Luke 1:1-4
It seemed good to me also
The preface is a historian’s. Many have taken it in hand, eyewitnesses delivered it, and he has traced it out to write in order, that thou mightest know the certainty.
People of the Bible
Luke
Wrote more of the New Testament than anyone else and never once puts his own name in it.
Also called The beloved physician
Everything known about him from the text is indirect. Paul calls him the beloved physician in a list of greetings, names him among the fellowlabourers in another, and writes at the end that only Luke is with me. The rest is grammar. In Acts 16, at Troas, the narration changes without comment from they to we, and it changes back, and changes again, and those seams mark the voyages he was actually on. It is the quietest authorial signature in the Bible.
Scroll down to the storyThe movements, in the order the text gives them.
The story of Luke
- 01
- 02
Acts 16:10-12
We endeavoured to go into Macedonia
One pronoun changes at Troas and the author steps into his own book. He does not explain it and never explains it.
- 03
Acts 20:5-12
A certain young man named Eutychus
The we sections are full of small physical detail: the many lights in the upper chamber, the long sermon, the third loft, the boy taken up dead.
- 04
Acts 27:14-44
A tempestuous wind called Euroclydon
The shipwreck is the most detailed sea narrative in ancient literature outside Homer, written by a passenger counting soundings in fathoms.
- 05
2 Timothy 4:11
Only Luke is with me
The last mention is in a letter from a cell, listing who has gone where. The physician is the one still there.
Why it matters
The two volumes are a third of the New Testament. The gospel is the one that keeps the songs, Mary’s and Zechariah’s and Simeon’s, and the parables of the prodigal, the good Samaritan and the lost coin, and the women who funded the mission. Acts carries the church from an upper room to a rented house in Rome. He tells Theophilus at the start exactly what he did: having had perfect understanding of all things from the very first, to write unto thee in order.
5 songs
The music
Every song in the catalogue whose passage falls inside these chapters.
