0swy

Is there much disintereted (i.e. non-Christian) evidence to identify who Luke was, when he lives and what he wrote? How important is he in establishing the case for an historical Jesus?

show_no_mercy

There's an article at the II archives that posits the case that Luke knew Josephus and copied off of him.

http://www.infidels.org/library/mode...djosephus.html

If Luke also wrote Acts, then it seems that he didn't know Paul personally since he contradicts a lot of the information that Paul writes about himself in his epistles.

gstafleu

Nope, no evidence. He is no more important than Mark for establishing the case for an HJ.

Gerard Stafleu

Ben C Smith

There is hardly any non-Christian evidence for any specific, named Christians during the first couple of centuries.

I have the (necessarily Christian) evidence for Luke, such as it is, on my gospel of Luke page. What must also be considered is the internal evidence, including (A) the prologues to Luke and Acts, (B) the we passages and extent of narration in Acts, and (C) the dominical predictions in Luke.

Ben.

aa5874

The Christian evidence for Luke as an author is not found anywhere in the NT. The word or name "Luke" is found only in 3 times and no mention is made that the character wrote any Gospel or Acts.

The prologues to Luke and Acts do not help in anyway to determine who wrote either gLuke or Acts of the Apostles, and further the prologues may even indicate that there were two different authors since the author of gLuke could have simply given his name as the author instead of twice repeating the name of some Theophilus as a some sort of clue or code.

The prologues may have been written to dupe the readers into thinking that both Gluke and Acts were written by the same person.


The information from Clement, Papias, Eusebius, Tertullian, Irenaeus, Origen and other church writers with respect to gLuke is not really credible, or cannot be trusted, since it would appear they were not aware that gLuke was written long after "Paul" was dead, and that there more than one person using the name "Paul".

The church writers were also of the erroneous opinion, and did propagate mistakenly or deliberately that "Paul" was aware of the gospel called "Luke", their chronology is a disater.

And the "we" passages have no real value as evidence since the author is unknown and the character called "Paul" could mean anyone alive in antiquity.

Ben C Smith

Which exact information from Papias concerning the gospel of Luke do you find incredible or unable to be trusted?

Ben.

PS: Do you ever tire of preaching your gospel of unknowing?

aa5874

Well, just tell me what is credible about Papias and gLuke.

And the passage should read "Any information from ....Papias....with respect to gLuke is really not credible or cannot be trusted.

Papias is just not credible, his chronology and authorship for the Synoptics is bogus.

S.C.Carlson

If you had followed Ben's link, you might have realized that Papias doesn't say anything about gLuke's authorship. But no, you decided to "double down."

Stephen

aa5874

Ben's link may not be that helpful.

Now, if you read Church History by Eusebius it would be realised that Papias's information is bogus. Papias is not credible.