The life and work of St. Paul

272 THE LIFE AND WORK OP ST. PA01.
He shared his journeys, his dangers, his shipwreck; he shared and cheered
his long imprisonments, first at Csesarea, then at Rome. More than all, he
became the biographer of the Great Apostle, and to his allegiance, to his
ability, to his accurate preservation of facts, is due nearly all that we know of
one who laboured more abundantly than all the Apostles, and to whom, more
than to any of them, the cause of Christ is indebted for its stability and its
dissemination.
Of Luke himself, beyond what we learn of his movements and of his cha-
racter from his own writings, we know but little. There is no reason to reject
the unanimous tradition that he was by birth an Antiochene, 1 and it is clear
from St. Paul's allusions that he was a Gentile convert, and that he had not
been circumcised. 2 That he was a close observer, a careful narrator, a man of
cultivated intellect, and possessed of a good Greek style, 3 we see from his two
books ; and they also reveal to us a character gentle and manly, sympathetic
and self-denying. The incidental allusion of St. Paul shows us that he was a
physician, and this allusion is singularly confirmed by his own turns of phrase. 1
The rank of a physician in those days was not in any respect so high as now
it is, and does not at all exclude the possibility that St. Luke may have been a
freedman but on this and all else which ; concerns him Scripture and tradition
leave us entirely uninformed. That he was familiar with naval matters ia
strikingly shown in his account of the shipwreck, and it has even been conjectured
that he exercised his art in the huge and crowded merchant vessels
which were incessantly coasting from point to point of the Mediterranean. 5
Two inferences, at any rate, arise from the way in which his name is intro-
duced : one that he had already made the acquaintance of St. Paul, perhaps
at Antioch ; the other that, thmigh he had some special
connexion with
Philippi and Troas, his subsequent close attachment to the Apostle in his
1 Euseb. H. E. iii. 4; Jcr. De Virr. Illustr. Such allusions as "Nicolas, a proselyte
of Antioch," and the mention of Christians important there, but otherwise anknown,
lend probability to this tradition (cf. xi. 20; xiii. 1, &c.). If we could attach any importance
to the reading of D in Acts xi. 28 ((rwearpa/j^ti/wv < w>v), it would show that
Luke had been at Antioch during the year when Paul and Barnabas were working there
before the famine. The name Lucas is an abbreviation of Lucaiius, as Silas of Silvanus ;
but the notion that they were the same person is preposterous.
2 Col. iv. 10, 11, 14.
3 As an incidental confirmation that he was a Gentile, Bishop "Wordsworth (on
1 Thess. ii. 9) notices that he says "day and night" (Acts ix. 24), whereas when he is
reporting the speeches of St. Paul (Acts xx. 31 ; xxvi. 7, in the Greek) he, like St. Paul
himself (1 Thess. iii. 10 ; 2 Thess. iii. 8 ; 1 Tim. v. 5, &c.), always says " night and day,"
in accordance with the Jewish notion that the night preceded the day. A more decisive
indication that Luke was a Gentile ia Acts i. 19, rfj iS(a Sut\tKT