It is my intention now to travel through the two books of Luke, the most prolific author of the New Testament. Although Paul wrote thirteen books, fourteen if we take him to be the author of Hebrews, the volume of material in Luke and Acts exceeds even the Pauline corpus. Luke has four fewer chapters than Matthew, but these chapters are all very lengthy. When he came to write the second volume, a history of the early church, he addressed it to the same man, and picked up right where he had left off at the end of Luke. Nothing could be clearer than that both books came from the same pen.

Although the author does not name himself, there has been an almost universal consensus throughout the history of the church that Luke, who became a companion of Paul when he was in Troas, is the writer. Modern scholarship questions everything, but it makes perfect sense that Luke would be the writer of these two works. As Paul traveled on more than one occasion to Jerusalem, Luke would have had ample opportunity to interview the eyewitnesses of the ministry of Jesus who were still living. This would also have given him access to the information he required to pen a history of the early days of the church. And, indeed, as we shall see, Luke often writes as one who, though perhaps not an eyewitness himself, had a thorough knowledge from personal investigation of that which had occurred from the birth of Christ up until Paul’s imprisonment. It is worth mentioning here that so notable a biographer of Christ as Alfred Edersheim was of the opinion that the unnamed disciple who encountered the risen Jesus on the road to Emmaus was, in fact, Luke.

Luke is commonly denominated as one of the “synoptic” gospels, meaning that the material in his gospel roughly parallels that which is recorded by Matthew and Mark. John is usually set in a category by himself, because almost all of his material is unique to himself. Luke, though he records many of the same stories as the other two synoptics, actually in about 60% of his gospel gives material not found in the other three gospels. Notable among these are his lengthy account of the birth of Christ, with the events leading up to that great event, the only recorded incident of our Saviour’s childhood, a record of incidents and teaching on a journey to Jerusalem, running from the 9th through the 19th chapters (though some of it is difficult to pinpoint), and also some incidents in the death and resurrection of Christ, such as the conversion of the thief on the cross and the aforementioned encounter with the disciples on the road to Emmaus.