Red-Letter Day
Evangelist & Companion of Paul
October 18
also known as Luke, St. Luke, Luke the Physician, Luke the Evangelist
Luke the Evangelist, the Greek-speaking physician of Antioch and companion of Paul, is the author the early church names for the two-volume Luke-Acts corpus. He alone preserved the church's daily songs: the Magnificat, the Benedictus, the Nunc Dimittis, and the angelic Gloria. His feast on October 18 is kept in red.
Luke is the evangelist who gave the church its songs. The Magnificat that Mary sang when she met Elizabeth, the Benedictus that Zechariah spoke when his tongue was loosed at John's birth, the Nunc Dimittis that the old man Simeon prayed when he held the infant Christ in his arms in the temple, and the angelic Gloria that broke over the shepherds on the night the Lord was born, all of them stand in the church's daily prayer because Luke alone wrote them down.
He was not one of the Twelve. He was, by the unanimous memory of the early church, a Greek-speaking physician from Antioch who came into the faith through Paul's preaching and walked with Paul through the long second half of Acts. He was the doctor at Paul's elbow through the Macedonian crossing, the shipwreck off Malta, and the Roman house arrest. He was the friend Paul named in the last letter the church has from him, when almost everyone else had gone home: only Luke is with me.
What Luke did with that companionship was set himself, deliberately and carefully, to write. He says so in the prologue. Many had taken in hand to draw up a narrative; he had followed all things closely from the first; he was writing, for a man named Theophilus and for the wider church behind him, so that the reader might know the certainty of the things in which he had been instructed. The Gospel that came out of that work is the longest of the four, and it is the Gospel of the poor and the outsider and the women, the Gospel of the prodigal son and the good Samaritan and the penitent thief, the Gospel where Christ on the cross prays for his executioners. Its companion volume, the Acts of the Apostles, is the only account the church possesses of the first generation after the resurrection: Pentecost, Stephen, the Damascus road, the council at Jerusalem, the voyages of Paul.
When the angels broke open the sky over Bethlehem, Luke alone preserved what they sang. In the King James translation, Luke writes: Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men./Luke) The whole of the church's eucharist begins from that one verse. Of the man himself, after Paul's death, the tradition is quiet. He is said to have lived to old age, unmarried, and to have died in Boeotia or Bithynia. What he left the church was the two books that bear his hand and the songs the church still sings every morning and every evening because he wrote them down.
How we know. The historical record for Luke rests on three layers. First, three brief notices in the Pauline epistles, Colossians 4:14, Philemon 24, and 2 Timothy 4:11, name him as a companion of Paul during the imprisonments. Second, the so-called we-passages in Acts (16:10–17, 20:5–15, 21:1–18, 27:1–28:16) have been read since antiquity as the author's first-person narrative of journeys made in Paul's company. Third, the patristic tradition is unanimous and early: Irenaeus of Lyons around the year 180, the Muratorian Canon late in the second century, Eusebius of Caesarea in the early fourth, and Jerome at its end all name Luke the physician, the companion of Paul, as the author of the Third Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles.
The foundational patristic attribution is Irenaeus. In the Roberts and Donaldson rendering in the Ante-Nicene Fathers, Irenaeus writes in Against Heresies 3.1.1: Luke also, the companion of Paul, recorded in a book the Gospel preached by him. The earliest sustained biographical notice is Eusebius. In McGiffert's translation of Ecclesiastical History 3.4 in the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Eusebius records: But Luke, who was of Antiochian parentage and a physician by profession, and who was especially intimate with Paul and well acquainted with the rest of the apostles, has left us, in two inspired books, proofs of that spiritual healing art which he learned from them. That sentence is the load-bearing biographical witness behind everything later: the Antiochian origin, the medical profession, the Pauline intimacy, the two books as a single inspired work. Paul's own epithet, in the King James of Colossians 4:14, gave the church its shorthand for Luke ever after: Luke, the beloved physician.
The church's reading holds Luke the physician, companion of Paul, as the author of both books, on the unanimous patristic witness anchored in Irenaeus and Eusebius. A more reserved modern critical handling treats the canonical Greek text as the work of an accomplished author of the late first century and notes that the patristic-Luke ascription cannot be proved against an anonymous later writer in whose work the apostolic Lukan tradition is preserved. The two-volume unity of Luke and Acts, the literary debt to prior gospel sources that Luke's own prologue acknowledges (many had taken in hand to draw up an account), the careful Hellenistic Greek of the prologues, and the theological coherence across both books are not in dispute. The patristic ascription remains the historic and liturgical reading.
Of Luke's own later life the early sources are nearly silent. The Monarchian prologues, a fourth-century Latin tradition, report that Luke remained unmarried, lived to the age of eighty-four, and died in Boeotia, having served the church in Greece. The tradition that his relics were translated to Constantinople in the fourth century and laid in the Church of the Holy Apostles is preserved by Jerome. The medieval legend that Luke himself painted icons of the Virgin, attested in the Greek world from the sixth century and in the Latin from the eighth, is later devotional elaboration rather than apostolic-era history, but it is the source of his patronage of artists.
October 18 has been Luke's feast in the Western calendar since the early sixth century, and the East keeps him on the same day. The color is red, for an evangelist the tradition counts among the seventy and reckons a martyr. Luke is patron of physicians, on the strength of Paul's beloved physician, and of artists, on the strength of the medieval tradition that he painted the first icon of the Virgin from life. Of the four living creatures of Revelation 4 he is the winged ox, because his Gospel opens in the temple with the sacrifice of Zechariah, a pairing fixed by Irenaeus and Jerome. His body rests in the Basilica of Santa Giustina in Padua; the head at St Vitus in Prague. Charles Wesley's Glory be to God on high sets the Lukan Gloria of Luke 2:14 and is widely sung on the feast.
Some links below are Amazon affiliate links. Commontide may earn a small commission from purchases; the public-domain links beside them are always free.
The Gospel According to Luke(Koine Greek, c. AD 80)
Recommended: ESV Study Bible (Crossway)
The longest of the four Gospels and the Gospel of the songs, the prodigal son, the good Samaritan, and the penitent thief. Tradition unanimously names Luke the physician, companion of Paul, as its author; modern criticism treats the patristic ascription as the standing tradition behind the canonical Greek text.
Other translations: King James Version (Wikisource)
Public domain: KJV at Wikisource
The Acts of the Apostles(Koine Greek, c. AD 80)
Recommended: ESV Study Bible (Crossway)
Luke's companion volume to the Third Gospel and the only narrative the church has of the first generation after the resurrection: Pentecost, Stephen, the Damascus road, the council at Jerusalem, and the voyages of Paul. The we-passages have been read since antiquity as Luke's own first-person account of journeys in Paul's company.
Other translations: King James Version (Wikisource)
Public domain: KJV at Wikisource
Ecclesiastical History 3.4 and 3.24(Greek, c. 313–325)
Eusebius of Caesarea in the early fourth century: the earliest sustained patristic notice of Luke as a person and the load-bearing witness behind every later telling. Identifies him as Antiochian, a physician, intimate with Paul, well acquainted with the rest of the apostles, and the author of two inspired books.
Public domain: EH 3.4 at CCEL, EH 3.24 at CCEL
Against Heresies 3.1.1(Greek (surviving in Latin), c. 180)
Irenaeus of Lyons, late second century: the earliest unambiguous datable witness to Lukan authorship of the Third Gospel, naming Luke the companion of Paul as the evangelist who recorded in a book the Gospel that Paul preached.
Public domain: AH 3.1.1 at CCEL
Luke for Everyone(English, 2004)
Recommended: N. T. Wright, Luke for Everyone (Westminster John Knox Press, 2004)
The lay-accessible entry point. Wright walks the reader through Luke chapter by chapter in short, prayable sections, in the voice of a believing scholar speaking to a thoughtful parishioner. The book to put first in a reader's hand who wants to read the longest Gospel with company, hearing the parables, the Magnificat, the road to Emmaus, in a register that honors what the church has prayed.
The Gospel of Luke (New International Commentary on the New Testament)(English, 1997)
Recommended: Eerdmans (1997)
The deeper scholarly-believing pick for the reader who has finished Wright and wants a verse-by-verse pastoral and theological commentary from inside the believing tradition. Joel Green has a pastor's ear and a Wesleyan's warmth, and he takes both Luke the man and the apostolic tradition standing behind the Gospel with full seriousness.
The lay-accessible entry point is N. T. Wright's Luke for Everyone (Westminster John Knox Press, 2004), a chapter-by-chapter walk through the longest of the four Gospels in short prayable sections (the parables, the Magnificat, the road to Emmaus) in the voice of a believing scholar speaking to a thoughtful parishioner. For going deeper, Joel B. Green's The Gospel of Luke in the New International Commentary on the New Testament (Eerdmans, 1997) is the most widely used full commentary on Luke in English, reading the Gospel as a literary and theological whole with a pastor's ear and a Wesleyan's warmth.
For the primary sources behind the church's memory of Luke, read first the New Testament epithets at Colossians 4:14, Philemon 24, and 2 Timothy 4:11; then Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.1.1 (CCEL, Ante-Nicene Fathers, Roberts and Donaldson); then Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.4 and 3.24 (CCEL, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, McGiffert in Schaff and Wace).
As an Amazon Associate Commontide earns from qualifying purchases.
Almighty God, you called your servant Luke to be an evangelist and physician of the soul: Grant that, by the wholesome medicine of the doctrine he taught, all the diseases of our souls may be healed; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.