Luke of Antioch, 15th Century, artist unknown
Brought to heal: Elaine Miles on Luke
‘Luke was sympathetic to anyone who was ill-treated or underappreciated.’
It is easy to think that Matthew, Mark, Luke and John clubbed together to tell us about the life and death of Jesus, and that it does not really matter which one you quote. But in fact they were very different characters, whose lives covered different stretches of history. They knew different areas where Jesus lived during his life, and had different interests.
So it is Luke who tells us the story of the Good Samaritan (retold in the Friend, 2 April). Luke was probably a Syrian, who would have been very much aware of the antagonism between the Jews and the Samaritans. Thus in Luke 9:52-3, when Jesus’ Galilean followers went to a Samaritan village to make arrangements for him on his way south, ‘the villagers would not have him because he was making for Jerusalem’.
There are several reasons for thinking that Luke was Syrian. One is that he says that a census was held when Quirinius was governor of Syria. Matthew thought it more important to mention Herod when giving a date. There is also the fact that Luke alone in Galilee mentions a Syrian called Naaman who had been healed. It is likely that Luke came to Galilee attracted by Jesus’ reputation as a healer, for Matthew tells us that Jesus ‘went round the whole of Galilee… curing whatever illness or infirmity there was among the people. His fame reached the whole of Syria, and sufferers from every kind of illness, racked with pain, possessed by devils, epileptic or paralysed, were all brought to him and he cured them’. Luke is the only one who mentions Lazarus apart from John, who probably told him the story; he also mentions Zachariah, who lost his power of speech when he heard that he was going to have a child after years without issue.
Luke was also sympathetic to anyone who was ill-treated or underappreciated. He apparently became friendly with John in Asia Minor when travelling with Paul, from Antioch, a Syrian city. If it was not for Luke we would not even know John’s full name, that he came of a well-to-do family, and that he had offered his house to the apostles after the crucifixion – the house to which Peter went to get in touch with the other disciples. John must have told him of this, also that there were two angels at the tomb. So it is Luke who tells us in Acts of the humiliations that John must have suffered as Paul repeatedly sent men to take authority over him in Ephesus. But in Colossians 4:14 he is to Paul in prison, ‘our dear friend Luke, the doctor’.
So Luke seems to have been a particularly sympathetic man, who seems to stress different aspects of Jesus’ work. John mentions Jesus treating the sick only when it was on the Sabbath, and although Matthew writes extensively of Jesus’ time in Galilee, the parables which he quotes concentrate on personal problems in the daily work of the farmers rather than their illnesses.
In the concentration on Jesus’ death we tend to forget that aspect of Jesus’ ministry; yet when Jesus gave instructions to his disciples on what they were to do as they went out ‘two by two’, they were to ‘heal the sick, awaken the dead, cleanse lepers, cast out devils…’
