Luke the Evangelist

Luke, a physician of Antioch, was not unskilled in the Greek language, as his writings show. A follower of the apostle Paul and the companion of all his travels, he wrote a gospel. Of it the same Paul says, “We are sending with him a brother whose praise in the gospel is throughout all the churches.” To the Colossians he writes, “Luke the beloved physician greets you,” and to Timothy, “Only Luke is with me.” He also wrote another excellent volume, to which he gave the title Acts of the Apostles. Its history extends to the second year of Paul’s stay at Rome, that is, to the fourth year of Nero, and from this we learn that the book was composed in that same city. [a]

So we count the Acts of Paul and Thecla, and the whole tale of the lion baptized by him, among the apocryphal writings. For how could it be that the inseparable companion of the apostle, who knew his other affairs, should alone have been ignorant of this? Moreover Tertullian, who lived near those times, mentions a certain presbyter in Asia, a follower of the apostle Paul, who was proved by John to have been the author of the book. He confessed that he had done it out of love for Paul, and he gave up his office of presbyter.

Some suppose that whenever Paul says in his letters “according to my gospel,” he means the book of Luke. They suppose too that Luke was taught the gospel history not only by the apostle Paul, who had not been with the Lord in the flesh, but also by the other apostles. Luke himself declares this at the beginning of his work, saying, “Just as they handed them down to us, who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word.” So he wrote the gospel as he had heard it, but he composed the Acts of the Apostles as he himself had seen it. He was buried at Constantinople, to which city his bones, together with the remains of Andrew the apostle, were moved in the twentieth year of Constantius.