Whereas many have set their hand to organize a narration about the deeds accomplished among us, as handed down to us from the beginning by those who had been eyewitnesses and underoarsmen of the word, it occurred also to me, having closely followed it all from the beginning, to write it exactly in order to you, honorable Theophilos, that you may recognize the sureness of the accounts concerning which you were taught.
*****
So the first account I composed about everything, O Theophilos, that Jesus began to do and to teach, up to that day when, having commanded through Holy Spirit the apostles he had selected, he was raised up; and to them he exhibited himself alive after his suffering, with many signs, being seen by them for forty days, and speaking about the realm of God.
[Luke 1:1-4; Acts 1:1-3; both my rough translations.]
Today is the feast of St. Luke the Evangelist. 'Lucas' was not a common name, but it seems to have been a nickname, a shortened form of 'Lucanus'; several people associated with St. Paul have shortened-form versions of Greek names, so it may well have been a Pauline quirk to give people nicknames. In Colossians 4:14, he is called ho iatros ho agapetos, the dear/beloved healer; this could mean any number of things, but traditionally it has been interpreted literally, as meaning that Luke was a physician, and very possibly the official or semi-official physician attached to St. Paul's missionary group. He is also mentioned in Philemon 1:24, as a fellow-worker of St. Paul, and in 2 Timothy 4:11 as the only one of the group still with Paul while Paul was in prison. He has sometimes been identified with the "brother famous among all the churches for proclaiming the gospel" in 2 Corinthians 8:18, although this also sometimes thought to have been Barnabas.
According to a longstanding tradition, he was one of the seventy-two disciples sent by Jesus on missionary journeys, as mentioned in Luke 10, which is why he could say, as he does at the beginning of the Gospel, that he had closely followed everything from the beginning. He is traditionally considered to have been a Gentile from Antioch; one reason for the thinking that the Gentile tradition is right is that the mention in Colossians explicitly names Aristarchus, Mark, and Justus as the only Jewish co-workers with Paul at the time. It is still possible, however, that Paul specifically means Judeans, and that Luke was ethnically a Jew, of Hellenistic, rather than Judean, family. (This would make his being a member of the Seventy more probable.) And of course he is the traditional author of both the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles, which constitute a little over one-quarter of the entire New Testament.. Famously, the Greek of both works is quite good -- not fancy, but clearly the work of someone who was very familiar with the language not just as spoken but as written. It's easy in our relatively literate age to forget that in most ages for most languages the spoken language and the written language can diverge quite a bit; several of the New Testament authors seem to have had a mostly spoken grasp of Greek, the author of the Gospel and Acts was clearly familiar with both. He effortlessly, and quite smoothly, alludes to a wide selection of the more widely accessible Greek literature. Insofar as we get a sense of him from his writings, he tends to be quite accurate, even meticulous, about things like cities and official titles; urbane and urbanite, I suppose.
The tradition suggests that he died of old age near Thebes, somewhere after about AD 84. It's unclear whether he was martyred; stories that say he was, say he was hanged, but other stories seem to depict him as dying of old age. He is a patron saint of historians, of course, but also patron saint of painters; there is an old legend that he painted a picture of the Virgin Mary. In any case, it is true that the Gospel of Luke has been perhaps the most favored source for paintings of the Life of Christ, so there is more than one reason to associate him with painting.
