The holy gospel of Jesus Christ, according to S. Luke, that is, the holy evangelical history of the words and deeds of Jesus, as described by Luke. The Arabic says, “In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, one God, the gospel of the excellent father, Luke the Evangelist. The laying open of the glorious gospel.” The Syriac, “In the name of the Lord and our God, we Jeschua Mescicho, sign the gospel, the sacred message of Luke the Evangelist, which he spoke and proclaimed in Ionic (i.e., Greek), in the great city of Alexandria.” From this diversity, it is clear that this title or inscription was prefixed to the gospel, not by Luke himself, but by the Church, which in like manner, inscribed one gospel “According to Matthew,” one “According to John,” and another “According to Mark.” Nay, as regards the faith of the future, this inscription would have been added to no purpose by Luke himself, unless the Church had declared it to be genuine (and not fraudulently substituted) and had handed it down as such. This speaks for tradition against the heretics. For why is the gospel bearing the name of Luke to be received as truly his, while the gospel with the title of “Matthew and Thomas” is not to be considered theirs? Or again, why is the gospel of Luke more canonical than the gospel of Apelles or Basilides? No other reason can be given but the proof, declaration, and tradition of the Church. For we accept it, not because it is written in the sacred books, but because it has been handed down by the Church. For instance, we believe this to be the gospel of S. Luke and canonical, not because Luke himself wrote it, but because this is the Church’s tradition and teaching. For although its own authority pertains to this gospel, as to the others, yet this authority would not be plain to us, but for the declaration of the Church. The same thing, likewise, is to be said of the sense or meaning of scripture. For the true sense of scripture is not what appears to you or me to be such (for so it would be uncertain and doubtful; for Calvin offers one sense, Luther another, and others another), but rather that which is taught and handed down by the Church, whose duty it is to hand on both what the true Sacred Scripture is, and also what its genuine meaning is. For Holy Scripture consists not in the outer shell of the letters or the words, but in their genuine meaning. Thus the Fourth Session of the Council of Trent, and the fathers passim, especially Tertullian (lib. 4 contra Marcionem cap. 5). (See commentary on S. Matthew 1:1.)

Note, first, that Matthew was the first Evangelist; he wrote in Hebrew to the Jews in Judea. Mark was the second; he wrote in Greek and Latin to the Romans in Italy. Luke was the third, writing to the Greeks in Greek; and John was the fourth, also writing in Greek; but Luke wrote the more elegantly, because he was by far more skilled in Greek. Hear S. Jerome (Epistle 103 [53] to Paulinus): “and they go wherever the influence of the Holy Spirit directs them.” “Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are the Lord’s team of four, and the true cherubim (which is interpreted, ‘store of knowledge’); through their whole body they are ‘full of eyes’, sparks shine from them, lightnings flash forth, their feet are ‘straight’ and point upwards, their backs are winged, ready to fly in all directions. They hold together and are interwoven one with another: like wheels within wheels they roll along and go wherever the breath of the Holy Spirit directs them.”

Moreover, among the faces or forms of the four cherubim, the third, that of the ox, is ascribed to Luke, both because he begins from the priesthood of Zachary, whose chief sacrifice was an ox, and also because he underwent the labors of an ox in the gospel, and bore about continually in his own body the mortification of the cross for the honor of Christ’s name, as the Church sings of him. (See commentary on Apocalypse 4:7, and Ezechiel 1:10.)

Note, second, that S. Luke wrote his gospel against certain careless, ignorant, perhaps even false evangelists, who in Syria or Greece had written an imperfect, perhaps even a lying gospel, as Luke himself insinuates at the beginning of his Preface. So say Origen, S. Ambrose, Theophylact on this passage, and S. Epiphanius (haeres. 51), who, however, when he adds that Luke wrote against Cerinthus and Merintus, does not seem to speak correctly; for these two, just like Basilides, were later than Luke, as is clear enough from Eusebius (lib. 3 Hist. cap. 32). Theophylact and Bede think, more plausibly, that Luke wrote his gospel against the apocryphal gospels of others, such as were circulating under the names of Thomas, Matthew, and the twelve Apostles.

Note, third, that Luke was not one of Christ’s seventy-two disciples, as Euthymius and S. Gregory (praefat. in Job, cap. 1) think, on the authority of Origen; for Luke never saw Christ in the flesh, but rather wrote down what he had heard about Him from Paul and the Apostles, as he says himself (Luke 1:2). Hence the fathers constantly call Luke “the disciple of the Apostles,” and Paul mentions him by name as his fellow laborer. So S. Jerome, commenting on Isaias, chapter 65 and on the preface to Matthew; where he says, “The third (Evangelist) is Luke the physician, by nationality a Syrian from Antioch, whose praise is in the gospel (cf. 2 Corinthians 8:18, 22), who himself was a disciple of the Apostle Paul. He wrote his book in the neighborhood of Achaea and Boeotia, tracing some things further back and, as he admits himself in the preface, describing what he heard rather than what he saw.” The same tradition is found in Irenaeus (lib. 1, 20) and Theodoret (Praefation. in Vitas SS. Patrum), Baronius, and others. Indeed, Tertullian (lib. 4 contra Marcion. cap. 5) thinks this gospel to be not so much Luke’s as Paul’s, because Luke wrote from the dictation of Paul, as Mark did from that of Peter. For he says, “What Mark wrote may be called the work of Peter, whose interpreter Mark was. And so the Digest (gospel) of Luke is usually ascribed to Paul, for what the disciples promulgated began to be ascribed to the masters.”

S. Jerome also states that Luke, in the gospel and Acts, performed the duties of a physician of souls, as he had before done of bodies. Thus he says in epistle 103 to Paulinus; “If we acknowledge that their author was Luke the physician, whose praise is in the gospel, we will likewise note that all his words are medicine to the languishing soul.” Again (ep. ad Philom.), “Luke the physician left to the churches in his gospel, and the Acts of the Apostles a record of how the Apostles from fishers of fish became fishers of men. So too, from being a physician of bodies, he became a physician of souls. As often as his book is read in the churches, his medicine does not fail to have its effect.”

Note, fourth, that Baronius thinks that Luke wrote in the companionship of S. Paul, in 58 A.D., because S. Jerome says that Luke wrote in Achaia and Bœotia, where S. Paul was that year. Others, however, are of opinion that Luke wrote his gospel earlier, as we must certainly admit, if we agree with S. Jerome (lib. de Script. Eccles. in Luca), Tertullian (lib. 4 contra Marcion, cap. 5), Primasius, Anselm, and others commenting on 2 Corinthians 8:18, that by the brother whose praise is in the gospel. Paul meant Luke, as S. Ignatius, his fellow-citizen and contemporary, plainly asserts in his letter to the Ephesians: “As Luke bears witness, whose praise is in the gospel.” For the Second Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians was written in the year 58 A.D., so that if the praise of S. Luke was in the gospel at that time, we must necessarily say that it had been published previously. Hence Euthymius, and Theophylact in his Preface to Luke, say that he wrote fifteen years after Christ’s ascension, that is, about the year 49 A.D. But Luke was not yet Paul’s companion, for he joined him in Troas in the year of Our Lord 51, as Baronius rightly concludes from Acts 16:10. It appears, therefore, that Luke wrote his gospel after the year 51 A.D., but some years before 58 A.D., for in that year it was already published and famous, as Paul says.

Note, fifth, that Luke, after he had joined S. Paul, passed some years away from him, having been sent by him to other places (as I have shown at Acts 16:10), until Paul, having passed through other regions, returned to Greece, so as to set sail for Syria, and from there to Rome (Acts 20:3-4). For Paul, then, with other companions of his voyage, who are named in that verse, took Luke also, as Luke states in that chapter, verses 5 and 15. From then on, therefore, Luke was the “diligent” companion of S. Paul, up to the first imprisonment, which Paul suffered at Rome in the second year of Nero; that is why Luke finished there the Acts of the Apostles, and, especially, those of Paul. Then, as S. Epiphanius relates, Luke left Paul in prison, and went into Dalmatia, Gaul, Italy, and Macedonia, and preached the gospel everywhere, and finally in Patara, a city of Achaia, in his eighty-fourth year, he was crowned with a glorious martyrdom and went to his heavenly reward in the year of Our Lord 61, the fifth of Nero, and the seventeenth of the pontificate of S. Peter at Rome. So Baronius says, at 61 A.D., citing S. Gregory Nazianzen, Paulinus, Gaudentius, Glyca, Nicephorus and others.

Lastly, who Luke was, what sort of a man and of what rank, I have described at length in the Prologue to the Acts of the Apostles, where I have said that Luke appears to be the same as Lucius, whom Paul calls his kinsman (Romans 16:21). But he seems to be distinct from Lucius of Cyrene, mentioned in Acts 13. For Luke was from Antioch, not Cyrene. Again, the Roman Martyrology, on April 22, says that Lucius was among the first disciples of Christ, which cannot be said of Luke.

Note, sixth, that the reason why Luke wrote a gospel after Matthew and Mark was two-fold: principally to confute the false gospels that were then springing up in Syria and Greece, as I said in Note 2; then, too, he had determined to write at length those words and deeds of Christ which had been passed over by the other Evangelists, and especially His infancy and childhood, and the annunciation, conception, and birth of His forerunner John the Baptist, His manger and swaddling clothes, the shepherds, His circumcision and presentation in the temple, the finding of the Child among the doctors; the conversion of S. Mary Magdalen, Zaccheus, and one of the two crucified thieves; the appearance of [the risen] Christ to the two disciples at Emmaus, the parables of the Pharisee and the publican, the Good Samaritan, the Lost Sheep, the Lost Coin, the Prodigal Son, Lazarus and the rich glutton, and others; which show the mercy of Christ and His love for sinners and the unfortunate. See S. Irenaeus (lib. 3 cap. 14), who recounts each. Luke also relates, more fully than the others, the passion, resurrection, and ascension of Christ.

Lastly, S. Peter Damian (serm. de S. Matthaeo) says, “Luke follows his own particular method and order when he describes the priestly stock of the Lord and His Person, and this remains his intention throughout his book, so that he does not fail to mention various things about the temple and the priests to the end of his gospel. . . . Indeed, the mediator between God and man, in His human nature, willed to be king and priest in one, that through His kingly power He might rule over us, and, by His priestly office, atone for us. These two personae of Christ are especially praised by the fathers, for to Him principally and by a singular prerogative God gave the throne of His forefather David, that His kingdom might have no end, and that He might be a priest for ever, according to the order of Melchisedech.

S. Anselm again, on Colossians 4, gives two reasons why Luke, more than the others, should speak of the mercy of Christ. 1. “Luke,” he says, “was a physician of bodies; then, when he turned to Christ, he was made a physician of souls. Hence he speaks, more than the other Evangelists, of the mercies of the Redeemer, by which the infirmities of sins are driven away from souls.” 2. “In Christ, he describes the person of a priest, making intercession for the sins of the whole world.”

Lastly, our own Jean de la Haye (in apparatu Evang. cap. 68) lists the twenty-five privileges granted to S. Luke, where, among other things from S. Jerome, S. Bede, and Ado, he says that S. Luke never committed a mortal sin, but passed an austere life of continual mortification; that he also preserved his virginity to the end, and therefore was especially beloved by the Blessed Virgin.

S. Ambrose and Titus of Bostra have written special commentaries on Luke. Tertullian, also, in his whole work against Marcion (who had declared the gospel of S. Luke, though adulterated, to be his own), treats of and explains many passages of this gospel. Cardinal Toletus, also, wrote at length, and with exactness, on the first twelve chapters of Luke.