Hist. eccl. Ecclesiastical History
Irenaeus
Haer. Against Heresies
Jerome
Vir. ill. De viris illustribus
Tertullian
Marc. Against Marcion
Other Greco-Roman Sources
OGIS Orientis Graeci Inscriptiones Selectae, edited by Wilhelm Dittenberger, 2 vols. (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1903–1905)
Dio Chrysostom
Or. Orations
Euripides
Herc. fur. Madness of Hercules
Herodotus
Hist. Histories
Homer
Il. Iliad
Od. Odyssey
Ovid
Fast. Fasti
Philostratus
Vit. Apoll. Vita Apollonii
Pliny the Elder
Nat. Natural History
Plutarch
Alex. Alexander
Seneca
Ep. Epistulae morales
Marc. Ad Marciam de consolatione
Stobaeus
Flor. Florilegium
Tacitus
Ann. Annales
Hist. Historiae
Introduction
Since many have undertaken to write a commentary on the Gospel of Luke, I too decided, after accepting an invitation from the editors of the New Covenant Commentary Series, to write an accessible explanation of this narrative on the life of Jesus for you, my dear readers. I hope this journey of discovery will be as enjoyable and edifying for you as it has been for me.
Alongside the authors of Matthew, Mark, and John, the third evangelist paints his distinctive portrait of Jesus while offering the added bonus of a sequel. The Acts of the Apostles carries the narrative beyond Jesus’ ascension into the burgeoning mission of the early church. It is useful to refer to the two documents, Luke and Acts, as Luke-Acts, despite their separation in the canonical ordering by the Gospel of John. Not only do Luke and Acts share the same author and identify Theophilus as the dedicatee (Luke 1:3; Acts 1:1), the mission of Jesus in the Gospel is continued by the apostles and the early church in its sequel. Many echoes of Luke are found in Acts. For example, the range of healings performed by Jesus is mirrored in the miracles of Peter and Paul. The motif of journeying is prominent in both books, with Jesus’ journey from Galilee to Jerusalem in Luke, and Paul’s many missionary journeys as well as his final voyage to Rome in Acts. Even though this commentary covers only the Gospel of Luke, it is helpful to maintain a forward glance to Acts when reading the Lukan narrative, knowing that the larger story extends beyond Luke 24, and, for that matter, even beyond Acts 28 to the many generations of Christians that follow.
This introduction briefly addresses items “behind” the narrative, such as matters of authorship, dating, place of writing, intended audience, genre, purpose, thematic elements, and the like. While some may find these discussions tedious and speculative, they remind us that this narrative, which Christians embrace as holy Scripture and inspired word of God, is a historical document written by a human author for an actual audience in a language and setting very different from our modern context. It behooves us therefore to exercise intellectual humility and prudence in our interpretation of these ancient words even as we believe that God continues to speak powerfully through them to us today. There are many ways to engage a scriptural text, but the strategy employed in this commentary emphasizes a historical and literary reading as a helpful starting point for interpretation.
Authorship
It may come as a surprise to some readers that the original autographs of the four Gospels no longer exist. All the ancient manuscripts and fragments thereof that we have of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are copies. In the earliest of these manuscripts the author is not explicitly named, rendering the four Gospels anonymous documents. The designations found in our English Bibles, “the Gospel of Luke” or “the Gospel according to Luke,” reflect traditional attributions. In many of the writings of the early church fathers, dated to the first few centuries CE, we find references to a person named Luke as the author of this account of the life of Jesus. Because this information does not come from within the narrative itself, we call these references “external evidence.”
One of the earliest manuscripts of the Gospel of Luke written on papyrus has a postscript that reads, “Gospel according to Luke.”1 Among the patristic writings of the early church fathers, we find attestations to a person named Luke as the author of this Gospel, who was a fellow-laborer and companion of Paul, a physician from Syrian Antioch, and the author of the Acts of the Apostles as well.2 In addition, the anonymous Anti-Marcionite Prologue for Luke states that the author was unmarried, had no children, and died in Boeotia at the age of eighty-four.3 Three Pauline letters in the NT mention a man named Luke, known to Paul’s readers as “the beloved physician” (Col 4:14), a companion of Paul (2 Tim 4:11), and a coworker of Paul (Phlm 24). In the book of Acts, there are segments in which the narrative switches to the use of the first person plural pronoun, suggesting that the author was with Paul when those events occurred (Acts 16:10–17; 20:5–15; 21:1–18; 27:1—28:16). Some interpreters view these so-called “we-passages” as evidence of the author’s knowledge of Paul, hence his ability to write extensively about Paul’s ministry in Acts.4 While it is possible that an initial erroneous attribution of the authorship to Luke was passed down from one generation of Christians to another, it seems more likely that the broad agreement of Lukan authorship across a wide range of ancient documents other than the NT has to do with the veracity of that attribution. Given that Luke-Acts constitutes a rather substantial piece of writing, it is unlikely that nobody in the early Christian movement knew who wrote it. Anonymous does not mean unknown.
It is not easy to determine whether Luke the physician was a Jew or a gentile. Even though one may deduce from Col 4:11 that the Luke mentioned in Col 4:14 could be a gentile, there is no indication in the writings of the patristic fathers to confirm it. Can the internal evidence, drawn from the Gospel itself, shed light on the ethnicity of the author whom we assume to be Luke the physician? From the prologue we note that the author was not an eyewitness to the ministries of Jesus (1:2). The sophistication of the Greek prose of Luke-Acts points to a highly educated individual, who was simultaneously at home in Greco-Roman culture and philosophy and well-versed in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures. This information, however, is not sufficient to draw firm conclusions about Luke’s ethnicity. He could have been a Jewish Christian of the Diaspora,
