The Physician of Antioch

Luke is the only Gentile among the writers of the New Testament — a conclusion drawn from Paul’s own list in Colossians, where Luke is named apart from “those of the circumcision.” Tradition adds that he was a physician of Antioch, educated in Greek, numbered among the Seventy, and (in later report) a painter of the Theotokos. This file sets out what the sources say and distinguishes the secure from the traditional, the attested from the disputed.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostle and Evangelist)

The Only Gentile Author of the New Testament

The single most consequential fact about Luke is also the most securely argued from Scripture itself: he was a Gentile, and so the only non-Jewish author of any book of the New Testament. The argument turns on a careful reading of one Pauline letter. Writing from prison, Paul sends greetings from his fellow workers, and he sorts them into two groups. First he names Aristarchus, Mark “the cousin of Barnabas,” and Jesus called Justus, and adds: “These are the only men of the circumcision among my fellow workers for the kingdom of God who have proved a comfort to me” (Colossians 4:10–11). Then, after this closed list of “those of the circumcision,” he sends greetings from a second set of companions — Epaphras, “Luke the beloved physician, and Demas” (Colossians 4:12–14). Because Luke falls outside the group Paul has explicitly bounded as “of the circumcision,” the natural inference is that Luke was a Gentile (Fitzmyer 1981, 1:42; Bruce 1984). This reading is the foundation of the ancient and modern consensus that the Evangelist was a Greek by birth and not a Jew.

The conclusion fits the internal character of Luke’s two volumes. His Greek is the most polished in the New Testament; his Gospel and Acts trace the movement of salvation outward from Jerusalem to “the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8) and culminate with the gospel preached openly at Rome (Acts 28:30–31); and his whole work shows an unmistakable concern for the Gentiles’ place in the people of God (on this theology, see The Gospel of Luke). The Church received him, accordingly, as the evangelist of the nations — the Gentile who wrote the gospel of the Gentile mission (on Scripture’s place in the Church, see Holy Scripture).

“Luke the Beloved Physician”

The same verse that places Luke outside “the circumcision” also gives him his ancient title. Paul calls him “Luke the beloved physician” — Loukas ho iatros ho agapētos (Colossians 4:14). This is the only place in the New Testament where Luke’s occupation is named, and it is the seed of the long tradition of Luke the doctor, the only one of the Evangelists to have plied a trade of learning. The notice is reinforced by the affection in the adjective: he is not merely the physician but the beloved physician, a man near to Paul in his imprisonment.

From this single notice grew a famous and now-qualified scholarly thesis. In 1882 W. K. Hobart published The Medical Language of St. Luke, arguing that the vocabulary of the third Gospel and Acts is saturated with the technical terms of Greek medical writers — Hippocrates, Galen, Dioscorides — and that this confirms the author was a trained physician (Hobart 1882). For a generation the argument was widely accepted. It does not, however, survive scrutiny. [Disputed: Hobart (1882) held that Luke's diction is distinctively medical and proves the author a physician; Cadbury (1920), in *The Style and Literary Method of Luke*, showed that nearly all of Hobart's "medical" terms occur just as freely in non-medical authors such as Josephus, Plutarch, and Lucian, so that the vocabulary is simply that of any educated Greek writer and proves nothing about a medical profession. Cadbury's refutation is now the standard view; the tradition that Luke was a physician rests on Colossians 4:14, not on his diction.] The Church’s confession of Luke the physician therefore stands on Paul’s word, not on a lexical statistic — and on Paul’s word it stands firmly.

The Antiochene Tradition

To the scriptural facts of his Gentile birth and his medical calling, the early Church added a place of origin: Antioch in Syria. Eusebius of Caesarea states it plainly: “Luke, who was by birth one of the people of Antioch and by profession a physician, being for the most part connected with Paul, and familiarly acquainted with the rest of the apostles, has left us… two inspired books” (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.4.6; trans. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 1). The same tradition appears in the so-called Anti-Marcionite Prologue to Luke, an early (probably late-second- or third-century) prefatory notice that calls Luke “a Syrian of Antioch, a physician by profession,” and adds that he served the Lord without distraction, unmarried and childless, and died at a great age in Boeotia (Anti-Marcionite Prologue to Luke; text in Aland; cf. Fitzmyer 1981, 1:38–39).

The Antiochene connection is congenial to the Lukan writings themselves, which give Antioch a prominent and well-informed place — it is there that the disciples were first called Christians (Acts 11:26), there that the Gentile mission was launched (Acts 13:1–3), and the so-called “Western” text of Acts even inserts a “we” at Antioch (Acts 11:28, Codex Bezae). This last detail is sometimes adduced as an early hint that the author counted himself among the Antiochenes (Fitzmyer 1981, 1:41). The Antiochene birth is best held, then, as an early and well-attested tradition — strongly supported but not stated in the New Testament — rather than as a bare scriptural fact.

Among the Seventy, and the Road to Emmaus

Orthodox tradition further numbers Luke among the Seventy (or Seventy-two) whom the Lord sent out ahead of Him (Luke 10:1–20), and commemorates him as one of the Seventy Apostles. This is the reason he is titled not merely Evangelist but Apostle in the Church’s usage, and it is reflected in the Synaxarion and the Byzantine liturgical tradition. It must, however, be pinned for what it is: a tradition, not a datum of the New Testament. The Gospels nowhere name the Seventy, and Luke — who alone records the sending of the Seventy — characteristically conceals himself; in his own preface he distinguishes himself from “those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word” (Luke 1:2), which has been read as implying he was not himself an eyewitness of the ministry (Fitzmyer 1981, 1:35, 41). The Church’s commemoration of Luke among the Seventy is thus a venerable tradition received in the Synaxarion, held alongside, and not in place of, his own prefatory self-distancing from the first witnesses.

A weaker and later strand of tradition makes Luke one of the two disciples whom the risen Lord met on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24:13–35) — the companion of the named Cleopas. The identification is an old guess, encouraged by the vividness of the scene and by Luke’s reticence about himself, but it has no early or authoritative attestation and is best registered as a pious conjecture rather than a tradition of the same standing as his place among the Seventy.

The Educated Greek

Whatever else is said of him, Luke writes as a man of letters. His Gospel opens with a single, balanced, periodic Greek sentence — the formal literary preface in which he addresses “most excellent Theophilus,” reviews the work of his predecessors, and states his own purpose: to write “an orderly account… that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught” (Luke 1:1–4). This preface is composed in the elevated Hellenistic style of the historians and is widely regarded as the finest Greek in the New Testament, the work of a writer trained in the conventions of his age (Cadbury 1920; Fitzmyer 1981, 1:35–36; on the preface and its design, see The Third Gospel). The polish of the prose is consonant with everything tradition reports of him — a Gentile, a physician, an educated provincial of a great Hellenistic city — and it is the surest internal sign of who the author was.

Finally, a tradition of a different order makes the physician a painter — the first iconographer, who is said to have painted the Mother of God from life. That tradition is late and is treated, with its attestation and its theological weight in the iconodule cause, in its own place (see Luke the Iconographer; on the doctrine of the icon, Icons and Iconoclasm).

References

The Holy Bible, Revised Standard Version. Colossians 4:10–14; Luke 1:1–4; 10:1–20; 24:13–35; Acts 1:8; 11:26; 13:1–3; 28:30–31.
Eusebius of Caesarea. The Ecclesiastical History 3.4.6. Trans. Arthur C. McGiffert, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 1. 1890. (Luke an Antiochene by birth, a physician, companion of Paul.)
Hobart, William Kirk. The Medical Language of St. Luke. Dublin: Hodges, Figgis; London: Longmans, Green, 1882. (The thesis that Luke’s vocabulary is technically medical.)
Cadbury, Henry J. The Style and Literary Method of Luke. Harvard Theological Studies 6. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1920. (Refutation of Hobart: the “medical” terms are common to educated Greek prose.)
Fitzmyer, Joseph A. The Gospel According to Luke I–IX. Anchor Bible 28. Garden City: Doubleday, 1981. (Discussion of the Antiochene tradition, the Seventy, the preface, and Luke’s Gentile identity, vol. 1, pp. 35–53.)
Bruce, F. F. The Epistle to the Colossians, to Philemon, and to the Ephesians. New International Commentary on the New Testament. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1984. (On Colossians 4:11/4:14 and Luke’s Gentile status.)
Anti-Marcionite Prologue to Luke. In Kurt Aland, ed., Synopsis Quattuor Evangeliorum. Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft. (Luke “a Syrian of Antioch, a physician,” dying at great age in Boeotia.)