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they remind us that this narrative, which Christians embrace as holy Scripture and inspired word of God, is a historical document written by a human author for an actual audience in a language and setting very different from our modern context.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, a gentile who converted from paganism to the Christian faith, or a gentile God-fearer who had spent time exploring Judaism and its Scriptures before becoming a Christian (cf. Acts 10:35; 13:16, 26). A well-educated man in any of these categories could fit the profile. Even the universal outlook in Luke-Acts does not necessitate that the author be gentile.
In spite of the widely-accepted opinion that Luke the physician authored this Gospel, our inability to draw a definitive conclusion about the author begs the question of the importance of an irrefutable answer for understanding the book’s message. Put differently, does not knowing more about Luke beyond some general tidbits change our reading of the narrative as a credible presentation and sound interpretation of Jesus? The answer is, “No, not as far as the key theological message about God’s plan of salvation is concerned.” We believe that the transmitters of the Jesus traditions, from whom Luke gathered his materials, as well as Luke himself, remained faithful in passing on the teachings and actions of Jesus as truthfully and accurately as they knew how. Some uncertainty on the issue of authorship notwithstanding, the text of the Gospel of Luke, as we now have it, is trustworthy for faith and discipleship.
Reading the Gospel as Scripture is at its core a matter of trust. The reader has to trust Luke the historian, biographer, theologian, and Christ-follower. More importantly, the reader has to trust God’s intervention in the writing, transmission, and reading of this Gospel. The process by which the Holy Spirit connects the author, the text, and the reader for the latter’s formation and edification remains a mystery of faith. In this commentary, I will refer to the author as Luke, with the understanding that this identification, albeit an educated guess, comes with a considerable amount of credible circumstantial evidence.
Recipients, Dating, and Place of Writing
Ideally, information on Luke’s original readers and their situation would shed light on the impetus behind Luke’s writing and the interpretation of his message. Among the four evangelists, Luke was already the most specific in naming the person for whom he crafted his narrative—one “most excellent Theophilus” (1:3), a man of considerable standing in his community. Beyond the fact that Theophilus is a Greek name, hardly anything else is known of this person; his location, profession, and the reason for his elevated status remain opaque to us. Also, we cannot assume that Luke was located where Theophilus and his community of faith were at the time of writing. Guesses among scholars on the location of the author and his original audience cover a wide geographical area, from Syrian Antioch, Ephesus, Philippi, Corinth, to Rome.5 From the letters of Paul, we note that these are all cities where Christian communities were operational in the first century CE.
Even though there is only one specifically named dedicatee, Luke’s narrative would have been read by more than Theophilus alone. A wider circle of followers of Jesus, perhaps the faith community of which Theophilus was part, would have listened to a public reading of Jesus’ story. Given the content of Luke-Acts, the sophisticated Greek prose, and the direction in which the gospel was spread from Palestine to the larger Greco-Roman world in the first few decades of the early church, one may surmise that Luke’s audience consisted mainly of urban gentile Christians, though Christian communities across the Roman Empire would have had a mix of Jewish and gentile believers in differing proportions.
The challenge of dating the Gospel of Luke is bound up with at least three considerations: the dating of the Gospel of Mark, the dating of the Acts of the Apostles, and the interpretation of the description of the fall of Jerusalem within the narrative. First, since Mark is widely accepted to be one of Luke’s sources, Luke must post-date Mark. Second, since the opening line in Acts refers to the Gospel of Luke as “the first book” (Acts 1:1), Luke must predate Acts, whether by a little or a lot. Third, the description of Jesus’ judgment on Jerusalem (19:43–44; 21:20–24;