St Luke the Evangelist

Today is the Feast of St Luke, companion of St Paul and author of the Gospel according to St Luke and the Acts of the Apostles.

In Bithynia, the birthday of St. Luke the Evangelist. He died, filled
with the Holy Ghost, after having suffered much for the Name of Christ.
His relics were translated to Constantinople, and thence taken to Pavia.


From the Roman Martyrology

The Collect for his Feast, from the Roman Breviary

May Luke, thy holy Evangelist, O Lord, we beseech thee, intercede in our behalf, who for the honour of thy Name bore continually in his body the mortification of the Cross. Through.

The Lessons for his Feast, from the Roman Breviary

Lesson iv:

The Lesson is taken from the Book on Ecclesiastical Writers, written by St. Jerome the Priest

Cap. 7

Lesson iv

Luke was a physician of Antioch, who, as appeareth from his writings, knew the Greek language. He was a follower of the Apostle Paul, and his fellow-traveller in all his wanderings. He wrote a Gospel, whereof the same Paul saith : We have sent with him the brother, whose praise is in the Gospel throughout all the Churches. Of him, he writeth unto the Colossians, Luke, the beloved physician greeteth you. And again, unto Timothy, Only Luke is with me. He also published another excellent book intituled The Acts of the Apostles, wherein the history is brought down to Paul's two-years sojourn at Rome, that is to say, until the fourth year of Nero, from which we gather that it was at Rome that the said book was composed.

Lesson v

The silence of Luke is one of the reasons why we reckon among Apocryphal books The Acts of Paul and Thecla, and the whole story about the baptism of Leo. For why should the fellow-traveller of the Apostle, who knew other things, be ignorant only of this? At the same time there is against these documents the statement of Tertullian, almost a contemporary writer, that the Apostle John convicted a certain Priest in Asia, who was a great admirer of the Apostle Paul, of having written them, and that the said Priest owned that he had been induced to compose them through his admiration for Paul, and that he was deposed in consequence. There are some persons who suspect that when Paul in his Epistles useth the phrase, According to my Gospel, he meaneth the Gospel written by Luke.

Lesson vi

Howbeit, Luke learned his Gospel not from the Apostle Paul only, who had not companied with the Lord in the flesh, but also from other Apostles, as himself declareth at the beginning of his work, where he saith : They delivered them unto us, which from the beginning were eye-witnesses and ministers of the word. According to what he had heard, therefore, did he write his Gospel. As to the Acts of the Apostles, he composed them from his own personal knowledge. He was never married. He lived eighty-four years. He is buried at Constantinople, whither his bones were brought from Achaia in the twentieth year of Constantine, together with the relicks of the Apostle Andrew.

His biography and an introduction to his Gospel from the Catholic Encyclopædia.

From Wikipedia.

From Ted Hewitt's Group.

From Tradition in Action.