The longest book in the New Testament is the Third Gospel, the account of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus that is attributed to a man called Luke. Though it is like the other canonical Gospels in many ways, there are nevertheless several details about Jesus’s life and ministry found only in the Gospel of Luke and several points of emphasis unique to his account. For those less familiar with this New Testament book—and even for those who are—let me offer this brief introduction, survey, and summary of the Gospel of Luke.[1]

Authorship & Date

All four of the canonical Gospels in our New Testament are technically anonymous. But all four have long traditions pertaining to their authorship, which eventually led to the addition of their eponymic titles. Since the second century, the Third Gospel has uniformly been attributed to Luke, as has the New Testament book called the Acts of the Apostles (this corpus of literature is regularly dubbed simply Luke–Acts). That the Third Gospel and Acts are written by the same person is clear enough from the coordination of their prefaces (Luke 1:1–4 and Acts 1:1–2) as well as their shared writing style and thematic interests. Furthermore, several passages in Acts indicate its author was accompanying the apostle Paul at those points in the story (see the “we” passages of Acts 16:10–17; 20:5–15; 21:1–18; 27:1–28:16). From Paul’s New Testament letters, we know a first-century man named Luke to have been a physician (Col. 4:14) who occasionally accompanied Paul as a “fellow worker” (Phlm. 24) in his missionary travels (2 Tim. 4:11). All this internal evidence lends credence to identifying Luke as the author of Luke–Acts.

Four lines of external evidence are more overt in supporting Luke’s authorship of Luke–Acts. First, in discussing the New Testament writings, a list of books called the Muratorian Canon dating to AD 170–80 attributes Luke–Acts to the man Luke. Two, among a second-century collection of introductory remarks prefaced to copies of the Gospels (perhaps comparable to introductions in modern study Bibles), the Anti–Marcionite Prologue to the Third Gospel descriptively names the author of Luke–Acts as Luke, a Syrian from Antioch, a physician by trade, a disciple of the apostles, and a follower of Paul. Third, by the third century traditional Gospel authorship appears to have been common enough to be represented in titles, and the oldest extant Greek manuscript of the Third Gospel, a papyrus codex called P75 (a.k.a. the Bodmer Papyrus XIV–XV) and dating to AD 175–225, has the first known occurrence of the title “Gospel According to Luke.” Fourth, among the early church fathers, several have written works identifying Luke as author of Luke–Acts. These include Irenaeus (ca. AD 130–200), Clement of Alexandria (ca. AD 150–215), Tertullian (ca. AD 155–240), Origen (ca. AD 184–254), a book called The Teaching of the Apostles (ca. AD 230), Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea (ca. AD 260–340), Pamphilus of Caesarea (died AD 309), Epiphanius of Salamis (ca. 310/320–403), Chromatius, bishop of Aquilaeia (ca. AD 345–407), Jerome (ca. AD 347–420), John Chrysostom, bishop of Antioch (ca. AD 349–407), and a book entitled Apostolic Constitutions (ca. AD 375–380). In fact, in all of church history, there is no other name so universally associated with the authorship of Luke–Acts.

Thus, given the internal evidence and the abundance of external evidence, we have little reason to doubt the well-attested and rather unanimous early church tradition that identifies the author of both the Third Gospel and Acts to be Luke, the first-century physician and sometimes ministry companion of Paul.[2] Since in several respects the Gospel of Luke seems dependent upon the wording and format of the Gospels of Matthew and Mark (these three are called the “Synoptic” Gospels because they “view together” the life of Jesus), it seems likely that Luke wrote after them, especially after the shorter and more rough Gospel of Mark.

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