Luke: Good News to the Poor

At a Glance

Who wrote it: Nobody signed it, but the same writer wrote Acts, and both books are addressed to a man named Theophilus. Around 180, Irenaeus named him as Luke, the doctor who traveled with Paul. Some scholars accept that. Many think the writer was a later admirer of Paul.

When: Most likely between 80 and 90. Some scholars place it in the early 100s.

Written for: Theophilus and readers like him across the Roman world, many of them Gentiles, who had already been taught about me. Luke wanted them sure of what they had learned (Luke 1:4), and sure that Rome had no case against me.

What it remembers of me: More about the poor, about women and about outsiders than any other gospel. The good Samaritan, the prodigal son, the rich man and Lazarus and Zacchaeus are only here. So are the shepherds, the manger, and my first sermon in Nazareth.

How close it stays to me: Very close, above all on the poor and the outsider.

If you only read three chapters: Luke 1, Luke 4 and Luke 15.

Words to Know

Theophilus — the man Luke wrote for. The name means friend of God. He may have been a patron who paid for the copying, or the name may stand for any reader who loves God.

Magnificat — Mary’s song in Luke 1, named for its first word in Latin.

Census — a Roman count of people and property, taken for taxes.

Samaritans — the people of Samaria, between Judea and Galilee. They worshipped the same God but on a different mountain, and my people and theirs despised each other.

Mammon — an Aramaic word for wealth or property, used as if it were a rival god.

The Book in Brief

Luke opens with a note to a man named Theophilus. Many have written about these events, he says, and he has traced everything carefully, so that Theophilus can be sure of what he was taught.

Chapters 1 and 2 tell of two births. The angel Gabriel tells an old priest, Zechariah, that his childless wife Elizabeth will bear a son, John. Gabriel tells Mary, a young woman in Nazareth engaged to Joseph, that she will bear a son by God’s Spirit. Mary visits Elizabeth and sings a song of praise. A Roman census takes Joseph and Mary to Bethlehem, where I am born and laid in a feeding trough, and shepherds, told by angels, come to see me. At twelve, I stay behind in the Temple, asking the teachers questions.

In chapters 3 and 4, John preaches by the Jordan, and I am baptized. After forty days of testing by the devil, I read from Isaiah in the synagogue at Nazareth, and my own town tries to throw me off a cliff.

Chapters 5 to 9 follow my work in Galilee. I call fishermen and a tax collector, heal the sick, choose twelve apostles, and preach blessings for the poor and woes for the rich. I raise a widow’s son from the dead. A woman known as a sinner washes my feet with her tears. Women travel with us and pay our way. I feed five thousand, and Peter says I am God’s Christ.

Near the end of chapter 9, I set out for Jerusalem. Many of my best-known stories come on this road: the good Samaritan, the lost sheep, the lost coin, the lost son, the rich man and Lazarus. At Jericho a chief tax collector, Zacchaeus, climbs a tree to see me and promises half his goods to the poor.

In chapters 19 to 21, I ride into Jerusalem on a colt, weep over the city, drive the sellers out of the Temple and teach there daily.

In chapters 22 and 23, Judas agrees to hand me over. After the Passover meal I am arrested on the Mount of Olives, and Peter denies me three times. Pilate sends me to Herod, who sends me back. Pilate finds no crime in me but gives in to the crowd. I am crucified between two criminals and promise one of them Paradise.

In chapter 24, women find my tomb empty, and two men in dazzling clothes tell them I have risen. That day, two followers walking to Emmaus know me when I break bread. I appear to my friends in Jerusalem, then lead them out to Bethany and am carried up into heaven. The book ends with them in the Temple, praising God.

Every other gospel begins with its story. Luke begins with a note to his reader.

Since many have undertaken to set in order a narrative concerning those matters which have been fulfilled among us, even as those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word delivered them to us, it seemed good to me also, having traced the course of all things accurately from the first, to write to you in order, most excellent Theophilus (Luke 1:1–3).

Read that carefully. Luke says that many had already written accounts. He says the material came from eyewitnesses, handed down to us, which means he was not one of them. And he says he investigated and put things in order.

That is a historian’s preface, written the way educated Greeks wrote them. It tells you three things at once. Luke was not there. Other gospels existed before his, and one of them was Mark, which he copied. And he thought it was worth doing again, better.

Who was Luke?

Paul’s letters mention a man named Luke: Luke the beloved physician (Colossians 4:14). Around 180, Irenaeus wrote that Luke, Paul’s companion, set down the gospel that Paul preached.¹

The same writer wrote Acts, and in parts of Acts the story suddenly switches from they to we, as if the writer were traveling with Paul. That is the best argument that the writer knew him.

But the Paul in Acts does not always match the Paul of the letters, and the writer never seems to have read Paul’s letters. So many scholars think the writer was a later admirer, writing a generation after Paul died. The question is open, and it does not change what the book says.

Go deeperWas the writer really a doctor?

For a long time, many readers thought the gospel itself proved that its writer was a doctor.

In 1882 a clergyman named William Kirk Hobart published, in Dublin, a book called The Medical Language of St. Luke. He listed some four hundred words in Luke and Acts that also turn up in Greek medical writers such as Hippocrates and Galen.² He pointed to small changes Luke makes when he copies Mark. Mark says that Peter’s mother-in-law lay sick with a fever (Mark 1:30). Luke says she was afflicted with a great fever (Luke 4:38), and Greek doctors did sort fevers into great and small. Mark says that the woman who had bled for twelve years had suffered many things by many physicians … but rather grew worse (Mark 5:26). Luke leaves out the part about growing worse (Luke 8:43). In 1906 Adolf Harnack, the leading church historian of his day, took up the case in a book called Luke the Physician.³

Then an American scholar, Henry J. Cadbury, checked the list word by word. He found about nine in ten of the “medical” words in writers who were not doctors at all: the historian Josephus, or the writers Plutarch and Lucian. He argued that Greek doctors mostly used the everyday words of educated Greek, not a vocabulary of their own. He also noticed that Galen, the very writer who mentions great and small fevers, objected to that way of speaking, and that Hobart had left this out.⁴

Most scholars today follow Cadbury, though a few think the question deserves a second look.⁴ The writer may well have been a doctor. His vocabulary does not prove it.

Mary’s song

Before I am even born, Luke gives my mother a song. She is a young woman from a village nobody had heard of, pregnant and unmarried, and this is what she sings:

He has put down princes from their thrones, and has exalted the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things. He has sent the rich away empty (Luke 1:52–53).

It is a song about God turning the world upside down. It is modeled on the song of Hannah, a thousand years older, from the book of Samuel: The LORD makes poor and makes rich. He brings low, he also lifts up (1 Samuel 2:7).

That is my mother’s voice as Luke remembers it. She did not sing about going to heaven. She sang about the hungry being fed and the mighty coming down. When people try to tell you I was not interested in such things, show them what my mother was singing before I was born.

The census

Luke tells you why I was born in Bethlehem when my family lived in Nazareth.

Now in those days, a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be enrolled. This was the first enrollment made when Quirinius was governor of Syria. All went to enroll themselves, everyone to his own city (Luke 2:1–3). So Joseph took Mary from Nazareth to Bethlehem, because he was of the house and family of David (Luke 2:4).

Here historians run into trouble, and I will not hide it from you.

Quirinius did take a census of Judea. The Jewish historian Josephus describes it. It happened in the year 6, when Rome removed Herod’s son from power and took over Judea directly. It provoked a revolt.⁵ But Luke also says I was born in the days of Herod, the king of Judea (Luke 1:5), and Matthew agrees. Herod the Great died in 4 BC. That leaves a gap of about ten years.

There is also no record of any census of all the world under Augustus, and Roman censuses counted people and property where they were. Nobody was sent back to the town of an ancestor who had lived a thousand years earlier.

Scholars have proposed ways to make it fit. Most historians think Luke combined a census he had heard of with the tradition that I was born in David’s town. He was writing eighty years later, and he may have been doing what Matthew did with the star: telling you who I was by telling you where I came from.

Go deeperWhat other ancient records say about the census

Here is the evidence on both sides, so you can weigh it yourself.

Augustus left an account of his own reign, set up in public after his death and copied onto stone in Asia Minor. In it he lists three censuses he held, in 28 BC, 8 BC and AD 14. They counted Roman citizens, a little over four million the first time and nearly five million the last. They did not count the ordinary people of the provinces.⁶

Those who defend Luke often point to Egypt, where papyri have survived in the dry sand. Roman Egypt held a household census every fourteen years, from at least AD 33.⁷ An edict of AD 104, from the Roman prefect who governed Egypt, Gaius Vibius Maximus, orders everyone living away from home to return “to their own hearths” for the house-to-house count.⁸ Critics answer that this sent people back to where they lived and farmed. It did not send them to the town of an ancestor who had lived a thousand years before.

Others point to Tertullian, a Christian writer of about 200. He said that a census had been taken in Judea under Sentius Saturninus, who governed Syria in the last years of Herod’s reign.⁹ That would fit Herod. But it names a different governor from Luke’s, and nobody knows where Tertullian found it.

Finally, some scholars, such as I. Howard Marshall, read Luke 2:2 another way. The Greek word translated first can also mean before, so the verse might say that this census came before the one under Quirinius.¹⁰ Almost every modern Bible still translates it the usual way.

None of this settles the question. It shows you why it is still argued.

No room

In the story, Mary laid him in a feeding trough, because there was no room for them in the inn (Luke 2:7).

Your Christmas plays have an innkeeper turning the family away. Luke never mentions an innkeeper. The Greek word translated inn is the same word Luke uses later for the guest room where I ate my last supper with my friends (Luke 22:11). Many scholars now think the picture is of a crowded family house, with the guest room full, and a baby laid in the manger where the animals were fed.¹¹

Either way, Luke’s point is the same. The first people told of my birth were shepherds, who were near the bottom of my world. And the first bed I had was an animal’s feed box.

My first sermon

In Mark, I go back to Nazareth halfway through my work and am rejected. Luke moves that visit to the very beginning and makes it the first sermon of mine that he reports.

I stood up in the synagogue, was handed the scroll of Isaiah, found the place and read: The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to heal the broken hearted, to proclaim release to the captives, recovering of sight to the blind, to deliver those who are crushed, and to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord (Luke 4:18–19).

The acceptable year of the Lord is the year of release, when debts were forgiven and land returned. And notice where I stopped reading. The next words in Isaiah are the day of vengeance of our God (Isaiah 61:2). I stopped in the middle of the sentence, before the vengeance.

Then I sat down and said, Today, this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing (Luke 4:21).

At first my neighbors were pleased. Then I reminded them that in the great famine, Elijah was sent to none of the widows of Israel, except to Zarephath, in the land of Sidon, to a woman who was a widow, and that in Elisha’s day only one leper was cleansed, Naaman, the Syrian (Luke 4:26–27). Two foreigners. God’s help going outside the family.

They were all filled with wrath in the synagogue … They rose up, threw him out of the city, and led him to the brow of the hill that their city was built on, that they might throw him off the cliff (Luke 4:28–29).

Luke put that at the start on purpose. It is the plan of his whole book: good news for the poor, and for the outsider, and the people at home furious about it.

Blessed are you who are poor

You know the Beatitudes from Matthew: Blessed are the poor in spirit (Matthew 5:3). Luke has a version too, and it is blunter.

Blessed are you who are poor, God’s Kingdom is yours. Blessed are you who hunger now, for you will be filled (Luke 6:20–21).

Not poor in spirit. Poor. Not hungry for righteousness. Hungry, now.

And then Luke has something Matthew does not have at all: But woe to you who are rich! For you have received your consolation. Woe to you, you who are full now, for you will be hungry (Luke 6:24–25).

Which version is closer to what I actually said? Scholars disagree. Many think Luke’s plainer form is older, and that Matthew, or his community, gave it a spiritual turn.¹² Even where Matthew says Therefore you shall be perfect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect (Matthew 5:48), Luke has Therefore be merciful, even as your Father is also merciful (Luke 6:36).

The stories only Luke kept

Some of the best-loved things I ever said survive in one book only, and it is this one. Without Luke you would not have any of these:

The good Samaritan. A lawyer asks, Who is my neighbor? (Luke 10:29). I tell him about a man beaten by robbers and left on the road. A priest passes by, then a Levite. But a certain Samaritan, as he traveled, came where he was. When he saw him, he was moved with compassion (Luke 10:33). Then I turn the question around: which of the three seemed to be a neighbor to the man? The lawyer cannot even bring himself to say the Samaritan. He says, He who showed mercy on him. Go and do likewise (Luke 10:36–37). For my listeners, a good Samaritan was a contradiction, like a good enemy soldier.

The prodigal son. A son takes his inheritance early, wastes it, and comes home starving, rehearsing a speech. But while he was still far off, his father saw him, and was moved with compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him (Luke 15:20). In my world, a grown man of standing did not run. The father does not wait for the speech.

The rich man and Lazarus. There was a certain rich man, and he was clothed in purple and fine linen, living in luxury every day. A certain beggar, named Lazarus, was taken to his gate, full of sores (Luke 16:19–20). The beggar has a name. The rich man does not. After they die, the places are reversed.

The rich fool, who builds bigger barns, and God says to him, You foolish one, tonight your soul is required of you. The things which you have prepared—whose will they be? (Luke 12:20).

The Pharisee and the tax collector, praying in the Temple. The tax collector beat his breast, saying, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!” and this man went down to his house justified rather than the other (Luke 18:13–14).

Zacchaeus, the chief tax collector who climbed a tree to see me, and who said, Behold, Lord, half of my goods I give to the poor. If I have wrongfully exacted anything of anyone, I restore four times as much (Luke 19:8). In Luke, that is what salvation looks like. I said, Today, salvation has come to this house. He had just promised half of what he owned to the poor.

There are more: the ten lepers, where the only one who comes back to thank me is a Samaritan, this foreigner (Luke 17:18). The widow of Nain. The lost coin. The persistent widow who wears down a judge.

Ask where these came from, and nobody can tell you. Luke had sources that Mark and Matthew did not have, or did not use. Scholars call that material L. Whatever it was, it loved the poor, the despised and the foreigner.

Go deeperMark, Q and L: where Luke’s stories came from

For two centuries, scholars have worked out how Luke put his book together by laying the first three gospels side by side.

Mark. Mark has 661 verses. Luke takes over about 350 of them, a little more than half, often keeping Mark’s order and much of his wording. But he leaves out one whole block, everything from Mark 6:45 to 8:26: my walking on the water, the foreign woman who argued with me for her daughter, a second feeding of a crowd, and more. Scholars call it Luke’s great omission. Nobody knows why he skipped it.¹³

Q. Matthew and Luke also share around two hundred verses that are not in Mark, most of them sayings, among them the Beatitudes and the prayer I taught my friends. Sometimes the wording is almost identical. In 1924 the English scholar B. H. Streeter set out the classic explanation. Both writers copied Mark, and both also copied a lost collection of my sayings, which scholars call Q, from the German word Quelle, source. Each also had material of his own, M for Matthew and L for Luke.¹³

Not everyone accepts Q. No copy of it has ever been found. In 1955 the Oxford scholar Austin Farrer argued that Luke had simply read Matthew, and in 2002 Mark Goodacre made the case again in The Case Against Q. Most scholars still think Q existed, but Farrer’s view has won a growing number of supporters.¹⁴

Either way, L is what is left: several hundred verses found in no other gospel, and among them some of the best-loved things I ever said.

The women

Only Luke tells you how my work was paid for.

With him were the twelve, and certain women who had been healed of evil spirits and infirmities: Mary who was called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out; and Joanna, the wife of Chuzas, Herod’s steward; Susanna; and many others; who served them from their possessions (Luke 8:1–3).

Women traveled with us, and women paid for the food. One of them was married to a senior official in Herod’s household. Luke names them.

Notice what Luke says about Mary Magdalene. She had been healed. He does not say she had been a prostitute. No gospel does. In the year 591, Pope Gregory the Great preached a sermon in Rome that merged her with an unnamed woman in Luke who was a sinner (Luke 7:37) and with Mary of Bethany.¹⁵ That merged figure, the penitent prostitute, became the Magdalene of Western art for fourteen hundred years. The Catholic Church quietly separated them again in 1969.

Luke also gives the women the first news of my rising. They go back and tell the apostles, and These words seemed to them to be nonsense, and they didn’t believe them (Luke 24:11).

Money

Luke talks about money more than any other gospel.

John the Baptist, in Luke, is asked what people should do, and he answers, He who has two coats, let him give to him who has none. He who has food, let him do likewise (Luke 3:11).

I say, Keep yourselves from covetousness, for a man’s life doesn’t consist of the abundance of the things which he possesses (Luke 12:15). Sell that which you have, and give gifts to the needy (Luke 12:33). When you make a feast, ask the poor, the maimed, the lame, or the blind (Luke 14:13). And, hardest of all, whoever of you who doesn’t renounce all that he has, he can’t be my disciple (Luke 14:33).

When I warn that You aren’t able to serve God and Mammon (Luke 16:13), Luke adds that the Pharisees who heard it were lovers of money, and they scoffed.

Luke even tells you what rulers called themselves. At my last supper, when my friends argue about which of them is greatest, I say, The kings of the nations lord it over them, and those who have authority over them are called “benefactors.” But not so with you (Luke 22:25–26). Benefactor was a real title. Greek kings had it carved on their coins.¹⁶

Pilate, three times

Luke wrote for readers in the Roman world, and he wanted them to know that Rome had no case against me.

In Luke, Pilate declares me innocent three times. I find no basis for a charge against this man (Luke 23:4). Then again after sending me to Herod, who found nothing either. Then the third time, “Why? What evil has this man done? I have found no capital crime in him” (Luke 23:22).

That is Luke making a point to his readers: the movement is no threat to the empire. He makes the same point again and again in Acts. It is worth asking why a Roman governor who found no crime had me crucified anyway, under a charge of being King of the Jews.

My last words, three different ways

The four gospels do not agree on what I said on the cross. In Mark and Matthew, I say one thing: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Luke does not have that at all.

Luke gives me three sayings no other gospel has.

Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing (Luke 23:34). This one is missing from some of the oldest copies of Luke. Some scholars think a later copyist added it. Others think a copyist removed it because forgiving the people who killed me was hard to accept.¹⁷

To the man crucified beside me who asked me to remember him: today you will be with me in Paradise (Luke 23:43).

And at the end, not a cry of abandonment, but a prayer from a psalm: Father, into your hands I commit my spirit! (Luke 23:46).

Each writer gave me the last words that told his readers who I was. In Mark, I die abandoned. In Luke, I die forgiving and trusting. Both books are in your Bible. You are allowed to notice that they are different.

On the road to Emmaus

Only Luke tells the story of two followers walking home to a village called Emmaus on the third day, talking about what had happened. A stranger joins them. They tell him the whole story, and in the middle of it they say one of the saddest sentences in your Bible: But we were hoping that it was he who would redeem Israel (Luke 24:21).

We were hoping. Past tense.

They invite the stranger to eat with them, and When he had sat down at the table with them, he took the bread and gave thanks. Breaking it, he gave it to them. Their eyes were opened and they recognized him, then he vanished out of their sight (Luke 24:30–31).

In Luke, I am recognized at a table, in the breaking of bread.

Notice also where Luke puts the appearances. In Mark and Matthew, my friends are told to go to Galilee. In Luke, they are told to stay: wait in the city of Jerusalem (Luke 24:49). And at the end of Luke, I am carried up into heaven from Bethany on what reads as the same day I rose (Luke 24:50–51). At the start of Acts, the same writer says I appeared over a period of forty days (Acts 1:3). He did not mind telling it two ways.

Go deeperWhere was Emmaus?

Nobody knows for certain where Emmaus was, and the copies of Luke do not even agree on how far away it was.

Most manuscripts say sixty stadia from Jerusalem. A stadion was about 600 feet, so that is about seven miles. But Codex Sinaiticus, one of the great early copies of the Bible, from the 300s, and several other manuscripts read a hundred and sixty stadia, about nineteen miles.¹⁸

That longer distance fits a town called Emmaus on the road from Jerusalem down to the coast. In the 200s the Romans renamed it Nicopolis, city of victory, and the Arab village of Imwas kept its old name. Eusebius, the church historian, identified it as Luke’s Emmaus around the year 300, and Jerome agreed.¹⁹ It is a long way to walk there and back in one day, but not an impossible one.

Another candidate is much closer. The Jewish historian Josephus says that after the war with Rome, the emperor Vespasian settled eight hundred discharged soldiers at a place called Emmaus near Jerusalem. The copies of Josephus disagree on its distance, thirty stadia or sixty. Many place it at Motza, west of the city, where a Roman veterans’ colony left its name in the Arab village of Qaloniya, from the Latin colonia.²⁰

In the Middle Ages, the Crusaders, looking for a village at about the right distance, chose others again: el-Qubeibeh, about seven miles out, and Abu Ghosh, where their church still stands.²⁰

Luke gives you the walk, the stranger and the broken bread. He does not give you a map.

Check It Yourself

Look up: Matthew 5:3–12, then Luke 6:20–26.

You will find: poor in spirit in Matthew, poor in Luke, and four woes to the rich that are only in Luke.

Then read Luke 4:16–30. Notice where I stopped reading, and why the crowd turned.

The Short Version

• Luke is the only gospel writer who explains his method. He says he was not an eyewitness and that many others had written before him.
• His census does not match the known history, and most historians think he joined two traditions.
• He keeps the poor, the women and the outsiders: Mary’s song, the Samaritan, the prodigal son, Lazarus at the gate, Zacchaeus.
• His Beatitudes say “you who are poor” and add woes to the rich.
• He gives me different last words from Mark and Matthew, and has Pilate declare me innocent three times.