St. Luke the Evangelist

Luke is known not only as the evangelist of the third Gospel but as the author of Acts and as the traveling companion of Paul. He is identified in the Pauline letters as the beloved physician, a Gentile, and one of the few who remained with Paul during the Roman imprisonment. His Gospel is the most literary of the four: the orderly account promised to Theophilus, the infancy narrative with the canticles of Mary and Zechariah and Simeon, the parables of the Prodigal Son and the Good Samaritan and the Rich Man and Lazarus, the post-resurrection appearance on the road to Emmaus. The quality of Luke's Greek — demonstrably finer than most of the New Testament — is a circumstantial detail worth noting without overstating.

The missionary journeys in Acts, told partly in the first-person plural — the "we" sections that suddenly appear in the narrative — give the picture of a man who was there, who kept careful notes, and who cared about how things actually happened and in what order. The preface to the Gospel, in which Luke explicitly states that he has carefully investigated everything from the beginning and set it down in orderly sequence after having consulted eyewitnesses, is one of the few explicit descriptions of method in the entire New Testament and deserves respect. There is a tradition that Luke was also a painter and that images of Our Lady attributed to him were venerated in Rome. This tradition should be treated with reserve, though Luke's literary achievement is the more certain and substantial claim.