Did Luke Write Luke-Acts?

On the New Testament's Most Prolific Writer

If there is a single person who composed more of the New Testament than any other, it is probably the author of the third gospel and its sequel, Acts of the Apostles.¹ But what do we actually know about the New Testament’s most prolific author?

Christian tradition identified him as ‘Luke the beloved physician’, a Gentile travelling companion of Paul mentioned in the Pauline corpus.² Yet by the end of the twentieth century, scholars were about “evenly divided” on whether this tradition was correct.³

In this piece, I give a brief introduction to the scholarly discussion. Why do many scholars reject Lukan authorship today, and how do others maintain it?

Where did ‘Luke’ come from?

It is generally accepted that Luke’s name was not originally attached to the gospel. As I have explained elsewhere, the earliest writings were formally anonymous. They appear to have received their uniform titles – ‘The Gospel According to X’ – sometime in the middle to late second century, when they came together as a fourfold collection.

The first unambiguous attestation to Luke as the author of Luke-Acts is Irenaeus (c. 180 CE), perhaps followed shortly afterwards by the Muratorian Canon. Thus, the question is whether Irenaeus (or his source) had good reason to assign the gospel and Acts to Luke, or whether Luke was inferred or even invented as their author.

A point raised in favour of Lukan authorship is that Luke was a relatively obscure figure.⁴ If the early Church was going to invent an author of these works, it would have selected an apostle or a more prominent follower of Jesus’ disciples. Moreover, while Luke-Acts is formally anonymous, it was surely not anonymous to its recipient, ‘the most excellent Theophilus.’ Taking Theophilus to be a real person,⁵ how could the author of such a major theological work have been lost to Church memory?

While Irenaeus is the first to mention Luke by name, scholars have sometimes found an earlier allusion to Luke in the writings of Justin Martyr (c. 150 CE). In his Dialogue with Trypho, Justin refers to the gospels as ‘the memoirs of the apostles and those who followed them’ (103). This is sometimes taken to mean that Justin was aware of our four named evangelists: ‘the apostles’ are Matthew and John and ‘those who followed them’ are Mark (who followed Peter) and Luke (who followed Paul).⁶

On the other hand, critics of Lukan authorship have emphasised that it is not until Irenaeus that we have an explicit attribution of the gospel to Luke. Prior to Irenaeus, Luke is never named. This makes his attribution in Irenaeus quite different to Mark, Matthew and John, who do appear at least as named figures in earlier works.

Also noteworthy is the fact that Marcion, the arch-heretic who knew and used Luke, did not attribute the book to our familiar evangelist (Tertullian, Marc. 2.4.3). This is an intriguing silence, since Marcion cited from two texts which mention Luke: Colossians and Philemon. If Marcion knew that Luke was the author of his favourite Gospel, this would have lent his writing a powerful apostolic authority.⁷

For the critic of Lukan authorship, the question as to why Irenaeus thought Luke wrote Luke-Acts can be answered. In the second half of Acts, a number of passages are written from the perspective of a travelling companion of Paul. Thus, it was possible for Irenaeus (or his source) to infer that Luke wrote the text, since Luke is mentioned repeatedly in the Pauline corpus (Col 4:14; Phlm 2:4; cf. 2 Tim 4:11).

For the critical scholar, however, there is cause to doubt that this information is historically reliable. Only one of the texts which mention Luke (Philemon) is widely considered to be an authentically Pauline. Moreover, we know that Irenaeus was not always correct about the authorship of the gospels. He is generally considered mistaken, for example, in thinking that Matthew wrote the Gospel of Matthew.

The ‘We’ Passages in Acts

Putting to one side the question of whether Luke was known by the early Church as the author of Luke-Acts, we must turn to the central piece of internal evidence: the use of the first-person plural (“we”) at several points in the second half of Acts.⁸

From Irenaeus to modern times, these “we” passages have often been taken to mean that the author was himself a travelling companion of Paul and a witness to the events narrated. First-person claims are not unusual in ancient historiography, and are generally (but not always) accepted as genuine where they are found.⁹ The we-passages also prove some of the most detailed, which coheres with an eyewitness claim.

Excursus: Luke the Doctor?

In 1882, W.K. Hobart proposed that Luke’s works employ a range of medical language consistent with Luke’s profession as a doctor (Col. 4:14). Yet this argument came under a scathing critique in the early twentieth century by Henry Cadbury, who is said to have earned his doctorate at Harvard by robbing Luke of his.