Gospel Of Luke Research Paper

Luke was born a Greek and a Gentile in Antioch, Syria. He was a physician and it is believed that he may have also been a slave, as it was not uncommon in his day for slaves to be educated in medicine so the family would have a resident physician. Luke is the only Gentile to have written books in the Bible. He is the writer of the third Gospel and it is believed that Luke lived a long life and died c. 74 in Greece. Luke's gospel shows special sensitivity to evangelizing Gentiles. It is only in his gospel that we hear the parable of the Good Samaritan, that we hear Jesus praising the faith of Gentiles such as the widow of Zarephath and Naaman the Syrian (Lk.4:25-27), and that we hear the story of the one grateful leper who is a Samaritan (Lk.17:11-19).

Luke wrote the Gospel of Luke and the Book of Acts, and at one time, it was all one book but was later separated into two books for ease of reading, however if you read the end of the Gospel of Luke and the beginning of the Book of Acts, you can easily see that it is a continuous book that was intentionally written as one book. Evidence to this fact is the way in which Luke begins the gospel by writing “to write to you an orderly account, most excellent Theophilus, that you may know the certainty of those things in which you were instructed” (Luke 1:3b-4) and which he begins Acts 1 with “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 through the Holy Spirit had given commandments to the apostles whom He had chosen” (Acts 1:1-2). So we see that Luke wrote these two books for historical purposes for Theophilus with the gospel being the account of Jesus’ earthly ministry and the Book of Acts which deals with what many consider the birth of the church and would better be called The Book of the Acts of the Holy Spirit because it reveals how God’s Spirit establishes, directs, guides, and grows the