Gospel of Luke

The Gospel of Luke is the third book in the New Testament’s collection of four Gospels. It covers the story of Jesus from his origins and birth through his ministry, death, resurrection, and ascension. This gospel forms the first half of a two-part work known as Luke–Acts, which together makes up 27.5% of the entire New Testament. The same author wrote both Luke and the Acts of the Apostles. Church tradition names this writer as Luke the Evangelist, a physician who accompanied the apostle Paul, but the gospel itself does not identify its author.

The composition of Luke is generally dated by scholars to around AD 80–90. The earliest surviving copies of the text fall into two main families: the Alexandrian text-type and the revised Western text-type. The oldest surviving manuscript fragment often cited is 𝔓4, dated to the late 2nd century, though this dating is debated. Another early manuscript, Papyrus 75 (also called Papyrus Bodmer XIV–XV), comes from the late 2nd or early 3rd century and includes an attribution of the gospel to Luke. The earliest complete texts are the 4th-century Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus, both from the Alexandrian family. Codex Bezae, a 5th- or 6th-century Western text-type manuscript with Greek and Latin versions on facing pages, shows many differences from the more familiar readings, but these variations do not affect core theology.

Scholars largely agree that the author of Luke used the Gospel of Mark as a source. The two-source hypothesis also suggests he used a hypothetical collection of sayings called Q, though alternative theories proposing a direct relationship between Matthew and Luke without Q are gaining ground. Luke follows Mark closely compared to how other ancient historians used their sources, though the parallels and variations among the Synoptic gospels are typical of ancient historical biographies.

The gospel opens with a preface and the birth narratives of John the Baptist and Jesus. The story then moves from Galilee to its climax in Jerusalem. Luke presents a three-stage view of salvation history: the era of the Law and the prophets, the epoch of Jesus, and the period of the church. The gospel’s high Christology portrays Jesus as divine in various ways, identifying him with the God of Israel and as a preexistent messiah within both Jewish and Greco-Roman contexts. The Holy Spirit also plays a more prominent role in Luke than in other early Christian writings, forming the basis for the early Christian community.

Luke–Acts is a religio-political history of the founder of the church and his successors. The author calls his work a “narrative” (diegesis) rather than a gospel, and he implicitly criticizes earlier writers for not including the speeches of Jesus and the Apostles, since such speeches were considered the mark of a complete report. The author was educated, a person of means, likely urban, and someone who respected manual work, though he was not a worker himself—unlike more highbrow writers of the time who looked down on the artisans and small business-people who made up Paul’s early churches and presumably Luke’s audience.

The earliest possible date for Luke–Acts is around AD 62, the time of Paul’s imprisonment in Rome, but most scholars place it at AD 80–90 because of its knowledge of Mark and the destruction of Jerusalem, and because it does not show awareness of the Pauline epistles. The latest tenable dates are early in the 2nd century, though a minority argue for dependence on the works of Josephus or see the work as a response to Marcion. Many arguments weigh against a later dating, including the Gospel of John’s awareness of Luke, its independence from Matthew under the two-source hypothesis, and references in 1 Clement.

The interpretation of the “we” passages in Acts as indicating that the writer relied on a historical eyewitness (whether Luke the evangelist or not) remains the most influential view in current biblical studies. Objections to this include claims that Luke–Acts contains theological and historical differences irreconcilable with Paul’s authentic letters. Scholarly opinion on the tradition that the author was Paul’s companion Luke was roughly evenly divided near the end of the 20th century, though most scholars maintain that the author of Luke–Acts, whether named Luke or not, met Paul at some point.