Luke the Evangelist was not one of Christ’s seventy-two disciples, as some think. According to Jerome, he was a disciple of the apostles, converted to the faith of Christ after Christ’s Ascension.
He was Syrian by nation, a citizen of Antioch, a physician by profession, and the inseparable companion of the apostle Paul. Thus the Apostle says in Second Timothy 4, “Luke alone is with me,” and says of him in Second Corinthians 5 [read: Second Corinthians 8:19]: “He was appointed by the churches as the companion of our pilgrimage.”
Just as Mark wrote his Gospel not from sight but from what he heard from Peter, so Luke wrote not from sight, as Matthew and John did, but from what he heard from Paul, who had received the Gospel from Jesus Christ. It was also approved by the primitive fathers. Thus the Apostle says of Luke: “His praise is in the Gospel throughout all the churches.”
Although many wrote Gospels or Acts of the Apostles, they were not accepted into the canon as indubitably true except for those of the four evangelists—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—and no Acts of the Apostles except that written by Luke. Other Gospels or Acts written by various authors and given the names of various apostles are numbered among the apocrypha because their truth is doubtful, as appears in Distinction 15, The Holy Roman Church.
Luke wrote in Greek. Hence, according to Jerome, his Gospel savors of Greek eloquence. Luke is interpreted “rising” or “raising,” or by derivation is said to come from “light.”
We do not read that he had either wife or children, but that he served the Lord in virginity. Full of the Holy Spirit, he died in Bithynia in the eighty-third year of his age, after continually bearing in his body the mortification of the cross for Christ’s name.
Just as Matthew is represented as a man, Mark as a lion, and John as an eagle, so Luke is figuratively represented as an ox by Ezekiel in chapter 1 and by John in Revelation 4.
They are represented by these animals because of the beginnings of their Gospel narratives. Matthew began with the genealogy of the fathers from whom Christ descended as man, and therefore is represented as a man. Mark began with the preaching of John the Baptist, crying in the desert like a roaring lion, and therefore is represented as a lion.
Luke began at the Temple, where, when Zechariah entered with a sacrifice of calves, John’s birth was announced to him. Luke is therefore shown as a calf, which was offered in the Temple. John thundered, “In the beginning was the Word,” soaring as far as the proclamation of the Word’s divinity, and therefore is indicated by the eagle, which flies higher than other birds.
Alternatively, because they all proclaim Christ as a man in the Incarnation, a calf in the sacrifice of the cross, a lion in the Resurrection, and an eagle in the Ascension, the evangelists are represented by these four animals.
Thus Ezekiel 1 says that each of those four living creatures had four faces: that of a man, a lion, an ox, and an eagle.
Or, according to Gregory on Ezekiel, all the elect of the Church, whose head is Christ, are comprehended in these animals. All are endowed with the four virtues signified by them: prudence by the man, who alone among the animals is rational, since prudence is right reason concerning things to be done; fortitude by the lion, according to the saying, “The lion is the strongest of beasts”; temperance by the calf, which is a sacrificial animal, because through temperance a person makes a sacrifice of the body by mortifying the passions of the concupiscible power; and justice by the eagle, which gazes upon the sun’s sphere with an unblinking eye, while justice is compared with the sun, according to the saying: “For you who fear the Lord’s name, the sun of justice shall arise.”
Concerning these elect, Gratian in Cause 23, Question 4, § From All These, expounds the words of the Psalm: “Your living creatures”—that is, those possessed by God through grace—“shall dwell in it,” namely the inheritance of which he had spoken, that is, the inheritance of heavenly glory; “in your sweetness,” namely the charity that “you have prepared for the poor,” that is, for the humble.
It follows: “God will give the word to those who evangelize.”
[Running head: Sixth Title.]