Tradition has long prized Luke for a particular kind of authority, that of an educated Greek speaking outsider rather than a Jewish insider, writing careful prose for a literate Gentile audience uncertain how the Jesus movement related to the wider Roman world it now had to live inside. That framing shaped centuries of reading: patristic writers cited Luke's medical vocabulary as evidence of authorship by "Luke the beloved physician" named in Colossians, though modern philology has weakened the argument by showing similar vocabulary in other educated Greek writers of the period.
Liturgically, Luke supplies most of Year C in the Catholic and many Protestant lectionaries and, through the Magnificat, the Benedictus, and the Nunc Dimittis, has given the church three of its most durable canticles, sung daily for centuries in the monastic offices of Vespers, Lauds, and Compline respectively. Luke's emphasis on the Holy Spirit, present at Jesus' conception, descending visibly at his baptism, and driving him into the wilderness, anticipates the same Spirit's far more dramatic arrival at Pentecost in Acts, and many readers take the two volumes together as a deliberate argument that the church's mission continues, rather than replaces, the work begun in Jesus' own ministry.