DAY 217
CHALLENGE
“Luke’s Gospel isn’t reliable. It was written long after the events, and Luke was not an eyewitness.“
DEFENSE
Luke’s Gospel was written within living memory of the events that it records, and it is based on eyewitness testimony.
We elsewhere discuss the fact that Luke wasn’t an eyewitness (see Day 44). Biographies are commonly written by people who aren’t eyewit- nesses, and Luke was in an especially good position as a biographer because he consulted eyewitnesses (Luke 1:2).
Raymond Brown proposed a late date for Luke and Acts of “85, give or take five to ten years” (An Introduction to the New Testament, 226, 280). If so, Luke would have been written a little more than fifty years after the ministry of Jesus, which was within living memory.
However, Luke was probably written earlier. The key to identifying when is its relationship with the book of Acts. Luke and Acts were written as a two-volume set, the first of which covered Jesus’ life and ministry and the second of which covered the history of the Church up to the time Acts was written.
The fact that they are meant as companion works is indicated by several factors: (1) Acts picks up exactly where Luke leaves off (compare Acts 1:1–2 with Luke 24:44–52). (2) Both are dedicated to the same man—Theophilus—who was apparently Luke’s patron (Luke 1:1–4, Acts 1:1). (3) Acts refers to the Gospel of Luke as “the first book” (Acts 1:1), implying that Acts is the second in the set.
This indicates that Luke was written earlier than Acts, and we have a very good idea of when Acts was written. Luke apparently completed it during the second year of Paul’s first imprisonment in Rome (see Day 79). Most hold that Paul’s imprisonment began in A.D. 60, though a careful reading of the evidence suggests it was in A.D. 58 (see Jack Finegan, Handbook of Biblical Chronology, 2nd ed., and Andrew Steinmann, From Abraham to Paul). Acts would then be written in A.D. 60, and Luke’s Gospel was written before that.
It is probable, given their dedication to the same man and the fact that the end of Luke seems to envision the beginning of Acts, that Luke was written only shortly before Acts, in A.D. 59, less than thirty years after Jesus’ ministry.