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Our curiosity about the authors of the New Testament always seems to outrun the sparse information that survived the church’s early years of dispersion and persecution. Nevertheless, we do have this brief description of the man behind the Third Gospel in an anonymous manuscript dating back to about 160 a.d.
Luke, a Syrian of Antioch, a physician by trade, was a student of the Apostles. Later on he was a disciple of Paul until the latter’s death. Having served the Lord faultlessly, having remained unmarried and without children, he passed away, full of the Holy Spirit, in Boethia [in northeastern Greece] at the age of 84. As gospels had already been written by Matthew in Judea and by Mark in Italy, Luke, under the impulse of the same Holy Spirit, wrote his gospel in the region of Achaia [in central Greece]. In his prologue, while acknowledging that other gospels had been written before his, he explained that it was necessary to present to the faithful converted from paganism an exact account of the economy of salvation, lest they should be impeded by fables or caused to stray from the truth…
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