Luke the Evangelist

Luke the Evangelist is the figure to whom early Christian tradition ascribes the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles, a two-volume narrative addressed to Theophilus that recounts the life of Jesus and the spread of the church from Jerusalem as far as Rome. Second-century witnesses, including Irenaeus of Lyons and the Muratorian Canon, already name Luke as author and as a companion of the Apostle Paul. Within the New Testament itself a man named Luke appears in the Pauline circle: Colossians calls him the beloved physician; Philemon lists him among Paul's fellow workers; and Second Timothy, portraying Paul near the end of his life, states that Luke alone is with him. The so-called we-sections of Acts, in which the narrator joins Paul's company on portions of the missionary journeys (notably from Troas to Philippi, and later on the voyage to Rome), have been read since antiquity as Luke's own travel notes, though modern scholarship continues to debate the precise relationship between those passages and the historical Luke.

Ancient ecclesiastical writers describe Luke as a Gentile, a native of Antioch in Syria, and a physician by training. Eusebius of Caesarea, in the Ecclesiastical History, speaks of Luke as being of Antiochian parentage and as having practiced medicine. Jerome, in On Illustrious Men, repeats the Antiochene origin and the medical profession, and notes Luke's skill in Greek. The Anti-Marcionite Prologue to the Gospel of Luke, an early though not precisely dated tradition, likewise calls him a Syrian of Antioch, a physician, a disciple of the apostles who later followed Paul until Paul's martyrdom, unmarried and without children, and dead at the age of eighty-four in Boeotia. No first-century source records a calendar year of birth or death; later writers who assign a year such as 84 often appear to have converted the traditional age at death into a date, which is not a reliable procedure. Luke is not known to have held any episcopal see, to have been Bishop of Rome or a patriarch of an Eastern church, or to have belonged to any later religious order.

After Paul's death, later legend sent Luke to preach in Achaia, Egypt, or other regions, and some medieval accounts made him a martyr; the oldest authorities are silent on martyrdom. The place of death is given as Boeotia in the Anti-Marcionite Prologue, and subsequent hagiography often specifies Thebes in Boeotia. Jerome reports that Luke's bones were transferred to Constantinople in the twentieth year of the emperor Constantius, about 357. In 1177 a body identified as Luke's was translated from the East to Padua, where it has been enshrined in the Basilica of Santa Giustina; a skull relic has been kept in the Cathedral of Saint Vitus in Prague since the fourteenth century. Scientific study of the Padua remains in the late twentieth century was reported as consistent with a man of eastern Mediterranean origin who died in old age, but such tests cannot confirm identity. From the Byzantine period Luke was also credited with painting images of the Virgin Mary, above all the Hodegetria type, a tradition that, whatever its historical basis, made him the patron of iconographers, painters, and artists.

The churches of East and West keep his feast on 18 October. He is invoked as patron of physicians and surgeons, of artists and painters, of notaries, and of various crafts including butchers, brewers, glassworkers, goldsmiths, lacemakers, bookbinders, sculptors, and stained-glass workers, as well as of bachelors and unmarried men. Those associations grew from his traditional profession as a physician, from the winged ox that is his symbol among the four evangelists (drawn from the sacrificial opening of his Gospel), and from the early claim that he lived unmarried. Veneration of Luke as a saint is of patristic antiquity and does not rest on a formal papal canonization of the later medieval type.