The Third Gospel

The Gospel according to Luke is the longest of the four Gospels and the only one to open with a formal literary preface in the manner of the Hellenistic historians, addressed to a certain Theophilus (Luke 1:1–4). It is also the first half of a single two-volume work that continues in the Acts of the Apostles, likewise addressed to Theophilus (Acts 1:1), so that nearly a quarter of the New Testament is the work of this one author. This file sets out the Gospel as a book — its preface, its place in the canon, its structure, its sources, and its universal horizon — reserving the source-critical and theological questions for their own sections.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostle and Evangelist)

The One Gospel with a Preface

Alone among the four Gospels, Luke begins not with a genealogy (Matthew), a wilderness cry (Mark), or a cosmic prologue on the Word (John), but with a single periodic Greek sentence of the kind that opened the works of the Greek historians and physicians: “Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the things that have been accomplished among us, just as those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word delivered them to us, it seemed good to me also, having followed all things closely for some time past, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, that you may have certainty concerning the things you have been taught” (Luke 1:1–4). The preface is the most polished Greek in the Gospels, and it announces the author’s self-understanding with unusual clarity.

Three things are claimed in these four verses. First, Luke places himself among “many” (polloi) who had already undertaken to set down the gospel events — he writes within an existing literature, not inventing the genre (Luke 1:1; the bearing of this admission on the synoptic problem is taken up in The Synoptic Problem). Second, he distinguishes himself from the “eyewitnesses and ministers of the word” who stand “from the beginning”; he is not himself an eyewitness but a researcher who has “followed all things closely” (parēkolouthēkoti . . . akribōs) and writes “in order” (kathexēs) — a claim to orderly investigation rather than apostolic autopsy (Luke 1:2–3). Third, the work is dedicated to “most excellent Theophilus” (kratiste Theophile), the honorific suggesting a man of rank, whose catechesis the Gospel is meant to confirm “that you may have certainty” (asphaleian, Luke 1:4). This is the language of a historian, and the early Church read it as the mark of the educated Gentile physician whom Paul names “the beloved physician” (Colossians 4:14; see The Physician of Antioch and Companion of Paul).

Third in the Canon and the Symbol of the Ox

In the fourfold Gospel canon as it settled in the second century, Luke stands third, after Matthew and Mark and before John — the order Irenaeus already presupposes when he gives the famous account of how each Evangelist transmitted the gospel: “Matthew also issued a written Gospel among the Hebrews . . . while Peter and Paul were preaching at Rome . . . Luke also, the companion of Paul, recorded in a book the Gospel preached by him” (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.1.1; trans. Ante-Nicene Fathers Vol. 1). For Irenaeus the number of the Gospels is neither more nor fewer than four, fixed by the very structure of creation — “four zones of the world” and “four principal winds” — and he aligns the four with the four living creatures of the throne-vision (Revelation 4:7; Ezekiel 1:10): “the third had, as it were, the face as of a man,” which Irenaeus reads as the Gospel that begins with the human priesthood of Zacharias and the genealogy of Christ (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.11.8; trans. ANF Vol. 1). In the later and more widely received form of the symbolism — which assigns the man to Matthew and the ox or calf to Luke — Luke is figured by the ox (or calf), the animal of sacrifice and priesthood, fittingly the symbol of the Gospel that opens in the Temple with the priest Zacharias and is bracketed by sacrificial worship (Luke 1:8–9; 24:53). [Disputed: the assignment of the four living creatures to the Evangelists varies among the Fathers — Irenaeus (*Against Heresies* 3.11.8) gives Luke the calf, the man to Matthew, the eagle to Mark, and the lion to John; the now-standard scheme (man=Matthew, lion=Mark, ox=Luke, eagle=John) follows Jerome, *Commentary on Matthew*, prologue, and is the order received in Orthodox iconography.] Eusebius likewise records the patristic consensus on authorship: “Luke, who was of Antioch and by profession a physician, being for the most part connected with Paul . . . has left us, in two inspired books, proofs of that art . . . The one of these books is the Gospel” (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.4; trans. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers Series II, Vol. 1).

The Structure of the Gospel

Luke’s narrative is built on a clear and deliberate architecture. It opens with the infancy narrative (Luke 1–2), the fullest in any Gospel — the annunciations to Zacharias and to Mary, the visitation, the births of John and of Jesus, the canticles (the Magnificat, the Benedictus, the Nunc Dimittis), the presentation in the Temple, and the boy Jesus among the teachers (the Theotokos’s place in these chapters is the subject of The Theotokos in Luke). After the baptism and temptation comes the Galilean ministry (Luke 4:14–9:50), inaugurated by the programmatic sermon at Nazareth in which Jesus reads from Isaiah and announces good news to the poor (Luke 4:16–21).

The structural feature most distinctive to Luke is the great central travel narrative, the long section that runs from “When the days drew near for him to be received up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem” (Luke 9:51) to the entry into the city (Luke 19:27–28). This “journey to Jerusalem” — some ten chapters with only a loose geographical thread — is the literary frame into which Luke gathers a large body of teaching and parable found nowhere else, including the Good Samaritan, the Prodigal Son, and the Pharisee and the Publican (the contents of this section are treated in The Gospel of Mercy). The Gospel then reaches Jerusalem for the Passion and the cross (Luke 19:28–23:56), and closes with a resurrection narrative centered on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24:13–35), where the risen Lord, unrecognized, opens the Scriptures and is made known “in the breaking of the bread” — a scene of unmistakably eucharistic shape — before the final appearance, the commission, and the ascension that close the volume in the Temple (Luke 24:50–53). That closing in the Temple deliberately mirrors the opening in the Temple, binding the whole Gospel into a single arc.

One Work in Two Volumes

The Gospel cannot be read in isolation, for it is the first half of a single composition. The preface to Acts looks back explicitly: “In the first book, O Theophilus, I have dealt with all that Jesus began to do and teach, until the day when he was taken up” (Acts 1:1–2). The same dedicatee, the same authorial voice, and the same theological program — the spread of salvation from Jerusalem outward — bind Gospel and Acts into the two-volume work that scholarship calls Luke–Acts (treated at length in The Acts of the Apostles and Luke the Historian). The Gospel ends with the ascension; Acts begins by retelling it, and carries the gospel of Christ from the Temple of Luke 1 to the apostle Paul preaching unhindered in Rome (Acts 28:31). The whole movement is one author’s account of how the salvation announced to Israel reached the nations.

Luke’s Sources

Luke himself tells us he worked from sources — the “many” who had compiled narratives and the tradition handed down “from the beginning” by “eyewitnesses and ministers of the word” (Luke 1:1–2). Modern source-criticism analyzes his Gospel into three broad bodies of material: a substantial overlap with the Gospel of Mark, which Luke appears to have used and rearranged; a body of sayings shared with Matthew but absent from Mark (the “double tradition”); and a large fund of matter found in Luke alone, conventionally labelled the special-Lukan or “L” material — the infancy narrative, much of the travel narrative, and most of the great parables of mercy. The precise relationship among these — whether the double tradition derives from a lost sayings-source, from Luke’s use of Matthew, or otherwise — is the substance of the synoptic problem, which this file leaves open; it is examined, with the competing solutions, in The Synoptic Problem, and the dating of the finished work in The Dating of Luke–Acts. What matters here is that Luke presents himself, and is received by the Fathers, as a careful editor of received tradition rather than an independent eyewitness (on the patristic understanding of the Evangelists, see The Church Fathers).

The Universal Horizon

A theme runs through the third Gospel from its opening chapters that marks it off from the others: its reach toward the whole human race. Where Matthew traces the genealogy of Christ back to Abraham, the father of Israel, Luke carries it back through Abraham to “Adam, the son of God” (Luke 3:38) — locating Christ not merely as the heir of the covenant but as the new head of all humanity. The same horizon appears when Luke, quoting Isaiah of the Baptist’s preaching, extends the citation further than the other Evangelists to reach the universal promise: “and all flesh shall see the salvation of God” (Luke 3:6; cf. Isaiah 40:5). This universalism — salvation for the Gentile as well as the Jew, for “all flesh” — is the seed in the Gospel of what comes to flower in Acts, where the word goes out from Jerusalem to “the end of the earth” (Acts 1:8). It is no accident that the only Gentile among the New Testament writers should be the Evangelist who frames the gospel as good news for the nations (on the salvation-historical reading of this horizon, see The Theology of the Third Gospel; on Christ as the new Adam, Christology).

References

The Gospel According to Luke (Luke 1:1–4 the preface; 3:6 “all flesh”; 3:38 the genealogy to Adam; 9:51 “set his face to Jerusalem”; 24:13–35 the Emmaus road; 24:50–53 the ascension). Cited by chapter and verse.
The Acts of the Apostles (Acts 1:1–2 the preface looking back to “the first book”; 1:8; 28:31). Cited by chapter and verse.
Irenaeus of Lyons. Against Heresies 3.1.1 (Luke the companion of Paul recording the Gospel Paul preached); 3.11.8 (the fourfold Gospel and the four living creatures). Trans. Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 1. Buffalo: Christian Literature Company, 1885.
Eusebius of Caesarea. Ecclesiastical History 3.4 (Luke of Antioch, physician, author of the Gospel and the Acts). Trans. Arthur C. McGiffert, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 1. 1890.
Jerome. Commentary on Matthew, prologue (the standard assignment of the four living creatures to the Evangelists, Luke = the calf/ox).
Fitzmyer, Joseph A. The Gospel According to Luke. 2 vols. Anchor Bible 28, 28A. New York: Doubleday, 1981–1985. (The preface, the structure, and the sources of the Gospel.)
Bovon, François. Luke 1: A Commentary on the Gospel of Luke 1:1–9:50. Hermeneia. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2002.
Marshall, I. Howard. The Gospel of Luke: A Commentary on the Greek Text. New International Greek Testament Commentary. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1978.