The Reception and Legacy of Luke and His Two-Volume Work

How the third Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles were received across the centuries: the fourfold-Gospel canon and the symbol of the ox; the Muratorian Canon; Marcion’s truncated Luke and the orthodox response; the patristic commentary tradition from Origen to Theophylact; the liturgical legacy of Acts in Paschaltide and the Magnificat in the daily office; and the artistic legacy that made Luke the patron of painters and physicians. The file closes on Luke’s enduring place as the evangelist of mercy, the Theotokos, the Spirit, and the Church’s own history.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostle and Evangelist)

Luke Within the Fourfold Gospel

Luke’s Gospel was received from the second century not as a free-standing book but as one face of a single fourfold Gospel. Irenaeus gives the classic statement: there cannot be more or fewer than four Gospels, corresponding to the four regions of the world and the four winds, and to the four living creatures of the cherubic vision (Against Heresies 3.11.8, ANF 1). It is here that the third Gospel acquires its emblem. Irenaeus assigns the creatures to the Gospels, and the calf — the ox of sacrifice — he gives to Luke, “for it indicated the sacerdotal and sacrificial order,” fitting to the Gospel that opens with the priest Zechariah serving in the Temple (AH 3.11.8, ANF 1). The pairing of creatures to evangelists varied among the Fathers — Jerome’s later scheme, which became standard in the West, likewise gives the ox to Luke, while differing from Augustine and from Irenaeus on the others — but the winged ox or calf has remained Luke’s symbol throughout East and West. The Muratorian Canon witnesses the same fourfold reception, naming Luke’s as the third Gospel and the work of “Luke the physician” (Muratorian Fragment, lines 2–8).

Marcion’s Luke and the Orthodox Response

If the Church received Luke as one of four, the heretic Marcion received him as the only one — and in doing so made Luke the great battleground of the second-century canon. Around AD 140 Marcion, rejecting the God of the Old Testament and the Jewish heritage of the gospel, constructed a canon of a single Gospel and ten Pauline epistles, and his Gospel was a version of Luke shorn of its infancy narrative and of much that bound it to the Scriptures of Israel. Tertullian devoted the fourth book of his Against Marcion to a verse-by-verse demonstration that the Gospel Marcion had mutilated was the catholic Gospel of Luke, and that its testimony, rightly read, told against Marcion’s own theology (Against Marcion IV, ANF 3). The episode is doubly important: it shows the third Gospel already authoritative enough in the 140s to be worth truncating, and the orthodox reply — insisting on the whole Luke against the cut-down Luke — was an early and decisive act in the formation of the canon. The Marcionite controversy also feeds the modern dating debate, since some scholars have argued that the canonical Luke as we have it responds to Marcion and is therefore late (see The Dating of Luke–Acts).

The Patristic Commentary Tradition

Luke drew sustained patristic commentary, East and West. The earliest substantial body is Origen’s Homilies on Luke, surviving largely in Jerome’s Latin translation, which works through the infancy narrative and the opening chapters with characteristic typological and spiritual exegesis (Origen, Homilies on Luke, trans. Joseph T. Lienhard, Fathers of the Church 94). In the West, Ambrose of Milan produced a full Exposition of the Gospel according to Luke in ten books, the most important Latin commentary on the Gospel from the patristic age and a major channel for the allegorical reading of Luke’s parables. In the East, Cyril of Alexandria’s Commentary on Luke survives substantially in Syriac and in catena fragments and gives the Alexandrian Christological reading of the Gospel. Among later witnesses the Venerable Bede composed an Exposition of the Gospel of Luke that gathered the earlier Latin tradition for the medieval West, and Theophylact of Ohrid’s eleventh-century commentary distilled the Greek exegesis — above all Chrysostom — into the form most read in the Byzantine and later Orthodox world (see The Church Fathers). Through these commentators Luke’s distinctive material — the Good Samaritan, the Prodigal Son, the publican and the Pharisee — entered the permanent imaginative vocabulary of Christian preaching (see The Gospel of Mercy).

The Liturgical Legacy

Luke’s two volumes are woven deep into the Church’s worship. The Acts of the Apostles holds a unique liturgical place: in the Byzantine rite it is the book appointed for continuous reading throughout the Paschal season, from Pascha to Pentecost, so that the Church hears the story of the Spirit-filled apostolic Church precisely in the weeks when it celebrates the Resurrection and awaits the descent of the Spirit (see The Acts of the Apostles). Luke’s infancy narrative supplies the Gospel readings and much of the hymnography for the feasts of the Annunciation, the Nativity, and the Meeting of the Lord, and his canticles have become fixed elements of the daily office. The Magnificat — Mary’s song at the Visitation (Luke 1:46–55) — is sung at Matins/Orthros with its refrain “More honourable than the cherubim,” and the Song of Zechariah (the Benedictus, Luke 1:68–79) and the Song of Simeon (the Nunc Dimittis, Luke 2:29–32) likewise belong to the daily prayer of the Church (see The Magnificat). No evangelist has given the liturgy more of its words about the Mother of God (see The Theotokos in Luke).

The Artistic and Cultural Legacy

Two enduring identities attached themselves to Luke beyond his books. The first is Luke the painter. From the sixth century the tradition grew that Luke had painted the Theotokos from life, and around this grew one of the great subjects of Christian art — “Saint Luke drawing (or painting) the Virgin,” treated by masters from Rogier van der Weyden’s celebrated panel onward — and the medieval and early-modern Guild of Saint Luke, the confraternity under whose patronage painters and other artists organized across Europe (see The First Iconographer and The Icons Attributed to Luke; the tradition is pinned to its late attestation there, not asserted as apostolic fact). The second identity is Luke the physician, drawn from Colossians 4:14, by which Luke became the patron of doctors and the healing arts. His evangelist-symbol, the winged ox, marks him in manuscript, mosaic, and church decoration throughout Christendom (on the icon and image in Orthodox theology, see Icons and Iconoclasm and The Theotokos).

Modern Reception

In the modern period Luke–Acts has become the most-studied two-volume work in the New Testament, and successive critical movements have left their mark on its interpretation. The rise of redaction criticism took Luke as its founding case: Hans Conzelmann’s Die Mitte der Zeit (English The Theology of St. Luke, 1960) argued that Luke had a distinctive theology of salvation-history, dividing time into the age of Israel, the ministry of Jesus as “the middle of time,” and the age of the Church — reading Luke not as a mere transmitter but as a theologian shaping his material. Ernst Haenchen’s commentary on Acts (1971) and the wider source-, form-, and redaction-critical schools pressed the historical questions, while the later twentieth century brought narrative and literary criticism that read Luke–Acts as a unified story with its own art. The “we”-passages debate — whether the first-person plural marks the author as Paul’s companion, an incorporated source, or a literary convention — remains a live crux at the heart of the discipline (see Authorship and History). Across these debates the Orthodox reception has held steady: the historical-critical inquiry is real and may be engaged, but the Church reads Luke as inspired Scripture and as the Evangelist’s testimony (see Holy Scripture).

Luke’s Enduring Place

When all the debates are set down, what the Church keeps is the evangelist himself: the writer who gave us the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son and so became the evangelist of mercy; who gave us the Annunciation, the Visitation, and the Magnificat and so became, more than any other, the evangelist of the Theotokos; whose Gospel and Acts trace the work of the Holy Spirit from the conception of Christ to the preaching of the gospel in Rome; and who, in writing the Acts, became the first historian of the Church’s own life. The winged ox of sacrifice still stands for him in the Church’s iconography, and his Gospel and his Acts are still read, year by year, in her worship — the lasting reception of a man who never named himself.

References

Irenaeus of Lyons. Against Heresies 3.11.8. Trans. in Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 1. Buffalo: Christian Literature Company, 1885.
Tertullian. Against Marcion, Book IV. Trans. in Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 3. Buffalo: Christian Literature Company, 1885.
Origen. Homilies on Luke. Trans. Joseph T. Lienhard. Fathers of the Church 94. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1996.
Ambrose of Milan. Exposition of the Gospel according to Luke (Expositio Evangelii secundum Lucam). Latin in CCSL 14; ed. and trans. various.
Cyril of Alexandria. Commentary on the Gospel of Saint Luke. Trans. R. Payne Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1859.
Theophylact of Ohrid. The Explanation of the Holy Gospel according to St. Luke. Trans. Christopher Stade. House Springs, MO: Chrysostom Press.
Jerome. Commentary on Matthew, preface (the evangelist-symbols); and De viris illustribus 7. Trans. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 3.
The Muratorian Fragment (Muratorian Canon). In Bruce M. Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament. Oxford: Clarendon, 1987.
Conzelmann, Hans. The Theology of St. Luke. Trans. Geoffrey Buswell. London: Faber & Faber, 1960.
Haenchen, Ernst. The Acts of the Apostles: A Commentary. Trans. Bernard Noble et al. Oxford: Blackwell, 1971.