Luke (Loukas—i.e. Lucas, perhaps shortened from Lucanus, as Silas from Silvanus), a companion of St Paul, mentioned in Col. iv. 14 as 'the beloved physician'; his absence from the list in Col. iv. 10-11 leads to the inference that he was a Gentile, and his name is suggestive of an Italian origin. Church tradition since Eusebius has made him a native of Antioch in Syria, and will have it that he was one of 'the seventy' mentioned in Luke, x. 1, 17, that after Pentecost he laboured in Bithynia, Greece, and Gaul, and that, after attaining a good old age, he died a martyr. The further tradition that he was a painter cannot be traced to an earlier date than the 8th century. He is named for the first time as author of the third canonical gospel in the Muratorian canon (2d century); and tradition has ever since been unvarying in ascribing to him both that work and its continuation, the Acts (q.v.) of the Apostles. With respect to the date and authorship of the last-mentioned book, all that can be said here is that the majority of modern critics are of opinion that it cannot have been written by a companion of St Paul. When compared with the genuine epistles of that apostle, it exhibits many important discrepancies in detail; of these the most striking perhaps are those which are seen when Acts xv. and Gal. ii. are carefully read together. The author of the Acts, however, had access to a variety of written, as well as oral, sources of information, and to the former class belonged the document the presence of which can still be distinguished in his narrative by the use of the pronoun 'we.' There is good reason to believe that Luke is the companion of St Paul who here speaks in the first person, and, this being so, it is not difficult to understand the process by which the authorship of the whole work ultimately came to be attributed to him. As regards the third gospel it is to be observed that its author in his preface expressly disclaims to have been an eye-witness of any of the events he records, and does not make the least pretension to any special apostolic sanction or authority. He is frankly a compiler, working after a considerable accumulation of literary material has taken place; who hopes to excel those who have gone before him in fullness of matter, accuracy of detail, comprehensiveness of scheme, and orderliness of method. That, if not himself a Gentile, he writes chiefly for Gentile readers is evident from such circumstances as the manner in which he habitually makes use of the Septuagint translation, his abstinence from Aramaisms, his referring to localities always by their Greek names, and the like. Amongst the documents employed by him the most important were the collection of 'logia,' or discourses and sayings of the Lord by Matthew, and some form of the gospel according to Mark (see GOSPELS). He must have had other sources for the details he has handed down regarding the nativity, and for the canticles which he alone has preserved. Working as he did, most probably in Rome, it was natural that he should reflect in his gospel much of the teaching of St Paul; the fact that he did so is indicated in the tradition (Eusebius) according to which that apostle alluded to the work of Luke in the expression, 'My gospel.' As regards date, the third gospel must be placed at least later than the destruction of Jerusalem (Luke, xxi. 20, 24; xix. 43, 44), and also in all probability some years later than the gospel according to Matthew.
See the commentaries of Lange, Meyer, Keil, P. Campbell (1892), and Plummer (1897); and GOSPELS.