Luke

Luke is a first-century companion of the apostle Paul named in the New Testament letters, and by long and near-universal Christian tradition the author of the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles.

Scripture names him three times in Paul's letters. Philemon 1:24 lists him among "my fellow workers," alongside Mark, Aristarchus and Demas; 2 Timothy 4:11 has Paul say, "Only Luke is with me," in a letter written from imprisonment near the end of his life; and Colossians 4:14 calls him "the beloved physician." Colossians 4:10–11 places him outside the group described as "of the circumcision," which is why he is generally understood to have been a Gentile. The narrative of Acts uses the first person plural at several points — "we stayed there seven days" (Acts 21:4), "we departed and went on our journey" (Acts 21:5), "we who were Paul's companions departed and came to Caesarea" (Acts 21:8) — and these "we" sections, which also include the voyage to Rome, are widely read as the narrator's own travel notes with Paul. In Acts 21:8–14 the group lodges with Philip the evangelist in Caesarea and witnesses the prophecy of Agabus (Acts 21:11) and Paul's refusal to be dissuaded from Jerusalem (Acts 21:13–14).

The Gospel that bears his name never names its author. Its preface says only, "it seemed good to me also, having traced the course of all things accurately from the first, to write to you in order, most excellent Theophilus" (Luke 1:3). The name is a Greek form, Loukas, related to the Latin Lucius, and the attribution of the third Gospel and Acts to Luke is attested from the late second century onward (Irenaeus and the Muratorian fragment) and was not seriously contested in the ancient church. That the author was a Gentile physician and travel companion of Paul is the traditional reconstruction; the Gospel's silence about its author's identity is a plain feature of the text, which is why the question of who wrote it has been debated in modern scholarship.

Traditions read him differently. Catholic and Orthodox churches venerate him as a saint, and the Eastern tradition holds that he painted icons of the Virgin Mary, a claim first attested several centuries later; he is popularly invoked as patron of physicians and of artists. Many Protestant readers treat him chiefly as a reliable historian and theologian of salvation for the Gentiles, without invocation. On authorship, conservative Catholic, Orthodox and evangelical scholarship generally defends Luke's composition of both books, while most critical scholars accept the attribution as early tradition without treating it as certain; the "we" passages remain the strongest internal evidence either way.

AI-generated reference entry, grounded in the passages where this term appears — history and Scripture stated as such, interpretation labeled as interpretation. Not a substitute for the text itself.