Luke
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
a New Testament evangelist. In Col. iv: 14, he is called "Luke the beloved physician." In Philemon he is called Lucas, and described as one of St. Paul's fellow-laborers, and when "Paul was ready to be offered" (II Tim. iv: 6), he adds, "Only Luke is with me." Identifying him with the writer of the Acts of the Apostles, his use of the pronoun "we," commencing with xvi: 10, shows that he joined Paul at Troas and accompanied him to Philippi (11-17). The resumption of the pronouns "he" and "they" xvii: etc.) shows remained at Philippi till these that he the apostle thither (xx: 6). He accompanied him on his subsequent missionary journeys (xx: 13-15, xxi: 1, etc.), was with him in his shipwreck (xxvii: 3, 27, xxviii: 2, 10), and his subsequent voyage to Rome (13-16). There is no trustworthy information as to the remainder of St. Luke's life. The Gospel according to St. Luke, in the New Testament canon, the third Gospel. The writer had his information from those who "from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word" (Luke i: 2), implying that he was not himself an eyewitness of the events that he records. There exists, or rather, is recoverable from the writings of Justin Martyr, Irenæus, Tertullian, and Epiphanius, a Gospel issued by the celebrated Gnostic, Marcion, so related to that of St. Luke, that Marcion's Gospel must have been an abridgment of St. Luke's, or Luke's an expansion of Marcion's. Marcion is believed to have begun to teach in Rome about A. D. 139 to 142 (Sanday), or 138 (Volkmar), or 130 (Tischendorf). "At that time St. Luke's Gospel had been so long published that various readings of it had already arisen." The incidents recorded are not in chronological order. There is a marked superiority to Jewish caste-prejudice or to ceremonial bondage. It is the Gospel that tells of the Prodigal Son (xv: 11- 32), the Good Samaritan (x: 30-37), the Pharisee and the Publican (xviii: 10- 14). The third Gospel is exactly such a work as, under Divine inspiration, might be supposed to emanate from the companion of St. Paul.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Collier's in 1921 took it as settled that the third Gospel came from Paul's travelling companion, reading the "we" passages of Acts as the author's own diary. Most critical scholars now treat Luke and Acts as a single two-volume work written anonymously around AD 80-90 or later, by someone who used Mark and a body of sayings material (the Q hypothesis, which had only just hardened into consensus when this was written) rather than by an eyewitness of Paul; the "we" sections are widely read as a source or a literary convention, and Cadbury's 1920 study undercut the older argument that the book's "medical language" proved a physician wrote it. The puzzle Collier's poses about Marcion has also shifted: the mainstream answer is that Marcion cut down an existing Luke, though a minority of scholars since the 1990s have argued the reverse. On the text itself, the Bodmer papyrus known as P75, found in Egypt and published in the 1950s, carries much of Luke in a copy from around AD 200 - far earlier than any manuscript available to the 1921 writer.
Written for this edition, 2026.