St. Luke

On October 18 the Church honors Luke the Evangelist, author of the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles, the "beloved physician" of Paul's letters (Colossians 4:14) and the companion who travelled with him on his later journeys — the "we" passages of Acts 16, 20-21, 27-28 mark the sections where Luke's own voice enters the narrative. Tradition, recorded by Jerome in De viris illustribus around 392, holds that Luke died in Boeotia at the age of eighty-four; the Eastern tradition says he was martyred by being hanged from an olive tree, the Western that he died in peace.

Luke's relics have a remarkable modern story. His body was long held at Thebes in Boeotia and was translated to Constantinople under the Emperor Anastasius I in 357. When Constantinople fell in 1453 the body was thought lost — but the skull had been brought to Padua, where it rests in the Basilica of Santa Giustina. In 1992-1998, scientific examination of the lead coffin beneath the high altar of Santa Giustina — conducted by the University of Padua — established that the remains are those of a first-century man of Anatolian or Syrian origin, anatomically consistent with the skull, confirming the Padua body as Luke's. The Basilica of Santa Giustina at Padua, a short walk from the Basilica of St. Anthony, is the chief pilgrimage site of the Evangelist.

The Eastern tradition that Luke was the first to paint an icon of the Virgin Mary — making him the patron of iconographers — is first attested in the iconoclast period and cannot be traced to the first century. But the claim has shaped Marian pilgrimage for over a thousand years. The Salus Populi Romani icon at Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome, the Hodegetria of Constantinople (lost in 1453), the Smolensk icon of Russia, the Vladimir icon, the Kykkos icon of Cyprus, and the Black Madonna of Częstochowa are all traditionally ascribed to Luke's hand. Modern scholarship dates the surviving icons to the 6th-9th centuries, but the tradition itself made Luke the patron of Marian art, and the icons that bear his name — above all the Jasna Góra image — are among the most venerated in Christendom.

Luke's Gospel gives the Church its most vivid Marian narrative: the Annunciation at Nazareth, the Visitation, the Nativity at Bethlehem, the Presentation, the Finding in the Temple — scenes found only in Luke, scenes that the Church reads at those very feasts. His literary geography of the Holy Land makes Jerusalem the climactic city of his two-volume work: the Gospel ends in Jerusalem, Acts begins there, and it is from Jerusalem that the Gospel goes out to Rome, the city of Luke's final chapter and of the martyrdom of the apostles whose mission he recorded.