Who Really Wrote Luke’s Gospel?

Here’s the second chapter (read chapter one here), from Paula Gott’s Plutarch’s Parable available for download, in its entirety, in the Reading Library under Essene Christianity, where she begins to describe how she discovered that Luke in the Gospels was really the philosopher and Pythagorean pundit: Plutarch.

CHAPTER TWO
BIOGRAPHIES
“LUKE”

I realized that Luke was a pseudonym for Plutarch just as I was wrapping up Gabriel’s Gift. Since the discovery was inadvertent and not the purpose for writing that book, it received only nominal mention in it. I did realize, when I discovered that virtually all the characters who appeared in Acts were historical or mythological characters who had appeared in Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, that I had been assigned another research and writing project. You’re now reading the results of that assignment.

Another clue that Plutarch was Luke was that his collection of works known as the Moralia contains teachings similar to those of Pythagoras and the Nazarenes and Essenes. The question was, could I support this deeply held “opinion” with data from other sources? And what about the two thousand year tradition that Luke was Paul’s beloved physician? Before I could even begin to present convincing proof that Plutarch was Luke, I first had to determine if there was any real proof that he was a physician who traveled with Paul.

All sources agree that the Church’s position has long been that Luke’s gospel was written by the person Paul named as the beloved physician at Colossians 4:14. Most people who have attempted to write a biographical history about Luke work under that assumption, and it is a deeply held conviction for most. But because Luke’s gospel all but screams in protest to that tradition, I kept looking for something that might suggest the tradition was not based on any supportable facts.

A most helpful web site, titled: From Jesus to Christ: The Story of the Storytellers. (original link has been replaced: original link of essays through PBS is no defunct.) It’s a collection of essays by various biblical and religious scholars.

The first essay is by Harold W. Attridge: The Lillian Claus Professor of New Testament Yale Divinity School. It begins with the following:

“Traditions report that Luke was a companion of Paul, a physician and therefore someone learned in Hellenistic literary and scientific culture. All of those are secondary traditions and most scholars view them as somewhat unreliable. What we can infer from the evidence of the Book of Acts and the third gospel is that the author was someone who was steeped in scripture, in the Septuagint, and who was aware of Hellenistic literary patterns, historiographical and novelistic. And these kinds of patterns certainly have an impact on his literary products.”

Attridge also reports that: “Luke was probably writing in the latter decades of the first century, probably in a thoroughly Hellenistic environment. Scholars speculate on whether the gospel was written in Antioch, which would have been a significant Hellenistic city, or in Asia Minor, in places like Ephesus or Smyrna. In either case, Luke would have been in touch with, and very heavily in dialogue with, Hellenistic culture broadly conceived.”

The same web site posted the following from an essay written by L. Michael White: Professor of Classics and Director of the Religious Studies Program University of Texas at Austin:

“Luke’s audience seems to be a much more cultured literary kind of audience. Luke’s Greek is the highest quality in style of anything in the new testament. It reads more like a novel in the Greek tradition, rather than Mark’s gospel, which has a kind of crude quality at times to the Greek grammar. So anyone on the street of a Greek city picking up Luke’s gospel would have felt at home with it if they were able to read good Greek.”

White also notes: “Jesus in Luke’s gospel comes across differently, he’s much more like a philosophic teacher, kind of like Socrates: he’s reasoned, he’s dispassionate, he’s a critic sometimes of society but he’s certainly concerned about the way his teachings bear on society. And in the end he dies very much like Socrates. The death of Jesus in Luke’s gospel is more like a martyr’s death, it’s much calmer, he goes inexorably to the cross, knowing that it is what must happen. Pilate isn’t at fault at all. Pilate tries to get rid of the case by sending Jesus away to Herod … Pilate isn’t the enemy of Jesus, he isn’t the bad guy. And once again this may reflect the kind of political concerns of Luke’s gospel. Jesus also isn’t a source of concern because he’s not a kind of rebel figure now, rather he’s a teacher, a philosopher, a social critic, a social reformer. He’s a good member of the Greco-Roman world.”

According to Kenneth S. Wuest, Quotes About the Bible and History, “Word Studies in the Greek New Testament,” (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans 1979) pp..52-54:

“Luke was a Greek, educated in the Greek schools, prepared for the medical practice which was held in high regard as a profession, and among the Greeks had attained to a place of eminence among the nations of the world. Greek doctors of medicine were in attendance upon many of the royal families of other nations. The Greeks were by nature and training, a race of
creative thinkers who pursued their studies in a scientific manner. Their sense of what really constituted scientific accuracy and method in the recording of history was well developed.”

“The writings of Luke . . . demonstrates Luke’s training as an historian.”

” . . . Luke arranges the facts of our Lord’s life in historical order as they occurred. The other Gospels do not claim to do that.”

” . . . Luke had the historian’s mind, a thing native to the educated Greek. Herodotus, the father of Greek history, exhibited the Greek determination to get at the truth no matter how much work it required . . . Sir William Ramsey said, ‘I regard Luke as the greatest historian who has ever lived, save only Thucydides.’ Thus we have no doubt but that Luke made a personal investigation of all the facts he had recorded. He interviewed every witness, visited every locality. If Mary was still alive, he, a doctor of medicine, investigated the story of the virgin birth by hearing from Mary’s own lips. And as Professor John A. Scott, a great Greek scholar has said, ‘You could not fool Doctor Luke.’”

So, even investigators who are clearly fundamentalist Christians, and who also believe the tradition that Luke was a physician, are forced to focus more on his “historian’s mind” and Greek heritage than on his practice of medicine. There is simply no evidence that he practiced medicine except for Paul’s reference to his beloved physician, and the fact that he was clearly quite well educated. The evidence is overwhelming, however, that he was a skilled writer, a historian, and a Greek, all of which describe Plutarch.

Another web site has posted An Introduction to the New Testament by Richard Heard, (Harper & Brothers, New York, 1950), prepared for Religion-Online by Ted and Winnie Brock.

“The tradition of Luke’s authorship of the gospel remained undisputed till modern times, and can be traced back to the second half of the second century AD. An early prologue to the gospel survives, which was perhaps written to stress the genuineness of the full gospel against a garbled version which Marcion, a second century heretic, edited to propagate his own views. In this prologue are given a number of details about Luke, which may well preserve much genuine tradition.

“Luke is a Syrian of Antioch, a doctor by profession, who was a disciple of apostles, and later followed Paul until his martyrdom. He served the Lord without distraction, unmarried, childless, and fell asleep at the age of 84 in Boeotia, full of the Holy Spirit.’”

As stated in the article, it is known that this supplemental information about Luke was furnished almost a century after Luke wrote his gospel, and only after Marcion, described as a “second century heretic,” became a significant competitor of the official Church. Marcion rejected the Old Testament and all gospels except Luke’s, but he altered Luke’s to exclude any reference to Old Testament texts. This prologue, then, was created by the official church to counter Marcion’s competing religion. This hardly qualifies as proof that Luke was a physician, and it is pure conjecture that the tradition ” . . . may well preserve much genuine tradition.”

This tradition has been adopted by many who repeat it without explanation of where and how it came to exist: “The reports of Luke’s life after Paul’s death are conflicting. Some early writers claim he was martyred, others say he lived a long life. Some say he preached in Greece, others in Gaul. The earliest tradition we have says that he died at Boeotia in 84 CE after settling in Greece to write his Gospel.“

But buried in this tradition is a piece of information that is of immense importance to my hypothesis that Plutarch was Luke. Whoever created this description of Luke in the second half of the second century must have known that he wrote his gospel while residing in the province of Boeotia. And coincidentally, Plutarch’s history includes the same province:

” . . . Plutarch was probably born in 46 in the Boeotian town Chaeronea.

“In the 90’s, Plutarch, who had seen much of the world, settled in his home town. When asked to explain his return to the province, he said that Chaeronea was in decline and that it would be even smaller if he did not settle there.”

Of course the province referred to here, Boeotia, is the very province in which church tradition says Luke settled to write his gospel! And the year of Luke’s traditional death, 84 ACE (although contradicted by other sources), reminded me of Anna’s age. My guess is that the church father who recognized what Plutarch had done, and realized that it was he who had written Luke-Acts, thought it might be clever to use Plutarch’s “birth code number,” 84, to allege his death in that year.

After Plutarch settled back in Boeotia to live out his life where he was born, a library was built near the sanctuary in the holy city of Delphi, where he served as one of the two permanent priests:

“In these years, a library was built near the sanctuary, and it is tempting to assume that Plutarch was behind this initiative.”

I believe that would be a safe assumption; Plutarch accumulated all the ancient myths, plays, and stories, including his own, in one place so that people could read Luke-Acts and figure out exactly what the truth was, and also figure out who wrote them.

The question, “Is there any real proof that Luke was a physician who traveled with Paul?” has, I think, been answered. All the church has to support the claim that Luke was Paul’s physician comes from Paul’s letter to the Colossians (4:14) and “church tradition,” created decades, if not centuries, later. And the “traditions” surrounding Luke do not always agree. No real proof exists.

Now I can set about to prove that Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus was Luke.

__________________________________________________

“PLUTARCH”

“Plutarch traveled widely, visiting central Greece, Sparta, Corinth, Patrae, Sardis, and Alexandria, but he made his normal residence at Chaeronea, where he held the chief magistracy and other municipal posts and directed a school with a wide curriculum in which philosophy, especially ethics, occupied the central place.

“He maintained close links with the Academy at Athens (he possessed Athenian citizenship) and with Delphi, where, from about 95, he held a priesthood for life; he may have won Trajan’s interest and support for the then-renewed vogue of the oracle.”

” . . . Plutarch’s philosophy was eclectic, with borrowings from the Stoics, Pythagoreans, and Peripatetic (but not the Epicureans) grouped around a core of Platonism. His main interest was in ethics, though he developed a mystical side, especially in his later years; he reveals that he had been initiated into the mysteries of the cult of Dionysus, and both as a Platonist and as an initiate he believed in the immortality of the soul . . .”

From Livius ” . . . Plutarch was probably born in 46 in the Boeotian town Chaeronea. His parents were wealthy people, and after 67 (ACE), their son was able to study philosophy, rhetoric, and mathematics at the Platonist Academy of Athens. However, Plutarch never became a Platonist puritan, but always remained open to influences from other philosophical schools, such as the Stoa and the school of Aristotle. It is likely that the young man was present when the Emperor Nero, who visited Greece at this time, declared the Greek towns to be free and autonomous.

“Because Plutarch was a rich man, he became one of the leading citizens of Chaeronea and he is known to have represented his town on several occasions. For example, he visited the governor of Achaea, and traveled to Alexandria and Rome (several times). Again, this proves that he was a rich man.

“Among his friends was Lucius Mestrius Florus, a consul during the reign of Vespasian, and Plutarch’s guide during his visit to Bedriacum, where two important battles had been fought in 69, the year of the four emperors. Mestrius also secured the Roman citizenship for Plutarch, whose official name now became Mestrius Plutarchus. At the end of his life, he was honored with the procuratorship of Achaea, an important office that he probably held only in name. His involvement in the Roman world, although from a carefully maintained distance, explains why he shows so much interest in the history of Rome.

“In the two first decades of the second century, he studied and wrote many books. According to an incomplete third-century catalogue, there were between 200 and 300 titles. These books brought him international fame, and the home of the famous author became a private school for young philosophers. He was often visited by Greeks and Romans, although not necessarily to study philosophy. The emperor Trajan may have been one of the visitors (winter 113/114?), and it may have been on this occasion that Trajan honored Plutarch with the ornaments of a consul, an important award. From now on, Plutarch was allowed to wear a golden ring and a white toga with a border made of purple.

“Plutarch died after his procuratorship, which was in 119, and before 125 . . .”

These various resources begin to paint pictures of Plutarch and Luke that contain an inordinate number of parallels: They were both city boys; both were wealthy; both were educated and had intimate knowledge about government and government positions. Both used the same unique phrases and words, and both used the same unique styles of writing. Only Luke mentions “Nazarenes” as being a “sect.” And the traditions and teachings of Nazarenes, based on OT descriptions of “nazirites,” describe the traditions and teachings of Pythagoras and Plato, both of whom Plutarch studied and imitated: he wore white, did not cut his hair, and was a vegetarian, among many other similarities