Only Luke Is with Me

As for those who claim that Paul alone knew the truth, and that the mystery was disclosed to him by revelation, let Paul himself convict them. He says that one and the same God was at work in Peter for the mission to the circumcised and in himself for the nations. Peter, then, was an apostle of the very God whose apostle Paul was; and the one Peter preached as God among the circumcised, and as the Son of God besides, Paul also declared among the nations. Our Lord did not come to save Paul only, and God is not so short of means that he should have just one apostle who knew his plan concerning his Son. [a]

And again, when Paul says, “How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news of good things, and preach the good news of peace,” he shows plainly that there was not merely one man preaching the truth but many. And again, in the letter to the Corinthians, after listing everyone who had seen God after the resurrection, he goes on: “But whether it was I or they, this is what we preach, and this is what you believed.” He is acknowledging as one and the same the preaching of all those who saw God after the resurrection from the dead.

And again, the Lord answered Philip, who wanted to see the Father: “Have I been with you so long, and you still have not known me, Philip? Whoever sees me sees the Father also. How can you say, Show us the Father? For I am in the Father and the Father in me; and from now on you know him, and have seen him.” So the Lord bore witness about these men that in himself they had both known and seen the Father — and the Father is truth. To claim, then, that these men did not know the truth is to play the false witness, and to be someone cut off from the teaching of Christ. Why else did the Lord send the twelve apostles to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, if these men did not know the truth? And how did the seventy preach, unless they had first come to know for themselves the truth of what they preached? Or how could Peter have been in ignorance — Peter, about whom the Lord testified that flesh and blood had not revealed it to him, but the Father who is in heaven? Just as “Paul was an apostle, not from men nor through a man, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father,” so it was with the rest: the Son leading them to the Father, and the Father revealing the Son to them.

Paul did agree to the request of those who summoned him to the apostles over the question that had been raised, and he went up to them at Jerusalem with Barnabas — and not without reason, but so that the freedom of the nations might be confirmed by them. He says so himself in the letter to the Galatians: “Then fourteen years later I went up again to Jerusalem with Barnabas, taking Titus along too. But I went up by revelation, and I laid before them the good news that I preach among the nations.” And again he says, “For an hour we gave way in submission, so that the truth of the good news might remain with you.” Now if anyone will look carefully in the Acts of the Apostles at the period in which Paul is said to have gone up to Jerusalem over that question, he will find that the years Paul names line up with it. So Paul’s own statement agrees with Luke’s testimony about the apostles — the two are as good as one.

That this Luke was inseparable from Paul, and his fellow worker in the good news, Luke makes plain himself — not as a boast, but because the truth itself obliges him to. He says that when Barnabas, and John who was called Mark, parted from Paul and sailed to Cyprus, “we came to Troas.” And when Paul had seen in a dream a man of Macedonia saying, “Come over into Macedonia, Paul, and help us” — “immediately,” he says, “we tried to go into Macedonia, understanding that the Lord had called us to preach the good news to them. So we sailed from Troas and set our ship’s course toward Samothrace.” Then he carefully records all the rest of the journey as far as Philippi, and how they gave their first address there: “for we sat down,” he says, “and spoke to the women who had gathered” — and some believed, a great many in fact. And again he says, “But we sailed from Philippi after the days of unleavened bread and came to Troas, where we stayed seven days.” [i]

And he recounts all the rest of his travels with Paul, noting with great care the places, the cities, and the number of days, until they went up to Jerusalem; and what happened to Paul there; how he was sent to Rome in chains; the name of the centurion who took charge of him; the figureheads on the ships; how they were shipwrecked; the island where they came safely ashore, and the kindness they were shown there, with Paul healing the leading man of the island; how they sailed from there to Puteoli, and from there reached Rome; and how long they stayed at Rome. Luke was present at all of it, and he set it down carefully in writing, so that he cannot be convicted of lying or of boasting. All these details prove both that he was older than the men who now teach otherwise, and that he was not ignorant of the truth.

And that he was not merely a follower but a fellow worker of the apostles, and of Paul above all, Paul has himself declared in his letters: “Demas has deserted me … and gone to Thessalonica, Crescens to Galatia, Titus to Dalmatia. Only Luke is with me.” By this he shows that Luke was always attached to him and never apart from him. And again he says, in the letter to the Colossians: “Luke, the beloved physician, greets you.” Now if Luke — who always preached in Paul’s company, whom Paul calls “the beloved,” who did the work of an evangelist with him, and who was entrusted with handing a Gospel down to us — learned nothing different from Paul, as his own words show, then how can these men, who were never attached to Paul at all, boast that they have learned hidden and unspeakable mysteries?

That Paul taught plainly what he knew, and not only to the men working with him but to everyone who heard him, he makes clear himself. The overseers and elders from Ephesus and the neighboring cities had gathered at Miletus, since Paul was hurrying on to Jerusalem to keep Pentecost. After testifying to them at length, and telling them what was going to happen to him at Jerusalem, he added: “I know that you will not see my face again. So I call you to witness this day that I am clean of the blood of all of you, for I have not held back from declaring to you the whole counsel of God. Watch over yourselves, then, and over the whole flock in which the Holy Spirit has placed you as overseers, to govern the church of the Lord, which he obtained for himself through his own blood.” Then, speaking of the evil teachers who were to arise, he said: “I know that after my departure fierce wolves will come in among you and will not spare the flock. And from among your own selves men will rise up, speaking twisted things, to draw the disciples away after them.” “I have not held back,” he says, “from declaring to you the whole counsel of God.” So the apostles delivered simply, and without favoring anyone, everything they had themselves learned from the Lord. And so too Luke, without favoring anyone, delivers to us what he had learned from them, as he testifies himself: “just as they handed them down to us, who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the Word.”

Now if anyone sets Luke aside as a man who did not know the truth, he plainly throws away the very Gospel he claims to be a disciple of. For it is through Luke that we have come to know a great many important parts of the Gospel: the birth of John, the account of Zechariah, the angel’s coming to Mary, Elizabeth’s cry, the descent of the angels to the shepherds, the words they spoke, the testimony of Anna and of Simeon about Christ, and how at twelve years old he was left behind at Jerusalem; also John’s baptism, the Lord’s age when he was baptized, and that this happened in the fifteenth year of Tiberius Caesar. And in his work as teacher, this is what he said to the rich: “Woe to you who are rich, for you have received your comfort”; and “Woe to you who are full, for you will go hungry; and you who laugh now, for you will weep”; and “Woe to you when everyone speaks well of you, for that is what your fathers did to the false prophets.”

All of the following we know through Luke alone — and many acts of the Lord we have learned through him that all the Gospel writers report as well: the great catch of fish that Peter’s companions hauled in when they let down the nets at the Lord’s command; the woman who had suffered for eighteen years and was healed on the Sabbath; the man with dropsy whom the Lord made well on the Sabbath, and how he defended himself for having performed a healing on that day; how he taught his disciples not to reach for the highest places at table; how we should invite the poor and the crippled, who cannot pay us back; the man who knocked in the night for loaves and got them because he would not stop asking; how, when the Lord was at table with a Pharisee, a woman who was a sinner kissed his feet and anointed them with perfumed oil, and what the Lord said to Simon on her behalf about the two debtors; also the parable of that rich man who stored up the goods that had come to him, and was told, “This night they will demand your soul from you; then whose will these things be that you have prepared?”; and, like it, the parable of the rich man who was clothed in purple and feasted in style, and poor Lazarus; also the answer he gave his disciples when they said, “Increase our faith”; his conversation with Zacchaeus the tax collector; the Pharisee and the tax collector praying in the temple at the same time; the ten lepers he cleansed all together on the road; how he ordered the lame and the blind to be brought in to the wedding from the lanes and the streets; the parable of the judge who had no fear of God, whom the widow’s persistence wore down until he gave her justice; and the fig tree in the vineyard that bore no fruit. There are many other things besides that are found in Luke alone, and both Marcion and Valentinus make use of them. And on top of all this, Luke records what Christ said to his disciples on the road after the resurrection, and how they recognized him in the breaking of the bread.

It follows, then, as a matter of course, that these men must either accept the rest of Luke’s account or else reject these parts too. Nobody with common sense will let them take some of what Luke reports as true and set the rest aside, as though he had not known the truth. If Marcion’s followers do reject these parts, they will have no Gospel left at all — for they cut down the Gospel according to Luke, as I have said already, and then boast in what is left of it. And Valentinus’ followers must give up their utterly empty talk, since they have taken from that same Gospel a great many openings for their own speculations, putting a bad meaning on what Luke has said well. But if instead they find themselves obliged to accept the remaining parts as well, then by studying the Gospel whole, and the teaching of the apostles, they will find they must repent, so that they may be saved from the danger they are in.

Again, we bring the same argument against those who do not recognize Paul as an apostle. Either they must reject the other words of the Gospel that we have come to know through Luke alone, and make no use of them; or, if they do accept all of these, they must accept the testimony about Paul as well, where Luke tells us that the Lord spoke to him first from heaven: “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? I am Jesus Christ, whom you are persecuting.” And then to Ananias, about him: “Go, for this man is a chosen vessel of mine, to carry my name before the nations and kings and the sons of Israel. For I will show him from now on how much he must suffer for my name’s sake.” So those who will not accept as a teacher the man God chose for this very purpose — that he should carry God’s name boldly, being sent to the nations just named — despise God’s choice and cut themselves off from the company of the apostles. They cannot argue that Paul was no apostle, when he was chosen for this; nor can they convict Luke of falsehood, when he proclaims the truth to us so carefully. It may well be that this is exactly why God set out so many Gospel truths through Luke — truths everyone must think it necessary to use — so that everyone might follow his later testimony too, the one that deals with the acts and the teaching of the apostles, and might hold the unadulterated rule of truth, and be saved. His testimony, then, is true, and the teaching of the apostles is out in the open and firm, holding nothing in reserve. They did not teach one thing in private and another in public. [t]

That is precisely the dodge of dishonest men, wicked seducers and hypocrites — the way the followers of Valentinus behave. They talk to the crowd about those who belong to the church, whom they themselves label “common” and “churchy.” With words like these they trap the simpler sort and draw them in, imitating our own way of speaking, so that these dupes will listen to them the more often. Then the newcomers are asked about us: how is it that when they hold beliefs like ours, we keep ourselves apart from their company for no reason? How is it that when they say the same things and hold the same teaching, we call them heretics?

When they have used such questions to overturn somebody’s faith, and have turned him into a hearer who no longer contradicts them, then they describe to him in private the unspeakable mystery of their Pleroma. But everyone is deceived who imagines that from the Scripture texts these men quote he can learn the teaching their words make sound so plausible. Error is plausible, and it bears a resemblance to the truth, but it needs a disguise; truth goes undisguised, and that is why it has been entrusted to children. And if any of their hearers does ask for explanations, or raises objections, they declare that he is not capable of receiving the truth, and does not have from above the seed that comes from their Mother; and so they give him no real answer at all, but simply pronounce him one of the middle region — that is, one of the merely animal natures.

But if a man gives himself up to them like a little sheep, and follows their practice and their “redemption,” he is puffed up to such a degree that he thinks he is neither in heaven nor on earth but has passed inside the Pleroma. Having already embraced his angel, he swaggers about with his nose in the air and all the pompous bearing of a rooster. There are some among them who say that a man who comes from above ought to live a good life, and so they put on a certain gravity along with the arrogance. The majority, though, have become scoffers as well. As if they were already perfect, living without any regard to appearances — indeed in contempt of what is good — they call themselves “the spiritual,” and claim they have already come to know that place of refreshment inside their Pleroma.

But let us go back to the line of argument we were following. It has been plainly shown that the preachers of the truth and the apostles of freedom called no one else God, and named no one else Lord, except the only true God the Father, and his Word, who holds first place in all things. From that it will be clearly proved that they confessed as Lord and God the one who is the Maker of heaven and earth — the one who also spoke with Moses, gave him the ordering of the law, and called the fathers — and that they knew no other. So the mind of the apostles concerning God, and the mind of those who learned from their words, has now been made plain.