St. Luke the Evangelist

Luke, by birth a Syrian of Antioch and by profession a physician, was among the most learned of the apostolic generation — fluent in Greek of an elegant register and trained in the medicine of his day. Tradition makes him one of the Seventy, and in some accounts the unnamed companion of Cleopas on the road to Emmaus on the evening of the Resurrection. He was certainly the close companion of Paul on the second and third missionary journeys, the "we" of much of the Acts of the Apostles, and the one who attended the apostle through both his Roman imprisonments.

He wrote the third Gospel for a certain Theophilus — likely a Roman of some standing — with a preface that mentions careful inquiry into eyewitness accounts. From the Mother of God herself he is said to have received the infancy narratives: the Annunciation, the Visitation, the Magnificat, the song of Zacharias, the Nunc Dimittis of Symeon, the boy Jesus in the Temple. These appear in no other Gospel and bear the unmistakable mark of Mary's memory.

He continued his account into the Acts of the Apostles, the only history of the first generation of the Church that survives from the first century. Through his eyes we see Pentecost, the protomartyr Stephen, Paul on the Damascus road, Cornelius, the council of Jerusalem, the long road to Rome.

Beyond writing he is venerated as the first iconographer of the Church. Of the icon of the Theotokos he is said to have painted in her presence, several venerable copies survive (including the Vladimir and the Hodegetria), each tracing its lineage to his original. After the death of Paul he labored in Greece, founded churches in Boeotia, and reposed at last in peace at Thebes at the age of eighty-four. His relics rest in part there and in part at Padua. The Church keeps his feast on October 18 and remembers him in every Liturgy when the Gospel is read.