The Authorship of Luke–Acts and the History of “Luke”

Both the third Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles are formally anonymous: neither names its author. The name “Luke” comes from the unanimous second-century tradition — the manuscript title kata Loukan, the Muratorian Canon, the Anti-Marcionite Prologue, and Irenaeus — joined to the internal “we” passages of Acts and the three Pauline notices that name a “Luke.” This file treats that authorship question at length, setting the traditional view and the modern critical doubts side by side as named positions, and inventories what can securely be known of the man against what is only inferred.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostle and Evangelist)

The Anonymity of the Two Books

The first fact about the authorship of Luke–Acts is the one most easily forgotten: the books do not name their author. The Gospel opens with a formal literary preface addressed to one “Theophilus” (Luke 1:1–4), and Acts resumes that address — “The former treatise have I made, O Theophilus” (Acts 1:1) — establishing that the two volumes are a single work by one hand. But nowhere in either prologue, and nowhere in the body of either book, does that hand give its name. In this the third Gospel is like the other three: the canonical Gospels are, strictly, anonymous compositions to which authorial names became attached in the course of the second century (see The Synoptic Problem). What we possess is therefore an anonymous two-volume narrative and a strong, early, and unanimous tradition that names its author Luke; the honest treatment of authorship is the assessment of how that tradition stands.

The Internal Evidence: the “We” Passages and the Pauline Notices

Two strands of internal evidence are taken to point toward the author. The first is the celebrated “we” passages of Acts — four stretches of the narrative (Acts 16:10–17; 20:5–15; 21:1–18; 27:1–28:16) in which the third-person account suddenly shifts to the first-person plural, as though the narrator were himself present, traveling with Paul from Troas to Philippi, from Philippi to Jerusalem, and on the voyage to Rome. On the traditional reading the “we” is the author’s own signature: he was a companion of Paul on precisely these journeys and wrote himself, unobtrusively, into the story (see Companion of Paul).

The second strand is the three notices in the Pauline corpus that name a “Luke.” Colossians 4:14 sends greeting from “Luke, the beloved physician”; 2 Timothy 4:11 has Paul write, near the end, “Only Luke is with me”; and Philemon 24 lists “Lucas” among Paul’s fellow-laborers. From the combination — an author who writes himself into Paul’s journeys, and a “Luke” named in Paul’s letters as a physician and companion — the early Church drew the identification that has stood ever since: the author of the two books is Luke, the Gentile physician who accompanied Paul (see The Physician of Antioch).

The Second-Century Tradition

The external tradition is early, broad, and remarkably consistent. The Gospel circulated under the title euangelion kata Loukan, “the Gospel according to Luke,” a form of attribution that the manuscript evidence shows to be very old. The Muratorian Canon — a list of accepted books usually dated to the later second century, though some place it later — describes the third Gospel as written by “Luke the physician,” whom Paul had taken with him as one zealous for the law, and notes that he had not himself seen the Lord in the flesh (Muratorian Fragment, lines 2–8). The Anti-Marcionite Prologue to Luke, of disputed date but plausibly second-century, gives the fullest early portrait: Luke a Syrian of Antioch, a physician, a disciple of the apostles and later a follower of Paul, who wrote his Gospel in Achaia and died unmarried at eighty-four. Above all Irenaeus, writing c. AD 180, states it twice and decisively: “Luke also, the companion of Paul, recorded in a book the Gospel preached by him” (Against Heresies 3.1.1, ANF 1), and again, marshaling the “we” passages as proof, “that this Luke was inseparable from Paul, and his fellow-labourer in the Gospel, he himself makes evident” (Against Heresies 3.14.1, ANF 1). Eusebius gathers the same tradition: Luke was by birth an Antiochene and by profession a physician, who set down the Gospel and the Acts (Ecclesiastical History 3.4, NPNF II/1); and Jerome repeats it in his catalogue of churchmen (De viris illustribus 7). On the name, then, the tradition does not waver.

The Question Stated: Traditional View and Critical Doubts

The authorship question is best set out as a structured dispute, because the tradition’s two claims — the name and the companionship — do not stand on equal footing.

[Disputed: (A) The traditional view holds that the author of Luke–Acts is Luke, the Gentile physician and companion of Paul named at Colossians 4:14, 2 Timothy 4:11, and Philemon 24 — the figure Irenaeus identifies (AH 3.1.1; 3.14.1, ANF 1). This view is defended in modern scholarship: Joseph A. Fitzmyer accepts Lukan authorship while dating the work to the 80s (The Gospel According to Luke I–IX, Anchor Bible 28, 1981), and Colin J. Hemer argues at length that the author's detailed and accurate knowledge of the eastern Mediterranean, of nautical and administrative realities, and of Paul's itineraries is best explained by a genuine companion (The Book of Acts in the Setting of Hellenistic History, 1989); this remains the conservative consensus. (B) Critical doubts hold that, whoever wrote it, the author was probably not Paul's actual travelling companion. The case rests on the tensions between Acts and Paul's own letters — the account of the Jerusalem council in Acts 15 set against Paul's first-person narrative in Galatians 2; the difference between the Paul of Acts (a miracle-working orator in continuity with the Twelve) and the Paul who speaks in his own letters; and the apparent absence in Acts of any knowledge of Paul's letters or his most characteristic theology. Philipp Vielhauer's essay "On the Paulinism of Acts" (German 1950; English 1966) argued from these that the author cannot have been Paul's close associate; Ernst Haenchen (The Acts of the Apostles, 1971) and Hans Conzelmann (The Theology of St. Luke, 1960; Acts of the Apostles, 1987) read Acts as the work of a later "early-catholic" theologian who used sources — and who employed the "we" either as one such source incorporated whole or as a literary convention of sea-voyage narration rather than as a personal memoir.]

The Honest Verdict

The two claims must be weighed separately. On the name, the tradition is as strong as any in the New Testament: it is early (Irenaeus c. 180, the title and the Muratorian Canon comparably old), geographically broad, and entirely unanimous — no rival name was ever proposed for the third Gospel, and “Luke” is an unlikely candidate for invention, being neither an apostle nor an eyewitness nor a figure of standing whose name would lend prestige (the Muratorian Canon is candid that he had not seen the Lord). This very obscurity is, by the usual canons, an argument for the attribution’s authenticity. On the companionship, the matter is genuinely contested: the tensions between Acts and the undisputed Pauline letters are real and are not dissolved by appeal to the tradition, and the force of the “we” passages depends on a literary judgment — whether they are autobiography or a deployed source or a convention — that cannot be settled by external testimony alone (on how this bears on dating, see The Dating of Luke–Acts). The honest position is therefore divided: very probably the author was named Luke, as the whole second-century Church held; whether that Luke was Paul’s personal travelling companion is a question on which serious scholars stand on both sides.

For the Orthodox reader this divided verdict is not a crisis. The Church receives the Gospel according to Luke and the Acts of the Apostles as the inspired word of God and as the writings of the Evangelist Luke, and this reception does not rise or fall with the academic adjudication of the companionship question (see Holy Scripture). The literary-historical inquiry is real and worth pursuing, but it belongs to a different order than the Church’s confession; the canonical authority of the two books was never grounded in a reconstruction of their author’s travel diary (see The Church Fathers).

What Can Be Known of the Man

When the inferred and the traditional are stripped away, the securely-knowable Luke is very small. From the writings themselves one can say that the author was a person of considerable Greek education, capable of a polished Hellenistic historical preface (Luke 1:1–4) and of a Greek that modulates from elevated literary periods to Septuagintal idiom; that he was steeped in the Greek Old Testament; that he was, on the strongest reading of Colossians 4:11–14, a Gentile rather than one “of the circumcision”; and that he produced a single two-volume work of Gospel and Acts. The association with Paul, in some form, is attested both by the internal evidence and by the unanimous tradition, even if its precise nature is disputed. Almost everything beyond this is tradition rather than secure history: that he was a native of Antioch (Eusebius, HE 3.4; the Anti-Marcionite Prologue); that he was a physician (Colossians 4:14, and the early prologues — though the older argument that the Gospel’s vocabulary proves medical training has not held up); that he was one of the Seventy or one of the two on the road to Emmaus; that he died unmarried at eighty-four in Boeotia (the Anti-Marcionite Prologue; see The Repose and Relics); and that he was the first iconographer of the Theotokos (a tradition unattested before the sixth century; see The First Iconographer). A Gentile, educated in Greek, associated with Paul, the author of two books — beyond that we have the Church’s loving memory rather than the historian’s documentation, and the difference between the two is itself part of the truth about Luke.

See Also

• Companion of Paul — the “we” passages and the Pauline notices treated in their own right
• The Physician of Antioch — the traditional portrait of Luke the Gentile physician
• The Dating of Luke–Acts — the date, on which the authorship debate partly turns
• Luke the Historian — the Acts-versus-Paul tensions and the question of Luke’s reliability
• Holy Scripture — the inspired books received by the Church independently of the critical verdict
• St. Apostle Paul — the Paul of the letters whose self-presentation the critical case invokes
• St. Irenaeus of Lyons — the fullest second-century witness to Lukan authorship

References

• Irenaeus of Lyons. Against Heresies 3.1.1; 3.14.1. Trans. in Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 1. Buffalo: Christian Literature Company, 1885.
• Eusebius of Caesarea. The Ecclesiastical History 3.4. Trans. Arthur C. McGiffert, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 1. 1890.
• Jerome. De viris illustribus (On Illustrious Men) 7. Trans. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 3.
• The Muratorian Fragment (Muratorian Canon), lines 2–8. In Bruce M. Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament. Oxford: Clarendon, 1987.
• The Anti-Marcionite Prologue to Luke. In Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament, and Fitzmyer (below), introduction.
• Fitzmyer, Joseph A. The Gospel According to Luke I–IX. Anchor Bible 28. New York: Doubleday, 1981.
• Hemer, Colin J. The Book of Acts in the Setting of Hellenistic History. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1989.
• Vielhauer, Philipp. “On the ‘Paulinism’ of Acts” (1950). In Studies in Luke–Acts, ed. L. E. Keck and J. L. Martyn. Nashville: Abingdon, 1966.
• Haenchen, Ernst. The Acts of the Apostles: A Commentary. Trans. Bernard Noble et al. Oxford: Blackwell, 1971.
• Conzelmann, Hans. The Theology of St. Luke. Trans. Geoffrey Buswell. London: Faber & Faber, 1960.