quoting Irenaeus, “the knot of Eve’s disobedience was untied by Mary’s obedience.”⁠⁵³ The Magnificat that follows — the song of the lowly and the poor lifted up — is prayed by the whole Church every evening at Vespers, and the Joyful Mysteries of the Rosary are drawn almost entirely from these Lukan scenes.⁠⁵⁴

Luke is also the evangelist of the Eucharist. His account of the institution — “This is my body, which will be given for you; do this in memory of me” — stands closest of all the Gospels to Paul’s, and it is Luke who gives the Church the road to Emmaus, where the risen Christ “took bread, said the blessing, broke it, and gave it to them,” and was “made known to them in the breaking of the bread.”⁠⁵⁵ The Emmaus pattern — Scripture opened on the way, then Christ recognized in the breaking of bread — is the pattern of the Mass itself, a point the Catechism draws out explicitly.⁠⁵⁶ In the Church’s Sunday cycle, Luke is the Gospel of Year C, read from Advent to Christ the King, so that once every three years the faithful hear the whole sweep of the physician’s Gospel — from the priest at the altar to the two disciples whose hearts burned within them on the road.

What we know and what remains open

Some things about Luke are as secure as anything in New Testament study. The Gospel and Acts are one work by one author, addressed to Theophilus. That author was a cultivated Greek writer, a second- or third-generation Christian dependent on eyewitnesses rather than one himself, and the most literary stylist among the evangelists. His Gospel was never doubted in the orthodox mainstream and stood at the center of the earliest canon controversy. Its theology of mercy, its concern for the poor and for women, its portrait of the praying Jesus, and its Marian and Eucharistic riches have marked Christian life ever since.

Other things remain genuinely open. Whether the author was the Luke of Paul’s letters, and whether that Luke was a physician, rests on a tradition that is early and unanimous but not beyond challenge, and the modern objections — centered on the portrait of Paul in Acts — are serious even if inconclusive. The date is contested across a range of fifty years, and the place of writing is essentially unknown. On these questions the Catholic Church leaves the historical work to scholarship; the Second Vatican Council’s constitution on revelation, Dei Verbum, affirms the inspiration and truth of the Gospels while endorsing the careful use of critical method, and Catholic scholars have accordingly felt free to weigh the authorship question on its historical merits.⁠⁵⁷ What is not open, for the believer, is the standing of the book. Whoever held the pen, the Church receives the Gospel of Luke as the inspired word of God — the Gospel in which the God of Israel proves to be, from Adam onward, the Father who runs to meet his lost children.

Key scholarly works on Luke

For readers who wish to go deeper, the following works represent the essential scholarly library on the Gospel of Luke.

Major commentaries: Joseph A. Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke, Anchor Bible, 2 vols. (1981–1985)—the standard critical commentary in English; François Bovon, Luke, Hermeneia, 3 vols. (2002–2013)—comprehensive on text, tradition, and reception history; Joel B. Green, The Gospel of Luke, New International Commentary on the New Testament (1997); I. Howard Marshall, The Gospel of Luke, New International Greek Testament Commentary (1978)—especially strong on the Greek text; Darrell L. Bock, Luke, Baker Exegetical Commentary, 2 vols. (1994–1996); and Luke Timothy Johnson, The Gospel of Luke, Sacra Pagina (1991), a Catholic literary reading.

Key monographs and studies: Hans Conzelmann, The Theology of St. Luke (German original 1954; English 1960); Henry J. Cadbury, The Style and Literary Method of Luke (1919) and The Making of Luke-Acts (1927); Loveday Alexander, The Preface to Luke’s Gospel (1993); Raymond E. Brown, The Birth of the Messiah, on the infancy narratives (1977; rev. 1993); Adolf von Harnack, Marcion: The Gospel of the Alien God (German 1921); Colin J. Hemer, The Book of Acts in the Setting of Hellenistic History (1989); and Bruce M. Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament (1987).

Frequently Asked Questions

Who wrote the Gospel of Luke?

The Gospel is formally anonymous; the author never names himself. From the late second century, however, a consistent tradition — Irenaeus, the Muratorian Fragment, the anti-Marcionite prologue, Eusebius, and Jerome — identified him as Luke, the Gentile physician and companion of Paul named in Colossians 4:14, Philemon 24, and 2 Timothy 4:11. The tradition rests largely on the “we” passages of Acts, which read as the memoir of one of Paul’s travel companions. Many critical scholars regard the attribution as a later inference and treat the work as anonymous, chiefly because they judge the portrait of Paul in Acts hard to reconcile with a close companion; others, including Fitzmyer and Marshall, defend the tradition in qualified form. The Catholic Church leaves the historical question to scholarship.

Is the Gospel of Luke the same author as the Acts of the Apostles?

Yes, and this is one of the most secure conclusions in New Testament scholarship. Luke and Acts are a single work in two volumes, both addressed to Theophilus; Acts opens by referring back to “the first book” about all that Jesus “did and taught.” The two books share a language, a style, and a theology so thoroughly that common authorship is rarely doubted even by scholars who reject the identification of that author with Luke the physician. Together they account for a little more than a quarter of the New Testament by length — the largest contribution of any single author.

When was the Gospel of Luke written?

Most scholars date it to about 80 to 90, after Mark and after the fall of Jerusalem in 70, which they see reflected in Luke’s version of Jesus’ prophecy about the city being “surrounded by armies.” A significant minority argues for a date before 70, resting heavily on the abrupt ending of Acts, which leaves Paul alive under house arrest around 62 and never mentions his death or the destruction of Jerusalem. A smaller group dates the work into the early second century. The Catholic Church takes no position on the date, treating it as a matter for historical research.

What is Marcion’s gospel, and how does it relate to Luke?

Marcion of Sinope, a second-century teacher who rejected the God of the Old Testament, assembled around 140 the first fixed Christian canon: one Gospel and ten letters of Paul. His single Gospel was a shortened version of Luke, with the infancy narrative and other material removed. Most scholars hold that Marcion edited canonical Luke to fit his theology, though a minority argues that his gospel and Luke drew on a common earlier source. Either way, Marcion’s mutilated Luke provoked the wider Church to define and defend its own fourfold Gospel, which is why a book that was never itself doubted sits at the heart of the ancient canon debate.

What makes the Gospel of Luke different from Matthew and Mark?

Luke is the longest and most literary of the Synoptic Gospels, and it preserves a large body of material found nowhere else: the annunciation to Mary, the Magnificat, the shepherds at the manger, the Good Samaritan, the Prodigal Son, Zacchaeus, the penitent thief, and the road to Emmaus. Its distinctive emphases are mercy toward sinners and outsiders, concern for the poor and the reversal of worldly fortunes, the inclusion of Gentiles (Luke traces Jesus’ genealogy back to Adam), the prominence of women, the role of the Holy Spirit, and the importance of prayer and joy. It is often called the Gospel of mercy.

How does the Catholic Church use the Gospel of Luke today?

Luke is the primary Gospel for Year C of the three-year Sunday lectionary cycle, read semi-continuously from Advent through the end of Ordinary Time. It is the scriptural source of the Hail Mary and the Magnificat, and the Joyful Mysteries of the Rosary come almost entirely from its infancy narrative. The Catechism draws on Luke’s annunciation for its teaching on Mary and on the Emmaus account for its understanding of the Mass. Luke’s canticles — the Magnificat, the Benedictus, and the Nunc Dimittis — are prayed daily in the Liturgy of the Hours.

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This post is part of an ongoing series covering every book in the New Testament canon and the early Christian texts that nearly joined them. See the full series at The New Testament Canon—How 27 Books Survived the Ancient Gauntlet.

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Footnotes

1. 1. Together, Luke and Acts account for roughly 27.5 percent of the New Testament by length, the largest contribution of any single author; see M. Eugene Boring, *An Introduction to the New Testament: History, Literature, Theology* (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2012), 556. Luke's Gospel, at twenty-four chapters, is also the longest of the four.

2. 2. Colossians 4:14 (NABRE): “Luke the beloved physician sends greetings, as does Demas.”

3. 3. Philemon 24; 2 Timothy 4:11 (NABRE): “Luke is the only one with me. Get Mark and bring him with you, for he is helpful to me in the ministry.” Colossians and 2 Timothy are both regarded by many critics as deutero-Pauline, a point that bears on how much weight the “physician” datum can carry.

4. 4. New American Bible (Revised Edition), note on Colossians 4:14: “Luke: only here described as a medical doctor; cf. Phlm 24 and 2 Tm 4:11. Traditionally the author of the third gospel.” See bible.usccb.org/bible/colossians/4.

5. 5. Irenaeus, *Against Heresies* 3.1.1 (ANF, vol. 1, trans. Alexander Roberts and William Rambaut). The full passage names all four evangelists in turn. See newadvent.org/fathers/0103301.htm.

6. 6. The Muratorian Fragment, lines on Luke (Roberts-Donaldson translation, ANF, vol. 5). The traditional dating places it around 170–200; a revisionist minority (A. C. Sundberg, G. M. Hahneman) argues for a fourth-century date, a proposal contested by Charles E. Hill, Joseph Verheyden, and others. See earlychristianwritings.com/text/muratorian.html.

7. 7. The so-called anti-Marcionite Prologue to Luke, in the translation of Helmut Koester, *Ancient Christian Gospels* (Trinity Press International, 1990), 335. The label and an early date were proposed by Donatien de Bruyne (1928); Jürgen Regul, *Die antimarcionitischen Evangelienprologe* (1969), placed the corpus in the fourth century, though Koester allows that the first part of the Luke prologue may be considerably earlier. A manuscript variant reads “Bithynia” for “Boeotia” and “seventy-four” for “eighty-four.”

8. 8. Eusebius, *Ecclesiastical History* 3.4.6–7 (NPNF, 2nd ser., vol. 1, trans. Arthur Cushman McGiffert). The substantive statement about Luke is at 3.4.7. See newadvent.org/fathers/250103.htm.

9. 9. Jerome, *De viris illustribus* 7 (NPNF, 2nd ser., vol. 3, trans. Ernest Cushing Richardson): “Luke a physician of Antioch, as his writings indicate, was not unskilled in the Greek language. An adherent of the apostle Paul, and companion of all his journeying, he wrote a Gospel.” See newadvent.org/fathers/2708.htm.

10. 10. The four “we” sections are Acts 16:10–17; 20:5–15; 21:1–18; and 27:1–28:16, as the NABRE note at Acts 16:10 lists them.

11. 11. Irenaeus, *Against Heresies* 3.14.1 (ANF, vol. 1). Irenaeus quotes the “we” passages seriatim and then cites 2 Timothy 4:11 and Colossians 4:14 to confirm the identification. See newadvent.org/fathers/0103314.htm.

12. 12. NABRE, note on Acts 16:10. See bible.usccb.org/bible/acts/16.

13. 13. Vernon K. Robbins, “By Land and by Sea: The We-Passages and Ancient Sea Voyages,” in *Perspectives on Luke-Acts*, ed. C. H. Talbert (1978), 215–42, proposed the sea-voyage convention; the proposal is contested by Colin J. Hemer, Joseph Fitzmyer, and Stanley E. Porter, *The Paul of Acts* (Mohr Siebeck, 1999), who argues for a pre-existing “we-source.”

14. 14. William Kirk Hobart, *The Medical Language of St. Luke* (Dublin: Hodges, Figgis; London: Longmans, Green, 1882).

15. 15. Henry J. Cadbury, *The Style and Literary Method of Luke*, Harvard Theological Studies VI (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1919), esp. Part I, “The Diction of Luke and Acts.” Cadbury sharpened the argument in later articles, including “Lexical Notes on Luke-Acts II,” *Journal of Biblical Literature* 45 (1926): 190–209.

16. 16. Philipp Vielhauer, “On the ‘Paulinism’ of Acts,” originally “Zum ‘Paulinismus’ der Apostelgeschichte,” *Evangelische Theologie* 10 (1950/51): 1–15; English translation in *Studies in Luke-Acts*, ed. Leander E. Keck and J. Louis Martyn (Abingdon, 1966), 33–50.

17. 17. Werner Georg Kümmel, *Introduction to the New Testament*, rev. ed., trans. Howard Clark Kee (Abingdon, 1975); Ernst Haenchen, *The Acts of the Apostles: A Commentary* (Blackwell / Westminster, 1971).

18. 18. Joseph A. Fitzmyer, *The Gospel According to Luke*, Anchor Bible 28 and 28A (Doubleday, 1981–1985), and *Luke the Theologian* (Paulist, 1989); I. Howard Marshall, *The Gospel of Luke*, NIGTC (Eerdmans, 1978); Darrell L. Bock, *Luke*, BECNT (Baker, 1994–1996); Colin J. Hemer, *The Book of Acts in the Setting of Hellenistic History*, ed. C. H. Gempf (Mohr Siebeck, 1989).

19. 19. Luke 1:1–4 (NABRE). The NABRE note observes that this is “the only one of the synoptic gospels to begin with a literary prologue,” written “in imitation of Hellenistic Greek writers.” See bible.usccb.org/bible/luke/1.

20. 20. Loveday Alexander, *The Preface to Luke's Gospel: Literary Convention and Social Context in Luke 1.1–4 and Acts 1.1*, SNTS Monograph Series 78 (Cambridge University Press, 1993).

21. 21. The shift is marked at Luke 1:5 by the Septuagintal *egeneto* (“it came to pass”), rendering the Hebrew narrative idiom. The NABRE note on 1:5–2:52 observes that Luke “writes in imitation of Old Testament birth stories” and that the canticles are “composed of phrases drawn from the Greek Old Testament.”

22. 22. See note 1 above.

23. 23. On the Two-Source Hypothesis and Markan priority, see B. H. Streeter, *The Four Gospels: A Study of Origins* (Macmillan, 1924). The proportion of Mark reproduced in Luke, and of Luke that is Markan, are standard approximations that vary with the method of counting; roughly, about a third of Luke derives from Mark and about half of Mark reappears in Luke.

24. 24. The material peculiar to Luke (“L”) includes the infancy narrative, the Good Samaritan (10:25–37), the Prodigal Son (15:11–32), the rich fool (12:16–21), Zacchaeus (19:1–10), the penitent thief (23:39–43), and the road to Emmaus (24:13–35).

25. 25. The “Great Omission” is the absence in Luke of any parallel to Mark 6:45–8:26, roughly seventy-five verses.

26. 26. The central section, or travel narrative, is usually given as Luke 9:51–19:27, though the end point is variously placed at 19:27, 19:44, or 19:48.

27. 27. On the Farrer hypothesis, see Austin Farrer, “On Dispensing with Q,” in *Studies in the Gospels*, ed. D. E. Nineham (Blackwell, 1955), and Mark Goodacre, *The Case Against Q* (Trinity Press International, 2002). On the Two-Gospel (Griesbach) hypothesis, see William R. Farmer, *The Synoptic Problem* (Macmillan, 1964).

28. 28. Acts 1:1 (NABRE): “In the first book, Theophilus, I dealt with all that Jesus did and taught.”

29. 29. For the majority dating, see Fitzmyer, *Luke* I–IX; Raymond E. Brown, *An Introduction to the New Testament* (Doubleday, 1997); François Bovon, *Luke 1*, Hermeneia (Fortress, 2002); and Kümmel, *Introduction*. The relevant verse is Luke 21:20, “When you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies.”

30. 30. John A. T. Robinson, *Redating the New Testament* (SCM / Westminster, 1976); Adolf von Harnack, *The Date of the Acts and the Synoptic Gospels* (1911), reversing his earlier position; Hemer, *The Book of Acts*, on the abrupt ending at Acts 28:30–31.

31. 31. Richard I. Pervo, *Dating Acts: Between the Evangelists and the Apologists* (Polebridge, 2006), dating Acts to about 115 on the basis of its apparent use of Josephus's *Antiquities* (93–94); Joseph B. Tyson, *Marcion and Luke-Acts: A Defining Struggle* (University of South Carolina Press, 2006).

32. 32. The Antioch and Achaia traditions derive from the anti-Marcionite prologue and Eusebius; the Gentile orientation is evident throughout, most conspicuously in the genealogy to Adam (3:38). Theophilus (“friend of God”) is generally taken as a real, Gentile literary patron, though some read the name as a designation for any Christian reader.

33. 33. Hans Conzelmann, *Die Mitte der Zeit: Studien zur Theologie des Lukas* (Tübingen: Mohr, 1954); English translation, *The Theology of St. Luke*, trans. Geoffrey Buswell (Faber and Faber, 1960). Conzelmann places John the Baptist at the close of the age of Israel and reads the ministry of Jesus, bracketed by Luke 4:13 and 22:3, as a period free of satanic interference — readings later scholars have contested. On the Temple frame, see the NABRE note at Luke 24:53: “The Gospel of Luke ends as it began (Lk 1:9), in the Jerusalem temple.”

34. 34. Luke 3:38 (NABRE): “the son of Enos, the son of Seth, the son of Adam, the son of God.” The NABRE note observes that “Luke's universalism leads him to trace the descent of Jesus beyond Israel to Adam and beyond that to God.”

35. 35. Luke 2:32 (NABRE): “a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and glory for your people Israel”; the Good Samaritan, Luke 10:25–37, is unique to Luke.

36. 36. Luke 1:52–53 (NABRE). The NABRE note on the Magnificat lists among its themes “the reversal of human fortunes” and notes its echo of Hannah's song (1 Samuel 2:1–10).

37. 37. The Beatitudes and Woes of the Sermon on the Plain, Luke 6:20–26; the rich man and Lazarus, Luke 16:19–31; Zacchaeus, Luke 19:1–10. The last two are proper to Luke.

38. 38. The widow of Nain (7:11–17), the sinful woman (7:36–50), Mary and Martha (10:38–42), and the women who provided for Jesus (8:1–3) are all peculiar to Luke; Anna the prophetess appears at 2:36–38. The NABRE note on the infancy narrative lists “the importance of women” among Luke's programmatic themes.

39. 39. On the Holy Spirit in Luke, see, e.g., 1:35; 3:22; 4:1, 4:14, 4:18; 10:21; 11:13. The NABRE prints “holy Spirit” throughout.

40. 40. Luke presents Jesus at prayer at 3:21 (baptism), 6:12 (before choosing the Twelve), 9:18 and 9:28 (Peter's confession and the Transfiguration), 11:1 (before the Lord's Prayer), and 22:41–44 (the Mount of Olives). The parables of the persistent widow (18:1–8) and the Pharisee and the tax collector (18:9–14) are proper to Luke. The NABRE note on 3:21 observes: “Luke regularly presents Jesus at prayer at important points in his ministry.”

41. 41. Luke 15:32 (NABRE). The NABRE note explains that to the lost sheep (shared with Matthew) Luke “adds two parables (the lost coin, Lk 15:8–10; the prodigal son, Lk 15:11–32) from his own special tradition.”

42. 42. On Marcion, his Evangelion and Apostolikon, and the breach of “the autumn of 144,” see the *Catholic Encyclopedia*, s.v. “Marcionites” (1910), which states that Marcion “created his own New Testament admitting but one gospel, a mutilation of St. Luke, and an Apostolicon containing ten epistles of St. Paul.” See newadvent.org/cathen/09645c.htm.

43. 43. Adolf von Harnack, *Marcion: Das Evangelium vom fremden Gott* (1921; ET *Marcion: The Gospel of the Alien God*). For the revisionist positions, see Jason BeDuhn, *The First New Testament: Marcion's Scriptural Canon* (Polebridge, 2013), who favors a shared earlier source, and Matthias Klinghardt, who argues for the priority of Marcion's gospel. The majority view remains that the Evangelion is a later abridgment of canonical Luke.

44. 44. Tertullian, *Against Marcion* 4.4 and 4.5 (ANF, vol. 3, trans. Peter Holmes). At 4.5 he also notes that “Luke's form of the Gospel men usually ascribe to Paul.” See newadvent.org/fathers/03124.htm.

45. 45. Irenaeus, *Against Heresies* 1.27.2 (“he mutilates the Gospel which is according to Luke”), 3.11.7 (“Marcion, mutilating that according to Luke”), and 3.14.3–4 (“if any man set Luke aside... he will... manifestly reject that Gospel of which he claims to be a disciple”), ANF, vol. 1.

46. 46. Irenaeus, *Against Heresies* 3.11.8 (ANF, vol. 1). The four living creatures are drawn from Ezekiel 1:10 and Revelation 4:7. See newadvent.org/fathers/0103311.htm.

47. 47. Irenaeus's own scheme assigns the lion to John, the calf to Luke, the man to Matthew, and the eagle to Mark; Jerome, in the preface to his *Commentary on Matthew*, gives the scheme that became standard in the West (man–Matthew, lion–Mark, ox–Luke, eagle–John), while Augustine, *De consensu evangelistarum* 1.6.9, offers yet another arrangement. All three agree that the ox belongs to Luke and give the same reason: his Gospel opens with Zechariah the priest.

48. 48. Eusebius, *Ecclesiastical History* 3.25, classes the four Gospels among the *homologoumena*. Luke appears in the Muratorian Fragment, in Origen (via Eusebius, *HE* 6.25), in Athanasius's 39th Festal Letter (367), and in the canons of the African councils (Hippo, 393; Carthage, 397).

49. 49. Papyrus 75 (Bodmer XIV–XV) is usually dated c. 175–225 and contains most of Luke and John; its close agreement with Codex Vaticanus is a landmark of text-critical study. Brent Nongbri has argued for a possible fourth-century date, a minority view. Papyrus 4 is another early witness to Luke.

50. 50. On the “Western non-interpolations,” the classic treatment is B. F. Westcott and F. J. A. Hort, *The New Testament in the Original Greek* (1881). The NABRE note on Luke 22:19c–20 explains that the longer reading is present in “the oldest papyrus manuscript of Luke” and bears “a close resemblance to the words of institution in the Pauline tradition (see 1 Cor 11:23–26).”

51. 51. Luke 1:28 and 1:42 (NABRE). The NABRE renders the angel's greeting “Hail, favored one!” where the Vulgate and the traditional prayer have “full of grace”; both translate the Greek *kecharitomene*.

52. 52. *Catechism of the Catholic Church* 490–491: “The angel Gabriel at the moment of the annunciation salutes her as ‘full of grace’”; and, quoting Pius IX's *Ineffabilis Deus* (1854), Mary was “from the first moment of her conception... preserved immune from all stain of original sin.” See vatican.va.

53. 53. Luke 1:38 (NABRE); *Catechism of the Catholic Church* 494, quoting Irenaeus, *Against Heresies* 3.22.4: “the knot of Eve's disobedience was untied by Mary's obedience.”

54. 54. The Magnificat (Luke 1:46–55) is the Gospel canticle of Vespers in the Liturgy of the Hours. The Joyful Mysteries of the Rosary — the Annunciation (1:26–38), the Visitation (1:39–56), the Nativity (2:1–20), the Presentation (2:22–38), and the Finding in the Temple (2:41–52) — are drawn almost entirely from Luke.

55. 55. Luke 22:19–20 and 24:30–35 (NABRE). The NABRE note on 22:19c–20 observes the close resemblance to Paul's account in 1 Corinthians 11:23–26.

56. 56. *Catechism of the Catholic Church* 1347 draws the parallel between the Emmaus meal and the Eucharistic liturgy: “Walking with them he explained the Scriptures to them; sitting with them at table ‘he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them.’” See also CCC 1329 on “the Breaking of Bread.”

57. 57. Second Vatican Council, *Dei Verbum* (1965), esp. §§11–12 and 19, on inspiration, inerrancy “for the sake of our salvation,” and the historical character of the Gospels. On the freedom of Catholic scholars in questions of authorship, see also the shift in the Pontifical Biblical Commission's posture after 1955.