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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadGreater Men and Women of the Bible by James Hastings: 583. The Writer of St. Luke's Gospel
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The Writer of St. Luke's Gospel
2. St. Luke's chief authority for the Gospel was the work of St. Mark, his late companion in Rome; besides this, he employed for the Lord's life a second source, which he shared with St. Matthew; and, thirdly, he was dependent upon special traditions which had their origin in Jerusalem or Judæa. It is most unlikely that he collected these while he made what was probably only a very short stay in Jerusalem during the first years of Nero's reign, for then they must also have been incorporated in St. Mark; and so far is this from being the case that they go beyond and even correct the conceptions and accounts of the latter Gospel. This material, therefore, must have reached St. Luke at a later period. In all probability it did not reach either St. Luke or St. John in written form, but depended upon the oral tradition of Christians of Jerusalem or Judæa who had wandered from Palestine or Jerusalem at or after the time of the Great War.
God gave men truths in His miraculous revelations, and other truths in the unsophisticated infancy of nations, scarcely less necessary and divine. These are transmitted as “the wisdom of our ancestors,” through men-many of whom cannot enter into them, or receive them themselves-still on, on, from age to age, not the less truths because many of the generations through which they are transmitted are unable to prove them, but hold them, either from pious and honest feeling (it may be), or from bigotry or from prejudice. That they are truths it is most difficult to prove, for great men alone can prove great ideas or grasp them.1 [Note: Letters and Correspondence of J. H. Newman, i. 205.]
It is quite easy to see why a legend is treated, and ought to be treated, more respectfully than a book of history. The legend is generally made by the majority of people in the village who are sane. The book is generally written by the one man in the village who is mad.1 [Note: G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 82.]
3. In the first and second chapters of St. Luke we have a narrative which comes from a Hebrew source, probably from the Virgin Mary herself. The narrator was undoubtedly one who thought in Hebraic fashion, and whose language was saturated with Hebraic imagery. Luke twice points out (Luk_2:19; Luk_2:51; cf. Luk_1:66) that Mary kept in memory and pondered significant sayings associated with the childhood and youth of her Son. This is said only of Mary, not of Joseph, though at this time he must have been still alive. In this way Luke indicates that the traditions in Luk_1:1-80; Luk_2:1-52 were transmitted through her. Who first wrote them down and when they were written we do not know. Nor can any intelligent critic regard the other narrative sections peculiar to Luke as his own fabrications, or as legends which originated outside of Palestine in the second or third generation after Christ. Their striking originality, which could not have been invented, has impressed them upon the mind of the Christian world to an extent scarcely true of any other portion of the whole body of gospel literature.
This narrative Luke has transmitted to us in a form which clearly shows its Hebrew origin, and equally clearly shows that it had been re-expressed in Lukan language and transformed by Luke. It has also been re-thought out of the Hebraic into the Greek fashion. The messenger of God, who revealed to Mary the Divine will and purpose becomes to Luke the winged personal being who, like Iris or Hermes, communicates the will and purpose of God. Exactly what is the difference between the original narrative and the Greek translation it is difficult to say or to speculate; but there was a more anthropomorphic picture of the messenger in Luke's mind than there was in Mary's. Yet we believe that Luke was translating as exactly as he could into Greek the account which he had heard. He expresses and thinks as a Greek that which was thought and expressed by a Hebrew.
Certainly, the most wonderful, the unique, point about the Greek genius, in literature as in everything else, had been the utter absence of imitation in its production. How has the burden of precedent, laid upon every artist, increased since then!1 [Note: Walter Pater.]
4. In using his materials Luke's methods are in the main those of other writers of the same period. They are quite unlike those of modern writers. A writer of the present day seeks to tell his story in his own words and his own way, giving references to, and, if necessary, quotations from, his sources, but carefully avoiding all confusion between traditional fact and critical inference, and certainly never altering the direct statement of the earlier documents without expressly mentioning the fact. The method of antiquity was as a rule almost the reverse. The author of a book based on earlier materials strung together a series of extracts into a more or less coherent whole, giving no indication of his sources, and modifying them freely in order to harmonize them. Sometimes he would select between several narratives, sometimes he would combine, sometimes he would give them successively, and by a few editorial comments make a single narrative of apparently several events out of several narratives of a single event. As a method this is obviously inferior to modern procedure, but even an inferior method can be well or badly used. That Luke used this method is clear from a comparison of the Third Gospel with Matthew and Mark, but on the whole he seems to have used it well, especially if it be remembered that his avowed object was not to “write history” but to provide the historical evidence for the Christian instruction which Theophilus had received.
Shakespeare, according to Carlyle, showed traces of a talent that could have turned the History of England into a kind of Iliad, almost into a kind of Bible. In writing his Gospel, Luke with the Greek element in his nature was long ago doing work Carlyle thought had been left undone until his generation. “A very great ‘work,' surely, is going on in these days, no less a ‘work' than that of restoring God and whatever was Godlike in the traditions and recorded doings of Mankind; dolefully forgotten, or sham-remembered, as it has been, for long degraded and degrading hundreds of years, latterly! Actually this, if you understand it well. The essential, still awful and ever-blessed Fact of all that was meant by ‘God and the Godlike' to men's souls is again struggling to become clearly revealed; will extricate itself from what some of us, too irreverently in our impatience, call ‘Hebrew old-clothes'; and will again bless the Nations; and heal them from their basenesses, and unendurable woes.”1 [Note: Carlyle, Miscellaneous Essays, vii. 225.]
5. Passing to the Gospel itself, we are in the fortunate position of finding a preface attached to it, which states very clearly why and how it was written. The Evangelist, so he tells us, had found in existence a number of narratives, embracing the main facts of Christ's life, as these had been handed down by oral tradition. With these narratives in themselves he had no fault to find; but they were manifestly inadequate for those who desired a full and detailed account of the Saviour's ministry. That account he found himself in a position to give, having first carefully investigated all the facts from the very beginning, and so he wrote his Gospel setting forth in order the evangelic tradition.
It might not have been without interest to comment on some of the more outward features of St. Luke's Gospel, such as its historical accuracy, the purity of the Evangelist's own style, and the literary skill displayed in the arrangement of the materials. But these points, after all, are of little account as compared with its loving, gracious, sympathetic heart. Luke is the most evangelic of all the Evangelists. He it is, as Dante remarked long ago, who describes most fully “the meekness and gentleness of Christ.”
There is scarcely an anecdote or a parable proper to Luke which does not breathe the spirit of mercy, and of appeal to sinners. The Gospel of Luke is especially the Gospel of pardon, and of pardon obtained by faith. “There is more joy in heaven over a sinner that repenteth than over ninety and nine just persons which need no repentance.” “The Son of Man is come not to destroy men, but to save them.” Any quantity of straining is lawful to him, if only he can make each incident of the Gospel history a history of pardoned sinners. Samaritans, publicans, centurions, guilty women, benevolent Pagans, all those whom Pharisaism despises, are his clients. The idea that Christianity has pardon for all the world is his alone. The door is open; conversion is possible to all. It is no longer a question of the Law; a new devotion, the worship of Jesus, has replaced it. Here it is the Samaritan who does the good deed, whilst the priest and the Levite pass indifferent by. There a publican comes out of the Temple justified by his humility, whilst the irreproachable but haughty Pharisee goes out more guilty than before. Elsewhere the sinful woman is raised by her love for Jesus, and is permitted to bestow on him particular marks of tenderness. Elsewhere, again, the publican Zacchæus becomes at the first onset a son of Abraham, by the simple fact of his having shown eagerness to see Jesus. Luke adds the taste for humility. “That which is highly esteemed amongst men is abomination in the sight of God.” The powerful shall be cast down from his throne, the humble shall be exalted; there, in brief, is the revolution wrought by Jesus. Now, the haughty is the Jew, proud of his descent from Abraham; the humble is the gentle man who draws no glory from his ancestors, and owes everything that he is to his faith in Jesus.1 [Note: E. Renan, The Gospels, 139.]
In his charming romance, Callista, Cardinal Newman describes the conversion of the perplexed Greek girl, thrown into prison and menaced with extreme peril, as caused by the reading of St. Luke's Gospel. “She read a few paragraphs, and became interested, and in no long time she was absorbed in the volume. When she had once taken it up, she did not lay it down. Even at other times she would have prized it, but now, when she was so desolate and lonely, it was simply a gift from an unseen world. It opened a view of a new state and community of beings, which only seemed too beautiful to be possible. But not into a new state of things alone, but into the presence of One who was simply distinct and removed from anything that she had, in her most imaginative moments, ever depicted to her mind as ideal perfection. Here was that to which her intellect tended, though that intellect could not frame it. It could approve and acknowledge, when set before it, what it could not originate. Here was He who spoke to her in her conscience: whose Voice she heard, whose Person she was seeking for.… That Image sank deep into her; she felt it to be a reality. She said to herself, ‘This is no poet's dream; it is the delineation of a real individual. There is too much truth and nature, and life and exactness about it, to be anything else.' ”2 [Note: J. H. Newman, Callista, 325.]