Introduction to Luke

 

EVENING SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 2/8/2026 8:24 PM

“INTRODUCTION TO THE GOSPEL OF LUKE”

            This evening marks the beginning of looking at the Gospel of Luke, and I am going to use the introduction that John MacArthur uses in his commentary on Luke.  MacArthur has four books he has written on the Gospel of Luke, and as mentioned in an earlier SD he took ten years to go through this gospel.

            “The gospel of Luke is the first of a two-volume history, along with the book of Acts (both addressed to the same man, Theophilus, and the ‘first account’ mentioned in Acts 1:1 refers to the gospel of Luke).”  I think it best to quote Acts 1:1-2 “1 ¶  In the first book, O Theophilus, I have dealt with all that Jesus began to do and teach, 2  until the day when he was taken up, after he had given commands through the Holy Spirit to the apostles whom he had chosen.”  “It is the longest book in the New Testament and , combined with Acts, makes Luke the author of more than one fourth of the New Testament—more than any other writer.  In those two books, Luke presents the most comprehensive New Testament account of the history of redemption.  His gospel and the book of Acts span six and a half decades from the birth of John the Baptist to Paul’s first Roman imprisonment.  Luke also includes a significant amount of new material (more than 40 percent of his gospel is not found in the other gospels [Darrell L. Bock, Luke 1:1-9:50, Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1994), 12’), including seven of Christ’s miracles and seventeen of His parables.

            “Yet despite the significance of his work, Luke himself remains largely unknown.  His name appears only three times in the New Testament—none of them in his own writings (Col 4:14; 2 Tim. 4:11; Philem. 24). Those passages reveal only a few details about him—that he was a physician who was beloved by Paul and was with the apostle during his first and second Roman imprisonment.  He was also a Gentile (see the discussion of Col. 4:10-14 in chapter 1 of this volume and Acts 1:19, where Luke’s use of the phrase ‘their language’ distinguishes him from the Jewish people). That he accompanied Paul on his missionary journeys is evident from the so-called ‘we’ passages in Acts (see the discussion under Author below).  But as will be seen in chapter 1 of this volume, the prologue to Luke’s gospel helps paint a more complete portrait of this remarkable man.

AUTHOR

 

            “The unanimous testimony of the early church is that Luke wrote the third gospel; no alternative author was ever proposed.  In the middle of the second century the apologist Justin Martyr (C. A. D 100-165) quoted from Luke 22:44 and 23:46 in his Dialogue with Trypho.  Although Justin did not name Luke as the author (citing as his source ‘the memoirs which…were drawn up by His [Christ’s] apostles and those who followed them’ ([chapter 103]), those two verses are unique to Luke.  They demonstrate the fact that Justin was familiar with Luke’s gospel and recognized it as authoritative. Justin’s pupil Tatian included Luke’s gospel in his Diatessaron, the first known harmony of the Gospels.  The Muratorian Canon, a second-century list of the books recognized as Scripture by some in the church, attributes the third gospel to Luke, as do such second and third century writers as Irenaeus, Tertullian, Origen, Clement of Alexandria, and the heretic Marcion.  The Anti-Marcionite prologue to Luke, written to combat Marcion, also declared Luke to be its author.  The oldest manuscript of Luke’s gospel (Bodmer Papyrus XIV [p 75]), dating from the late second or early third century, names Luke as the author.

            “Summarizing the significance of the early church’s testimony to Luke’s authorship of the third gospel, Robert H. Stein writes,

Such unanimity in the tradition is impressive…In general such uncontested and ancient tradition should be accepted unless there is good reason to the contrary.  This is especially so when it names a minor figure in the early church and a non-apostle as the author of over one quarter of the entire NT. (Luke, The New American Commentary [Nashville:  Broadman & Holman, 19912], 21)

Stein’s last point is especially significant.  The apocryphal gospels were attributed to well-known figures, such as Peter. Why would someone forging a work purporting to have come from one of Paul’s companions have chosen the relatively obscure Luke instead of someone more prominent?

            “Further proof that Luke wrote Luke and acts comes from the so-called ‘we’ passages in Acts, where the writer’s use of the first person pronoun indicates that he was traveling with Paul (16:10-17; 20:5-21:18; 27:1-28:16).Thus, the writer of Acts could not be any of Paul’s coworkers mentioned by name in those sections (e. g. Silas, Timothy, Sopater, Aristarchus, Secundus, Gaius, Tychicus, and Trophimus).  By process of elimination, that leaves Luke and Acts.  No one, however, has ever seriously argued for Titus and the author, which leaves Luke, as the unanimous testimony of the early church affirms (see the discussion above).

 

DATE, PLACE OF WRITING, ADDRESSES

            “Luke was written before Acts, which is a sequel to it (Acts 1:1), so the question of when it was written is closely connected to the date of Acts.  Some liberal scholars date Luke in the second century.  They argue that its author drew some of his material from the Jewish historian Josephus, who wrote late in the first century.  But the difference between the two accounts far outweigh the similarities (cf.  Alfred Plummer, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary of the Gospel According to St. Luke, The international Critical Commentary [Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1969], xxxix; D. Edmond Heibert, An introduction to the New Testament, Volume One: The Gospels and Acts [Chicago: moody, 1979], 137).  In the middle of the second century the heretic Marcion included his revised version of Luke as the only gospel in his cannon of Scripture.  If Luke had been written only a short time earlier, it could not have become widely respected enough in the church for Marcion to have chosen it.  Nor could a second-century author had consulted eyewitnesses to the life and ministry of Jesus (Luke 1:2-3); most, of not all of them, would have been dead.

            “Two dates for Luke and Acts have been proposed by conservative scholars; either between A.D/ 70 and 80 (following the completion of Mark’s gospel as a source.  Since Mark is usually dated after Peter’s death during the persecution instigated by Nero, Luke would have to have been written still later.  The priority of Mark, however, has never been established, and the absence of any evidence for it has led scholars to question Luke’s dependence on Mark’s gospel (e.g., Robert L. Thomas and Stanley N. Gundry, eds., A Harmony of the Gospels  [Chicago: Moody, 1979], 274-79; Eta Linnemann, Is There a Synoptic Problem? [Grand Rapids; Baker, 1992]; Robert L. Thomas and F. David Farnell, eds., The Jesus Crisis [Grand Rapids: Kregel, 1998], especially chaps. 1, 3, 6).  Since Luke’s dependence on Mark cannot be established, the argument for the later date collapses.

            “A number of facts support the earlier date for the writing of Luke and acts.  That date best explains the abrupt ending of Acts; Luke did not mention Paul’s release and subsequent travels because the apostle was still in prison when he wrote Acts.  Further there is no mention in Luke’s writings of any even later than about A.D. 61, including such significant events as the death of James, the brother of Jesus and head of the Jerusalem church (around A. D.  62); Nero’s persecution, during which Peter and Paul were martyred (in the mid-60’s); and the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in A.D. 70.  Finally, Luke does not refer to Paul’s epistles, suggesting that he wrote Luke and Acts before the collection of those epistles was widely circulated in the church.  The most natural explanation for those omissions is that Luke wrote his gospel and Acts before those events happened.  The best date, therefore, for Luke’s gospel is A. D. 60-61.

            “Where Luke wrote his gospel is not known for certain.  Some in the early church speculated that he wrote from the Greek providence of Achaia; others argued for Rome (cf. Col. 4:14; Philem. 24), the later possibility is more likely.

            As will be discussed in chapter 1 of this volume, Luke addressed his gospel to a man named Theophilus and, by extension, other Gentiles.  He avoids using Aramaic terms that his Gentile readers would be unfamiliar with (e. g., 22:1, 7) and Israel’s geography (e. g., 1:26; 4:3`; 23:51; 24:13) for them.

 

PURPOSE AND THEMES

 

            “Luke’s purpose in writing his gospel was that his readers might ‘know the exact truth about the things [they had] been taught’ (1:4; see the exposition of that verse in chapter 1 of this volume).  To that end, he did careful research (see the discussion of his sources in chapter 1).”

            This is as far as I am going to go in this introduction and so in tomorrow evening’s SD I will begin to look at the first chapter entitled “Luke’s Prologue (Luke 1:1-4).

2/8/2026 9:46 PM