The Private Letters of Luke

187 Pages·1958·7.972 MB·English

by  Roger Bradshaigh Lloyd

ROGER LLOYD
The Private Letters
of Luke
GREAT NECK, NEW YORK
THE PRIVATE LETTERS OF LUKE
Copyright © 1958, Channel Press, Inc.
All rights reserved under International and Pan
American Copyright Conventions. Published in Great
Britain in 1957 by George Allen & Unwin, Ltd.,
under the title" The Letters of Luke The Physician,"
copyright under the Berne Convention.
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number, 57-12035
CONTENTS
PART ONE
LETTER
I Theophilus to Luke IS
II Luke to Theophilus 19
III Theophilus to Silvanus 2.S
IV Silvanus to Luke 31
V Nicholas to Silvanus 35
VI Lllke to SilvanllS 39
VII Issachar to james the Elder 47
VIII james the EiJer to Barnabas 50
IX Luke to Theophilus 53
X Theophilus to Luke 58
Xl Barnabas to james the Elder 62
XII Luke to Theophilus 71
XIII Issachar to Eleazor 80
XlV Luke to Silvanus 83
xv Issachar to Eleazor 89
XVI Nicholas to Silvanus 92
XVII Theophilus to Luke 96
XVlD Silvanus to Luke lor
XIX Persis to Nicholas 113
XX Luke to Theophilus u8
INTERLUDE 123
6 THE PRIVATE LETTERS OF LUKE
PART TWO
LETTER
XXI Theophillls to Silvanus page 127
xxn Silvanus to TheophiIr4s 130
XXIII Theophilus to Felix Covemor of Palestine 133
XXIV Luke to Theophilus 136
XXV Felix to Theophilus 145
XXVI Philip the Deacon to James the Apostle alJd Elder 147
XXVII James the Apostle al/d Elder to the Christians oj
Palestine whom it may COllum 149
XXVIII Luke to Silvanus ISO
XXIX Luke to Silvanus 160
XXX Theophilus to Luke 171
XXXI Mark to Luke 174
XXXII Luke to Mark 178
XXXIII Luke to Silvanlls 186
XXXIV Luke to Theophilus 191
PREFACE
It is not the function of a preface to make excuses or to fore
stall criticism, and ordinarily a book ought to stand on its
own feet, and to explain itsel£ But when a book is an imag
inary reconstruction of the life of so universally beloved and
familiar a saint as Luke the Physician, a certain amount of
preliminary explanation both of the characters and of the
episodes invented for them does become necessary. This book
is certainly a work of fiction, not of history or of biblical
criticism. But all the characters, except for one, appear if
only as names, and most of them as far more than names, in
the New Testament, and all the epi~odes are related to known
facts, or are at least reasonable inferences from them. Some
thing, therefore, does need to be said about the relationship
of conjecture to fact in the invented correspondence which
follows.
Any book about St. Luke which strays beyond the field of
a commentary on his writings is bound to be a work of fiction.
The certain historical facts we know about him are few indeed.
He was a doctor. He was much loved. He was the friend and
travelling companion of St. Paul, and the friend of his friends.
He wrote the third gospel and the book of the Acts of the
Apostles, and from the passages in the latter where he writes
We instead of They, we can trace some of his movements.
But that is all and the rest is conjecture. But while conjecture
must always be labelled as such and not concealed, it need not
be wild or improbable as long as it is kept in line with logically
and psychologically reasonable inferences from the known
facts. For example, it is a tradition and not a proved fact that
Luke lived for some years in Antioch and there became a
member of the Christian local congregation. But this is so
overwhelmingly probable, and makes sense of other facts
8 THE PRIVATE LETTERS OF LUKE
which if it were not true would remain disconnected, that to
refuse to accept it because it cannot now be exactly proved
is to carry scholarly and legal caution to lengths inappro
priate in a work of fiction.
There are, however, two other facts about St. Luke which
are as certain as anything in this dubious world can be. nle
first set of facts concerns the kind of man he was and his
attitude to life. He was a very good and deeply compassionate
doctor whose practice had bred in him a deep understanding
of women and a profound, even an indignant sympathy with
the hopeless sufferings of the poor. He had a deep hostility to
the power of wealth, which is not at all the same thing as
saying that he disliked and distrusted all rich people just
because they were rich. But he had his austere side. Once a
man had become a Christian he was rightly to be judged, in
St. Luke's view, by far severer standards than would have
been appropriate to apply to him while still a heathen. It is
certain, too, that though he was the steadiest of all St. Paul's
friends, his profound admirer, and his constant companion,
he did not see in Christianity exactly the same values in the
same order of importance that St. Paul saw. In his writings he
neither endorses nor criticises what is called the Pauline
Gospel. He simply ignores it, though he had heard his friend
utter it a thousand times. That is fact, and Letter XXIV tries
to explain the fact. In this it is like practically all the other
letters, which are really fictitious embroideries or variations
on factual themes.
The other undeniable fact about St. Luke is the appeal he
has always made to Christian imagination, and never more
strongly than today. Among all the characters in the New
Testament it is he that we should most ~e to meet, and with
him we think we should be most at home and at ease. The
fact that we know little about him for certain does not shake
our conviction that if we knew all we should not be less
Roger Lloyd 9
attracted by the whole than we are by the part. My own
attraction is lifelong, and of all the people in history I suppose
I think most often about two, Shakespeare and St. Luke.
You cannot constantly think about St. Luke without forming
your own convictions, and creating your own vivid pictures
of the sort of man he was, what he looked like, how he became
a Christian, and why he accepted the vocation to write the
stories of Jesus' life and the adventures of the Apostles. The
guesses you make about these things, and the bridges you
imaginatively build to carry you over the gaps in the narrative
gradually become convictions. As long as they make a psy
chologically consistent picture, though unprovable, they may
well be true. This, at any rate, is the St. Luke of my imagina
tion; and I do not believe he is wildly different from the first
century Greek physician-evangelist whom St. Paul and
Silvanus and so many other New Testament characters knew
well and loved dearly.
He was not a solitary and not a quietist. More perhaps than
most saints he can be seen only as a figure in a crowded scene,
quick with action. Any account of him must therefore be an
account of at least some of the other Christians he knew. I
have therefore written this book in the form of a series of
letters by him, to him, and about him. All his correspondents
except for Issachar occur in the New Testament. Of some of
them, Silvanus and Barnabas, we know as much or more than
we do of St. Luke. Theophilus is almost pure guesswork. To
him he dedicated both his books: 'It seemed good to me
to write unto thee, most excellent Theophilus, that thou
mightest know the certainty of those things wherein thou
has been instructed'. The salutation, 'Your Excellency', gives
him high official position; 'that he had been instructed',
makes it clear that he had become a Christian. Any further
identification is a matter of guesswork alone, and an author
is frec to make a Theophilus to serve his own purpose. It
10 THE PRIVATE tETTERS OF LUKE
was artistically convenient that Luke should at some time
have cured the Roman Minister of State of his asthma, and
these statements have no other authority. Nor can I guarantee
that either Nicholas the Deacon or Persis the Public Scribe
were in life as I have imagined them in fiction. But I hope so.
Every church has need of simple and unpretentious heroes
and is saved in the end by its homespW1 saints. The scoundrelly
but tortured Issachar is pure invention, but St. Paul's letters
make it plain that there were plenty of Jews, and baptised
Christians among them, of the type and lineage of Issachar,
who did their not inconsiderable best to torment his life and
ruin his ministry.
Of the various episodes only three need a little explanation
here. That St. Luke suddenly appears in Troas is certain because
the 'We' passages in ACTS start at that point, and the imagined
riot in church in Antioch in Letter XVI provides a reason for
his going there. Letter XIX which brings Paul and his friends
to Luke at Troas when they had intended to be miles away
in Bythinia, and identifies Luke with the mysterious man of
Macedonia who cried 'Come over and help us', is an attempt
to wrench an intelligible story out of ACTS XVI, 6 to 12,
which is perhaps the most mysterious and difficult passage
anywhere in the Bible. That later St. Luke had two years to
spare, so to speak, while St. Paul was in protective custody in
Caesarea is certain fact. That he used it to travel about Pales
tine finding out all he could about the life of Christ is a con
jecture of the overwhelmingly probable sort. It is certain that
he recorded many things in that Life which, as it seems, the
other evangelists did not know, and hardly less certain that
he discovered them by personal enquiry. If so, those two
years were the obvious time for the enqui,ry to be undertaken,
and probably the only time.
Among the facts which Luke alone seems to have known is
almost the whole of the Christmas story. All the scholars