Luke Overview

Bible Book Overviews — Steve Gregg

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Luke Overview

Bible Book OverviewsSteve Gregg

In this overview of the Gospel of Luke, Steve Gregg discusses the authorship and authenticity of the Gospel, as well as the unique stories and themes it contains. While the authorship of the Gospel has been debated, evidence from early church fathers suggests that Luke, the physician and companion of Paul, wrote it. Luke's Gospel provides detail on Jesus' life and teachings, including unique stories such as the birth narratives of John the Baptist and Jesus, the story of the widow in Nain, and Jesus preaching in Nazareth. The Gospel also emphasizes the role of the Holy Spirit in the lives of believers and includes the Great Commission of preaching repentance and remission of sins to all nations.

Transcript

The authorship of the book of Luke is a very interesting topic because, I mean, we say, well, it's obviously it's written by Luke. His name's right on it. But the authors of the Gospels did not put their names on the Gospels.

The Gospel according to Matthew, Gospel according to Mark, according to Luke, according to John, do not have their names on the originals. They submitted these documents in the early church anonymously. But of course, the persons to whom they gave them knew who they were.

I mean, these were people important enough to, you know, if you were living in the first century and someone said, hey, I wrote a book of the story of Jesus and he was in your church or visiting your church, I mean, somehow that manuscript has to get from his hands into yours, you'd know who it was and you'd remember who it was and your church would remember who it was. And so what we have is traditions that have been passed down generation after generation in the first two centuries that remember who wrote these, although they were anonymously written. And that is in contrast to the fake Gospels that were mostly written in the second and third century.

We call them the Gnostic Gospels. You know, the Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of Peter, the Gospel of Judas, the Gospel of Mary, and those Gospels, the Gospel of Philip, those are Gnostic Gospels that were written later and all of them put the author's name, but a fake one. They all pretended to be somebody important, whereas the real Gospel writers didn't pretend to be anyone at all.

The church just knew who they were because how could they not? How could they not know who handed them the manuscript, especially if it was the Apostle John or the Apostle Matthew or something like that? But we do have testimony from the early church on the Gospel of Luke in particular that Luke in fact was the author. Now, if one would say, well, how do we know the tradition is true? Well, that's an interesting study. How would you discover the author of a book like this if we didn't have any tradition telling us? I think there's enough evidence for us to know.

And so, you know, people say, well, you can't trust those early testimonies, even though all the early fathers, even from, you know, the mid-second century, we're talking the 100s AD, less than 100 years after it was written, probably. They all said it was Luke. As I say in your notes, Irenaeus in the year 170 identifies the author as Luke.

Clement of Alexandria in 195, Tertullian in 215 AD. They all quote extensively from the book of Luke and Acts, which you will find is by the same author, and identify the author as Luke. So there was not like another opinion.

It's not like there's a dispute. Some people thought it was Luke and someone thought it was someone else. Everyone in the early church unanimously recognized the author as Luke, although both books, Luke and Acts, were submitted without the author's name on them.

Now, one could deduce this very largely from the book of Acts. Of course, Luke wasn't one of the apostles. The author of the book of Luke was not one of the apostles.

He does not claim to be. In fact, he claims at the very beginning that he had access to earlier written documents about the life of Christ and that he had access also to those who had been eyewitnesses in the beginning. So, who, you know, he was like a secondhand witness, but he was in touch with the apostles and whoever he was, was, you know, a historian of great access to the original information.

And all he claims for himself is this. He doesn't claim that he saw it himself. This is the only, probably the only gospel that's not written by an eyewitness, but by one who knew the eyewitnesses and had interviewed the eyewitnesses and gotten his material from them.

But he simply said, I have had, in the King James Version, perfect knowledge. He means comprehensive knowledge. He's had comprehensive knowledge of this story from the beginning, he said.

And that's good enough for me. I mean, if somebody had comprehensive knowledge of the life of Jesus from the beginning and had interviewed the apostles on the subject and had some of the earlier works of people who were eyewitnesses to consult, obviously, this is a pretty good credentials for any historian to have. But we know that the author of Luke is the same man as the author of Acts for a number of reasons.

The most obvious is that both books are addressed to the same man. And his name is given. The author's name is not given, but the man to whom the books were written, his name is given.

His name is Theophilus. And when you get to Acts, Acts begins addressing Theophilus and mentioning the previous work he had written, which obviously is the book of Luke. So, I mean, the author clearly says he'd written two works, both to the same man.

In Luke chapter one, for example, in verse three, Luke 1, 3, it says, It seemed good to me also, having had perfect understanding of all things from the very first, to write to you an orderly account, most excellent Theophilus, that you may know the certainty of those things which in which you were instructed. So he addresses his, the receiver of the gospel as most excellent Theophilus. Now in Acts chapter one, verse one, it says, The former account I made, O Theophilus, of all that Jesus began both to do and teach until the day in which he was taken up, after he threw the Holy Spirit and given his commandments to the disciples.

Well, that's exactly the material covered in the book of Luke, the story of Jesus up until the Ascension. In fact, Luke's writings are the only ones that record the Ascension of Jesus. Matthew doesn't record it, and Mark doesn't record it, and John doesn't record it.

The Ascension of Jesus is only recorded in the book of Luke and the book of Acts. But note, when you come to the book of Acts, the same author is writing to the same man and makes a reference to the earlier account and describes what was in the earlier account, which is exactly what was in the gospel of Luke. There's never been any shadow of a doubt that Luke is the author of these works, or at least the same man is.

But how would we know it's Luke besides the tradition? As far as I'm concerned, the tradition could never have arisen without it being true, but let's just be, play the skeptic for a moment and say, okay, what if we didn't trust the tradition? Well, we find as we read the book of Acts, obviously by the same author, that at a certain point in the book of Acts, he stops speaking in the third-person pronouns and starts using the first-person pronouns. You know, he talks about Peter and John and they did this and they did that and they did that, and then there's Paul and Barnabas, or initially Paul and Barnabas, later Paul and Silas, and they did this and they did that, and then at a certain point in chapter 16, we find him saying, and then we sailed. Without any fanfare, without any ostentation, he just changes the pronoun.

We sailed to Greece, to Macedonia, and we went to Philippi, and then these things happened to Paul and Silas and Philippi, and then left and went down to Thessalonica, but the author didn't. We came to Philippi, but they left Philippi, meaning the author stayed in Philippi, and we have these sections in the book of Acts that scholars refer to as the we sections, because it's not everything after chapter 16 that's we. It's sometimes the author is with them, sometimes he's not.

He makes no big flourish about it. You know, you have to notice it. Oh, it's we again here now, and now it's them, you know, it's they, and so you can tell from these we sections precisely when the author was traveling with the Apostles and when he was not, and it's really interesting because you'd think that someone who's traveling with the Apostles would make a big deal about that.

Oh, and I happened to join them here, and you know, I wasn't with them before, but now I'm part of their team too, you know, and but he doesn't. It's just kind of that change of pronoun is what gives it away. And there are several we sections in the book of Acts, and they're listed in your notes there under the third part where it says author was a companion of Paul who was with him in Rome, and there's the the we sections are Acts 16, 10 through 17, Acts 25 through 21, 18, and also Acts 27, 1 through 28, 16.

So there's three we sections, and we find that what the author did is he joined Paul and Silas on the second missionary journey halfway through, and they were at Troas, and this is when Paul and Silas were trying to figure out which direction they should go. They tried to go into Asia, and the Holy Spirit forbade them. They tried to go to Bithynia, and the Holy Spirit forbade them, and they weren't sure which way to go, and then one of them had a dream of a Macedonian man saying, come over to Macedonia and help us, and so it was decided that's the direction they would go, and at that point we have the first we, so we sailed, you know.

So obviously the author joined Paul's apostolic party in Troas as he sailed the first time into Europe, which happened to be northern Greece he landed in, and apparently after the church in Philippi was founded, and Paul's kind of run out of town, and Silas too, they left this author behind. Apparently he was a little more obscure than they were. He could work kind of in the shadows a little more, and keep, make sure the brand-new church wouldn't just fall apart.

He's there to kind of babysit them, and maybe nurture them a little bit while Paul and Silas had to be away. Later on, the author joins them again, and travels with him some more. Eventually he goes to Jerusalem with them, and in the very end of the book where Paul's traveling from Caesarea to Rome, and at the end of Acts when Paul is still two years under house arrest in Rome, those, that's a we section.

So apparently when Paul made his last trip to Rome in the book of Acts, before he got arrested in Jerusalem, Luke was with him on that trip, and we know that Paul got arrested in Jerusalem. He was detained in prison for two years in Caesarea, which is still in Palestine, and Luke was still around. Now Luke wasn't in prison, so he would have, or we're still, should be talking about the author at this point, because we're trying to decide if this is Luke, but the author was kind of hanging around Paul.

Paul was in prison. The author was at liberty, but that was close enough that he could go visit people like Philip the Evangelist, who lived in Caesarea where Paul was in prison, and who was one of the deacons in the early church. He could certainly get a lot of stories of the early Jerusalem church that appear in the early chapters of Acts from that interview.

He also went to Jerusalem with Paul more than once, and could interview the other apostles and many others that were known. So when Paul was then shipped to Rome, the author was on the ship with him, and was shipwrecked with him, and then went to Rome and was with Paul while Paul was under house arrest for two years in Rome. So when the book closes, the author is still with Paul.

So this author, at least in the latter part of Paul's ministry, certainly the latter half of his second missionary journey and the rest, his third missionary journey, this man was with him. Now, how does that point to Luke? Well, there are a certain number of names of people that we get from Paul's letters, companions of his who are rather lesser-known people. In some cases, we know almost nothing except their names, because Paul, at the end of one of his epistles or two, will say, oh, and so-and-so sends greetings to you, and so does so-and-so, and so-and-so, and so-and-so, and so-and-so, a list of names that mean almost nothing to us, but apparently were known to the readers, and obviously to Paul.

They were with him. And in Colossians, which Paul, we assume, wrote from Rome, there are, there's some think not, but it's assumed that Paul wrote from Rome, Colossians, and Philemon, which was written to the same church from the same place at the same time. Luke is among the names mentioned.

Now, there's other names too, but we do know that Luke then was with Paul in Rome at the end when he wrote the prison epistles. So we know that the author was also with Paul there, but who else might have been? There might have been some other guys too, but we do know that Luke was at least one of the candidates. He's one of the guys that was with Paul, and his name appears at the end of some of these epistles.

Now, there are other names too that could be candidates, including Timothy, obviously, and a man named Sopater, and Aristarchus, and Secundus, and Gaius, and Tychicus, and Trophimus, and Silas. Now, these guys were with Paul a lot of the time too, so how do we know they weren't the author of these two books? We know because the author mentions these other guys by name. He talks about Timothy by name, and Silas, and all these others are mentioned by name, where the author never mentions himself by name, which is typical in the Gospels too.

I mean, of course, Luke was not with Jesus in the Gospels, but he was with Paul in the book of Acts, but the Gospel writers, Matthew, Mark, and John, don't really mention themselves by name either, even when they talk about themselves. I mean, Matthew refers to himself as Levi, the tax collector, and doesn't mention he's the author at the same time. John mentions himself as simply as the disciple whom Jesus loved, and does mention himself being with Jesus, but doesn't give his name.

And the writer of Acts mentions himself as a companion, but not by name. And so, these other people who might be thought maybe to be candidates for authorship, they are mentioned by name in Acts as someone other than the author. So, we know they're not the ones who wrote it, and it kind of dwindles down the candidates down to maybe one or two possible guys, and one of those is Luke, and lo and behold, the entire early church was convinced it was Luke who wrote these, and they would have reason to know.

But another thing about Luke that makes him almost certainly the candidate to be the author, and this is again as if we were totally discounting tradition, which there's no reason to discount, but we're just being like gratuitously skeptical here, saying, well, what if the tradition's wrong? Well, all the evidence points to So far, we've only got him and maybe one or two possible other guys who could even conceivably fit the data we know, but we have this in Colossians 4, as Paul's writing to the Colossian church, probably from Rome, Colossians 4.14, he says, Luke, the beloved physician, and Demas greets you. So, Luke was with Paul, and he was the beloved physician. Now, the reason that's interesting is because in the books of Luke and Acts, Greek scholars have identified as many as 400 specific words that are found in ancient Greek medical texts.

It's not as if no one else would know these words, and the person who used them would have to be a medical man, but it's a great abundance of language that's otherwise known from ancient Greek medical texts. And so, there's a lot of medical vocabulary here. And also, some of the healings and so forth are described as a physician might.

For example, the man at the beautiful gate in Acts chapter 3, when Peter said, silver and gold, I have none such as I have, I give you, and he took his hand to heal the layman, and the narrator says, and he received strength in his ankles and stood up. Now, if I was writing, I'd just say, hey, he got up, you know, but I mean, the writer was paying attention to what, where was the problem here with this man's leg? Oh, it was his ankles. I can see.

I mean, it's like, the author writes as if he might very well be a medically trained and medically concerned individual. Again, that tips the scales toward Luke as well. But there's a couple other things too.

And that is that Luke is relatively an unknown man. He doesn't seem like it does because we have two books in the Bible with his name on it. But when they were written, they didn't have his name on it.

They had no one's name on it, which means where would we find any reference to Luke to make us think he was significant at all? Only in those references that Paul gives that, you know, Luke is with me here and these other guys too. I mean, Luke is certainly one of the most obscure names in the New Testament. He's not mentioned at all in the Gospels.

And he's not meant, his name doesn't appear in the book of Acts. There's just the we, you know, there's no name Luke. And in the epistles of Paul, he's mentioned only a few times as in a list of people who were with Paul.

And therefore, you could hardly find a more obscure individual to assign the books to. And if we assume that the early church was kind of, you know, they didn't know who wrote these, but they'll assign it to someone really important like Matthew or like John or like even Mark or maybe why not Peter or one of the other apostles. No one would pick Luke as the false author of the work because when false authors are named, for example, in the Gnostic Gospels, it's always someone really, really important.

You know, when you're going to make up a false authorship, you're going to pick somebody that's worth lying about, you know, somebody that's going to give it a credibility that you wouldn't have if you told who the real author is. And the name Luke is not one of those names. The early church would have no reason to attribute these books to Luke, except that they knew he was the guy who wrote it.

Now, there's one other thing, too. This author is the only author of the New Testament book who was not a Jew. Now, we can't tell that just from reading him, although it is the case that no other New Testament books has such cultured Greek language.

All the New Testament is written in Greek, but most of the authors who were not Gentiles, their Greek wasn't all that literary. Luke and Acts and Hebrews alone have the most articulate, the most literary Greek in the entire New Testament. In fact, there has been one theory that Luke was the author of Hebrews, since we don't know who it was, or maybe that he had translated for Paul or something like that.

But there are those who at one time, Clement of Alexandria thought that Hebrews, since it's anonymous, thought it might have been written by Paul and translated into Greek by Luke because the Greek style is and that of the other books by this author is the best Greek in the New Testament, which doesn't prove it's a Gentile, but it could well be that this man's native language was Greek. I mean, Paul was one of the most educated Jews in the empire. He certainly wrote Greek fluently, but he didn't write it very well.

His native language is probably Aramaic. Of course, people back then were multilingual, but you'd have a language you spoke at home and your parents spoke and there'd be your native language. Then you'd have second and third languages.

Paul certainly knew Latin. He knew Greek and he knew Aramaic. There's no question about it in Hebrew.

But Paul's Greek was not that grammatically proper at times, whereas this author did. And if someone as educated as Paul, who actually went to college in Tarsus, which had one of the great universities of the time in the Gentile world, if he went to his education there and still didn't write any better than he did in Greek, then that someone who would naturally write in Greek as well as Luke did, there's a good chance that it's a Gentile. But how do we know if Luke was a Gentile? Well, we do know that because of chapter four of Colossians again, one of the few places that we've actually find Luke's name in Paul's letters.

But you have to read the context before it. In Luke, Colossians four, beginning at verse 10, he says, Aristarchus, my fellow prisoner, greets you with Mark, the cousin of Barnabas, about whom you received instructions. If he comes to you, welcome him.

And Jesus, who is called Justice, not the more famous Jesus, of course. These are my only fellow workers for the kingdom of God who are of the circumcision, mean Jews. They have proved to be a comfort to me.

So he's just listed a bunch of guys who are with us. These are the only Jewish brothers I have with me. Then he says, Epaphras, who is one of you, meaning a Colossian, a servant of Christ, a great great student.

So then he gets down to verse 14, Luke, the beloved physician. So Luke is mentioned among those that are not among the circumcision. Paul had Jewish Christian and Gentile Christians with him, and he lists Luke being not among the Jewish Christians.

So he was so Luke, we know, was a Gentile physician. And the author of these books, we don't we can't prove from anything in the books that the author was a Gentile or a physician. But the language he used as commander, the Greek language very strongly suggests that he would be more than ordinarily qualified to to have those that background.

So, you know, I think the biggest proof that Luke is the author is that no one would have any reason to assign the books to Luke if he wasn't. He just wasn't an important enough man to put his name on there as a fake author. You know, and so that's I may have taken more time than you want to take.

But I love to know that we're not just following tradition because there's unbelievers often say, well, you know, these these these gospels in the Bible, they probably weren't written by anyone even in the first century or no one who knew Jesus wrote them. And that's not true. They deny, in other words, the traditional authorship of all these.

They'd like to say someone a few generations later wrote them with either faulty memory or with mythological accretions to the story and things like that. And that simply isn't true. The evidence is certainly there that it was written by a companion of Paul.

And when was it written? Well, we know this, that in the book of Acts, the book closes with Paul in Rome waiting to be on trial before Nero. Now, we know that Nero did try Paul and there's evidence in the pastoral epistles, that's the letters to Timothy and Titus, that Paul actually was released and that he traveled some more to some other places. And then he was arrested again and put in prison and executed around 67 or maybe 68 AD by Nero.

Now, this was long enough before that. That Paul was still in prison the first time when acts was written. How do I know he was in prison? Just because the book ends with him in prison.

How do we know that that's when it was written? Well, because he says at the very end of the book of Acts, Paul continued two full years. In this house arrest situation, now think about it. If it had been less than two years.

He couldn't say it had been two full years, he wouldn't know how long it's going to be. If it had been more than two years, he would say how long it was. He wouldn't say two full years, he'd say two and a half years or three or whatever years it was.

The fact is that when Acts was written, the author did not know how long Paul's imprisonment would be. And by the time he finished writing, Paul had been two years in prison. He was in prison in Rome in 60 AD, which means that Acts was almost certainly not written any later than 62.

And it was the second book. The first book would have been written earlier, probably at least a year or two earlier. So we could say it might have been written before Paul came to Rome when Paul was in prison at Caesarea, because Luke was again cooling his heels, hanging around, waiting for something to happen, for Paul to be released or something.

Paul was in prison in Caesarea. And that's when Luke really had time to stay around Paul's more or less and still go and interview members of the early Jerusalem church and so forth. And he may well have written Luke at that time.

But that would mean it was written before 60 AD. And he wasn't the first. He said, he opens by saying in verse one, Inasmuch as many have taken in hand to set in order a narrative of those things which are most surely believed among us, just as those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word delivered them to us.

So he knew of many who had attempted to set out the events of the life of Jesus in an orderly way before he did. And he did it as early as 60 AD or earlier. So we really have very, very early historical records of the life of Jesus, regardless what unbelievers suggest to the contrary.

They don't have any evidence. I remember N.T. Wright, who, of course, is one of the most respected New Testament scholars alive today, was asked in a meeting, You know, what do you think are the date of the writing of the Gospels? And he said, I mean, I knew this was the answer. It was good to have someone as smart as him say it.

So we really don't have any certainty about the time of writing of any of the Gospels. We have to just deduce from within them. And like I said, we can deduce from this that Acts was written no later than 62 and Luke before that.

And almost all scholars believe that Mark was written before Luke, although some of the church fathers thought not. Some of the church fathers thought Luke was earlier than Mark. In any case, we have good reason to simply accept the tradition that Luke is the author.

And if someone wants to challenge it, they have nothing. I mean, they say, I doubt it. Well, doubt it all you want.

A person can be infinitely skeptical, but you ought to have reasons for doubting it. I mean, there are reasons for believing it and very strong ones. What are the reasons for doubting it? I just don't want to believe it.

You know, I mean, well, that's pretty much where the skeptics are on almost everything they doubt about the Bible. They just there's never been any proof that anything in any of the Gospels isn't true. No one has ever found any archaeological dig or there's no other ancient historical record that would suggest that anything in any of the Gospels actually is untrue.

So why don't they believe it? And they just don't want to believe it. To me, I'd rather believe something that had some evidence, even if it wasn't ironclad evidence, than something for which no evidence exists at all, which is doubt. All right.

Now, why did Luke write this? I mean, if it wasn't the first, he says there were others before him who doubt why he bother with it. Well, we don't know. He doesn't say why he did say.

I mean, the reason he gives is that he wanted Theophilus to know the certainty of the things he'd heard about. Jesus and he wanted to document it in an orderly way. Now, an orderly way doesn't mean in order chronological order, because there's no reason to believe that the events in Luke are recorded in chronological order any more than Matthew or Mark.

The three synoptic Gospels cover much of the same material, but they do put things in different chronology, which is fine because they're not claiming to do otherwise. If somebody wants to write, you know, well, even I mean, if you've ever I mean, this is typical of my biography that's at the website. You know, I go through topically, you know, here's here's my early education.

Here's my marital experience. Here's my ministry experience. You know, doubles back and goes back to, you know, I got married in a certain year and this happened up to the present.

Then go back. My ministry began a certain year. It certainly overlaps that other part to tell a story.

You don't have to tell it in chronological order unless you're going to say you're going to. If you tell someone this is the order things happened and you don't tell it in the correct order, then you're a deceiver. You're wrong.

But if you're if you're just saying these things happened and I'm not necessarily saying they happen in this order, but they all happened. Well, then you don't need chronological order. But he said he did want to make an orderly account as opposed to a random kind of account.

So the office would know the certainty of things. Well, who's theophilus for? We don't know who theophilus is. There's an early church father named Theophilus, but he's much too late to be this theophilus.

So he's a different theophilus. The word theophilus in Greek means lover of God. Theos is the word for God in Greek and phileo is word for love.

Theophilus means lover of God. There have been some who have suggested that this is kind of used as a term for any Christian reader. Oh, lover of God, I want you to know these things are true.

And I'm not really talking about somebody's name, but any any lover of God is the intended beneficiary of this writing. However, that's probably not a correct theory because theophilus is actually a well-known proper name at the time. There are a number of known theophilus at the time.

So it's more likely that he's not talking about a generic category, but someone whose name is really theophilus. One thing that's interesting, though, in Luke, he addresses Theophilus as most excellent theophilus, whereas in Acts he simply says, oh, Theophilus. Now, oh, Theophilus is a more affectionate kind of way of speaking, you know, oh, Timothy, oh, you know, oh, man, you know, oh, Theophilus.

It's a very casual way of addressing somebody. Whereas in the and that's in Acts, but in Luke, he says most excellent theophilus. And we find that when Paul, for example, addressed Felix or Agrippa or Festus, these were Roman officials.

They call it most excellent Felix. Most excellent. It's sort of like saying your honor or your majesty or something, you know, some kind of title like that.

And so when Luke says most excellent theophilus, some have thought, well, maybe this was a government official. And maybe he didn't call him that the next week because the guy had become a brother. Maybe the guy got converted from reading the Gospel of Luke.

And by the time the second book was written, maybe a couple of years earlier, he just Luke knew him as a brother in the church. He just said, oh, Theophilus. There certainly is a marked difference in the formality of the address in Luke as opposed to the informality of the address in Acts.

Some people say that theophilus might not have been a government official. He might have been a the patron. People who wrote books in those days often wrote under the patronage of somebody who paid for the parchment and the ink and for their time.

That I mean, most people didn't have parchment. Unless they I mean, most people didn't write on parchment very often. But there were people who did.

And most people were not authors. But guys who were authors would often, if they're going to undertake a major work, find a rich patron who would sponsor the expense of the work. And then they dedicate it to them.

And so some people think, well, maybe maybe Luke knew this rich guy, Theophilus, and maybe he was the patron. But that wouldn't explain so well that most excellent Theophilus in one book and just O Theophilus in the second one. One theory that's been interesting and some scholars have thought is that.

That Luke wrote these while Paul was in under house arrest, waiting to stand trial before Nero. And that Theophilus might have been an official under Nero who had been assigned by Nero to research the case, you know, to come up. So that when it comes before Nero, Nero's a busy man.

He's the emperor of the whole empire. So he would have underlings that would kind of research the case and give them a synopsis of it and things like that so that he could. Be brought up to speed rather quickly, and some think that Theophilus was perhaps Nero's appointed man to research Paul's case and Luke.

Acting almost in the role of Paul's attorney, as it were, is writing these documents for the sake of Theophilus. To familiarize him with Paul's case. But if that were true, you wouldn't need quite so much information, for example, in the first book about Jesus, because although the story of Jesus certainly is relevant to Paul's case and what he was preaching, you know, the book would be.

It contained a lot more information that would be necessary just to apprise someone of Paul's situation. On the other hand, Luke may have used the opportunity to evangelize the guy by writing the whole story of Jesus and and acts, you know, Luke and acts together. Make up about a quarter of the New Testament, just those two books.

New Testament is 27 books, but most of them are really short. Luke and Acts combined is a quarter of the and that means Luke wrote more of the New Testament than any other person. Unless Paul wrote Hebrews, no one knows who wrote Hebrews.

Paul's epistles combined do not make as much material as Luke's two books. If you add Hebrews to Paul's epistles and if that's why Paul, then Paul just barely exceeds Luke. But most people do not believe that Paul wrote Hebrews, and I don't think there's a reason to insist on it.

So we could say Luke is the primary contributor to the New Testament. We have. Having read about a quarter of it, which is kind of surprising when you hear it that way, you know, who thought it? So I've talked about the date.

Let's start with the special contents that are in Luke that are not actually found in the other gospels. Obviously, if you're reading through the New Testament, by the time you get to Luke, you will have read Matthew and Mark. And by the time you get to Luke, you're going to find some of the stories are awfully familiar.

Some of the stories in Luke have been found in Matthew and Mark, so you'll be reading them for the third time. Some of them have been found only in Matthew or only in Mark. So if you're reading the second time, but some of them are unique to Luke and they're not found in Matthew or Mark.

When we were talking about Mark last month, I was telling you the theories of many scholars, which I do not particularly credit. But most New Testament scholars hold to them anyway. I have other views than they do on this, but the general feeling is that Mark wrote first.

And Mark's gospel being the shortest has the least material in it. And Matthew and Luke, which cover much of the same material in Mark and are longer, perhaps used Mark as one of their sources. And that explains why they have so much of the same material as each other and Mark, if he is one of their sources.

But that they had other sources besides Mark. Some of which Luke and Matthew use together, too. And that's where this document Q is theoretically imagined by scholars.

But we don't know that such a document ever existed. I won't go into that again. We went into that in Mark.

I personally think that Luke probably wrote largely from notes that he took in interviews with the apostles, with Paul himself. He traveled with Paul extensively. Paul had spent time with the apostles before he ever met Luke.

And Paul traveled with Barnabas, who was one of the chief men that the apostles trusted and sent to Antioch to see if the Antioch church was valid or not. I mean, Paul spent a lot of time with people who had known Jesus or who at least had been in the early Jerusalem church right from Pentecost onward. So, Paul, certainly Barnabas, certainly Silas, who's also an early member of the Jerusalem church, Luke would have had access to those guys and the other apostles probably more briefly.

They stayed in the home of Philip the evangelist, who's one of the first seven deacons in the Jerusalem church. So, Luke could have been taking notes from these interviews. And there's others whose names are unknown to us that he would have crossed their paths.

And he doesn't name his sources, but he mentions that there are many sources, including eyewitnesses that he had. So, he didn't depend on Mark or Q for his information. He had actual human witnesses, not other written documents necessarily.

Now, I won't go again, as I did last time, somewhat into the so-called synoptic problem. Why so many of the passages in Luke and Matthew are verbatim the same as Mark. And others are not.

Telling the same story, sometimes they're different. That's called the synoptic problem. To what degree were these three gospels dependent on each other and to what degree were they independent of each other? It's a fascinating study, but it won't help us much with Luke at this point.

So, and we discussed it more in when we talked about Mark last time. Let's talk about what's in Luke that's not really in the others, in the other gospels. There's a lot of overlapping material, of course, but some things are not overlapping.

For example, the actual story of Jesus begins in Luke earlier than any of the other gospels, unless you think of John's prologue. In John's prologue, in the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word, that's earlier than any of the gospels. Start with the story of Jesus, but then by John 1, 14, it says, and the word became flesh and dwelt among us.

That's generic of the incarnation, you know, itself. But as far as stories about the life of Jesus, John doesn't really get into the stories until after Jesus has been baptized and tempted in the wilderness, and he's, and he returns to where John baptized him, and and John testifies of him in John chapter 1. So, so John's gospel doesn't start, there's nothing of Jesus' childhood in John, and there's nothing of Jesus' childhood in Mark. But Luke and Matthew both have birth narratives of Jesus, but they don't overlap very much.

They are certainly are not at odds with each other, but skeptics again often say, oh, these contradict each other. One of them says that Mary and Joseph were from Nazareth, and one of them has them from Bethlehem. No, it doesn't.

They just are people who don't read very carefully and don't really want to, I think, in most cases. They want to find problems they don't want to understand. Anyone who wants to understand can easily harmonize the data, but it's true.

The stories in the birth narratives of Jesus and Matthew are different, different stories, than the ones in Luke. For example, Matthew's gospel covers the story from Joseph's side. Matthew 1 begins with Joseph's genealogy.

Then, before the end of Matthew 1, the angel appears to Joseph to tell him that he should not be afraid to marry Mary because she has not been cheating on him. She's pregnant by the Holy Spirit. Then in chapter 2 of Matthew, the wise men come, and then because Herod threatens the babies of Bethlehem, an angel comes to Joseph and tells him go to Egypt.

And then when Herod said an angel in Egypt comes to Joseph and tells him to go back, and then an angel told Joseph to go up to Nazareth. And there he worked as a carpenter. And that brings you pretty much to the end of the birth narratives in Matthew.

Luke has different parts of the story, and they're from Mary's side. It's Mary's relatives that were the parents of John the Baptist. And Luke begins without, before Mary's even mentioned, her cousin Elizabeth and her husband, a priest, Zacharias, are told by an angel that they are going to have a child.

And this is, of course, the announcement of John the Baptist's birth. And Luke chapter 1 tells about that, and of course Zacharias was struck dumb for the next nine months. And then in chapter, the other part of chapter 1, an angel comes to a virgin named Mary in Nazareth.

Okay, so we are introduced to Mary, and then the angel announces to her that she's going to have a child. So we have Luke telling things from Mary's side. Her cousin Elizabeth is the mother of John the Baptist.

Then Mary receives a visit from the angel. This was never mentioned in Matthew. And nothing is really mentioned of revelations given to Joseph in Luke's version.

So we've got stories from Joseph's side in Matthew and from Mary's side in Luke. We have, as we go on, the shepherds in Luke chapter 2 come. Well, I'm getting ahead of myself here, because we have the birth of John the Baptist first, and then we have the birth of Jesus, and then we have the shepherds coming to the manger.

We don't have the wise men. We have the wise men in Matthew. We have the shepherds in Luke.

Now, actually, the wise men didn't come when Jesus was born. They came probably a couple of years later. But the shepherds came the same night.

And then it skips from that, from the birth of Jesus, till when he was 40 days old. Well, it does mention he was circumcised on the eighth day, but it says after 40 days, when Jesus was 40 days old, they had to follow the Jewish custom of dedicating the firstborn son, which the law required. Mary and Joseph had to go to the temple to offer a sacrifice in the dedication of Jesus as the firstborn son.

And there they met, of course, Anna, the old lady who was there all the time. She was at least in her 80s and spent her whole time fasting and praying in the temple. And there's this old guy named Simeon, we assume he was old.

We're not told he was old, but he was told that the Holy Spirit had told him he would not die until he'd seen the Messiah. And then when he saw Jesus and knew it was him, he said, oh, now let me depart in peace. You get the impression of an old man, you know, he's ready to die now.

Actually, there's no mention of his age. He could have been a young man. Okay, I can die now because I've seen the Messiah.

I'll go with the first impressions. I think he was probably an old man. So we've got Simeon and Anna in there.

And then before that chapter ends, Mary and Joseph leave Bethlehem and Jerusalem and they go on up to live in Nazareth. But at the end of the chapter, they make a visit at Jesus age 12 to Jerusalem. This may in fact be the first time Jesus ever went to Jerusalem because under Jewish law, the males, 12 years old and over of the Jews, had to make these pilgrimages to Jerusalem.

Women and children didn't have to. We're specifically told Jesus was 12 years old. And his family went, this is like a week-long walk, so they wouldn't necessarily do this if they didn't have to.

They might, but they wouldn't necessarily. This might be the first time that Jesus went to Jerusalem as a young adult. At least it was the first time he's required to.

And we know the story how he got kind of lost in the crowd. His parents started home to Nazareth, got a, you know, better part of a day away from Jerusalem and realized that he wasn't in the crowd. So they went back looking for him.

They found him speaking to the teachers in the temple and causing them to marvel at his wisdom. And that's the only story of the childhood of Jesus that the whole Bible contains other than his infancy narratives. You've got infancy narratives in Matthew chapters 1-2 and in Luke chapters 1-2.

And that way Matthew and Luke are similar, though they don't cover any of the same stories. And then Luke alone gives us a story from when Jesus was 12. Which could very well be his bar mitzvah.

Now these days Jews are bar mitzvahed at age 13. I don't know how far back that custom goes. We don't have writings as far as I know going back 2,000 years about the customs of the Jews.

Exactly, and I'm not, I could be wrong, but I might I might hold tentatively the theory that it was his bar mitzvah at age 12. And that would mean that he was passing a bar mitzvah for Jews, the Jewish boy becomes a man officially. And that's the first time Jesus apparently ever referred to God as his father.

He may, we say when did Jesus know that he was the son of God? Well, at least by then, but maybe not before then. Because when he said to his parents, why were you looking for me? Didn't you know I'd be in my father's house? It says Mary and Joseph didn't understand what he was talking about. What do you mean your father's house? Joseph's your father, right? I mean Mary knew that Joseph wasn't the father, but he was the foster father.

And in 12 years time, there'd never been any mention of God being Jesus' father. And now Jesus mentions it for the first time and they, it takes them aback a little bit. So it may be that now that he was a young man, God gave him the revelation.

Okay, you are not an ordinary boy. You're the son of God. And Jesus obviously knew it at that point.

If he knew it before that is possible, we don't have any record of it. But that would seem to give us a good reason to include that story. If that was the time that answers our question, when did Jesus know who he was? All right, so we also have in Luke in chapter 3, a genealogy of Jesus.

Now that's in Luke chapter 3, beginning of verse 23, and to the end of the chapter, traces the genealogy back to Adam. Now there is a genealogy of Jesus, only one other one in Matthew chapter 1, which goes only back as far as Abraham. And in Matthew, the genealogy is clearly that of Joseph.

It traces the genealogy down from David through the kingly line, Solomon, Rehoboam, and the rest of the kings down to the very last of them, Jehoiakim. And then through the intertestamental period down to Joseph, and he's introduced as Joseph, the husband of Mary, to whom was born Jesus. So Matthew does not say that Joseph was Jesus's father, but he said he was the husband of Mary, Jesus's mother.

So it's very clear that genealogy in Matthew is that of Joseph. Now a casual reading of the genealogy in Luke 3 gives the impression that this too is a genealogy of Joseph. Because in verse 23, it says, this is Luke 3, 23, Now Jesus himself began his ministry at about 30 years of age, being as was supposed the son of Joseph, the son of Heli, the son of Methah, the son of Levi, the son of Melchi, and going all the way back to Adam.

The problem here is that in Matthew's genealogy of Joseph, Joseph was not the son of Heli. His father's name was Jacob. And it's an entirely different genealogy.

This is not even a similar genealogy where a few names are changed. There's, it's, nothing is the same. The only names that are the same between the time of Jesus and the time of David a thousand years earlier is the name David, and Zerubbabel is in both genealogies.

Apart from that, none of the names are the same really. So this is confusing. This has caused some people to say, oh, there's a contradiction there.

But I don't know how there could be a contradiction. Because certainly neither Matthew nor Luke were making these names up off the top of their head. You know, this is, if I believe these were written before 70 AD, and therefore the family records and genealogies would still be available at the temple.

And any historian doing a serious attempt to write somebody's biography and wanting to give their genealogy, Markham and John didn't bother to give the genealogy, but both Matthew and Luke intended to. They would have gone to the temple to see the records and copy the names down. That's how you do it.

But if they were given the same genealogy, they'd have the same names. They'd be looking at the same records. And one theory that the early church had was that there's a really complex situation where there's a, what's called a Levite marriage, where a man died childless and his brother had to marry the the widow and the first child was named after the dead father and so forth.

It's very complicated. And the early church had this explanation that Joseph was a product of a Levite marriage somewhere a few generations back and therefore his actual father was one person and his legal father would be another. But in a Levite marriage, the two fathers, the legal one and our brothers, they'd have the same genealogy going backward.

My understanding would be that Luke, who's been giving us Mary's side all through the whole first two chapters, is still giving us Mary's side. He's given us Mary's genealogy. Now we can't prove that because it doesn't say it's Mary's genealogy, but we know it's different than Joseph's.

So what do we do with verse 23 where it says Jesus was 30 years of age being as was supposed the son of Joseph, the son of Heli and so forth. I believe Heli was Mary's father. We can't prove this, but from Matthew we can prove he wasn't Joseph's father.

And when it says as was supposed the son of Joseph. Now we have parentheses in our Bibles. The Greek doesn't have parentheses.

But it's very possible that there is a parenthesis intended here as all the translators seem to acknowledge. They put parentheses in. But what if they put it in the wrong place? Since the Greek doesn't have it.

What if it was being then parentheses as was supposed the son of Joseph, closed parenthesis. Now in the New King James as was supposed is in parenthesis. What if you added more within the parenthesis? Since the parenthesis isn't in the Greek, you just have to put it where you think it belongs.

What if the whole phrase as was supposed the son of Joseph was in parenthesis? That would mean that reading it without the parenthesis would make a sensible sentence and the parenthesis is just something said on the side. Then it would be saying that Jesus was 30 years old being the son of Heli. Now a man is often called the son of somebody who's his grandfather or ancestor.

After all Matthew begins you know the genealogy of Jesus, son of David, son of Abraham. Well, neither David nor Abraham were Jesus' immediate father certainly. They were his ancestors.

Son of in the Bible can mean a descendant of. And if it's saying that Jesus was son of Heli would mean that that was his nearest male ancestor, which would be his mother's father. Now if that's too confusing, you don't have to go along with it.

But to me it satisfies all the necessary things. Both genealogies are from David, but not through the same sons of David. Matthew's genealogy comes down through Solomon the king, son of David.

And Luke's genealogy comes down through Nathan, a different son of David. And that's where the genealogies diverge. But you see the Messiah has to be son of David.

There's very little else that had to be true for a man to be the Messiah. He absolutely had to be son of David because back in 2 Samuel 7 12 God made it very clear from David's loins would come this king who would be the Messiah. The Jews knew that.

Even in Jesus' ministry said, you know, what do you think about the Messiah? Whose son is he? They were immediate. David's son, of course. Even the term son of David was a messianic title.

So sometimes the blind men say son of David have mercy on us. They knew they knew he wasn't one of the immediate sons of David. He was the Messiah.

That's what they were saying. The Messiah is son of David. But if since Joseph was not Jesus' biological father, then we'd have to know was Mary descended from David.

Now both genealogies are people who are descended from David, but not the same Davidic line. In Luke, it's a different Davidic line, but it is from David. Now if this is Mary's genealogy, then we have proof that Jesus was descended from David.

If this is not Mary's genealogy, we have no idea if Jesus was descended from David or not. We know Joseph was, but he wasn't Jesus' father. So unless his mother was descended from David, we have no way to know if Jesus even qualifies to be the Messiah on those grounds.

Certainly the Bible would not leave that out. And therefore for several reasons, although it's not obvious just by reading it, it's certainly possible that Luke has given us Mary's genealogy. First, because he's covered the whole story from Mary's side where Matthew covered it from Joseph's.

Second, because it can be read that way without any violence to the text. Third, because if it isn't, we don't have Mary's genealogy anywhere, and we don't even know if Jesus was biologically related to David. Which is one of the most important things to know if you're going to say he's the Messiah.

So I think that Luke does give us Mary's, although it's not the clearest thing in the world to see. Okay, so we have the genealogy. Now, both Matthew and Luke begin the adult ministry of Jesus with his baptism by John.

This is in Matthew 3. It's also in Luke 3. As we saw Luke 3 then ends with Jesus gets baptized by John, and then there's the genealogy. When you get to Luke 4, as also with Matthew 4, you've got the temptation of Jesus, three temptations in the wilderness. It's true that Matthew and Luke do not have the same order of temptations.

The first one's the same, but the second two are reversed in Luke vis-a-vis Matthew. So we don't know the exact order. It hardly matters.

The three temptations are the same temptations. And then they, Matthew and Luke both then immediately jump to the Galilean ministry. But that wasn't when Jesus' ministry began.

All the synoptic gospels leave out what John includes, and that's one reason I think John later wrote what he did. He filled in gaps that the synoptics had left out. Let me show you in Luke chapter 4. We have the story of the temptation of Jesus up through verse 13.

Then verse 14 says, then Jesus returned in the power of the Spirit to Galilee, and then it begins his ministry in Galilee, which lasted for in excess of a year. It was the great Galilean ministry. Primary, most of the stories we know of Jesus' ministry come from the Galilean ministry.

Most of the miracles we know, not all of them, but most of them come from that. Now, Mark and Matthew do the same thing. They skip directly from the temptation of Jesus to the Galilean ministry.

When we get to Mark's gospel, we find out, well, it wasn't quite like that. They're leaving out stuff, as every historian must. No historian can record everything that happens.

As John said, if everything Jesus ever did was recorded, the earth itself couldn't contain the books, and that's true probably almost anyone's life. If every breath they took, every word they spoke, every step they took was recorded, it'd be bigger than the Encyclopedia Britannica. So every historian has to decide, what am I going to include, what am I going to leave out? And the great Galilean ministry is apparently, in the eyes of most of the gospels, writers, the most important part to start with.

John tells us, though, that after Jesus was tempted in the wilderness, he didn't immediately go to Galilee. He came back to where John was baptizing, and John began to testify, oh, there's the Lamb of God, you know, I saw him baptized, you know, I saw the dove come down, and so forth. And then we find Jesus cleansing the temple in John chapter 2, and we find him, you know, turning water into wine in Cana.

We find in chapter 3 his conversation with Nicodemus. We find in chapter 4 his talk with the woman of the well. That all happened before the Galilean ministry.

At the end of John 4, it connects with the Galilean ministry. So John fills in a gap there that the other gospels just leave out. Why'd they leave it out? Well, they had to leave something out.

Not everyone's going to leave the same things out, but that's what Luke did, as well as Matthew and Mark. They go directly to the Galilean ministry. Okay.

Then, Luke has something unique that none of the other gospels have, and that is that before Jesus does anything else in Galilee, he goes to his hometown, Nazareth, and he preaches there. He offends them, and they try to kill him. They want to throw him off a cliff, but he walks out, you know, unscathed, and they do him no harm.

Then there's also in Luke alone, and this is a little later, in chapter 7, the story of the widow of Nain, whose son had died, and Jesus and his crowd, the Bible says multitudes were following him down the street, and they intersect with another multitude coming down a crossroad with a casket, because there's a funeral procession. So here's Jesus and his disciples. You can see it from a helicopter view.

Jesus progressing toward this intersection, and this funeral procession progresses, and they run into each other, and Jesus raises this dead boy. His mother was a widow. He was the only son.

She was totally bereft. Jesus gives her her son back. One of the few resurrections of the dead that we have recorded.

We only have resurrections of the dead in Jesus' ministry three times besides his own. Of course, the story of Lazarus, very famous, story of Jairus' daughter, and then this one. Now, Lazarus is only mentioned in John.

This one's mentioned only in Luke, and Jairus' daughter is mentioned in more than one gospel. So, that story there, and then the sinful woman who washed Jesus' feet with her tears, and he said, your sins are forgiven. That's also in Luke, but nowhere else.

Luke alone tells that story in chapter 7, verses 36 through 50. Luke also contains something unlike the other gospels. He's got a unique, very long passage.

It's usually referred to as the travel narrative by New Testament scholars. It starts at chapter 9, verse 51, and it goes all the way through chapter 18, verse 14. And you find at chapter 9, verse 51, it says, now it came to pass that when the time had come for him to be received up, that he steadfastly set his face to go to Jerusalem.

Now, this sounds like, okay, he's going to be crucified soon, so he's going to go to Jerusalem to be crucified there. Yeah, but he doesn't get to go directly there. We have nine chapters of him wandering around in Samaria and Korea, which is on the other side of the Jordan, and a little bit in Judea and so forth.

His Galilean mystery is apparently over at this point, and he's going a rather circuitous route toward Jerusalem. You get the impression, okay, it's time for him to be crucified, but it's not quite. He's got almost maybe close to another year of ministry before he's crucified, and but he's going that general direction.

I think the idea is he's done with his Galilean mystery at this point. So he's kind of going to Jerusalem through a windy way, hitting some other places that he hadn't been to before. And that's called the travel narrative.

Now, that travel narrative contains 16 of the 23 parables that are in Luke. Luke has 23 parables, and 16 of them, well over half, are found in this unique passage that's not in any other gospel. So these parables are not found elsewhere, and those include a lot of important ones, you know, the prodigal son, the lost sheep, the good Samaritan.

I mean, these are some very important parables that are there that aren't anywhere else. Also, when Jesus was finally arrested, we know that he had three trials before Jewish courts and three trials before Gentile courts in, you know, 12 hours time or something like that. When he was first arrested, he was taken to the house of Annas, the high priest, briefly.

We're not told anything about what happened there. It's not Luke who tells us this, but then he was taken to Caiaphas' house, where they found him guilty of blasphemy. And then after dawn, he was taken back to Caiaphas' house, and they had to find some other charges to trump up because they needed Roman permission to have him killed, and the Romans couldn't care less about a Jew committing blasphemy.

Romans were not offended by Jews blaspheming Jewish God. So the Sanhedrin that had condemned him in their trial of blasphemy had to think of something entirely different to accuse him of before the Romans so that they'd want to kill him. So they came up with the charge of sedition.

So they brought Jesus at dawn or at six in the morning approximately to Pilate's house. Now, he had had three Jewish trials, one before Annas and two before Caiaphas. Now there's going to be three trials before Romans.

Pilate first, and then when Pilate finds that Jesus is kind of a hot potato, he doesn't really want to deal with him, he finds out that Jesus from Galilee says, oh, that's Herod's jurisdiction. I'll send you to Herod. And Herod wanted him to do a miracle, but he didn't accommodate Herod, so Herod sent him back to Pilate.

So there's a trial before Pilate, one before Herod, one before Pilate again, and then of course Pilate agreed to have him crucified. Luke alone tells the story of him going before Herod. So we wouldn't know that he had had that little interlude in his trials before Pilate.

The other other Gospels simply talk about him going to Pilate and eventually Pilate condemns him. But in the middle of that, Luke tells us Pilate sent him to Herod and Herod sent him back. As far as resurrection appearances, a very important resurrection appearance given in some detail is to the two men on the road to Emmaus on Sunday, probably afternoon, when Jesus had risen that morning.

These men, we don't know who they were. One's name was Cleopas, but we don't know the other one's name and we don't know who Cleopas was otherwise. But these two men met Jesus, didn't know it was him, until they'd walked all the way to their town, invite him for dinner, and when he broke bread, he just disappeared from view and they suddenly knew it was Jesus.

And they got on foot and ran all the way back to Jerusalem. They found the twelve gathered without Thomas present and and without Judas, of course. And they said, and they were told by the apostles, Jesus has risen and he has appeared to Peter.

This story about the two men on the road to Emmaus is found only in Luke and in the controversial long ending of Mark. If you were here last week, you know, we were talking about the long ending of Mark. Some manuscripts have it and some don't.

But in the long ending of Mark, there's only like a sentence about it. Whereas Luke gives in great detail the story of the two men on the road to Emmaus. So that's his unique contribution to that business.

In Luke, the great commission is a different one than the one in Matthew and then the one in Acts, which Luke wrote. Jesus apparently gave commissions to the disciples at various times. In Matthew chapter 28, it was on a mountain in Galilee that Jesus said, Go and make disciples of all nations baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son, Holy Spirit and you know teaching them to observe all things I've commanded you and law I'm with you always to the end of age.

That's Matthew that happened in Galilee. But Luke chapter 24 and Acts chapter 1 both have commissions that Jesus gave them in Jerusalem before Pentecost. The one in Luke chapter 24, verse 44 through 49 says, And he said to them, these are the words which I spoke to you while I was still with you that all things must be fulfilled which were written by the law of Moses and the prophets and the Psalms concerning me And he opened their understanding that they might understand the scriptures Then he said to them thus it is written and thus it was necessary for Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead the third day And that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in his name to all nations beginning at Jerusalem And you are witnesses of these things behold.

I send the promise of my father upon you And tarry in the city of Jerusalem until you are endued with power from on high and then it tells about his ascension once again Matthew and Mark and John do not tell us about the ascension of Christ We get that only from Luke here and in the first chapter of Acts written by the same author Now notice what he said in the great commission here. It has these same elements As the commission essentially in Acts chapter 1, but it's a different wording So it may be that Jesus said these things, you know while they were in the upper room And then later they went out to out of all this. He said essentially the same thing again that ascended It's not impossible to believe that or perhaps Luke is paraphrasing In one place, you know that one place he gives it in more detail than when he repeats it in Acts he kind of paraphrases it but basically the commission is That repentance and remission of sins should be preached To all nations beginning at Jerusalem And you're the witnesses of these things and he says and behold I send the promise of my father Which is the holy spirit.

Well in Acts chapter 1 We find um Just turning over there real quickly because we're just about done He does say to them in verse Eight but you shall receive power when the holy spirit has come upon you And you shall be witnesses to me in Jerusalem and in all judaea and samaria and the end of the earth now what this has in common with the one in Luke is Starting in Jerusalem both both places. You start in Jerusalem go to all nations Both of them say you're my witnesses And both of them say the holy spirit will be given to you In Luke it says the promise of the father here. He just says when the holy spirit comes upon you But we see that these three elements of the great commission in Luke 24 are found also in Acts chapter 1 So as I said, Jesus may have said the same thing twice in slightly different terms or Luke might be giving the same Commission in slightly different words, but then Acts chapter 1 also describes the ascension of Christ And then we have the story which we're not going to go into now of the coming of the holy spirit and the acts of the apostles so this is mainly the things that are Uh unique in the gospel of Luke and not in the other gospels.

I'm not going to keep going tonight because I've gone a long time and there are some other details about Luke that you can find in the notes i've given you But this is kind of just a introduction and overview The idea of these is not that you leave here knowing the book but knowing What you'll find in the book when you read it and and being able to recognize The the unique features that as you encounter them in the book these uh These lectures obviously are too brief. They're not intended to be a substitute for reading and studying the book itself And as you probably know at our website there are verse by verse teachings through Luke, so I mean if so if uh, you know The introduction and slight overview of the book what's your appetite and you say? Oh, I want to study this in depth There's always the other lectures available at the narrow path.com The guy who runs our youtube page Uh, he he gets this is streamed to facebook video He takes that and he puts it on the youtube page so you can find them on youtube He also takes the audio from them and puts them on our website If you go home tonight and look at our facebook page, it's there and it'll also be on youtube eventually Yeah, just go to there's a link to it at our website under Links and resources to the video page. But yeah, there's youtube of it But for the next 30 days, it'll also be on the facebook page this video.

All right. Well, why don't we close then?