besquared.org Blog

I don’t want to spend a lot of time on this issue, but since we are about to read this book together, it might be nice to have some common idea of who wrote it. The book itself is anonymous. So it cannot be an article of faith who wrote the book. (This means that if you meet someone who thinks that the authors name was Fred and he was a fisherman from Egypt, you should not question his faith – just maybe his sanity.)

We can know a few things from the text of scripture itself. The author is the same as the author of Acts, and it was written for Theophilus. We will talk about that name when we reach it in the text. The text of acts includes some first person accounts so our author either used a first person account as a source text or the author was a companion of Paul. The author was not an eyewitness to the events of the gospel but rather was a researcher and a historian who gathered sources and interviewed witnesses to prepare this text. Many scholars are convinced that the author had access to the Gospel of Mark among other sources when the gospel was written.

Nevertheless, I feel no hesitation calling this the gospel of Luke. The tradition of Lukan authorship is very early and is affirmed by both orthodox and heretic teachers. It is hard for me to imagine that this authorship idea could have been concocted with such universal acceptance within only a generation or two after the composition of the book unless it were true. In addition, Luke was a companion of Paul and so the shift into the first person for some sections of Acts would be readily understandable if the tradition is correct.

Consequently, although I will not make it an article of faith, I am quite confident to call Luke the author of this book and when appropriate to make use of what we know about his background and his ministry context to help us understand this gospel better.

If you have got questions or want to put forward your argument for Fred the fisherman from Egypt, let me know.

-Ethan