In the midst of what has been called the "higher criticism" of the Bible in recent times, one of the long accepted traditions that has been most strenuously assailed and, indeed, in the minds of many scholars, seemed, for a time at least, quite discredited, was that St. Luke the Evangelist, the author of the Third Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles, was a physician. Distinguished authorities in early Christian apologetics have declared that the pillars of primitive Christian history are the genuine Epistles of St. Paul, the writings of St. Luke, and the history of Eusebius. It is quite easy to understand, then, that the attack upon the authenticity of the writings usually assigned to St. Luke, which in many minds seemed successful, has been considered of great importance. In the very recent time there has been a decided reaction in this matter. This has come, not so much from Roman Catholics, who have always clung to the traditional view, and whose great Biblical students have been foremost in the support of the previously accepted opinion, but from some of the most strenuous of the German higher critics, who now appreciate that destructive, so-called higher criticism went too far, and that the traditional view not only can be maintained, but is the only opinion that will adequately respond to all the new facts that have been found, and all the recently gathered information with regard to the relations of events in the olden time.

By far the most important contribution to the discussion in recent years came not long since from the pen of Professor Adolph Harnack, the professor of church history in the University of Berlin. Professor Harnack's name is usually cited as that of one of the most destructive of the higher critics. His recent book, however, "Luke the Physician,"[33] is an entire submission to the old-fashioned viewpoint that the writer of the Third Gospel and of the Acts of the Apostles was a Greek fellow-worker of St. Paul, who had been in company for years with Mark and Philip and James, and who had previously been a physician, and was evidently well versed in all the medical lore of that time. Harnack does not merely concede the old position. As might be expected, his rediscussion of the subject clinches the arguments for the traditional view, and makes it impossible ever to call it in question again. It is easy to understand how important are such admissions when we recall how much this traditional view has been assailed, and how those who have held it have been accused of old-fogyism and lack of scholarship, and unwarranted clinging to antiquated notions just because they thought they were of faith, and how, lacking in true scholarship, seriously hampering genuine investigation, such conservatism has been declared to be.

The question of Luke's having been a physician is an extremely valuable one, and no one in our time is better fitted by early training and long years of study to elucidate it than Professor Harnack. He began his excursions into historical writing years ago, as I understand, as an historian of early Christian medicine. Some of his works on medical conditions just before and after Christ are quoted confidently by the distinguished German medical historians. From this department he graduated into the field of the higher criticism. He is eminently in a position, therefore, to state the case with regard to St. Luke fully, and to indicate absolutely the conclusions that should be drawn from the premises of fact, writings, and traditions that we have. He does so in a very striking way. Perhaps no better example of his thoroughly lucid and eminently logical mode of argumentation is to be found than the paragraph in which he states the question. It might well be recommended as an example of terse forcefulness and logical sequence that deserves the emulation of all those who want to write on medical subjects. If we had more of these characteristic qualities of Harnack's style, our medical literature, so called, would not need to occupy so many pages of print as it does—yet would say more. Here it is:

The importance of the concession that Luke was a physician should be properly appreciated. His whole gospel is written from that standpoint. For him the Saviour was the healer, the good physician who went about curing the ills of the body, while ministering to people's souls. He has more accounts of miracles of healing than any of the other Evangelists. He has taken certain of the stories of the other Evangelists who were eye-witnesses, and when they were told in naÏve and popular language that obscured the real condition that was present, he has retold the story from the physician's standpoint, and thus the miracle becomes clearer than ever. In one case, where Mark has a slur on physicians, Luke eliminates it. In a number of cases the correction of Mark's popular language in the description of ailments is made in terms that could not have been used except by one thoroughly versed in the Greek medical terminology of the times. As a matter of fact, there seems to be no doubt now that Luke had been, before he became an Evangelist, a practising physician in Malta of considerable experience. His testimony, then, to the miracles is particularly valuable as almost a medical eye-witness.

In medical science, St. Luke's time was by no means barren of knowledge. The Alexandrian school of medicine had done some fine work in its time. It was the first university medical school in the world's history, and there dissection was first practised regularly and publicly for the sake of anatomy, and even the vivisection of criminals who were supplied by the Ptolemei for human physiology, was a part of the school curriculum. A number of important discoveries in brain anatomy are attributed to Herophilus, after whom the torcular herophili within the skull is named, and who invented the term calamus scriptorius for certain appearances in the fourth ventricle. His colleague, Erasistratus, the co-founder of this school at Alexandria, did work in pathological anatomy, and laid the foundation for serious study there. For three centuries there is some good worker, at or in connection with Alexandria, whose name is preserved for us in the history of medicine. Other Greek schools of medicine in the East, as, for instance, that of Pergamos, also did excellent work. Galen is the great representative of this school, and he came in the century after St. Luke. A physician educated in Greek medicine at that time, then, would be in an excellent position to judge critically of the miracles of healing of the Christ, and it would seem to have been providential that Luke was called for this purpose.

The evidence for his membership of our profession will doubtless be interesting to all physicians. Some of the distinctive passages in which Luke's familiarity with medical terms to such an extent that to express his meaning he found himself compelled to use them, will appeal at once to these, for whom such terms are part of everyday speech. The use of the word hydropikos, which is not to be met with anywhere else in the New Testament, nor in the non-medical Greek literature of that time, though the word is of frequent occurrence as a designation for a person suffering from dropsy (and always, as in Luke, the adjective for the substantive), in Hippocrates, Dioscorides, and Galen is a typical example.

Where such vague terms as paralyzed occur Luke does not use the familiar word, but the medical term that meant stricken with paralysis, indicating not any inability to use the limbs, but such a one as was due to a stroke of apoplexy. We who, as physicians, have heard of so many cures of paralysis from our friends, the Eddyites, are prone to ask, as the first question, what sort of a paralysis it was. Luke made inquiries from men who were eye-witnesses, and then has described the scene with such details as convinced him as a physician of the reality of the miracle, and his description was meant to carry conviction to the minds of others.

Occasionally St. Luke uses words which only a physician would be likely to know at all. That is to say, even a man reasonably familiar with medical terminology and medical literature would not be likely to know them unless he had been technically trained. One of these is the word sphudron, a word which is only medical, and is not to be found even in such large Greek lexicons of ordinary words as that of Passow. Sphudron is the anatomical term of the GrÆco-Alexandrian school for the condyles of the femur. Galen and other medical authors use it, and Luke, in giving the details of the story of the lame man cured, in the third chapter of the Acts, seventh verse, selects it because it exactly expresses the meaning he wished to convey. In this story there are a number of added medical details. These are all evidently arranged so as to give the full medical significance to the miracle. For instance, the man had been lame from birth, literally from the womb of his mother. At this time he was forty years of age, an age at which the spontaneous cure of such an ailment or, indeed, any cure of it, could scarcely be expected, if, during the preceding time, there had been no improvement.

In the story of the cure of Saul's blindness Luke says in the Acts that his blindness fell from him like scales. The figure is a typically medical one. The word for fall that is used is, as was pointed out by Hobart ("Medical Language of St. Luke," Dublin, 1882), exactly the term that is used for the falling of scales from the body. The term for scales is the specific designation of the particles that fall from the body during certain skin diseases or after certain of the infectious fevers, as in scarlet fever. Hippocrates and Galen have used it in many places. It is distinctively a medical word. In the story of the vision of St. Peter, told also in the Acts, the word ecstasis, from which we derive our word ecstasy, is used. This is the only word St. Luke uses for vision and he alone uses it. This term is of constant employment in a technical sense in the medical writers of St. Luke's time and before it. When the other evangelists talk of lame people they use the popular term. This might mean anything or nothing for a physician. Luke uses one of the terms that is employed by physicians when they wish to indicate that for some definite reason there is inability to walk.

In the story of the Good Samaritan there are some interesting details that indicate medical interest on the part of the writer. It is Luke's characteristic story and a typical medical instance. He employs certain words in it that are used only by medical writers. The use of oil and wine in the treatment of the wounds of the stranger traveller was at one time said to indicate that it could not have been a physician who wrote the story, since the ancients used oil for external applications in such cases but not wine. More careful search of the old masters of medicine, however, has shown that they used oil and wine not only internally but externally. Hippocrates, for instance, has a number of recommendations of this combination for wounds. It is rather interesting to realize this, and especially the wine in addition to the oil, because wine contains enough alcohol to be rather satisfactorily antiseptic. There seems no doubt that wounds that had been bathed in wine and then had oil poured over them would be likely to do better than those which were treated in other ways. The wine would cleanse and at least inhibit bacterial growth. The subsequent covering with oil would serve to protect the wound to some degree from external contamination.

Sometimes there is an application of medical terms to something extraneous from medicine that makes the phrase employed quite amusing. For instance, when Luke wants to explain how they strengthened the vessel in which they were to sail he describes the process by the term which was used in medical Greek to mean the splinting of a part or at least the binding of it up in such a way as to enable it to be used. The word was quite a puzzle to the commentators until it was pointed out that it was the familiar medical term, and then it was easy to understand. Occasionally this use of a medical term gives a strikingly accurate significance to Luke's diction. For instance, where other evangelists talk of the Lord looking at a patient or turning to them, Luke uses the expression that was technically employed for a physician's examination of his patient, as if the Lord carefully looked over the ailing people to see their physical needs, and then proceeded to cure them. Manifestly in Luke's mind the most interesting phase of the Lord's life was His exhibition of curative powers, and the Saviour was for him the divine healer, the God physician of bodies as well as of souls.

There are many little incidents which he relates that emphasize this. For instance, where St. Mark talks about the healing of the man with a withered hand, St. Luke adds the characteristic medical note that it was the right hand. When he tells of the cutting off of the ear of the servant of the high priest in the Garden of Olives St. Luke takes the story from St. Mark, but adds the information that would appeal to a physician that it was the right ear. Moreover, though all four evangelists record the cutting off of the ear, only St. Luke adds the information that the Lord healed it again. It is as if he were defending the kindly feelings of the Divine Physician and as if it would have been inexcusable had He not exerted His miraculous powers of healing on this occasion. It is St. Luke, too, who has constantly distinguished between natural illnesses and cases of possession. This careful distinction alone would point to the author of the third gospel and the Acts as surely a physician. As it is it confirms beyond all doubt the claim that the writer of these portions of the New Testament was a physician thoroughly familiar with all the medical writings of the time and probably a physician who had practised for a long time.

Certain miracles of healing are related only by St. Luke as if he realized better than any of the other evangelists the evidential value that such instances would have for future generations as to the divinity of the personage who worked them. The beautiful story of the raising from death of the son of the widow of Nain is probably one of the oftenest quoted passages from St. Luke. It is a charming bit of literature. While it suggests the writer physician it makes one almost sure that the other tradition according to which St. Luke was also a painter must be true. The scene is as picturesque as it can be. The Lord and His Apostles and the multitudes coming to the gate of the little city just as in the evening sun the funeral cortÈge with the widow burying her only son came out of it. The approach of the Lord to the weeping mother, His command to the dead son to arise, and the simple words, "and he gave him back to his mother," constitute as charming a scene as a painter ever tried to visualize. Besides this, Luke alone has the story of the man suffering with dropsy and the woman suffering from weakness. The intensely picturesque quality of many of these scenes that he describes so vividly would indeed seem to place beyond all doubt the old tradition that he was an artist as well as a physician.

It is interesting to realize that it is to Luke alone that we owe the account of the well-known message sent by Christ Himself to John the Baptist when John sent his disciples to inquire as to His mission. After describing His ministry He said: "Go and relate to John what you have heard and seen: the blind see, the lame walk, the deaf hear, the lepers are made clean, the dead rise again, to the poor the Gospel is preached." To no one more than to a physician would that description of His mission appeal as surely divine.

To those who care to follow the subject still further, and above all, to read opinions given before the reversal of the verdict of the higher criticism on the Lucan writings, indeed before ever that trial was brought, there is much in "HorÆ LucanÆ—A Biography of St. Luke," by Henry Samuel Baynes (Longmans, 1870), that will surely be of interest. He has some interesting quotations which show how thoroughly previous centuries realized all the force of modern arguments. For instance, the following paragraph from Dr. Nathaniel Robinson, a Scotch physician of the eighteenth century, will illustrate this. Dr. Robinson said:

It is even interesting to realize that St. Luke's tendency to use medical terms has been of definite value in determining the question whether both the third gospel and the Acts of the Apostles are by the same man. They have been attributed to St. Luke traditionally, but in the higher criticism some doubt has been thrown on this and an elaborate hypothesis of dual authorship set up. It has been asserted that it is very improbable on extrinsic grounds that they were both written by one hand and certain intrinsic evidence, changes in the mode of narration, especially the use of the first personal pronoun in the plural in certain passages, has been pointed to as making against single authorship. This tendency to deny old-time traditions of authorship with regard to many classical writings was a marked characteristic of the early part of the nineteenth century, but the close of the century saw practically all of these denials discredited. The nineteenth century ushered in studies of Homer, with the separatist school perfectly confident in their assertion that the Iliad and the Odyssey were not by the same person, and even that the Iliad itself was the work of several hands.

At the beginning of the twentieth century we are quite as sure that both the Iliad and Odyssey were written by the same person and that the separatists were hurried into a contrary decision not a little by the feeling of the sensation that such a contradiction of previously accepted ideas would create. This is a determining factor in many a supposed novel discovery, that it is hard always to discount sufficiently. A thing may be right even though it is old, and most new discoveries, it must not be forgotten, that is, most of those announced with a great blare of trumpets, do not maintain themselves. The simple argument that the separatists would have to find another poet equal to Homer to write the other poem has done more than anything else to bring their opinion into disrepute. It is much easier to explain certain discrepancies, differences of style, and of treatment of subjects, as well as other minor variants, than to supply another great poet. Most of the works of our older literatures have gone through a similar trial during the over-hasty superficially critical nineteenth century. The Nibelungenlied has been attributed to two or three writers instead of one. The Cid, the national epic of Spain, and the Arthur Legends, the first British epic, have been at least supposed to be amenable to the same sort of criticism. In every case, scholars have gone back to the older traditional view of a single author. The phases of literary and historic criticism with regard to Luke's writings are, then, only a repetition of what all our great national classics have gone through from supercilious scholarship during the past hundred years.

It is not surprising, then, that there should be dual or even triple ascriptions of authorship for various portions of the Scriptures, and Luke's writings have on this score suffered as much or more even than others, with the possible exception of Moses. It is now definitely settled, however, that the similarities of style between the Acts and the third gospel are too great for them to have come from two different minds. This is especially true, as pointed out by Harnack, in all that regards the use of medical terms. The writer of the Acts and the writer of the third gospel knew Greek from the standpoint of the physician of that time. Each used terms that we find nowhere else in Greek literature except among medical writers. What is thus true for one critical attack on Luke's reputation is also true in another phase of recent higher criticism. It has been said that certain portions of the Acts which are called the "we" portions because the narration changes in them from the third to the first person were to be attributed to another writer than the one who wrote the narrative portions. Here, once more, the test of the medical words employed has decided the case for Luke's sole authorship. It is evidently an excellent thing to be able to use medical terms properly if one wants to be recognized with certainty later on in history for just what one's business was. It has certainly saved the situation for St. Luke, though there may be some doubt as to the real force of objections thus easily overthrown.

It is rather interesting to realize that many scholars of the present generation had allowed themselves to be led away by the German higher criticism from the old tradition with regard to Luke as a physician and now will doubtless be led back to former views by the leader of German biblical critics. It shows how much more distant things may influence certain people than those nearer home—how the hills are green far away. Harnack confesses that the best book ever written on the subject of Luke as a physician, the one that has proved of most value to him, and that he still recommends everyone to read, was originally written in English. It is Hobart's "Medical Language of St. Luke,"[34] written more than a quarter of a century before Harnack. The Germans generally had rather despised what the English were doing in the matter of biblical criticism, and above all in philology. Yet now the acknowledged coryphÆus of them all, Harnack, not only admits the superiority of an old-time English book, but confesses that it is the best statement of the subject up to the present time, including his own. He constantly quotes from it, and it is evident that it has been the foundation of all of his arguments. It is not the first time that men have fetched from afar what they might have got just as well or better at home.

Harnack has made complete the demonstration, then, that the third gospel and the Acts were written by St. Luke, who had been a practising physician. In spite of this, however, he finds many objections to the Luke narratives and considers that they add very little that is valuable to the contemporary evidence that we have with regard to Christ. He impairs with one hand the value of what he has so lavishly yielded with the other. He finds inconsistencies and discrepancies in the narrative that for him destroy their value as testimony. A lawyer would probably say that this is that very human element in the writings which demonstrates their authenticity and adds to their value as evidence, because it shows clearly the lack of any attempt to do anything more than tell a direct story as it had come to the narrator. No special effort was made to avoid critical objections founded on details. It was the general impression that was looked for.

Sir William Ramsay, in his "Luke the Physician and Other Studies in the History of Religion" (New York: Armstrong and Sons, 1908), has answered Harnack from the side of the professional critic with much force. He appreciates thoroughly the value of Professor Harnack's book, and above all the reactionary tendency away from nihilistic so-called higher criticism which characterized so much of German writing on biblical themes in the nineteenth century. He says (p. 7): "This [book of Harnack's] alone carries Lukan criticism a long step forwards, and sets it on a new and higher plane. Never has the unity and character of the book been demonstrated so convincingly and conclusively. The step is made and the plane is reached by the method which is practised in other departments of literary criticism, viz., by dispassionate investigation of the work and by discarding fashionable a priori theories."

The distinguished English traveller and writer on biblical subjects points out, however, that in detail many of Harnack's objections to the Lukan narratives are due to insufficient consideration of the circumstances in which they were written and the comparative significance of the details criticised. He says, "Harnack lays much stress on the fact that inconsistencies and inexactnesses occur all through Acts. Some of these are undeniable; and I have argued that they are to be regarded in the same light as similar phenomena in the poem of Lucretius and in other ancient classical writers, viz., as proofs that the work never received the final form which Luke intended to give it, but was still incomplete when he died. The evident need for a third book to complete the work, together with those blemishes in expression, form the proof."

Ramsay's placing of Harnack's writing in general is interesting in this connection. (P. 8) "Professor Harnack stands on the border between the nineteenth and twentieth century. His book shows that he is to a certain degree sensitive of and obedient to the new spirit; but he is only partially so. The nineteenth century critical method was false, and is already antiquated....

"The first century could find nothing real and true that was not accompanied by the marvellous and the 'supernatural.' The nineteenth century could find nothing real and true that was. Which view was right and which was wrong? Was either complete? Of these two questions, the second alone is profitable at the present. Both views were right—in a certain way of contemplating; both views were wrong—in a certain way. Neither was complete. At present, as we are struggling to throw off the fetters which impeded thought in the nineteenth century, it is most important to free ourselves from its prejudices and narrowness."

He adds (pp. 26 and 27): "There are clear signs of the unfinished state in which this chapter was left by Luke; but some of the German scholar's criticisms show that he has not a right idea of the simplicity of life and equipment that evidently characterized the jailer's house and the prison. The details which he blames as inexact and inconsistent are sometimes most instructive about the circumstances of this provincial town and Roman colonia.

"But it is never safe to lay much stress on small points of inexactness or inconsistency in any author. One finds such faults even in the works of modern scholarship if one examines them in the microscopic fashion in which Luke is studied here. I think I can find them in the author [Harnack] himself. His point of view sometimes varies in a puzzling way."

As a matter of fact, Harnack, as pointed out by Ramsay, was evidently working himself more and more out of the old conclusion as to the lack of authenticity of the Lucan writings into an opinion ever more and more favorable to Luke. For instance, in a notice of his own book, published in the Theologische Literaturzeitung, "he speaks far more favorably about the trustworthiness and credibility of Luke, as being generally in a position to acquire and transmit reliable information, and as having proved himself able to take advantage of his position. Harnack was gradually working his way to a new plane of thought. His later opinion is more favorable."

Ramsay also points out that Professor Giffert, one of our American biblical critics, had felt compelled by the geographical and historical evidence to abandon in part the older unfavorable criticism of Luke and to admit that the Acts is more trustworthy than previous critics allowed. Above all, "he saw that it was a living piece of literature written by one author." In a word, Luke is being vindicated in every regard.

Some of the supposed inaccuracies of Luke vanish when careful investigation is made. Some of his natural history details, for instance, have been impugned and the story of the viper that "fastened" itself upon St. Paul in Malta has been cited as an example of a story that would not have been told in that way by a man who knew medicine and the related sciences in Luke's time. Because the passage illustrates a number of phases of the discussion with regard to Luke's language I make a rather long quotation from Ramsay:

In a word, then, the whole question as to Luke's authority as a writer, as an eye-witness of many things, and as the relator of many others with regard to which he had obtained the testimony of eye-witnesses is fully vindicated. Twenty years ago many scholars were prone to doubt this whole question. Ten years ago most of them were convinced that the Luke traditions were not justified by recent investigation. Now we have come back once more to the complete acceptance of the old traditions.

Perhaps the most unfortunate characteristic of much nineteenth-century criticism in all departments, even those strictly scientific, was the marked tendency to reject previous opinions for new ones. Somehow men felt themselves so far ahead of old-time writers and thinkers that they concluded they must hold opinions different from their ancestors. In nearly every case the new ideas that they evolved by supposedly newer methods are not standing the test of time and further study. There had been a continuous belief in men's minds, having its basis very probably on a passage in one of St. Peter's Epistles, that the earth would dissolve by fire. This was openly contradicted all during the nineteenth century and the time when the earth would freeze up definitely calculated by our mathematicians. Now after having studied radioactivity and learned from the physicist that the earth is heating up and will eventually get too hot for life, we calmly go back to the old Petrine declaration. Some of the most distinguished of the German biologists of the present day, such men as Driesch and others, calmly tell us that the edifice erected by Darwin will have to come down because of newly discovered evidence, and indeed some of them go so far as to declare that Darwinism was a crude hypothesis very superficial in its philosophical aspects and therefore acceptable to a great many people who, because it was easy to understand and was very different from what our fathers had believed, hastened to accept it. Nothing shows the necessity for being conservative in the matter of new views in science or ethics or religion more than the curious transition state in which we are with regard to many opinions at the present time, with a distinct tendency toward reaction to older views that a few years ago were thought quite untenable. We are rather proud of the advance that we are supposed to be making along many lines in science and scholarship, and yet over and over again, after years of work, we prove to have been following a wrong lead and must come back to where we started. This has been the way of man from the beginning and doubtless will continue. The present generation are having this curious regression that follows supposed progress strongly emphasized for them.