The Gospel According to Luke and The Acts of the Apostles

Before you read this, you should read my introduction to the question of authorship and dating of the New Testament.

Summary of the Tradition

Papias - No recorded comment.

Irenaeus - Luke recorded the teachings of Paul, after the deaths of Peter and Paul.  He wrote after the Hebrew Matthew, at around the same time as Mark, and before John.

Clement - Luke was written before Mark and John and at the same time as Matthew.  When taken with Clement's writing on Mark, this means that Peter and Paul were alive at the time.

Origen - Luke wrote the third Gospel for the Gentiles and it was praised by Paul.

Jerome - Luke was a physician from Antioch, and was highly literate in Greek.  He traveled with Paul in all his journeys.  Paul mentions Luke in (2 Cor. 8:18),  (Col. 4:14),  (2 Tim. 4:11)

Augustine - Luke edited Matthew and Mark, and wrote third.

Authorship

    First, we should say that Luke and The Acts of the Apostles were written by the same person.  This is indicted by the first several verses of each (Lk 1:1-4, Acts 1:1), as well as the uniform style throughout.  From the introduction to Luke, we know that he was not an eyewitness (first witness) of Jesus.  Also, he never names himself.  Greek scholars agree that the author of Luke was highly educated and wrote elegantly.  This translates into the English version.  Whether he was a historian, a physician, both, or something else continues to be debated and will probably never be resolved without ambiguity.

    We analyze the tradition much the same way that we analyzed the tradition for Mark.  We know that the traditions are independent because they do not agree completely.  They do all agree on the authorship, so many independent traditions point to the same answer.  The tradition's source must have started before Irenaeus and Clement, so it is early.  Because of this, we must accept that Luke is the author of the Gospel bearing his name, and that he was an associate of Paul.  This association is given more depth by the "we passages" of Acts.  Luke refers to Paul and himself as "we" three times (Acts 16:10, 20:5, 21:1-18)  We also have the references in the letters of Paul (Col 4:11b and Col 4:14, Philm. 24, 2 Tm. 4:11)  These passages all indicate that Luke was a close friend and traveling companion of Paul, which hangs together with the ancient tradition.  Therefore, we should agree that the Luke from the New Testament, is the author of Luke.  

    In addition to Paul, Luke used Q as a source, and also had access to oral traditions that only he records.

Dating

    Unfortunately, like Mark, the tradition does not allow us to nail down the date of writing.  Because of the two source hypothesis, we know that Luke was written after Mark (AD 55-70). Assuming that Mark and Luke were not in the same community, we should give Mark's Gospel some time to propagate to Luke and become a trusted document.  Therefore, the earliest that Luke could reasonably have been believed to have been written is about AD 60.  For Acts, we also must take into account that Acts ends its description of events in AD 62.  Therefore the earliest that Acts could have been written is about AD 65.  Like Mark, the tradition disagrees about whether Luke wrote before or after the deaths of Peter and Paul.  Again similar to Mark, this confusion should not have occurred if Luke wrote well after their deaths.  This implies an upper limit on the date of composition to be AD 75 for the gospel.  Because the tradition seems to refer to the gospel, and not to Acts, we should allow some extra time for Acts to be written and move the upper limit to AD 85.