The italicized portions of the Q&A below are extracts from Mikeal C. Parsons’s BAS Library article “Who Wrote the Gospel of Luke?“ Mikeal C. Parsons is a Professor and the Macon Chair in Religion at Baylor University. Parsons is author of Body and Character in Luke and Acts: The Subversion of Physiognomy in Early Christianity (Baker Academic, 2006).
Over the centuries, numerous traditions have evolved around this somewhat shadowy evangelist: Luke is credited with writing not only his gospel but the New Testament Book of Acts as well. He is portrayed as a physician, a friend of Paul’s and even a painter, and is described as a gentile writing for a gentile audience. Parsons examines the author of two of the most significant contributions to our understanding of the founders of Christianity and its first followers.
Other Interesting Points in his article
The Book of Acts is thus presented as the Third Gospel’s sequel. In it, Luke will continue to relate the events that transpired among the earliest Christians, from shortly after Jesus’ death until just before Paul’s.
The extrabiblical evidence that these two books are by the same hand dates as early as the last third of the second century, when both the Muratorian Canona (the earliest known list of writings deemed canonical by the church) and the early church father Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons, identify Luke as the author of both the Third Gospel and the Book of Acts.1
Common Events in Luke and Acts
…the attribution of Luke and Acts to a single author is based primarily on shared literary and thematic elements.2 For example: [bullet formatting mine]
- …both texts include travel narratives in which the hero—Jesus or Paul—journeys to Jerusalem and is arrested on false charges (Luke 9:51–19:28; Acts 19:21–21:36).
- The miracles performed by Peter and Paul in Acts mirror those of Jesus in the Gospel of Luke.
- All three figures heal lame men with the instructions: “Stand up and walk” (Acts 3:1–10, 14:8–11; Luke 5:17–26); and
- all three resurrect the dead, with Peter and Jesus employing the same command: “Get up” (Acts 9:36–40, 20:7–12; Luke 8:40–56).
- In Luke, the Holy Spirit descends upon Jesus while he is at prayer before 40 days of “testing” and before he begins his public ministry (Luke 3:21–22). So it is in Acts, when the Holy Spirit falls upon his disciples on the Feast of Pentecost while they are at prayer after 40 days of instruction but before they begin their public ministry (Acts 2:1–4).
- Furthermore, the account of the first Christian martyr, Stephen, who is tried before the high priest and then stoned to death (Acts 6:8–15, 7:54–60), reflects the trial and death of Jesus (Luke 22–23). Jesus, at his trial, predicts that “the Son of Man will be seated at the right hand of the power of God” (Luke 22:69); Stephen, standing before the high priest, exclaims that he “[sees] the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God” (Acts 7:56).
- When Jesus dies, he cries out: “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit” (Luke 23:46); Stephen makes a similar plea during his martyrdom: “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit” (Acts 7:59).
The gospel title—“Euangelion kata Lukan,” (The Gospel According to Luke)—appears at the end of the oldest extant manuscript of the Gospel of Luke, a papyrus known as P75, now in the Bodmer Library in Geneva. But this fragmentary manuscript dates only to about 175 to 225, or 100 to 125 years after the gospel is thought to have been written. The title probably reflects the oldest tradition, linking an author named Luke to the writing of the Third Gospel. The reliability of this tradition, however, is uncertain.
The Book of Acts is not the only potential source of information about the relation between Paul and Luke, however. The name Luke appears three times in letters attributed to Paul. (These are, incidentally, the only appearances of this name in the New Testament.) Unfortunately, this Luke is never identified as the gospel writer. Of course, that hasn’t stopped speculation, from the time of Irenaeus on.
Was the writer Luke the physician mentioned in “Paul’s” letter to Colossians 4:14?
They also lead us to the next assertion traditionally made about Luke: He was a physician, as is suggested by Colossians 4:14. This, too, is repeated in the writings of Irenaeus and in the Muratorian Canon but has received mixed reviews in recent scholarship. Late in the 19th century, Irish physician and scholar William K. Hobart searched the healing stories in Luke for what he believed were medical terms, such as “crippled,” “pregnant” or “abscess,” or ordinary words used in a “medical” sense. From this “internal evidence” Hobart concluded that Luke and Acts were written by the same person, and that the writer was a medical man.6 But Henry Cadbury soon dismantled this argument by demonstrating that the terms on Hobart’s lists occur in the Septuagint, Josephus, Plutarch and Lucian, all non-medical writers. Cadbury concluded, “The style of Luke bears no more evidence of medical training and interest than does the language of other writers who were not physicians.”7 In a tongue-in-cheek lexical note entitled “Luke and the Horse-Doctors,” Cadbury later showed that Luke’s vocabulary shows a remarkable similarity with the corpus of writings of ancient veterinarians!8 His refutation was so effective that he virtually eliminated this special pleading to a so-called medical vocabulary.9 His students used to jest that Cadbury earned his doctorate by taking Luke’s away.
MLA Citation
Parsons, Mikeal C. “Who Wrote the Gospel of Luke?” Bible Review 17.2 (2001): 13–16, 18–21, 54.
