All scholars agree that Luke was not an eyewitness of the events reported in his first volume. Most obviously, whoever Luke was, he was surely from the Diaspora; many scholars cite his apparent lack of direct acquaintance with Galilean geography, and he probably did not know Aramaic. Moreover, Luke writes at least a generation after the events that dominate his Gospel (and longer still after those he reports in his infancy narratives). Although a substantial minority of scholars continue to date Luke-Acts in the 60s, contending that Luke omits Paul’s death because it had not yet occurred when he wrote, and a smaller number date the work, or part of it, in the early second century, the majority of scholars favor the final three decades of the first century, with most clustering in the mid-range of 70-90.
Presumably, then, Luke did not know any of the events reported in his Gospel firsthand; yet he likely wrote within the lifespan of some of the eyewitnesses. While no one argues that Luke was an eyewitness of the events in the Gospel, other lines of evidence may help us reconstruct the sort of information about Jesus that would have been available to Luke; the degree of freedom a writer like Luke may have felt to adapt information or to “fill in” what he lacked; and a first-century audience’s expectations regarding the nature of Luke’s truth claims.
This content is by Craig Keener, but edited and posted by Defenders Media.
For more, please check out Dr. Keener’s Between History and Spirit.
