Authorship

The Gospel of Luke and Acts are two volumes of a single literary work which accounts for a quarter of the New Testament canon.29 _{The author of Luke-Acts is a well-educated}

person, an accomplished writer who is very familiar with both Old Testament literary traditions and Hellenistic literary techniques.30 The Gospel prologue (Luke 1:1-4) indicates that the author is not an eyewitness of the ministry of Jesus, but likely a second

28 _{Ibid, 254-255.}

29 _{Johnson, The Gospel of Luke, 1. Joseph A. Fitzmyer points out that the study of Acts can help explain}

the Lukan redaction of the gospel material. In Fitzmyer’s view, “in small ways Luke had actually been preparing by literary foreshadowing for details important for the end of his account.” The Gospel of Luke I-

IX, The Anchor Bible (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1981), 4.

or third generation Christian. 31 The Third Gospel has traditionally been attributed to Luke, who appears in Philemon 24 as Paul’s “fellow worker”; in Col 4:14 as “the beloved physician”; and in 2 Tim 4:11 as Paul’s “sole companion.”32 _{In spite of recent arguments}

to the contrary, Fitzmyer defends the traditional view that Luke, a companion of Paul, was the author of the Third Gospel and Acts.33 _{Luke was likely a non-Jewish Semite}

(probably a Syrian), native of Antioch, where he was “well educated in a Hellenistic atmosphere and culture.”34

Luke, the Beloved Physician

Of some relevance to a study on medical ethics is the traditional claim that Luke was a physician. In Col 4:14 Luke is referred to as “the beloved physician,” and this has become a Church tradition. Some have also argued in favor of this tradition by pointing to the way the Good Samaritan attended to the wounded man (10:34-35), and the

omission of Mark’s reference to the failure of “many physicians” to cure the woman in

31 _{Ibid, 35. Francois Bovon points to the masculine participle in 1:3 as an indication of the author’s gender.}

Bovon, Luke 1. A Commentary on the Gospel of Luke 1:1–9:50 trans. Christine M. Thomas, ed. Helmut Koester, (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2002), 8.

32 _{Fitzmyer, The Gospel of Luke I-IX, 36. The identification of the Third Gospel with Luke has been a}

Church tradition since late second century.

33 _{Fitzmyer believes the We-Sections of Acts (16:10-17; 20:5-15; 21:1-18; 27:1-28:16) support the}

traditional identification of Luke as the author of Luke-Acts, because it is likely that these “represent a diary of the author, later used in the composition of Acts.” Fitzmyer, Luke I-X, 36-41. In contrast to Fitzmyer, Bovon believes that Luke “has had no immediate access or direct contact with the events that he narrates,” and the We-Sections in Acts are “one of the artistic techniques he employs to substantiate the credibility of the story and to heighten its vividness.” Nevertheless, Bovon thinks that, “Luke perhaps participated as a coworker on further missionary journeys and thus continued the Pauline mission.” Bovon,

Luke 1,13.

34 _{Fitzmyer’s argument is based on the form of Luke’s name, the NT passages in which he is mentioned,}

and the ancient tradition about his Antiochene origin. Fitzmyer, The Gospel of Luke I-IX, 42-47. On the other hand, Bovon suggests that Luke might have been a Macedonian based on the circumstances related to the first occurrence of the We-passages, especially the appearance of the Macedonian man in Paul’s dream (Acts 16:9-10). Bovon, Luke, 8.

Lk 8:43, and that she has spent all her money to no avail (cf. Mk 5:26).35 W. K. Hobart in 1882 re-examined this claim by providing a detailed comparison of the language and style in Luke-Acts with the texts of Greek medicine, especially Hippocrates, Galen, Dioscurides and Arataeus. Hobart insisted that the author of Luke-Acts used more

technical expressions which were found in medical texts, but not found in Mark’s Gospel, a major source of Luke’s Gospel.36 However, in 1912 H. J. Cadbury provided a counter argument by showing that most of the “medical language” in Luke could also be found in the Septuagint, and in cultivated Hellenistic writers such as Josephus, Lucian, and

Plutarch who were not physicians. Subsequently, G. A. Lindeboom also demonstrated that there is no similarity between the Lukan prologue and the prologues of medical texts by Galen, Hippocrates and Dioscurides.

In her recent volume,biblical scholar Annette Weissenrieder provides a study of Luke’s healing narratives in parallel with texts from the Corpus Hippocraticum and other ancient medical manuscripts. 37 _{Her research focus is the images of illness in Luke’s}

Gospel: the “barrenness” in Elizabeth and Zacharias, the healing of ten “lepers” in Luke 17:11-19, and Luke’s redaction of three Markan healing narratives (Luke 8:43-48; 8:40- 42, 49-56; 9:37-43). She argues that “the author of the Gospel of Luke intensifies the indicators of illness in the text” and that Luke “refers to an understanding of illness that

35 _{Fitzmyer, Luke I-IX, 52-53.} 36 _{Ibid, 51-52.}

37 _{Annette Weissenrieder, Images of Illness in the Gospel of Luke, 10-12, 28-32. While supporting Pilch’s}

socio-anthropological approach, lauding his distinction between “illness” and “disease,” Weissenrieder finds Pilch’s division of the human body into three physical areas – heart/eye, mouth/ears, hands/feet – and his assignment of all women illness narratives to the third category unsubstantiated. Building upon Rupert Riedl’s binnensystem, Weissenrieder proposes an explanatory model that transcends the division between the “internal” and the “external” of the human body.

was valid within the time and context of his work and his depictions of illness can be made plausible against a background of ancient medicine.”38 _{In her view, Luke}

consistently edited the Markan narratives using the illness construct of his time in order to “make his central message plausible: that of the presence of divine reality in the human sphere.”39 _{The Lukan author sought to provide “well-informed presentations of illness”}

in order to establish coherencies between the human and the divine realities.40 Though her extensive work further highlights the eruditeness of the author of the Third Gospel, it does not resolve the question whether Luke was a physician.41