Justified True Belief

(●) A doctor who never met Jesus wrote more of the New Testament than anyone else, a Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles, and he opened the first of them by telling his reader how he had checked. + Add up the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles and you have rather more than a quarter of the New Testament by word count, which is more than Paul wrote even counting every letter that carries his name. The two books are really one work in two volumes, written for the same reader and picking up in the second exactly where the first left off, and it is only an accident of how the canon was arranged that John now sits between them. The man who wrote them never once gives his name. Not in the preface, not in the travel narrative, not at the end. What we have instead are three passing mentions in Paul’s letters, one of which calls him "Luke the beloved physician" (Colossians 4:14), and a second-century church that names him without hesitation and never proposes anybody else. There is also a stranger clue inside the book itself. Halfway through Acts, with no announcement and no explanation, the story stops saying "they" and starts saying "we." He matters on a Christian apologetics site for a reason he would probably have found obvious. Of all the New Testament writers he is the one who stops at the door and tells you what he did: he says other people had already written accounts, that he went to those who had been there from the beginning, that he followed everything closely, and that he set it down in order so his reader could be sure of what he had been taught. Then he wrote a second book stuffed with governors, proconsuls, city officials, harbours, ship’s tackle and local titles, which is to say a book that can be checked. People have been checking it for nineteen centuries.

(●) Before c. 50 AD: His early life survives in three lines of Paul and one sentence of tradition. + Almost everything a biographer would want is missing. No birth year, no death year, no parents, no hometown that anyone can prove. What there is amounts to this. Paul names him three times in letters sent from custody: "Luke the beloved physician greets you, as does Demas" (Colossians 4:14); a list of fellow workers that runs "Mark, Aristarchus, Demas, and Luke" (Philemon 24); and one lonely line near the end, "Luke alone is with me" (2 Timothy 4:11). The first of those passages carries a second piece of information, and it is tucked into the way Paul organises his greetings rather than stated outright. He lists Aristarchus, Mark and a man called Jesus Justus, and then says of those three, "These are the only men of the circumcision among my fellow workers for the kingdom of God" (Colossians 4:11). Men of the circumcision is Paul’s ordinary way of saying Jews, naming them by the sign of the covenant that marked out Israel. Epaphras, Luke and Demas come next, in a separate breath, on the far side of that sentence. Read in the ordinary way, that puts Luke outside the circle of Jewish believers and makes him the one Gentile author in the New Testament, a Gentile being simply a non-Jew. Some scholars push back, and they are not being difficult for the sake of it. Perhaps he was a Hellenistic Jew, meaning a Jew raised in the Greek-speaking world rather than in Judea, or perhaps a God-fearer, a Gentile who worshipped Israel’s God without going the whole way and becoming a convert. The question cannot be closed. But the plain reading of the sentence is still the strongest reading of it. Where he came from is tradition rather than record, and the tradition is old and consistent. Eusebius, writing his church history in the early fourth century, says he "was of Antiochian parentage and a physician by profession" (Ecclesiastical History 3.4.6, McGiffert’s translation). A short Latin prologue attached to Luke’s Gospel in many medieval Bibles says the same, adding that he never married, had no children, and died in Boeotia in central Greece at the age of eighty-four. Antioch in Syria fits what he writes: he takes an unusual interest in that city, and it is where he tells us the disciples were first called Christians (Acts 11:26). As for the doctoring, a Dublin clergyman named William Kirk Hobart published The Medical Language of St. Luke in 1882, arguing that Luke’s vocabulary proved a medical training, and for the best part of forty years the argument was repeated everywhere. Then Henry Cadbury, in The Style and Literary Method of Luke (1920), ran the same words past Lucian the satirist, Plutarch and Josephus, none of them medical men, and found the words there too. The medical-vocabulary case collapsed, and it deserved to. The evidence that Luke was a physician is Paul’s adjective, which is quite enough to be going on with.

(●) c. 50 AD: At Troas the narrative of Acts changes to “we,” and its author steps into his own story. + Paul is at Troas, on the north-west coast of what is now Turkey, at the end of a journey in which every road he tried to take was closed to him. In the night he sees a man of Macedonia asking him to come over and help. And then the sentence that follows does something the book has not done in sixteen chapters: "And when Paul had seen the vision, immediately we sought to go on into Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to preach the gospel to them" (Acts 16:10). There are four of these stretches, and scholars call them the "we" passages: Acts 16:10–17, 20:5–15, 21:1–18, and 27:1 through 28:16. In between, the book goes back to "they." Nothing marks the transitions. No "at this point I joined them," no apology, no explanation at all. That is either an author quietly signalling where he was present, which is how the second-century church read it and how most readers since have read it, or it is a literary trick. The literary-trick reading deserves a hearing, because it has been seriously argued by serious people. Vernon Robbins proposed in the 1970s that ancient writers slipped into the first person plural, the "we" form, as a convention whenever they narrated a sea voyage, whether or not they had ever been aboard the ship. If that is right, the "we" in Acts tells us nothing about where its author was. Two things have gone against the theory. For one, the parallels offered for it turn out, on inspection, either to be accounts by people who really were on the ship or not to use "we" in the way the theory requires. For another, the "we" in Acts does not begin at a gangplank. It begins on land at Troas, in the decision to go, and it ends on land in Rome. There is also a detail nobody would plant. The "we" drops away at Philippi in chapter 16 and picks up again at Philippi in chapter 20, some seven years later, as though the writer had simply stayed in the city while Paul moved on. The text never says so. It is the kind of thing that is much easier to explain if it happened than if somebody arranged it.

(●) c. 57 AD: He sailed to Jerusalem with the relief money, and lodged with men who had known Jesus. + The third "we" section reads like a travel diary, with the ports named in the order a passenger would have seen them come up: Cos, Rhodes, Patara, then the open run to Tyre with Cyprus passing by on the left, then Ptolemais, then Caesarea (Acts 21:1–8). Paul was carrying a collection taken up among the Gentile churches for the poor Christians of Jerusalem, and the atmosphere is heavy all the way, because everyone they meet tells him not to go. What matters for the two books is the company he was keeping on that trip. At Caesarea the party stayed in the house of Philip the evangelist, "who was one of the seven" (Acts 21:8), meaning one of the men appointed alongside Stephen more than twenty years earlier, which makes Philip a first-hand witness to the events of Acts 6 to 8 that Luke narrates. Philip had four unmarried daughters who prophesied (Acts 21:9). On the way up to Jerusalem they lodged with "Mnason of Cyprus, an early disciple" (Acts 21:16), a man introduced for no reason except that he was there from the beginning. In Jerusalem itself, "Paul went in with us to James, and all the elders were present" (Acts 21:18). Nobody can prove that Luke took notes in those rooms. But a writer who tells his reader he went to "those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses" (Luke 1:2) turns out, by his own account, to have spent that fortnight among precisely such people, and the coincidence is worth noticing.

(●) c. 57 to 59 AD: Paul sat in custody at Caesarea for two years, and the Gospel’s unique material may be what those two years produced. + Arrested in the temple courts and nearly lynched, Paul was taken under guard to Caesarea on the coast, where the governor Felix kept him for two years and then handed the case, unresolved, to his successor Festus (Acts 24:27). The trail of the "we" goes quiet for that whole stretch and picks up again when the prisoner is put on a ship for Italy, which suggests the writer was somewhere within reach the whole time. Now comes the part that is inference rather than record, and it is worth saying so before saying it. About a third of Luke’s Gospel appears in no other Gospel: the birth narratives, the good Samaritan, the prodigal son, the rich man and Lazarus, the Pharisee and the tax collector, Zacchaeus, the criminal who asked to be remembered, the walk to Emmaus. All of it is material somebody had to go and get. Two years on that coastline, within a day’s ride of Jerusalem and a few days of Galilee, with Philip and James and the elders and whoever else was still alive, is the most natural window anyone has proposed for getting it. It is a reasonable guess and nothing more. Luke never tells us when he did his work.

(●) c. 59 to 60 AD: He was aboard for the shipwreck, and wrote up the voyage in one of the most detailed sea narratives to survive from antiquity. + Acts 27 is not written the way a man invents a storm. It is written the way a passenger remembers one. The grain ship out of Alexandria; the wind called the northeaster that comes down off Crete and drives them out to sea; the crew passing ropes under the hull to hold the ship together; the cargo going over the side on the second day and the ship’s own tackle on the third; and then the sentence that fixes the tone of the whole chapter, "When neither sun nor stars appeared for many days, and no small tempest lay on us, all hope of our being saved was at last abandoned" (Acts 27:20). The detail that persuades sailors comes on the fourteenth night, when the crew sense land in the dark. "So they took a sounding and found twenty fathoms. A little farther on they took a sounding again and found fifteen fathoms" (Acts 27:28). A fathom is roughly six feet, so the sea floor came up by thirty feet in the space of a short run: exactly what a lead line shows a ship closing an unseen coast, and exactly the sort of number nobody bothers to invent. In 1848 a Scottish yachtsman named James Smith of Jordanhill, who had sailed those waters himself, published a book-length study of the chapter. He worked out the drift of a ship lying to in a Mediterranean gale, which is to say a ship that has given up on going anywhere and is riding the weather out under almost no sail, and put it at about a mile and a half an hour. He checked the figure with seamen who knew those waters. Then he measured the run from Cauda, the little island south of Crete under whose lee they ran once the storm had them, to the coast of Malta, and found that at that rate of drift a ship would take thirteen days and an hour or so to cover it. Which is to say, she would come up on the land in the dark of the fourteenth night, which is exactly where Acts puts her. Smith was a sailor testing a text against the sea, and the text held. Whatever else is true of the man who wrote Acts, he had been on that ship.

(●) c. 60 to 67 AD: In Rome he is on the list of men still with Paul, and one letter says he was the last one left. + The "we" runs all the way into the capital: "And when we came into Rome, Paul was allowed to stay by himself, with the soldier who guarded him" (Acts 28:16). Then it stops, and the book closes with Paul reasoning all day with the Jewish leaders who came to his lodging and, in its last two verses, teaching there for two whole years at his own expense. The letters fill in a little of what the narrative drops. Colossians and Philemon, written from custody in the early sixties, both send greetings from Luke. Then comes 2 Timothy, and its single sentence is the bleakest in the New Testament roll calls: "Luke alone is with me. Get Mark and bring him with you, for he is very useful to me for ministry" (2 Timothy 4:11). Demas, who stood next to Luke in the Colossians greeting, has walked out in the verse before. Everyone else is scattered or sent away. The doctor stays. Two honest notes. The dating of 2 Timothy depends on a second Roman imprisonment that Acts does not record and that we know of only from tradition, so the mid to late sixties is a reasonable placement rather than a fixed one. And a good many scholars hold that the letters to Timothy and Titus were written later, in Paul’s name, by someone in his circle. On either view the line tells us what the early church believed about Luke: when the others were gone, he was the one who was still there.

(●) c. 62 to 85 AD: The two volumes were finished somewhere in these years, and then the record of his life simply stops. + Acts ends without telling us how Paul’s appeal to Caesar came out. For a book that has been building towards that trial for eight chapters, it is an odd place to put the last full stop, and one long-standing argument runs that the simplest reason is that the trial had not happened yet, which would date Acts to about 62 and the Gospel a little earlier. Others read the ending as deliberate, a book that means to close with the gospel reaching Rome "with all boldness and without hindrance" (Acts 28:31), and date the work to the seventies or eighties, after Mark and after the fall of Jerusalem. The range from the early sixties to the mid eighties is where the honest answer sits, and nobody has yet found a way to narrow it. After that the New Testament says nothing more about him, and everything that follows is tradition of one age or another, worth having as long as it is labelled. The short Latin prologue that travelled with his Gospel in the medieval Bibles, usually dated to the late second century though some place it considerably later, says he was unmarried, childless, filled with the Holy Spirit, and that he died in Boeotia at eighty-four. Later accounts make him a martyr hanged from an olive tree in Greece, which the older notice knows nothing about, and which is the direction stories about apostolic men tend to travel as the centuries pass. Then there are the bones. In AD 357 the emperor Constantius II had relics said to be Luke’s brought to Constantinople for the church of the Holy Apostles, together with relics of Andrew; Jerome records that removal, and relics of Timothy had reached the same church the year before. The basilica of Santa Giustina in Padua has claimed the body since the Middle Ages. And then there is the easel. One tradition has him painting the earliest portraits of the mother of Jesus from life, a story first traceable to Theodore the Lector in the early sixth century, which is why medieval and Renaissance painters’ guilds took him for their patron, and why so many artists painted the scene of Luke painting, with Mary sitting patiently for him. It is a lovely story with no first-hand support behind it, and the guild halls are its real monument.

What He Taught

(T1) He told his reader at the outset how the book had been made, and said plainly that certainty was the point of it. + Imagine a relative handing you a thick folder about your own family and saying, before you open it: other people have put versions of this together, I went to everyone still living who was actually there, I worked through the whole thing carefully, and I have set it down in order so you can see for yourself that what you were told is true. You would read that folder differently from an anonymous one. Luke’s first four verses are that speech. They are one long, formal, carefully balanced sentence in Greek, the sort of opening a serious Greek historian or a medical writer put at the head of a work, and they make four claims in a row. Others had written already. There were "eyewitnesses and ministers of the word" who had handed the material on. He had followed it all closely himself. And the point of the exercise was certainty for a named man. That man is addressed as "most excellent Theophilus." The Greek word is kratiste, and it is not a term of endearment; it is the way you address a Roman official of rank. It turns up three times more in Acts, twice of the governor Felix and once of Festus (Acts 23:26; 24:2; 26:25). Theophilus does mean "friend of God," and a few readers have taken him for a symbol standing in for any Christian reader at all, which is not a silly suggestion. But the title, and the phrase "the things you have been taught," fit a real patron who had been catechised, meaning taken through the basic course of instruction a new believer was given, and who now wanted to see the evidence underneath it. None of this makes Luke a modern historian, and it is worth saying so plainly rather than being caught out on it. Ancient historians composed speeches to fit the occasion, arranged material by theme, and wrote to persuade. Luke does all three. What he claims is investigation, ordered arrangement, and access to people who were there, and he is the only writer in the New Testament who stops to claim it.

(Q) "Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the things that have been accomplished among us, just as those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word have delivered them to us, it seemed good to me also, having followed all things closely for some time past, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, that you may have certainty concerning the things you have been taught." + Source: Luke 1:1–4 (ESV). The whole preface, and in Greek a single sentence. Acts opens by looking back at it, "In the first book, O Theophilus, I have dealt with all that Jesus began to do and teach" (Acts 1:1), which is how we know the two volumes are one work (T1).

(T2) The Savior he describes goes looking for exactly the people the respectable had written off. + A short, rich, thoroughly disliked tax contractor climbs a tree because he cannot see over the crowd, and the visiting teacher stops under the branch and invites himself to dinner. Everybody watching complains. That scene is in Luke and nowhere else, and it is the shape of his whole Gospel in miniature. Look at what only he preserved. The good Samaritan, in which the hero belongs to the neighbouring people Judeans despised most (Luke 10:25–37). The prodigal son, and the father who runs (Luke 15:11–32). The Pharisee and the tax collector at prayer, with the wrong man going home justified (Luke 18:9–14). Zacchaeus (Luke 19:1–10). The criminal on the next cross, promised paradise that afternoon (Luke 23:39–43). Luke also gives women more room than any other Gospel gives them: Elizabeth and Mary carry the opening chapters, the prophetess Anna is named with her tribe and her age, the widow of Nain gets her son back, and a list of women including Joanna, the wife of Herod’s household manager, is said to have funded the mission out of their own means (Luke 8:1–3). The grumble that runs under all of it is quoted in so many words: "This man receives sinners and eats with them" (Luke 15:2). There is an objection worth putting in the reader’s own voice. You might think, well, of course a Gentile doctor writing for a Roman patron would soften everything into kindness to outsiders. But Luke is also the evangelist who records the hardest sayings about the cost of following, the man who must hate his own life, the builder who should count whether he can finish the tower, the demand to renounce everything (Luke 14:26–33). The welcome is wide and the terms are severe, and he saw no tension between them.

(Q) "For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost." + Source: Luke 19:10 (ESV). The last line of the Zacchaeus story, spoken over the head of a crowd that had just objected to the company Jesus was keeping. "Son of Man" is the title Jesus most often uses of himself, drawn from the figure who comes with the clouds in Daniel 7:13–14 (T2).

(T3) What began in one Galilean province was always meant for every nation, and the Spirit is what carried it there. + Matthew traces the family line of Jesus back to Abraham, the father of Israel, and stops. Luke keeps going, generation after generation, past Abraham, past Noah, all the way to "the son of Adam, the son of God" (Luke 3:38). The genealogy is a thesis. Whatever this is, it is not a Jewish family matter. He says it again through an old man in the temple. Simeon takes the infant in his arms and calls him "a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and for glory to your people Israel" (Luke 2:32), and the order of that pair is deliberate. Then the second volume turns the thesis into a map. The risen Christ tells the disciples they will be his witnesses "in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth" (Acts 1:8), and those place names are the table of contents of the book that follows: Jerusalem through chapter seven, Judea and Samaria through chapter twelve, and the rest of it out into the empire until the last verse leaves Paul preaching in Rome "without hindrance." The engine all the way through is the Holy Spirit, and Luke is emphatic about it in a way that is easy to miss. The Spirit fills Elizabeth and Zechariah and rests on Simeon before Jesus is baptised, leads him into the wilderness, falls at Pentecost, sends Philip down the Gaza road, tells Peter to go with the men from Cornelius, and blocks Paul from Asia so that he ends up at Troas looking at a vision of Macedonia. The mission is never a strategy somebody thought up. In Luke’s telling it is a push the church keeps having to catch up with, and the hardest push of all is towards people the first believers did not want to include. That is why the meeting in Acts 15, where the Jerusalem leadership decides that Gentile converts need not become Jews first, is the hinge of the whole book.

(Q) "But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth." + Source: Acts 1:8 (ESV). The last recorded words of Jesus in Luke’s second volume, spoken on the Mount of Olives just before the ascension, and the outline of everything that comes after them (T3).

(T4) What a person does with money shows what that person actually worships. + A farmer has a bumper harvest and decides to tear down his barns and build bigger ones, and God calls him a fool, because the accounts are being closed that night (Luke 12:16–21). A rich man in purple steps over a beggar at his gate every day for years and then finds the positions reversed (Luke 16:19–31). Mary sings, before her son is born, that God "has brought down the mighty from their thrones and exalted those of humble estate" and "has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty" (Luke 1:52–53). No Gospel comes back to money as often as this one. The theme carries straight into the second volume, and it turns practical. The first Christians in Jerusalem "were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all, as any had need" (Acts 2:45). Barnabas sells a field and lays the money down. Ananias and Sapphira sell a field, keep back part of the price, and pretend otherwise, and Luke tells that story at length because the lie is about money and the sin is not (Acts 5:1–11). Paul, saying goodbye to the Ephesian elders, holds up his own calloused hands and says he coveted nobody’s silver. It is worth being careful about what the claim is. Luke does not teach that being poor saves anyone or that being rich damns anyone; Zacchaeus stays a wealthy man, and wealthy people fund the mission in chapter eight. What he teaches is that money is a rival claimant on the heart, perfectly honest about its intentions, and that generosity is the first visible sign that the claim has been refused. The line of Jesus that Paul quotes to those same Ephesian elders, to make exactly that point, survives nowhere else in the New Testament and nowhere else in any Gospel. Scholars have a name for a saying of Jesus preserved outside the four Gospels: an agraphon, Greek for "unwritten." This one is much the most famous of them.

(Q) "It is more blessed to give than to receive." + Source: Acts 20:35 (ESV). Paul is quoting Jesus to the elders of Ephesus, who had come down to meet him at Miletus, and Luke is the only writer who preserves the line. The full sentence runs: "In all things I have shown you that by working hard in this way we must help the weak and remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how he himself said, It is more blessed to give than to receive" (T4).

(Q) "For I am persuaded that none of these things has escaped his notice, for this has not been done in a corner." + Source: Acts 26:26 (ESV). Paul on trial at Caesarea, speaking to King Agrippa II with the governor Festus listening. The argument is not that Agrippa should take his word for it. It is that the events are public property, recent, and in the king’s own jurisdiction, so he can check. Luke wrote both his books on that assumption, and it is the assumption later readers took him up on.

What the Church Made of Him

(†) The church attached his name to the books early, agreed about it everywhere, and never put forward a rival. + Both books are formally anonymous, so the name has to come from somewhere outside them, and the striking thing is how quickly it arrives and how little argument there ever was about it. Around AD 180 Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons, writes flatly that "Luke also, the companion of Paul, recorded in a book the Gospel preached by him" (Against Heresies 3.1.1, Roberts and Donaldson’s translation), and he builds a further argument on the "we" passages a few chapters later (3.14.1). The Muratorian Fragment, a battered Latin list of accepted books usually dated to the same period, says that "the third book of the Gospel, that according to Luke, the well-known physician Luke wrote in his own name" after the ascension, and adds that he did not himself see the Lord in the flesh (Roberts and Donaldson’s translation). Eusebius and Jerome repeat it in the fourth century. The oldest surviving copies say it too: the papyrus catalogued as P75, usually dated to about AD 200 though some palaeographers now argue for a later date, writes "Gospel according to Luke" at the foot of the text as a closing title. The argument this carries is simple and it is about motive. If a second-century church wanted to give an anonymous Gospel a pedigree, it had apostles to choose from. Choosing an obscure Gentile doctor who never met Jesus, and who is known from three passing lines in Paul’s mail, is a strange piece of forgery. It is a very natural piece of memory. There is even a hostile witness. About AD 144 Marcion, a wealthy shipowner from Pontus who taught that the God of the Old Testament was a lesser being than the Father of Jesus, built his own canon out of ten letters of Paul and a single Gospel, and the Gospel he chose was Luke, cut about to remove what he disliked. Tertullian spends a whole book of Against Marcion taking the scissors off him. A man does not bother trimming a book that nobody regards as authoritative.

(†) Acts turned out to be the New Testament book most exposed to checking, and the checking changed at least one skeptic’s mind. + Most of the New Testament is hard to test from the outside. Acts is not. It carries its reader across the eastern Mediterranean and on to Rome, through some fifty towns and cities and nine named islands, and it hands out official titles like a man who knows the local paperwork, which in the Roman world was a good way to be caught out, because the titles changed from province to province and from decade to decade. - The politarchs of Thessalonica. Acts 17:6 calls the city authorities there politarchs, city rulers, a word that appears in no surviving classical author, so for a long time there was nothing in literature to check it against. More than sixty inscriptions have turned up since, three quarters of them from Macedonia, and one of them, cut on a block from the Vardar Gate at Thessalonica and now in the British Museum, gives exactly that title to exactly those officials. - Gallio at Corinth. "But when Gallio was proconsul of Achaia" (Acts 18:12) sounds like background colour, the name of the Roman governor of southern Greece dropped in to set a scene. A broken inscription found at Delphi, quoting a letter of the emperor Claudius, fixes Gallio’s year in office to about AD 51 to 52, and that one stone gives the whole chronology of Paul’s life its fixed peg. - Sergius Paulus on Cyprus. Luke calls him "the proconsul" (Acts 13:7), which is the right title for the governor of a province administered by the senate rather than the emperor, and Cyprus had passed from the emperor to the senate in 22 BC. - Publius on Malta. Acts 28:7 calls him "the chief man of the island," an odd way to name a governor. Two inscriptions from Malta give a leading Maltese the same title, one in Greek calling a Roman knight named Prudens "first of the Maltese," one in Latin reading "first of all of the municipality of the Maltese." The best-known convert to taking Acts seriously is William Ramsay, a Scottish archaeologist who went out to Asia Minor in the 1880s expecting Acts to be a second-century patchwork of little use to a topographer. He had been persuaded by the Tübingen theory, the German reconstruction that treated Acts as a late and tidied-up book papering over an old quarrel between Peter’s party and Paul’s: the ingenuity and apparent completeness of it, he wrote afterwards, had at one time quite convinced him. He came back saying the opposite, and said it for the rest of his life. In The Bearing of Recent Discovery on the Trustworthiness of the New Testament he wrote that "Luke is a historian of the first rank; not merely are his statements of fact trustworthy; he is possessed of the true historic sense," and a few lines further on, "this author should be placed along with the very greatest of historians." Later scholarship has been more measured than Ramsay and better documented, and Colin Hemer’s The Book of Acts in the Setting of Hellenistic History is where the evidence is now gathered. The limits are worth stating too. Getting titles and harbours right proves that a writer knew the world he was describing and cared about getting it right. It does not by itself settle what he says about a resurrection, and no honest use of the argument pretends otherwise. What it does is establish the kind of writer he was, which is where any assessment of a witness has to start.

(†) His first two chapters gave the church its Christmas and four of the songs it has sung longest. + If you have ever heard a carol service, you have heard Luke. The stable, the manger, the shepherds keeping watch, the multitude of the heavenly host: all of it is in his second chapter and nowhere else, and it is his text that gets read on Christmas Eve. When Francis of Assisi set up a manger with an ox and a donkey at Greccio in 1223 and began the custom of the nativity scene, he was staging Luke 2. Four songs come out of those same two chapters, and the Latin church named them from their opening words and built its daily prayer around them. Mary’s song, the Magnificat (Luke 1:46–55). Zechariah’s, the Benedictus (Luke 1:68–79). The angels’, the Gloria in Excelsis (Luke 2:14). And old Simeon’s, the Nunc Dimittis (Luke 2:29–32), sung at the close of the day for something like fifteen centuries by monks, and after the Reformation at Evensong in every English parish that used the Book of Common Prayer. Bach, Byrd, Palestrina, Vivaldi and Rachmaninoff all set them. The parables have travelled just as far, and often out of the church altogether. "Good Samaritan" is now a phrase in English and a category in the statute books of several countries, covering laws that protect a passer-by who stops to help. The prodigal son has been painted by Rembrandt, staged, filmed and rewritten so many times that the story is recognised by people who could not name its source. A great deal of what the world thinks it knows about Jesus, it knows from Luke.

(†) Two dates in his own books are the hardest things in them to defend, and they have not been settled. + A writer who invites checking gets checked, and an honest ledger has to carry the debits as well as the credits. Two entries in the debit column belong to Luke himself rather than to anybody’s later use of him. - The census. "This was the first registration when Quirinius was governor of Syria" (Luke 2:2), and the birth is placed in the reign of Herod the Great. Herod died in 4 BC. Quirinius became legate of Syria, meaning the governor the emperor himself appointed over that province, in AD 6, and he held a registration in that year, the census that provoked the revolt of Judas the Galilean, all of it described at length by Josephus (Antiquities 18.1.1). That is a gap of roughly ten years, and it is the single most argued-over verse in the Gospel. The main proposals: that the Greek word rendered "first" can be read "before," making the sense a registration earlier than the famous one under Quirinius, a reading defended by N. T. Wright in Who Was Jesus? among others; that Quirinius held an earlier command in the East and a registration fell in it; that a census begun under Herod was completed and recorded years later under Quirinius. Each has able defenders and none has won the field. Calling it unresolved is the honest description. - Theudas. In Acts 5:36 Gamaliel, speaking in the middle thirties, mentions a rebel named Theudas and then says Judas the Galilean rose up "after him," though Judas belongs to AD 6. Josephus places a Theudas under Fadus, the procurator, or Roman governor, of Judea in the middle forties, which is roughly a decade after Gamaliel’s speech (Antiquities 20.5.1). The usual answers are that Theudas was a common name and that Josephus himself reports a crop of pretenders in the disorder after Herod’s death, so the two need not be the same man; the alternative is that one of the two writers is wrong here, and Josephus is not infallible either. It remains a genuine difficulty. A third, lesser puzzle is often raised beside these and is a different sort of question: how the Jerusalem visits in Acts line up with the ones Paul counts in Galatians 1 and 2. That is a matter of two writers with different purposes selecting differently, and the proposed harmonies are reasonable. The census and Theudas are harder, and it does the case for Luke no good to pretend otherwise. What can fairly be said is that these two stand out because the list of places where he has been tested and has held is so long.