Gospel of Luke

Luke opens with the most self consciously literary preface in the New Testament, addressed to "most excellent Theophilus" and promising an orderly account "investigated everything carefully from the very first," the language of Greco Roman historiography rather than of a sermon or a letter. The same preface reappears, briefer, at the start of Acts, confirming that the two books were conceived as one continuous work later separated in the canon by the insertion of John.

Luke is the longest Gospel and, with Acts, the largest single contribution to the New Testament by one author. Its distinctive material includes the nativity as most Christians picture it, the shepherds, the manger, the census of Quirinius, entirely absent from Matthew's different birth account, and a run of parables found nowhere else: the Good Samaritan, the Prodigal Son, the Rich Man and Lazarus. Women, the poor, and social outsiders receive sustained attention unmatched in the other Gospels, from Mary's Magnificat, which reads as a hymn of reversal for the lowly against the powerful, to the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector. Luke also gives the fullest account of Jesus' ascension, the scene that becomes, in Acts, the hinge into the story of the early church.

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.