Theopedia

Gospel of Luke

“For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.”

— Luke 19:10

Overview

The Gospel of Luke is the third of the four canonical gospels and, with the Acts of the Apostles, the first half of a two-volume history of Jesus Christ and the early church addressed to a reader named Theophilus.1 Ancient testimony unanimously assigns both books to Luke, the travelling companion of Paul and “the beloved physician” (Col. 4:14; Philemon 24; 2 Tim. 4:11).2 Among the gospels, Luke gives the fullest account of Jesus’s birth and infancy and the longest connected narrative of any book in the New Testament, holding a position between Matthew and Mark in the balance it strikes between recording Jesus’s deeds and preserving his discourses.3

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Author and Date

Luke identifies himself in his own preface as one who did not personally witness Jesus’s earthly ministry but “carefully investigated everything from the beginning” from those “who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word” (Luke 1:1-3).2 The New Testament elsewhere marks him as a physician who travelled with Paul from Troas onward, evidenced by the sections of Acts written in the first person plural, and who remained with Paul during his Roman imprisonment.2 Michael Kruger argues that Luke’s language in his preface, echoing the “eyewitnesses” and “ministers of the word” of Acts 1:22 and 6:4, presents him as one trained in the apostolic tradition rather than a distant investigator piecing together secondhand reports.4 Ancient tradition places the composition of Luke’s gospel in the years surrounding Paul’s Roman imprisonment, roughly AD 60-63, with Acts following soon after; all three synoptic gospels were written before the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70.5

Theophilus, addressed by name and given the honorific “most excellent” (Luke 1:3), was most likely a recent convert whom Luke wished to reassure of the “certainty” of what he had already been taught, language suggesting he had received some form of catechetical instruction.1 Luke states this purpose directly: that Theophilus might know “the certainty of the things you have been taught” (Luke 1:4).

Historical and Literary Context

Luke’s genealogy of Jesus, unlike Matthew’s, traces his ancestry past Abraham all the way to Adam, “the son of God” (Luke 3:38), identifying Jesus not only as Israel’s promised king but as the Savior of humanity as such.5 This universal reach, addressed to a Gentile convert and unfolding within a Greco-Roman setting, runs throughout the gospel: several of its best-known parables, the good Samaritan and the prodigal son among them, appear in no other gospel and give sustained attention to Samaritan and other outsider figures.5 Kruger argues that Luke’s preface presents his work not as a secular chronicle but as a continuation of the biblical story Scripture had already been telling, an account written to bolster confidence in the gospel rather than merely record history.4 As the first volume of a two-part history completed in Acts, Luke’s gospel supplies the account of Christ’s earthly ministry that Acts assumes as it traces the gospel’s spread from Jerusalem to Rome.

Structure

Luke’s narrative divides broadly into the events surrounding Jesus’s birth and infancy (Luke 1-2), his Galilean ministry (Luke 3-9:50), and his journey to Jerusalem (Luke 9:51-19:27), before concluding with his final week, death, and resurrection in Jerusalem (Luke 19:28-24:53). The travel narrative to Jerusalem is Luke’s distinctive structural feature: an extended block introduced at Luke 9:51, “he set his face to go to Jerusalem,” that gathers a large body of material, much of it found in no other gospel, under the framework of a single journey rather than strict chronological sequence.3 Twelve parables belong to this section alone, including the good Samaritan, the lost sheep, the lost coin, the prodigal son, the rich man and Lazarus, and the Pharisee and the tax collector.3

Major Themes

Compassion for the marginalized

Luke repeatedly shows Jesus bringing the good news of forgiveness to those Jewish religious society treated as outsiders. Bavinck observes that Jesus “brought the gospel of forgiveness and salvation to publicans and sinners, the poor and the imprisoned” (Matt. 5:1ff.; 11:5, 28-30; Luke 4:18-19; 19:10), a mission that put him at odds with the Pharisaic religion of his day.6 Luke alone records Jesus reading Isaiah’s prophecy of good news to the poor in the Nazareth synagogue as a statement of his own mission (Luke 4:18-19), and Luke alone records the parables of the prodigal son and the rich man and Lazarus, along with Jesus’s declaration to Zacchaeus, a despised tax collector, that “the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost” (Luke 19:10). Women, too, appear throughout Luke’s narrative, from Elizabeth and Mary in the birth narrative to the women who provided for Jesus’s ministry (Luke 8:1-3) and were first at the empty tomb (Luke 24:1-10).

Salvation for all nations

Luke’s genealogy, tracing Jesus’s line to Adam rather than stopping at Abraham, signals from the outset that his gospel is not for one nation but for humanity as a whole.5 This universal note recurs in Simeon’s blessing over the infant Jesus as “a light for revelation to the Gentiles” (Luke 2:32) and in parables unique to Luke, the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the prodigal son, in which Jesus is set forth as the Savior of sinners without regard to their standing before Jewish society.5

The Holy Spirit

Bavinck traces the Holy Spirit’s work across the whole of Jesus’s earthly life as Luke records it: the Spirit conceived him in Mary’s womb (Luke 1:35), guided him in the wilderness (Luke 4:1), and empowered him to preach the gospel (Luke 4:18ff.); Jesus, in Luke’s own words, “was always full of the Holy Spirit” (Luke 4:1).7 Luke also records the Spirit’s descent on Jesus at his baptism (Luke 3:22) and Jesus’s own promise that the Father will give the Holy Spirit to those who ask (Luke 11:13), a theme Luke resumes as the controlling one of his second volume, Acts.

Prayer

Luke records Jesus at prayer at several pivotal moments: at his baptism (Luke 3:21), before choosing the twelve (Luke 6:12), at his transfiguration (Luke 9:28-29), and in Gethsemane (Luke 22:41-44), and includes two parables on persistent prayer found nowhere else in the New Testament, the friend at midnight (Luke 11:5-13) and the persistent widow (Luke 18:1-8).

Related Doctrines

External links

References

  1. Michael J. Kruger, The Question of Canon: Challenging the Status Quo in the New Testament Debate (Nottingham: Apollos, 2013), 143: “Luke is presenting his Gospel as an apostolic source for encouraging and reassuring Christians about the good news they have believed, that is, it was a book written for the church. It was not just history, but salvation-history.” ↩ ↩2

  2. Elijah Porter Barrows, Companion to the Bible (New York: American Tract Society, 1867), 431-432. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  3. Barrows, 433-435. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  4. Kruger, 141, 143. ↩ ↩2

  5. Barrows, 432-433. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5

  6. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 22, “The Spirit’s Means of Grace.” ↩

  7. Bavinck, chap. 17, “The Order of Salvation.” ↩