Luke the Evangelist

Luke is the saint who worked in two mediums. He wrote the third of the four gospels and its sequel, the book of the Acts, and set down more of the New Testament than any other single writer. Then a later tradition gave him a second craft, the brush, and called him the first person to paint an icon of the Virgin. The evangelist of the word became the patron of the image, and every iconographer since has worked under his name.

The beloved physician

What the New Testament itself says about Luke is small and specific. Paul, writing to the Colossians, sends greetings from “Luke, the beloved physician.” Tradition and most scholars fill in the rest: a Greek from Antioch in Syria, a doctor by training, who joined Paul on his travels and appears in the Acts at the points where the narrative shifts into “we.” He was an educated man of the Greek-speaking east, close enough to the apostolic circle to write its history.

That history is his real monument. The Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles are one work in two volumes, both addressed to a certain Theophilus, and together they run from the birth of Christ to Paul’s arrival in Rome. The church has credited them to Luke since Irenaeus named him in the late second century. The books themselves do not sign a name, and scholars are divided on the authorship and date; the tradition puts the gospel around the year 60, while critical scholars generally place the pair a generation later. What is not in doubt is that one careful writer, working in good Greek, gave the early church its account of its own beginnings.

The first icon painter

The tradition that carries Luke’s name furthest is the one that is hardest to date. He is remembered as the first iconographer, the man who painted the Virgin and Child from life, and from that first painting the whole later tradition of the Hodegetria, the great Marian image type, is said to descend. Because of it he became the patron saint of painters and of everyone who writes icons.

The legend is later than the life. The earliest source that connects Luke to a painted icon is the sixth-century historian Theodorus Lector, writing around 530, and the tradition becomes widespread only from the eighth century. No first-century evidence for Luke the painter survives, and art historians date the surviving icons attributed to him, and the Hodegetria form itself, to the fifth and sixth centuries. The tradition honours Luke rather than records him. It reached back across five hundred years to give the practice of icon painting an apostle at its head, and in doing so it made a first-century physician the guardian of an art he almost certainly never practised.

Thebes and Padua

After Paul’s death, the tradition follows Luke on through Italy, Dalmatia, Macedonia and Greece as a preacher. It holds that he died at Thebes in Boeotia at the age of eighty-four, and many accounts say he was hanged on an olive tree, though some hold he died in peace; the sources concede the details are not agreed.

The end of the relics is better documented than the end of the man. Around the year 357 the emperor Constantius II had Luke’s remains carried to the Church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople, one of the earliest recorded translations of a saint’s relics. Centuries later, after the sack of Constantinople, they came to rest in the Basilica of Santa Giustina in Padua, where they remain. In 1992 a single rib was returned to his tomb at Thebes, a fragment sent back to the ground he had started from.

Lukindan

In the Serbian lands the evangelist’s feast on 31 October (18 October on the old calendar) is Lukindan, and many households keep it as their krsna slava. Here the physician-saint is honoured as a healer, and the day also stands on the edge of winter. The old sayings mark it: Ide Luka, eto vuka, Luke comes and the wolf comes, and Sveti Luka, sneg do kuka, Saint Luke, snow up to the hip. The folk customs of the day, the wolves and the flocks and the reading of the first winter, are kept on its own page.

The reference icon behind our own image shows Luke the plain way, an ageing bearded man in a dark robe with the gospel book held to his chest. It is the older of his two portraits, the evangelist before the painter. The second portrait, Luke at the easel with a brush, is the one the guilds of painters hung in their halls, a physician who wrote a book and, in the tradition if not in the record, taught the world to make a face out of gold and paint.

Sources

Bibliography. The same list is held in the article’s frontmatter for the citation tools that read it programmatically.

• The Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles (the two-volume work traditionally attributed to Luke; the attribution first explicitly named by Irenaeus, late 2nd century)
• The Epistle to the Colossians 4:14 (‘Luke, the beloved physician’)
• Theodorus Lector, Ecclesiastical History (c. 530), the early source connecting Luke to a painted icon of the Virgin
• Orthodox synaxarion for the Apostle and Evangelist Luke (18 October / 31 October)
• Encyclopaedia Britannica, ‘Saint Luke’; OrthodoxWiki, ‘Apostle Luke’
• Serbian ethnographic and church coverage of Lukindan / Lučindan (the slava, the wolf and livestock customs, the weather sayings), October 2024-2025