Did Luke Know Jesus? (Or At Least Meet Him)

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily match my own. - Dr. Bart D. Ehrman

The question of whether the author of Luke, one of the four canonical Gospels, had any direct acquaintance with Jesus is a topic that invites both intrigue and debate. While Luke's Gospel has long been celebrated for its rich narrative and theological depth, the identity of its author remains shrouded in mystery.

Did Luke know Jesus? In this article, I’ll examine the historical context surrounding Luke’s authorship, including early references to him, his relationship with the Apostle Paul, and any evidence suggesting a personal connection to Jesus.

Who Wrote the Book of Luke?

What was Luke’s relationship to Jesus? Did Luke ever meet Jesus? In order to answer these questions, we must identify the author of the Gospel of Luke. However, this task turns out to be complicated.

Luke, like all four of our canonical Gospels, was originally written anonymously. That is, there is no author’s name on the oldest manuscripts of Luke and nowhere in the Gospel does the author name himself. So, where did we get the title “The Gospel According to Luke”?

Our earliest reference to the book being authored by someone named Luke is in the 2nd century by a Christian bishop and author named Ireneaus. Writing around 180 CE, Irenaeus reported and defended the tradition that the author of that Gospel, as well as the book of Acts, had been Luke.

There are two things to point out here. First, Irenaeus was writing roughly a century after the Gospel of Luke had been written. This means that the notion that Luke had written it, which, again, is never mentioned in the book itself, had been passed down by word of mouth for generations by the time Irenaeus learned of it. We don’t know where this idea began, but Irenaeus seems to believe that it is well-established as fact.

Second, if Ireneaus was correct, this author named Luke had been Paul’s companion. Paul, remember, never met Jesus during his lifetime. It would make sense, then, that Luke had never met Jesus either.

Later Christian authors, including Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen all believed the tradition that Paul’s companion Luke had written the Gospel of Luke, perpetuating the tradition even down to the modern day for many Christians. But who was this associate of Paul?

A look into the New Testament provides three instances where someone named Luke is mentioned in letters claiming to be written by Paul. In Colossians 4:14, Paul sends greetings from himself and several fellow missionaries to the people of Colossae. He names one of these as “Luke, the beloved physician.” This is the origin of a tradition that the author of Luke was not only Paul’s companion but also a doctor and/or healer (the Greek word iatros could mean either).

The problem with this information, though, is that most scholars agree that the epistle to the Colossians was not actually written by Paul but by a later Christian author writing in Paul’s name (he reasons for this are extremely complicated, as outlined in Bart Ehrman’s book Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics). For this reason, we may not be able to trust the information’s accuracy.

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The second reference to Luke is in 2 Timothy 4:11. Paul, apparently in prison and awaiting the death penalty, says he has been abandoned by most of his fellow workers: “Only Luke is with me,” he says. Unfortunately, most critical scholars agree that this letter, like Colossians, was not written by Paul but written in his name long after his death by another author, leaving the authenticity of this information in question, too. We do, however, have one reference to Luke from an authentic letter of Paul’s.

This final reference comes from an undisputed letter of Paul called Philemon. At the end of this extremely short letter, by Paul’s standards, Paul sends greetings from himself and several companions including Luke, calling them his coworkers (Greek: synergoi). This was probably the source of the other two letters’ references to Luke since the other names of Paul’s companions from this letter are repeated there as well. So, is this Luke the author of the Gospel of Luke?

Unfortunately, the only reliable information about Luke that we get from the real Paul is that he was one of Paul’s fellow missionaries. His name was Latin and, therefore, Roman, but even Jews had Roman names sometimes, especially diaspora Jews like Paul (another Latin name). However, while Luke may have been a companion of Paul’s, does this mean that he knew Jesus?

Most scholars agree that Paul wrote Philemon sometime between 57-62 CE. By that point, Jesus had been dead for about 30 years. Is it possible that Luke could have known Jesus and then become a companion of Paul’s? Perhaps, but that might pose a problem for his authorship of the Gospel of Luke.

In The Historical Jesus: An Essential Guide, James Charlesworth notes that scholars have a range of dates for the composition of Luke’s Gospel. The consensus says it was written sometime from 80-110 CE. So, if Luke was 25 when he knew Jesus, he would have been 55 when he was Paul’s companion as listed in Philemon. But since the Gospel of Luke was written at least 20 years after that, he would have been at least 75 when he wrote the book. It was relatively rare, although not impossible, for a person to live that long in the 1st century. So does the author of Luke leave us any clues about meeting Jesus?

Let’s examine the Gospel itself to see if there’s any evidence pointing to such an encounter.

What Was Luke’s Relationship to Jesus?

The author of Luke’s Gospel gives us a tiny bit of information about why he is writing his Gospel in the preface.

Let’s unpack this a bit.

In his Brief Introduction to the New Testament, Bart Ehrman notes that this preface indicates that several other versions of Jesus’ life have already been written. In addition, Ehrman writes that the author says that stories about Jesus were “handed on to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word.” This seems to indicate that Luke’s author is one of the recipients of these stories, possibly just through written documents passed on by eyewitnesses. Some people ask “Did Luke the Apostle ever meet Jesus?” But he himself was not an apostle, disciple or eyewitness to Jesus’ life. Instead, Luke is reporting what he has heard and read.

We know, for example, that Luke got most of his narrative structure from the Gospel of Mark, large portions of which he copies. However, Ehrman also points out that Luke’s preface says that he is writing “a well-ordered account,” possibly indicating that he thinks Mark was written badly and that he will correct Mark’s errors.

The author also addresses his Gospel (and the book of Acts) to “most excellent Theophilus.”  In other places in the book of Acts, the author uses the title “most excellent” (Greek: kratiste) for Roman governors, so this might indicate that Theophilus was some type of government official. This could explain why Luke seems so preoccupied with making Christians appear to be good citizens of the empire.

Harold Attridge notes that this was one of the purposes of Luke-Acts since “after all, [Christianity’s] founder was executed as a political criminal, and [Christians] were being associated with the destruction of Jerusalem, and some people would have thought of them as incendiaries, as revolutionaries.” The author of Luke, therefore, wanted “to show that Jesus himself taught an ethic that was entirely compatible with good citizenship of the empire.”

This may be another piece of evidence indicating that the author never met Jesus. In addition to the above, many scholars have noted that the high level of Greek in Luke indicates a Gentile author with a high-level Roman education, something that Jesus’ Palestinian Jewish followers definitely did not have.

In the Eerdmans Commentary on the Bible, for instance, David Balch writes that the author followed the example of Classical Greco-Roman literature in writing a Greek religious and political history of Jesus and the church his followers created. Again, none of this would have been likely coming from the original followers of Jesus in Palestine, most if not all of whom were probably illiterate. Bart Ehrman notes, for example, that the “vast majority of Palestinian Jews in this period were illiterate — probably around 97%.”

All of this evidence points toward a couple of conclusions: First, the author of Luke was a highly-educated Greek speaker and member of the Roman empire. His Greek writing is far too high-level to have been written by a 1st-century Palestinian Jew, most of whom were illiterate in their first language Aramaic, let alone Greek.

Second, even if Paul’s companion Luke wrote the Gospel, he probably didn’t know Jesus. Why? Let’s look at the timeline. The only authentic letter of Paul in which Luke is mentioned is Philemon, written between 57 and 62 CE, 30 years after Jesus’ death. If Luke had been 25 at the time of Jesus’ death, he would have been around 50 when Philemon was written. But scholars date the composition of Luke between 80-110 CE. If it were written in the year 90, Luke would have been 80, an age not many people even reached in the 1st century.

Whether Luke wrote the Gospel of Luke or not, the author of Luke did not know Jesus, either during his lifetime or after his resurrection. He admitted as much when he said that stories about Jesus had been “handed on to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word.” The author was merely writing a new version of what he had already heard and read.

Conclusion: Did Luke Know Jesus?

It’s difficult to know much about the author of Luke-Acts. Both books (they were originally two volumes of one large work) were written anonymously. Traditions linking the writings to Paul’s companion Luke began to surface in the late 2nd century with the Christian author Irenaeus. This tradition, which had apparently been passed down to him, continued for centuries and is often still taught today in churches.

However, there are good reasons to doubt that the author of Luke, whatever his name, met the historical Jesus while he was alive. First, unlike Jesus’ Palestinian Jewish followers, the author was highly literate in Greek and apparently a proud citizen of the Roman Empire.

In addition, the preface of Luke seems to say that the author was not present during Jesus’ life. Instead, he notes that his work is following that of several other written pieces. Moreover, he writes traditions about Jesus that were passed down to him and others by eyewitnesses.

Despite the paucity of information we have about the author, we can be relatively certain he did not know Jesus.