A website to help you study the Gospel of Luke, one of the key documents of the Christian faith

How Luke's Gospel was composed

There seem to have been three stages in the development of the raw material used by Luke: The individual stories, sayings and memories of the original witnesses - handed down by word of mouth or occasionally written down. (`Form critics' have tried to analyze how these different jigsaw-puzzle pieces are combined into the Gospels. The word used for one of these elements of tradition is `pericope'.) The attempts to write it all down in order, which Luke had carefully read and absorbed `from the beginning'; he'd watched the whole process of Jesus biography get under way, and reviewed it carefully as new accounts began to be completed. He passes no judgment on these first attempts, but clearly he believed there was something missing, which he could supply by compiling his own version. Luke's selection of much of that material and his shaping of it into his own Gospel. This doesn't mean that the facts had been exaggerated, distorted, or altered beyond recognition in the process of transmission! We need to remember that People were much more accustomed to using their memories than we are! They didn't have the same range of memory aids, electronic organisers, even pocket diaries! Parchment was expensive and cumbersome. Accurately remembering and reproducing verbal memories was an important skill. Luke wrote at a time when the original eyewitnesses were still very much alive (even if some were getting rather old). There had been no time for a `Chinese whispers' story about Jesus to grow up. The true facts were still very much capable of being ascertained. Luke says that the raw material was `delivered to us from those who were from the first eyewitnesses and ministers of the Word'. The Greek word used here - paredosan - implies a careful, official handing down of something valuable and precious (see how the same word is used in 1 Cor 15:3), rather than just a casual passing on of stories. Luke says he has written his account `in order'. This word - kathekes - doesn't necessarily mean `chronological order'. It means either that Luke is setting out to write a continuous narrative, instead of the fragmentary accounts which have been written about one part of the Jesus story or another; or else that he is giving a complete account, filling in bits which the previous attempts have left out. Use your browser's back button to return to the page you were reading