One writer, traditionally a doctor named Luke, produced over a quarter of the New Testament
Luke's gospel and the book of Acts were written as one two-part work that makes up 27.5 percent of the New Testament, more than any other author. Tradition names him Luke, a physician and companion of Paul, and possibly the only New Testament writer who was clearly not Jewish. Scholars split roughly evenly on that attribution.
The Gospel never names its author, much like other Greco-Roman biographies, and it claims to rely on eyewitnesses rather than to be one. Yet the attribution is old: the earliest manuscript, Papyrus 75 from around AD 200, credits Luke, as did Irenaeus writing around AD 180. Paul's letter to Philemon mentions a Luke, and Colossians calls him 'the doctor', which is why he became patron saint of physicians and, among others, artists, brewers and butchers. His feast day is 18 October.
Whoever wrote Luke–Acts was highly educated. The Greek is among the finest in the New Testament, and the author alludes to Homer, Euripides, Plato and Thucydides, suggesting schooling in the standard Hellenistic curriculum of the eastern Mediterranean. In parts of Acts the narrator shifts to 'we', implying he travelled with Paul: joining him at Troas, staying in Philippi, and sailing with him on the dangerous voyage to Italy. A line in Colossians sets Luke apart from Paul's Jewish colleagues, though some scholars think it only separates strict observers from others and see Luke as a Hellenised Jew.
His reliability as a historian divides opinion. The archaeologist William Ramsay, impressed by accurate place names and official titles, ranked him among the greatest historians, and classicist E. M. Blaiklock put him alongside Thucydides. Critics answer that he wrote to persuade rather than to record; Mark Powell doubts history was ever Luke's aim, and Robert Grant flagged improbable crowd sizes and a possible chronological slip over the rebels Theudas and Judas, though that point is fiercely disputed.
Legend fills in his end. A widespread early tradition says he died at 84 in Boeotia, and a 14th-century Greek historian recorded that his relics were moved from Thebes to Constantinople in 357. Some accounts make him a martyr hanged from an olive tree; others disagree.
Source: Luke the Evangelist
