Who wrote The Gospel of Luke? Clear and Comprehensive Answer

It doesn’t take long to recognize how people’s memories (short or long-term) aren’t always the most reliable.

If you would have asked ten people about what happened thirty minutes after a car crash, you’d really have to do some work to configure what has really taken place. Did the driver of the red truck run the stop sign or was it actually the blue sedan driver’s fault that caused the crash in the intersection? There would probably be eyewitnesses arguing over the colors of vehicles involved. It wasn’t a blue sedan, it was a green sedan! 

This is a real simple example to explain human being nature of storytelling, since all of us are storytellers, but stories are how we explain to others and how we understand other people’s explanation of the world around us.​​

What do we do, then, when it comes to the gospels and their supposed “eyewitness testimony”? Can we trust them?!

What is the Gospel of Luke?

The Gospel According to Luke is the third of the four New Testament Gospels (narratives recounting the life and death of Jesus Christ) gathered with the Gospels according to Mark and Matthew. It is considered as one of the three Synoptic Gospels. 

The Gospel of Luke is traditionally credited to St. Luke, “the beloved physician” (Col. 4:14), a close associate of St. Paul the Apostle. Luke’s Gospel is clearly written for Gentile converts. It traces Christ’s genealogy, for example, back to Adam, the “father” of the human race, rather than to Abraham, the father of the Jewish people. The date and place of such a Gospel’s composition are uncertain, but many have dated the Gospel back to 63–70 CE, others somewhat later.

The Gospel of Luke tells about the origins, birth, ministry, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ. Together with the acts of the Apostles, it makes up a two-volume work which most scholars call Luke–Acts, and about 27.5% of the New Testament.

The combined work divides the history of first-century of Christianity into three stages, with the Gospel making up the first two of these discussions, the life of Jesus the Messiah (Jesus Christ) from his birth to the beginning of his mission in the meeting with John the Baptist, followed by his ministry with events such as the Sermon on the Plain and its Beatitudes, and his Passion, death, and resurrection.

Who wrote the Gospel of Luke?

Luke-Acts is completely written by an influential man named Theophilus from whom Luke may have received funding for this writing endeavor. Theophilus may have been a new convert and was financially able to affront the funds and materials necessary to Luke. 

Luke himself would have been a man of great means, as well. However, he cultivated a literary background and wrote in good idiomatic Greek. So, if the Gospel bearing his name and the Acts of the Apostles were written by the traditionally ascribed author, according to this fact, they most probably were composed during or shortly after the Jewish revolt (66–73 CE). 

Some scholars have also associated Luke with the Pastoral Letters and the Letter to the Hebrews, either as author or as amanuensis, because of linguistic and other similarities with the Gospel and the Acts.

Who is Saint Luke According to Christianity Teachings?

Saint Luke the Evangelist, (flourished in the 1st century CE; feast day October 18). In Christian tradition, he is the author of the Gospel according to Luke and the Acts of the Apostles, a companion of St. Paul the Apostle, and the most literary of the New Testament writers.

If Luke was the author of the third Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles, the course and nature of his ministry may be sketched in more detail from both texts. He excluded himself from those who were eyewitnesses of Christ’s ministry, so he was not one of Prophet Jesus’s companions.

According to Luke:

1 Since many have undertaken to set in order a narrative concerning those matters which have been fulfilled among us,

2 even as those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word delivered them to us.” (Luke 1:1-2)

Who wrote the book of Saint Luke?

The book was written by Luke, who had his own perspective. It resembles the other synoptic in its treatment of the life of Jesus, but it goes beyond them in narrating the ministry of Jesus, widening its perspective to consider God’s overall historical purpose and the place of the church within it. 

Luke, and its companion book, Acts of the Apostles, portray the church as God’s instrument of redemption on Earth in the interim between the death of Christ and the Second Coming. The two books combined provide the first Christian history, outlining God’s purpose through three historical epochs. 

The epoch of the Law and the prophets, which lasted from ancient Israel to the time of St. John the Baptist; the epoch of Jesus’ ministry; and the epoch of the church’s mission from the ascension to the return of Christ. 

Those questioning Luke’s authorship point to the fact that the theological emphases of his Gospel and the Acts differ considerably from those of Paul’s writings, and that the description of the Council of Jerusalem (Acts 15) is divergent from the description of the conference in the 2nd chapter of the Letter of Paul to the Galatians. 

Those objections are based upon the assumption that Luke was the disciple of Paul (and would, therefore, reflect his theology) and upon the traditional identification of Acts 15 with the conference in Galatians. Both of those premises, however, are quite probably mistaken.

Who wrote the Book of Luke KJV?

The King James Version (KJV), King James Bible (KJB), Authorized Version (AV), or originally 1611 King James Version (the letter J was not added until the 1629 Cambridge Revised Version) is an Early Modern English translation of the Christian Bible for the Church of England, which was commissioned in 1604 and published in 1611, by the sponsorship of King James VI and I

 The English Church initially used the officially sanctioned “Bishops’ Bible”, which, however, was hardly used by the population. More popular was named “Geneva Bible”, which was created upon the basis of the Tyndale translation in Geneva under the direct successor of the reformer John Calvin for his English followers. However, their footnotes represented a Calvinistic Puritanism that was too radical for King James. 

In particular, the decidedly anti-royalist tone of the Geneva Bible was unbearable for King James I, for he was a strict advocate of divine right. The translators of the Geneva Bible had translated the word king as tyrant about four hundred times – the word tyrant does not appear once in the KJB. 

For his project, King James convened the Hampton Court Conference in January 1604, where a new English version was conceived in response to the problems of the earlier translations perceived by the Puritans, a faction of the Church of England. 

James gave the translators instructions intended to ensure that the new version would conform to the ecclesiology, and reflect the episcopal structure of the Church of England and its belief in an ordained clergy.

Wycliffe Effort in The Gospel of Luke

Wycliffe advocated translation of the Bible into the common vernacular. According to tradition, Wycliffe is said to have completed a translation directly from the Vulgate into Middle English – a version now known as Wycliffe’s Bible. While it is probable that he personally translated the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

The followers of John Wycliffe undertook the first complete English translations of the Christian scriptures in the 14th century. These translations were banned in 1409. The Wycliffe Bible predated the printing press but it was circulated very widely in manuscript form, often inscribed with a date which was earlier than 1409 in order to avoid the legal ban. 

Because the text of the various versions of the Wycliffe Bible was translated from the Latin Vulgate, and because it also contained no heterodox readings, the ecclesiastical authorities had no practical way to distinguish the banned version. 

William Tyndale Effort in The Gospel of Luke

Consequently, many Catholic commentators of the 15th and 16th centuries (such as Thomas More) took these manuscripts of English Bibles and claimed that they represented an anonymous earlier orthodox translation. Then, William Tyndale translated the New Testament into English in 1525.

In 1525, William Tyndale, an English contemporary of Martin Luther, undertook a translation of the New Testament. Tyndale’s translation was the first printed Bible in English. Over the next ten years, Tyndale revised his New Testament in the light of rapidly advancing biblical scholarship and embarked on a translation of the Old Testament. Despite some controversial translation choices, and in spite of Tyndale’s execution on charges of heresy for having made the translated Bible, the merits of Tyndale’s work and prose style made his translation the ultimate basis for all subsequent renditions into Early Modern English. 

Who wrote the Gospel of Luke according to the Catholic Church?

St. Luke wrote a greater volume of the New Testament than any other single author, including the earliest history of the Church. Ancient traditions also acknowledge Luke as the founder of Christian iconography, making him a patron of artists as well as doctors and other medical caregivers

According to Catholic teachings, the beloved physician,”a traveling companion of St. Paul (Col 4:14).  The Gentile St. Luke wrote his work for Theophilus, a Gentile Christian who may have been his benefactor.  As a careful historian, Luke sets the scene of Jesus’s birth in its political context by mentioning various rulers and places at the time (2:1-4).

Luke’s Gospel begins with dramatic appearances of the angel Gabriel to Zechariah and to Mary.  Gabriel foretells two miraculous births: the birth of John the Baptist to Zechariah’s post-menopausal wife and the virginal conception of Jesus in the womb of Mary.  

Next, the Lucan Gospel traces Jesus’s genealogy back to Adam in order to show the universality of the salvation which he brings.  Luke is the only Gospel writer who tells the parables of the prodigal son (15:11-32) and the good Samaritan (10:25-37).  He alone tells us the stories of Mary and Martha (10:38-42) and of the disciples on the road to Emmaus (24:13-35).

Other students of biblical history deduce from Luke’s writings that he was the only evangelist to incorporate the personal testimony of the Blessed Virgin Mary, whose role in Christ’s life emerges most clearly in his Gospel. Tradition credits him with painting several icons of Christ’s mother, and one of the sacred portraits ascribed to him – known by the title “Salvation of the Roman People”– survives to this day in the Basilica of St. Mary Major.

Some traditions hold that Luke became a direct disciple of Jesus before his ascension, while others hold that he became a believer only afterward. After St. Paul’s conversion, Luke accompanied him as his personal physician– and, in effect, as a kind of biographer, since the journeys of Paul on which Luke accompanied him occupy a large portion of the Acts of the Apostles. Luke probably wrote this text, the final narrative portion of the New Testament, in the city of Rome where the account ends.

Who actually wrote the Gospel of Luke?

Some scholars, on the other hand, doubt that Luke is in fact the author of the two New Testament books, traditionally ascribed to him, and argue for a date later in the 1st century CE.

 The original copies of Luke and the other Gospels have not been preserved; the texts that survive are third-generation copies, with no two completely identical. The earliest witnesses (the technical term for written manuscripts) for the Gospel of Luke fall into two “families” with considerable differences between them, the Western and the Alexandrian text-type, and the dominant view is that the Western text represents a process of deliberate revision, as the variations seem to form specific patterns.

How can we measure the reliability of the Gospel of Luke ? 

1- the author was not an eyewitness of the events of Jesus’s life

Compiling all the information we have before us, Dr. Luke is the physician and co-worker with the apostle Paul. Traditionally, Luke is proposed as the author of the Third Gospel. However, he is the only viable candidate for the authorship of the two-volume work known as Luke-Acts. 

Because, a few distinctive markers are found. First and most noticeably, the author of the Third Gospel writes to one “Theophilus” (Acts 1:3) and seeks to provide an “orderly sequence” (Acts 1:3) of the life of Jesus, after having had “carefully investigated everything from the very first” (1:3) according to what the “original eyewitnesses and servants of the word handed down” (Acts 1:2). 

From this information, one can gather that the author was not an eyewitness of the events of Jesus’s life. But, the author had access to those who had.

2- The author of the Third Gospel also authored the book of Acts

Second, the author of the Third Gospel also authored the book of Acts. The level of detail and precision, writing style, the similar address to Theophilus, as well as the connective clause in the first of Acts connects the two works to the same author.

3- The Linguistic Level of Greek used in both the Third Gospel and the book of Acts

Third, the level of Greek used in both the Third Gospel and the book of Acts is highly advanced. Having taken biblical Greek courses, I have found that a person learns first from the Gospel of Mark and John before tackling the Gospel of Luke. Due to the high degree of Greek employed in the Third Gospel and the book of Acts, one can deduce that the author is quite advanced in his education.

4- Jesus’s ministry to the Gentiles and to the outcasts of society

Fourth, the author focuses on Jesus’s ministry to the Gentiles and to the outcasts of society. The Sermon on the Plain is preserved in the Third Gospel. There the author notes that people came to hear Jesus from all around. The author notes that many of the people who heard Jesus were Gentiles from the region of Tyre and Sidon (Luke 6:17).

5- The author describes medical matters

Fifth, the author describes medical matters far more and to a greater degree than the other Gospels. In Luke 4:38, Luke is sure to note that Simon Peter’s mother-in-law suffered from a high fever. In Luke 14:2, the author describes a man’s body that had “swollen with fluid.” Such details indicate a man who has an eye for medical matters.

6- The author was a close associate of the apostle Paul

Sixth, because of the author’s involvement with the book of Acts, one can deduct from the “we passages” that the author was a close associate of the apostle Paul. For instance, the author of Acts writes that “When it was decided that we were to sail to Italy, they handed over Paul and some other prisoners to a centurion named Julius, of the Imperial Regiment” (Acts 27:1).

7- Many  teachings that are not found in the other Gospels

Finally, the author had access to a great wealth of Jesus’s teachings that are not found in the other Gospels. For instance, it is only in the Gospel of Luke that one reads the Parable of the Good Samaritan and the Parable of the Lost Son. The author would have needed to have access to multiple eyewitnesses to be able to possess such knowledge and to be able to construct the orderly account that he did.

The conclusion

It makes a difference whether or not the writers of the Gospels were concerned with getting true stories or just telling good stories. There’s no doubt that the stories are compelling and fascinating, but that means very little if the authors didn’t care to get accurate details.

For sure, there are situations where the stories have been manipulated by others since they have a vested interest in the stories being told. However, when it comes to the Gospels (and the rest of the New Testament for that matter), what I think we have found is a group of people have told these stories just because their whole world relied on them. Practically, we do not know for sure whether these stories are true stories or not. Jesus was a person who changed everything for everyone, so we had to be certain that all these stories are totally accurate for the magnitude of the person they were written about.