Commentary on Luke

This volume has no such ambitious aim as that of being a final commentary on the Gospel according to S. Luke. The day is probably still far distant when any such commentary can be written. One of the difficulties with which the present commentator has had to contend is the impossibility of keeping abreast of all that is constantly appearing respecting the Synoptic Gospels as a whole and this or that detail in them. And the Third Gospel abounds in details which have elicited special treatment at the hands of a variety of scholars. Every quarter, indeed almost every month, brings its list of new books, some of which the writer wishes that he could have seen before his own words were printed. But to wait is but to prolong, if not to increase, one’s difficulties: it is waiting dum defluat amnis. Notes written and rewritten three or four times must be fixed in some form at last, if they are ever to be published. And these notes are now offered to those who care to use them, not as the last word on any one subject, but simply as one more stage in the long process of eliciting from the inexhaustible storehouse of the Gospel narrative some of those things which it is intended to convey to us. They will have done their work if they help someone who is far better equipped entirely to supersede them. 


Reasons are stated in the Introduction for regarding a study of S. Luke’s style as a matter of great interest and importance; and it is hoped that the analysis given of it there will be found useful. A minute acquaintance with it tells us something about the writer of the Third Gospel. It proves to us that he is identical with the writer of the Acts, and that the whole of both these books comes from his hand. And it justifies us in accepting the unswerving tradition of the first eight or nine centuries, that the writer of these two books was Luke the beloved physician.