St Luke was a doctor, surely?
St Luke was probably many things. The is evidence in his writing in the Acts of the Apostles as well as his gospel that he was a sailor, an artist and a man of letters. Perhaps not all at once.
I have written about the gospels as history but now I want to concentrate on St Luke. This is because there are special reasons to take him seriously as a historian and therefore to treat his writing as history.
Luke was a Greek
Unlike almost every other human author of the Bible, who were all Jewish, Luke shows by his name and his writing style that he was a Greek, or someone immersed in Greek culture, which influenced most European culture, including ours. Therefore, he thought more logically, rationally, scientifically than many people. He was concerned with evidence and put a lot of detail in his writing.
An artist’s impression of St Luke at his writing
Luke was an eye witness
Apart from his gospel, the style and content show that Luke also wrote the Acts of the Apostles. In Chapter 16 the narration switches from ‘they’ to ‘we’, at the point where he must have joined St Paul and some other apostles and accompanied them for their next journey. Otherwise the writer would have used either the first person or the second person throughout. So he wrote about things he witnessed.
Luke knew St Paul and other apostles
Luke would have got the other parts of his story directly from St Paul and the other apostles, including some who had known Jesus. What about the story of Jesus’s birth? Jesus’s mother, Mary, could well have been alive when Luke was writing. She would have been in her seventies.
Luke certainly lived in the first century
Luke was meticulous in giving precise details of names of towns and regions where things took place. He was similarly precise in giving the job-titles of people, such as magistrates, town clerks, procurators and tribunes In the first century, these varied in different parts of the Roman Empire, as it had grown gradually and the Romans had left in place whatever systems of local government existed. However, in the early second century, the Emperor Trajan reorganised and standardised everything. The writer of Acts did not use the later names, as he would have had he been writing later.
So what?
If the Acts of the Apostles is authentic, then St Luke’s gospel must be. What does that say about the rest of the New Testament?