Saint Luke, Evangelist (October 18th)

Of the various Saints and Commemorations that we celebrate this week: 

Oct. 14th -- Saint Callistus I, Pope and Martyr

Oct. 15th -- Saint Teresa of Jesus, Virgin and Doctor of the Church

Oct. 16th -- Saint Hedwig, Religious; 

Oct. 16th -- Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque, Virgin

Oct. 17th -- Saint Ignatius of Antioch, Bishop and Martyr

Oct. 18th -- Saint Luke, Evangelist

Oct. 19th - Twenty-ninth Sunday of Ordinary Time - Year C

Oct. 19th -- Saints John de Brébeuf and Isaac Jogues, Priests and Companions, Martyrs


I’ve chosen to write about Saint Luke, Evangelist.


The original Apostles and the Evangelists are among the oldest Saints recognized in the Church (and are often the only ones recognized in the various Protestant traditions).  They are often the among most studied studied, and yet because of the distance of time they are also the ones about which we have the least solid documentation.


By a combination of two thousand years of reflection on the Biblical and some extra-Biblical texts that we have, most Biblical scholars would propose that Saint Luke entered the Church through the mission of St. Paul to the Greek preferring world of the Eastern Mediterranean though there remains a question of whether or not Luke would have been a Hellenized Jew or simply a Gentile prior to his conversion.  


That St. Luke would have entered the Church in this way is supported by the following matters:


  1. Among all the Evangelists, he is the only one who wrote extensively, indeed an entirely separate book on the Acts of the Apostles, after Jesus’ death / resurrection and otherwise earthly mission had been completed.   The Gospels of Matthew and John were by tradition written by Jesus’ named Apostles Matthew and John themselves.  The Gospel of Mark, was by tradition written by “Mark” in good part as recollections of (perhaps) St. Peter (another, and the head Apostle named by Jesus).  St. Luke would have entered the Church only after Jesus’ departure from the scene.  Hence is would have been important to explain how he (and others) entered into the Church as a consequence of the Apostles’ acts and preaching.

  2. Biblical scholars have long noted that the Greek of Luke’s Gospel is by far the best of the four Gospels, strongly suggesting that Greek was his first language.  

  3. Relatively small but revealing matters in his texts suggest that he was Greek world, including that his Gospel alone refers to the “Sea of Galilee” (in reality a lake of a similar size as Lake Tahoe in California) as “Lake Genezareth”).  While the inhabitants of Galilee may not have seen any body of water larger than the Sea of Galilee, if St. Luke came from the Greek world, he would certainly have grown-up with knowledge of far larger bodies of water like the Eastern Mediterranean and Aegean Seas.  

  4. Finally, a good portion of the latter part of the Luke’s Acts of the Apostles is written in the first person, “we” as in “then we went …” suggesting that the author was a first hand participant in the events described some of St. Paul’s missionary adventures. 


So that St. Luke came from the Hellenistic (Greek) Eastern Mediterranean world seems clear.  Interestingly, there remains scholarly debate about whether St. Luke had grown up as a Hellenized Jew or outright a Greek Gentile, the arguments for St. Luke having been a Hellenized Jew being:

 

  1. He doesn’t refer to any of the classical Greek pagan myths that he would have been certainly exposed to if he had grown up as a Greek Gentile.  In contrast, 

  2. though Greek, he still had an excellent grasp of Jewish Tradition,  Scripture – the various Canticles that appear in the early parts of the Gospel of Luke  (the Infancy Narrative of Jesus) do hold to the form of Old Testament counterparts and common Jewish prayers of the time, and

  3. He had a very good grasp of the conflicts and positions of the various factions within the Jewish community of the time.


Still by Tradition, St. Luke is remembered as having been a physician (one wonders how even a Hellenized _Jew_ of the time would have been able to get such training)..


Further and perhaps even more surprisingly (in the context of Judaism out of which early Christianity came), St. Luke is also remembered as having been or become an artist (an iconographer).  


Four icons, three existing to this day, one by tradition being a copy of an original made by him, are reputed to exist to this day.  These icons are:


  1. Our Lady of Vladimir, one of the most sacred icons of the Russian Orthodox Church, presently sharing space in the state run Tretyakov Gallery and the church of St. Nicholas in Tolmachi in Moscow, Russia;

  2. Our Lady of Czestohowa, Poland’s national patroness, the original to be found at the Shrine of Jasna Gora Monastery in Czestohowa, Poland.

  3. The Salus Populi Romani, an image of Mary as the Theotokos (God-Bearer) which arrived in Rome via Constantinople (today’s Istanbul, Turkey) at the time of St. Gregory the Great (late 500s AD), and has been located since in Rome’s Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore,

  4. The original image, now lost, of the Theotokos of Our Lady of Perpetual Help.


But did St. Luke _actually_ paint these icons, or was “the inspiration” to them?  Simply counting out the verses, there is more about Mary, the Mother of Jesus in the Gospel of St. Luke than the rest of the New Testament combined.  However, art critics studying the matter say that all of the Theotokos icons attributed to St. Luke  are of a thoroughly Byzantine style, a style that really did not come to fore until the 5th-6th centuries, A.D.  Still as an inspiration?  We will never know.


Thematically, Luke’s Gospel tended to defend women, the poor and the outsiders.  It would seem therefore that St. Luke himself tended to gravitate toward the marginalized, and may have felt himself – as Hellenized Jewish convert or as simply a Greek Gentile convert to Christianity – to be part of the community “at the margins” as well.


Nevertheless, it is clear that he brought many gifts, and inspired many more, to the Church as well.


St. Luke, pray for us, and help us to appreciate the many gifts that we all bring to the Community and the Kingdom.

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