Christian apologist Michael Jones, who goes under the handle “Inspiring Philosophy,” has just put up a video arguing that the Gospel of Luke was written by a physician named Luke, who was a traveling companion of St. Paul, and who consulted eyewitnesses to Jesus’ life, death and resurrection before penning his Gospel. The video, which I’ve posted above, makes a very well-argued case. It may persuade some of my viewers that Luke did indeed base his account of Jesus’ life on the testimony of eyewitnesses with whom he had conversed. However, I was not so easily convinced, and after viewing the video, I posted some critical comments, which I’ve appended below. (For some strange reason, they appear to have been deleted.) I’ll let viewers decide who has the better case, but before I present mine, let me state candidly that I do not claim to be certain of my position. It is entirely possible that I am wrong. If I am, though, then I think the author of Luke’s Gospel has got a lot of explaining to do, about why he wrote his Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles the way he did. Without further ado, here’s my reply to Jones.

My reply to Inspiring Philosophy (Michael Jones) – I’ve added links and bolding:

Hi Michael. I’ve been watching your video, and I’d just like to make a few pertinent comments.

1. I’ve written a post titled, “Apologists vs. Paulogia and Kamil Gregor: Are the Gospels authentic and are they reliable?” (March 21, 2024) over at The Skeptical Zone. Here’s the link: http://theskepticalzone.com/wp/apologists-vs-paulogia-and-kamil-gregor-are-the-gospels-authentic-and-are-they-reliable/

It deals with many of your arguments, and it presents both sides of the case. I suggest you take a look at it. (A few of my points below are excerpted from my post.)

2. You mentioned the Anti-Marcionite Prologue as evidence of Luke’s authenticity. You omit to mention that Bruce Metzger dated it to the fourth century (see Bart Ehrman, “Forgery and Counterforgery,” Chapter 9, footnote 105). Wikipedia, in its article, “Anti-Marcionite prologues,” states: “All three [prologues] were originally dated to the late 2nd century AD, but are now considered of uncertain date. If they are based in part on the writings of Irenaeus and Hippolytus of Rome, they must be no earlier than the 3rd century.[5]”

Ref. [5]: Edward Earle Ellis (2002), “The Making of the New Testament Documents,” Brill Academic, pp. 359–360.

3. You also mentioned the Muratorian fragment. which you dated to around 150 A.D. However, Encyclopedia Britannica (see https://www.britannica.com/topic/Muratorian-Fragment) refers to it as ” a late 2nd-century-ce fragment of a Latin list of New Testament writings then regarded by Christians as canonical (scripturally authoritative).” Ehrman, in an online article titled, “The Four Gospels in the Muratorian Fragment” (November 20, 2014 – see https://ehrmanblog.org/the-four-gospels-in-the-muratorian-fragment/ ), notes that “the majority of scholars continue to think that the text contained in the Muratorian Fragment was originally composed at the end of the second century – say, roughly around the time of Irenaeus – and that it came from Rome (based on some of the references in the text).”

4. What that means is that the earliest attestation we have that Luke was the author of the third Gospel comes from around 180 A.D. However, proponents of the theory that Luke was based on eyewitness accounts of Jesus generally date Luke-Acts to around 60 A.D. That means that there’s a 120-year gap between Luke’s Gospel and its earliest attestation as being written by Luke. I put it to you that 120 years is plenty of time for legends and unreliable stories about the authorship of the third Gospel to arise.

5. You invoke the Principle of Charity as grounds for taking the traditional account of the authorship of Luke’s Gospel as correct. What this overlooks is that the traditional account is demonstrably wrong on other points. For instance, none of the early Church Fathers maintained that Mark’s Gospel was written first; the general consensus was that Matthew wrote the first Gospel. Yet if there’s one thing that contemporary scholars (including many evangelicals) are virtually unanimous on, it’s that Mark’s Gospel was written first. Also, traditional sources disagree as to whether Mark’s Gospel preceded Luke’s or the other way round. Given such fundamental disagreements and basic blunders, how can we trust them?

6. You make much of the argument from names in Luke’s Gospel, citing a 2024 paper by Luuk van de Weghe and Jason Wilson. You may be interested to know that Brian Blais and Kamil Gregor have written a reply to van de Weghe and Wilson, which is awaiting publication. Allow me to quote the following comment from Kamil Gregor, written three months ago on Reddit (“Why Name Popularity is a Good Test of Historicity” by Luuk van de Weghe and Jason Wilson (a peer reviewed Journal response to Kamil Gregor and Brian Blais)” at https://www.reddit.com/r/AcademicBiblical/comments/1d90z7j/why_name_popularity_is_a_good_test_of_historicity/ ):

“Also, in what turns out to be really unfortunate timing, our second article on this is finishing publication process with JSNT and should be out any day now. This gist is that we took two textual corpora that include a large number of first-century Palestinian Jewish named males, including many fictional ones (the Babylonian Talmud and a corpus consisting of the Clementine Homilies, the Acts of Pilate and Solomon of Bosra’s The Book of the Bee), and looked at whether statistical analysis of name popularity distributions is able discover that there are fictional named characters present. And the answer is no and in some respects, distributions of name popularity in these two corpora actually fit the general population better because they don’t have some of the disproportional representation that Gospels-Acts have. We replicated the same analysis we used in our first article so any methodological flaws with the first article might be present as well. You’ll just have to wait and see ;)”

You might also want to have a look at this article: “Allegorical Characters with Common Names in the Alexander Romance and the Gospels” (https://adversusapologetica.wordpress.com/2016/04/07/allegorical-characters-with-common-names-in-the-alexander-romance-and-the-gospels/ ) by Dr. Matthew Ferguson, who has a Ph.D. in classics. Ferguson points out that Greek popular-novelistic biographies, which were clearly allegorical, such as the Alexander Romance, contained names that were common in 5th-4th century B.C. Greece. That does not make them historical.

7. You present strong arguments that Luke was a physician. However, in an online post (“Why Was the Gospel of Luke Attributed to Luke?”, December 4, 2014, at https://ehrmanblog.org/why-was-the-gospel-of-luke-attributed-to-luke/ ), Bart Ehrman writes that “analyses of the language of Luke-Acts have shown that contrary to what used to be claimed, there is no higher incidence of “medical” language there than in other comparable texts (for example, the writings of Josephus).” Also, Luke is referred to as a physician in only one place in the New Testament: Colossians 4:14. There are excellent grounds for believing that Colossians is a forgery, as Bart Ehrman argues in “Forgery and Counterforgery.” Leaving aside the massive stylistic and vocabulary differences between Colossians and the seven letters generally agreed by critical scholars to have been written by Paul, there are important theological differences as well. Paul envisages the resurrection as a future event (Romans 6:1-6, 1 Corinthians 15, Philippians 3:11); Colossians, on the other hand, envisages the resurrection as already having taken place. In Ehrman’s words, believers are “already leading a kind of glorified existence in the present.” In Colossians 2:12-13 and 3:1, the writer tells believers: “you were raised [aorist] in him [Christ] through faith”; “God made you alive with him”; and “you have been raised up with Christ.” That’s quite different from Paul.

8. You mention the “we” passages in Acts. However, classical scholar Dr. Richard Carrier, in article, titled, “Do the ‘We’ Passages in Acts Indicate an Eyewitness Wrote It?” (https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/23477 ), argues that the author of Acts used the Odyssey as a model. According to Carrier, “it was a popular literary style to narrate sea adventures in the first person plural, even in the midst of narratives otherwise given in the third person, or even first person singular.”

9. You make much of the historical details that the author of Luke-Acts gets right. Allow me to quote from Dr. Richard Carrier’s blog article, “How We Know Acts Is a Fake History” (April 21, 2023 at https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/23447 ): “The only details Luke gets right a lot are details with no actual connection to Christianity (like ‘matters of Roman imperial and senatorial provinces,’ from geography to laws and administration) … So that he gets incidental details right that have themselves nothing to do with Christian history tells us nothing about his accuracy in the rest. Those could all be gotten from reference books in any public library, which were in every major city under the Empire.” In a response to a query of mine in the comments, Carrier adds that “there were tons of reference books and public acta and histories, a thousand times more than just the Antiquities… Hence, for example, much of his material for the Aegean region almost certainly comes from a historian of the Aegean.”

I should add that even if it turns out that Luke-Acts is historically reliable, that doesn’t necessarily make it reliable in its claims regarding supernatural miracles worked by Jesus and the early Christians in the first century.

10. Finally, you make no attempt to deal with passages where Acts clearly contradicts Paul, instead of dovetailing with his account. For example, Galatians 1:18 says that Paul didn’t visit Jerusalem until three years after his conversion experience, while Acts 9:23 says it was much sooner: after many days had gone by. This is but one of the many contradictions highlighted in Carrier’s article.

I think ten points is quite enough work for one evening, so I shall lay down my pen here. Over to you.