Fr. Stephen De Young: So tonight, we are starting Luke. Tonight, you get the long, tedious introduction rather than a short, quick review of the introduction that I’ll do later in subsequent weeks.

As you can see, I’ve already changed on the board, we’re now in The Gospel According to St. Luke, and I’ll reiterate here the importance of that title. The title is not just “Luke” the way we refer to it, or even “Luke’s Gospel”, because there’s one gospel, there’s one Christ. He lived one life, he suffered and died once. That’s the gospel. The gospel is what Christ did. So, what we have in each of what we call the four Gospels, plural, sort of a shorthand is actually the Gospel according to St. Matthew, the Gospel according to St. Mark, the Gospel according to St. Luke, Gospel according to St. John. It’s the same story, the same history, the same gospel, but from four different perspectives, four different perspectives of four different authors.

And as we’ve said before, it’s important that we remember that this is the way that the Church has chosen to give us the Gospel. It’s given us four separate versions, four separate authors, four separate treatments. The Church certainly could have just chosen one of them. It could have picked one and said, well, Luke has most of the stuff we like. It’s the one that includes the most extensive information about Christ’s birth, sort of goes the farthest from front to back. And, as we’re going to talk about in a minute, has Acts as sort of the second volume, so it sort of continues. They could have just said, well, we’ll just make Luke the Gospel and not worry about those other ones.

The Church could have taken all four of them and sort of smushed them together. Worked them all together, woven them together into one story. And in fact, that was done in the third century by a Syrian guy named Tatian, who put together what’s called the Diatessaron, or the “through four”, where he took the four Gospels and wove them together, took all the details out of each version of the stories, smushed them all together and turned it all into one big Gospel.

Well, that’s interesting to read some time if you want to kind of see how things fit together. But that’s not what the Church did in terms of the Scriptures we have. The Scriptures we read in the Church, the Scriptures we have to read at home.

So, when we read the four Gospels and we notice that there are differences, whether there are different versions of the same story, or one has stories another one leaves out, or one seems to leave out stories and another one has, this isn’t accidental. It isn’t like the Church canonize the four Gospels. And, then a few hundred years later, somebody sat down and actually read all four of them and said, “Hey, you know what? These don’t agree with each other. Oh, no, what do we do now?”

A lot of times our atheist brothers and sisters will do documentaries for various television channels and come and say, “Well, you know what? The Gospels don’t agree with each other.” Like they’ve just discovered something that we as Christians were unaware of for 2000 years.

Like, “Wait a minute, what? How can I possibly believe this now?” But this is intentional.

The Church knew that there were, quote&emdash;unquote disagreements at the time that they canonized, and they chose to canonize four and these four in particular anyways. And that’s because the Church believes that by reading all four of these, each with a different perspective on the person of Jesus Christ, we get a well&emdash;rounded picture, a full picture of who Jesus Christ is.

The same way that if you didn’t have depth perception for some reason, you cover one eye, and you look at the world and everything is flat. If you look at everything from that flat perspective, there are going to be all kinds of things you miss. If you record what you see and another person records what they see from a right angle, and another person records what they see from a right angle, and another person standing on the other side records what they see, you get a full picture of whatever it is you’re looking at. I used the example last time in talking about some of these differences and some of these issues.

We have to think about this more the way we think about normal literature and make it a little less special in the sense of how we interpret it. For example, if I get four different biographies of George Washington and one of those biographies of George Washington has chosen to focus on George Washington as a statesman, it’s going to focus on his political achievements, his time as president, this kind of thing. But I get another one that’s focusing on Washington as a general, it’s going to focus on his military exploits, the Revolutionary War. I get another one that chooses to focus on the early life of George Washington before he became a prominent person. And I get another one where the author is just trying to be as comprehensive as possible. Maybe it’s twice as thick as the other ones. It’s just trying to record as much information as possible from George Washington.

They’re not going to agree about everything. If I look up a particular event, some events might not be in all four of them. Some of them may be in two or three of them and not the fourth. Some of them might give more or less detail. The one about him as a statesman is going to focus a lot more on Shays’ Rebellion than the one about his early life. That didn’t happen in his early life. And so, when we read normal literature, we do this all the time.

I’ve never known someone to read their third biography of George Washington or Abraham Lincoln and go, “Well, everything I read is different! This guy must have never existed, right?” Or “How can I believe, how can I trust any of this? It doesn’t all agree.”

And yet that’s what people sort of seem to expect us to do when we read the four Gospels about Jesus and they don’t all match up perfectly. They expect us to just throw up our hands, “Well, I guess you can’t trust anything.” Or, “I guess He’s just made up.”

What we have in the four Gospels is exactly what we would expect to have if we have four different people writing about the life of Jesus Christ. They each have their own emphases; each have their own things that they think are important. They each have their own perspective on the stories. They each talk to different eyewitnesses. And if you’ve ever done any kind of investigation from the level of even a parent asking two different kids what happened, you know that if you have two people who are actually there and saw it, they’re going to give you two different stories. And if you go to them and if you ask them and they all give you the exact same story,

Interlocutor: It’s a lie.

Fr. Stephen: Right. [Laughter] That tells you that they got together and concocted something. So, St. John Chrysostom actually made this point about the Gospels. He said that the differences between them is actually what proves that they’re true, because if you have four different sets of eyewitness testimony, they’re not going to agree on all the details. Whereas he was saying if someone had just made all this up about Jesus, then we’d expect it to all be pretty much lockstep the same because they’d all be concocting the story. All the Apostles would have gotten together and gotten their story together to make sure there weren’t any inconsistencies.

So, we should look at that as a positive thing. And so just like we did with Matthew and Mark, as we’re going through Luke, I’m going to do my best to try and keep us to Luke. I know, we want to, sort of, our mind wanders and we say, “Well, what about these other parts from other Gospels?” And we want to try to bring them in. But it’s really important that we hear each of the four voices and for what they’re saying individually, after you’ve done that, after we’ve gotten sort of each of the four perspectives individually, then we can talk about how they fit together and how we understand them together. It’s important that we let each one speak for itself.

So, in terms of who Luke is, who wrote Luke, I’m going to have a brief excursus because again, I’ve been watching documentaries, which I know I shouldn’t do. But the popular thing now has become to say that the four Gospels originally circulated anonymously. They say this all the time. Those labels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, those only came later.

Now, of course, by later, they mean the second century. So not that much later, but they want to make the point that it was later. And these books were circulating around anonymously because nowhere in the text of Luke, for example, does it say, “Hi, I’m Luke, and I’m writing this.”

Well, here’s the problem with that. There are four Gospels, and we know there’s even more literature about Jesus circulating around in the first century. There’s no titles, supposedly. What did they call them? They had to call them something to distinguish between one and another. They could have just numbered them 1, 2, 3, 4 or something, but they had to have something. Now, there is no evidence, zero evidence, in terms of manuscripts of the text, in terms of references from the early Church fathers, that these books were ever called anything other than Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

Yes, it’s true, we don’t have references in the first century referring to this Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, but we don’t have references of them being called anything else. The Church Fathers don’t say this Gospel, written by Luke, which some people call “XYZ”. There’s none of that. And there is that for other documents.

For example, there was an early heretical gospel called the Gospel to the Hebrews. And when we hear about that in the Church fathers, they say the Gospel to the Hebrews, which is also called the Gospel to the Nazorians, and at least there’s about three other names for it. But we never find that with Matthew, Mark, Luke, John ó they’re never referred to as anything else.

So, it seems to me that if you’re going to make the claim that these circulated anonymously, you’re going to have to at least give me a theory as to what they were called before they were called Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Even if it’s just numbers, you’re going to have to give me a theory, and then you’re going to have to back up that theory with something you’re going to have to show me someone calling the Gospel of Luke by some other name than Luke.

And the fact is, at least right now, we don’t have anything. So based on the evidence, all the evidence we have refers to the book that we’re about to read as the Gospel According to Luke. Never anything else. Which seems to me to mean that historically, if all the evidence you have points in one direction and there’s no evidence pointing in any other direction, you have a pretty conclusive case this Gospel is written by somebody named Luke.

If you want to argue about who that Luke is, that may be a separate topic, but arguing that this book just floated around with no title, along with a bunch of other similar books, which also had no titles, for about 100 years, it doesn’t seem to make any sense to me at all.

Interlocutor: Well, when you ask about the title, we get the words Apostle and Epistle later on in the formation of the Church because everybody had a different idea of what the Church should be. And, it even came to the fact that you had people, if I’m correct, joining a monastic group or joining the Essenes. So if you say, what could we call Luke, Mark? Could we not call them the Letters of Luke? Did they all come as we see this now, in one book?

Fr. Stephen Yes, this is one literary unit. In a second as we’re going to talk about, the Gospel According to Luke, is actually the first piece of a two&emdash;part work, Acts of the Apostles being the second piece. Epistle is really a genre. It’s a format. There’s a way that letters, and we’ll talk about this more when we get into starting with Romans, when we get into the epistles. But it was a format. The Epistle basically is just a type of letter that was sent in the first and second century. And it had certain format.

The same way when we write formal letters, they have a format in modern times with the date, the recipient, dear whomever, and we sign it with “Sincerely” or “Love” or “In Christ” or whatever at the end and then put our signature. We have that sort of format. Epistle is a format that was used then, and so like I said, when we get into the Epistles, we’ll talk about that format, that there’s sort of a heading. There’s greetings at the beginning, sort of salutations, and then sort of a thesis statement, and then you go from there. At the end, there’s sort of closing remarks and greetings that are sent.

We’ll see that with St. Paul at the end of all of his epistles and says, “say hi to so and so, say hi to so and so, remember so and so in your prayers,” and then a closing sort of blessing.

So that’s a format. And so, the book of Luke does not follow that format. It follows a very different format. But that’s a good segway into what I’m about to talk about, which is the format that Luke has actually written in. As I just mentioned a couple of times, Luke is part of a two&emdash;volume work, and we know that for sure, because we’re going to see here at the beginning, when we get into the text, it’s a book that was written for someone.

There’s a patron Theophilus, for whom this book was written. And, at the beginning of the book of the Acts of the Apostles, we’re going to have a similar introduction. And it’s going to say “In the former book, Theophilus, I wrote about XYZ,” and that’s going to summarize the Gospel of Luke. And then he’s going to go into volume two about the beginnings of the Church. And this two&emdash;volume work is written by Luke in the form of history. We talked about how Matthew and Mark are recording historical events, but the format they use is closer to an ancient biography in the ancient world. They’re a little different than our biographies. They’re sort of lives of famous men. And if you go and read Plutarch’s Lives, that’s a good example. He was a Roman author who wrote Lives of Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great and Caesar Augustus and other notable people. It was in a former format similar to that.

Luke, on the other hand, seems to be drawing more on Greek history. In fact, his Greek and his syntax structure is very similar to what Thucydides used in his history of the Persian Wars and that kind of thing. So, Luke is presenting his Gospel and the story of the early church to us in this format of history, that he’s trying to be a historian. And he’s going to tell us at the beginning, when we get into the introduction here, he’s going to mention directly that he consulted sources, that he went out and did research.

He’s not just going to sort of launch into the story like we saw with Mark or start with the genealogy of Jesus like Matthew. They were kind of drawing on Old Testament literary forms. Luke is going to tell us at the beginning, he’s writing this for Theophilus, who’s his patron, who’s paid for this to be composed because this was an expensive thing for the ancient world.

To give you an idea, if you were a Christian living in the first or second century and you wanted a copy of the Book of Romans, just the Book of Romans on a scroll, it would have cost you the equivalent of about $5,000, for one book of the Bible.

So Theophilus, who commissioned Luke to write these two books, that was for a copy of a book, you can imagine in terms of commissioning one to be written, the amount of money we’re talking about here. And these are two substantially long books. If you put them together, they’re more than a quarter of the New Testament, Luke and Acts.

If you count books, St, Paul wrote more books in the New Testament than anyone else. But if you go by length, if you go by the number of words written, St. Luke wrote more in the New Testament than anyone else. Because, in terms of volume, it’s bigger than all of St. Paul’s letters put together.

So, this is a history. He’s presenting it to us that way, and he’s presenting it as the result of research that he went out and found eyewitnesses. He went out and consulted other documents that other people had written about what Jesus said and did. And he’s bringing that all together now to write for Theophilus an account, a historical account, who Jesus was, what he said and did, his life and his death and his resurrection, his ascension into heaven.

And then, Acts of the Apostles picks up from Christ’s ascension and goes from there, talks about the Apostles to Jerusalem, and then ultimately the Apostle Paul and his missionary journeys, and about the early Church.

And the fact that these books are linked gives us the best evidence that it was a particular Luke who wrote both works, because there are a series of passages in the second half of the Book of the Acts of the Apostles where all of a sudden it switches from saying “he”, referring to St. Paul traveling and preaching the gospel, to “we”.

And those “we” passages start as soon as this fellow named Luke joins St. Paul on his journey. It’s right at the same time in the text, it mentions that Luke joined St. Paul and then immediately, “we went, we went, we went.”

Now, some people have said, “Oh, that’s a literary device.” But first of all, if that’s a literary device, there is no other work of ancient literature that uses that literary device where all of a sudden someone recording a history switches to “we”.

It wasn’t there. That’s never happened. Second, it doesn’t explain why all of a sudden it switches in the middle of the book. If it was a literary device, you’d expect to find it all the way through. Start with “we”, end with “we”. So that argument that it’s a literary device kind of doesn’t make sense.

And also, it wouldn’t make sense for someone who wasn’t actually there, if someone was trying to claim credit, if someone was trying to claim to be Luke. So, let’s say the person who wrote it wasn’t actually Luke, but they were trying to claim to be Luke. And we have a lot of literature like that in the early Church, especially people who came up with new versions of Christianity, who we now call heretics, people who are sort of on the fringes, they did that a lot.

They would write something and then they claim that St. Peter wrote, or they write something and claim that St. James wrote to try and give more authority. Because if they just said “Shlomo Weinstein from Caesarea wrote it”, nobody would be interested in reading it. They’d be like, “Take your writing and go home.”

If they claimed an apostle wrote it that someone might be interested. So, they did that all the time. So, if we’re going to say, well, maybe this person is just claiming to be Luke, well, if that’s the case, right, he did it awfully subtle. Because what you find when you read those other works where someone’s claiming to be someone they’re not is they make a very big deal about claiming to be that person.

So, if you find something that claims to be written by Peter, it usually starts out with something like, “I Peter, Prince of the Apostles, leader of the Church in Jerusalem, eyewitness to Christ, et cetera, et ceteraÖ” It goes on and on to try to impress you with the authority that it’s claiming to have. It doesn’t just suddenly throw in a “we”.

If this was a person who isn’t Luke claiming to be Luke, then we would expect to find at the beginning of the book: “I Luke, Companion of Paul, et cetera, et cetera, et ceteraÖ”, and writing this thing. But he doesn’t do that. It’s a very subtle thing.

So all this, combined with the fact that it never circulated under anybody else’s name, is a pretty solid case that was written by Luke as Luke, who was a companion of St. Paul, therefore, would have heard the Gospel from St. Paul, would have heard these stories from St. Paul. And then additionally, as he says, consulted information to put this together, this St. Luke was a companion of St. Paul. We’re also told is a physician, it’s a little different than being a doctor today. It’s a little different, because medicine was a lot different in the first and second centuries than it is today.

But this means a few things. It means he was highly educated, which makes sense because, as I said, the Greek here is a lot like classical Greek history. So, somebody who had been educated as a physician would have read those classical Greek works. That kind of matches up well.

So, he would’ve been highly educated. As a physician at this point, their teachings and understandings of the human body were a lot closer to philosophy than to science. They sort of had beliefs about how the body works. They didn’t have the scientific method, where we do experiments and then repeat them and then get data back and test our hypotheses. They didn’t really do that so much.

What they did was they read texts from various other learned physicians who described to them, when you’re faced with this problem, do that. And then if you tried that, that didn’t work well, you consult another author. And you say, well he says to do this for a fever. And depending on where you were, these could be more or less outlandish. Some of the ancient ones we have get kind of weird. You’re making poultices with animal dung and raw eggs and all kinds of things and putting them into somebody’s wound. And then, go figure, half the patients died three days later.

It was a little bit different, but it does mean that he had a large formal education and was well read. Church tradition also tells us that St. Luke was the first church iconographer. And this also makes sense if he was a physician, because part of education, our education, is kind of bifurcated now, but part of classical education then was they would learn art and music as well as philosophy, history, all of these things were brought together.

So, it would be very uncommon for a person educated enough to be a physician not to be in some way involved in the arts, whether it was the visual arts or sculpture or music or some other similar area. There are two icons surviving in the world that are claimed to be icons painted by St. Luke. One of them is on Mount Athos, and one of them, I believe, currently is in the Vatican. They were talking about giving it back. I believe it’s still there.

And these, interestingly enough, are not painted on wood, as we typically think of icons painted on wood or painted on the walls of a church or another building. These are actually painted on wax tablets, which is part of the evidence that they’re legitimately from the first century. Because it was common to paint portraits on wax tablets in the first century, it was a cheaper and easier to use medium. And if you wanted to scrap it and start over, all you had to do is melt the wax. You melt the wax, you roll it back out. You can start over again, which made it much more efficient than having to buy new papyrus, which was very expensive, or trying to paint on vellum, which was animal skin, which is another thing that was used for writing but not so great for trying to paint a portrait.

And so, both of these are portraits of the Theotokos, of Christ’s mother. So related to that tradition is, because of the amount of material in the Gospel we’re about to read, that pertains to Mary, Christ’s mother herself, the source of which seems to be who would know exactly what Mary was thinking when the angel came to her and told her she’s going to have a son except for herself? And it’s tradition that one of the people who said Luke consulted was Christ’s mother herself, who had been still alive at the time. Either way, that the gospel was written. So, she’s one of the people whom he went to get information.

And we’ll find as we get started here, that the Gospel contains a lot more information from before Christ’s birth than the other Gospels, certainly more than as we saw in the Gospel according to St. Mark, he picked up with Christ’s baptism, so he ignored Christ’s early life entirely. In St. Matthew’s Gospel, we saw an account of Christ’s birth, and we’re going to see a much fuller one here in St. Luke’s Gospel.

So then finally, in terms of the introduction. Well, I shouldn’t say that because I probably will find more in introduction. We’ve been talking about the four living creatures in Ezekiel and the way those represent the four Gospels traditionally. And remember the four living creatures, there was a creature with the face of a man, there was one with the face of a lion, one with the face of an ox and one with the face of an eagle. And these have been traditionally identified with the four Gospels, such that you’ll see in a lot of iconography and a lot of other symbols of the four Gospel writers. You’ll see, for example, these animals around them signifying the connection.

We talked about how St. Matthew’s Gospel typically has been associated with the face of the man because it focuses on Christ’s humanity and his suffering as a human being as one of us. We talked about how the lion is traditionally associated with St. Mark’s Gospel because it focuses on Jesus as the Davidic King. We talked about, that’s why he starts with Christ’s baptism, and Christ’s baptism is sort of a coronation the way St. Mark describes it; it’s the story of Christ taking his throne in the Gospel.

St. Luke’s Gospel, that we’re about to start, is traditionally associated with the face of the ox, which is what that drawing is supposed to be. It’s a sort of cartoon ox. And this is because traditionally Gospel according to St. Luke has seemed to focus on Christ in a twofold way.

The ox is a symbol of sacrifice. Remember oxen and bulls were sacrificed routinely in the temple. And so, it focuses both on Christ’s priesthood and on Christ’s offering himself as a sacrifice on our behalf to his Father. And so then of course, if you were following along when we get to Gospel according to Saint John, this is going to be associated with the Eagle, but we’ll talk about that when we get there.

So, one brief last note before we get into the text: as I mentioned, St. Luke’s Greek is really influenced by classical Greek histories. That in addition to telling us that he’s writing it as a history, also tells us a little bit about the audience that he expects to be reading it. We saw that the Gospel according to St. Matthew, for example, clearly had a very Jewish-centric audience in mind, both in the amount that he quoted the Old Testament, in the way he structured things. We talked about the Sermon on the Mount and how it was structured similar to the Torah and saw connections with the Ten Commandments and with Moses and how Jesus was portrayed. So that was clearly aimed at a very Jewish audience that was very familiar with the Hebrew Scriptures.

Mark, we talked about also had a very sort of Jewish-Roman audience in mind, although St. Mark was taken a little differently in that St. Mark interacted a lot more in a negative way with sort of the hierarchy, particularly the priestly hierarchy of Judea and Jerusalem and Christ’s conflict with that. And since St. Mark’s Gospel was written before the destruction of the temple, that was more of an issue at that point than it was later.

When St. Matthew’s Gospel, St. Luke’s Gospel are being written and the temple has already been destroyed, they’re not in power anymore. That’s not as important.

The fact that St. Luke writes for Theophilus in this way, sort of in this historical format, means he’s probably aiming it at a very different audience. He’s aiming this at a more broad Greco-Roman, Greek-speaking audience. That’s not to say he doesn’t quote the Scriptures.

He quotes the Old Testament Scriptures in Greek translation very frequently, but he’s also clearly aiming now, having written a little bit later, he’s aiming now at a group that’s including a lot of Gentile converts to Christianity, and those Gentile converts would know something about the Jewish Scriptures in their Greek translation. But he’s also speaking to them in a language and in a format that they can understand and pick up on what it’s doing. And we’ll see as we go through also going to St. Luke.

St. Luke is going to do a lot more of setting things over against sort of Roman practice, Roman tradition, Greek practice, Greek tradition. And this fits in with the picture that we’re going to get of Luke in Acts of the Apostles, remember, he shows up when those “we” passages start, where he’s traveling with St. Paul. And what is St. Paul doing? He’s going from city to city preaching the gospel and for the most part getting thrown out of synagogues and finding his converts among the Gentiles. So, it seems pretty clear that the audience to which St. Luke is writing is that audience to which he went and preached with Paul who are now going to receive in written form what they’ve already received in verbal form.

Interlocutor: When was the Old Testament translated from Ancient Hebrew into Ancient Greek?

Fr. Stephen The formal translation of it, we have bits and pieces that are earlier than this, so it’s possible that individual books and individual people were sort of translated by various people at various times. But the systematic translation of what we now call the Old Testament into Greek, the first major translation that we refer to as the Septuagint, was begun around 200 B.C. So around 200 B.C., at the prompting of the Ptolemaic governor of Alexandria, Egypt, where the Great Library was. The Great Library of Alexandria is one of the wonders of the ancient world. And the Ptolemies set that up with the goal of bringing together all of the wisdom in the world into that one place, into that one library. And so, they acknowledged, even though the Greeks and the Jews, as we saw in Maccabees, didn’t get along real well, they acknowledged that the Jewish traditions were ancient, and so they wanted that to be a part of the library. And so, they commissioned the translation.

The reason it’s called the Septuagint, remember, is that’s the word for seventy and originally the Pentateuch, the Torah, the first five books were translated by seventy rabbis over the course of seventy days. So, it’s referred to as the translation of the seventy.

Now, technically, they only did the Torah, but that whole Greek translation is referred to as the Septuagint or the version of the seventy, even though the seventy people worked for 70 days on just the first five books. And some of the books, as we saw as we were going through the Old Testament, weren’t even written at the time that that writing began, for example First Maccabees, Second Maccabees, the events took place after 200. So that translation effort goes on from 200 to probably about 50 or 60 B.C., so that’s the time period was being traced.

So, by the time we get to the first century, by the time we get the time when Jesus lived, when Jesus was an adult, talking around 30 A.D., the Greek translation of the Scriptures is already in wide circulation. And most synagogues in major Roman cities outside of Judea itself, even in Galilee, but outside of Judea itself, most synagogues were reading the Scriptures in Greek, in the Greek translation.

And interestingly, before Christianity came along, this changed after Christianity came along, but before Christianity came along in the Jewish tradition, and we see this at some of the early tractates in the Talmud, the only translation of the Scriptures other than the original Hebrew, the only translation that was allowed to be read in the synagogue was the Greek translation. It had a special status even in the Jewish community before Christianity.

The Targums, the Aramaic translations, could not be read by themselves. If you were going to read the Targums in the Aramaic, you had to read the Hebrew first and then the Aramaic. If you had a bunch of people who didn’t know Hebrew, who only knew Aramaic. But, you could just read the Greek by itself. So, even in the Jewish community, that Greek translation has a special status at this time.

What’s going to happen is Christians are going to latch onto that Greek translation and turn it into their Old Testament. And because of that, the Jewish community is going to end up rejecting it. In the early centuries, they’re going to make a few attempts to go back and edit it, to edit the Greek and make it, I’ll be fair, according to them, make it closer to the Hebrew. The unfair version is to dechristianize it, to make it less prone in their mind to Christian interpretation, which they saw as a misinterpretation.

But eventually, they gave up on that and just rejected the Greek translation and went back to the Hebrew as the only valid text. Whether they’re Jewish or they’re Gentile converts, most of the people outside of Judea, so most Christians, especially after 70 A.D., when the Temple is destroyed, are going to know the Old Testament in the Greek translation, not in the original Hebrew, because Hebrew had fallen into great disuse at this point, and nobody spoke Aramaic outside of Judea and Galilee.

So that’s how that works. So, when Luke quotes anything from the Old Testament, he’s quoting it from that Greek version and that’s how they knew and recognized the Scriptures at that point.

So, unless there are any other questions, we’ll go ahead and get started on the text.

Okay, so Luke 1 verse 1:

Inasmuch as many have taken in hand to set in order a narrative of those things which have been fulfilled†among us, just as those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word delivered them to us, it seemed good to me also, having had perfect understanding of all things from the very first, to write to you an orderly account, most excellent Theophilus, that you may know the certainty of those things in which you were instructed.

So that’s sort of our little preamble, that’s our header, sort of our dedication to Theophilus, who commissioned this work. But it already tells us a few things. Working backwards, we start with “Öthat you may know the certainty of those things in which you are instructed.” So, Theophilus, whose name means one who loves God, Theophilus clearly is a convert to Christianity, someone who’s been instructed in the faith, meaning he’s not someone who was with Jesus while he was alive. He’s not one of the seventy.

He didn’t know these things firsthand, but he was taught. And so now he’s commissioned this work so that he can have sort of the whole story about Jesus. He’s heard about Jesus, he’s heard preaching about Jesus and the things that he did, but he wants sort of the wholeÖ he wants “the rest of the story” to quote Paul Harvey, he wants the whole thing.

And so that’s why he’s commissioned this, what Luke here calls an orderly account. We’re setting all this out in order. Now, we also have, notice in verse two, “just as those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word delivered them to us.”

So, Luke is identifying himself as sort of, of that next generation. There were the apostles who were first, they were eyewitnesses, they saw all these things. And then, as we’re going to see in book two, the Acts of the Apostles, who became ministers of the word, ministers of Christ, the New Covenant, they received all these things from Christ himself.

They then handed them on to the Church and St. Luke is identifying himself as one of those people in that generation who had them handed down to him.

And then, two notes on verse one. First of all, it’s not a narrative of “those things which have happened among us” or “those things that have come to pass for us”, it’s “those things that have been fulfilled among us”, those things that have reached their fullness among us.

Meaning, St. Luke is saying that these aren’t just a series of interesting events. He’s already tying in this idea of prophetic fulfillment, that these events have a particular significance and it’s in relationship to that Old Testament revelation.

And then finally, right there at the beginning, “Inasmuch as many have taken in hand to set in order a narrative of those things,” we don’t know what all the many he’s referring to is because, of course, the only things we have written before him that correspond to this would be the Gospels of St. Mark and probably St. Matthew. Two isn’t many.

So, this is where we get the idea that he’s consulting sources. There are many different people who set down, here are some things Jesus said, here is Jesus’s preaching, here are miracles Jesus performed.

There were documents at the time St. Luke was writing this. There were a whole bunch of them. Probably fragmentary, probably bits and pieces here and there. Maybe someone who was literate heard St. Paul preaching or St. Peter preaching and wrote down what he said.

So, we have all these little pieces here and there and St. Luke is telling us he did some research. Not only did he talk to the eyewitnesses and the ministers of the word, the Apostles, but he also pulled together these texts and accounts from here and there to pull everything together and put together a complete story.

Interlocutor:My question is this: he has a title, “Most Excellent Theophilus”. Would he be in government? Why “Most Excellent”?

Fr. Stephen: It is possible. But it’s also common for, if he’s the one commissioning this, it’s sort of a dedication. And you would expect to find “My good friend”, “Most wise”, this kind of ingratiating thing referring to this person who is your patron on the project. Now he obviously is a wealthy person to be able to commission this. So, it’s possible that he’s in government. That doesn’t necessarily mean that.

It’s sort of like, if you gave me the money and pay me, I’m going to pay you for this year so you can take this year off and go write a book, I would probably write a real nice dedication to you in the front of that book to express my gratitude.

“Thank you to a good friend, and wise, who conceived the project.” But you know what I mean, you’d write that sort of thing and so it’s more in that vein though. It isn’t impossible that he was some kind of official, but we don’t know for sure.