Gospel and the Acts to Luke, the beloved physician, the friend of St. Paul, cf. Frag. Murator., and Iren., Adv. Her,, iii., 14.
But Luke, we have been recently reminded, was not an uncom- mon name, and many Christians may have borne it in the latter part of the first century (McGiffert, Apostolic Age, p. 435). But not only is the above tradition precise in its mention of Luke as a physician ; the writings attributed to him bear upon the face of them indications of the hand of a medical man. No reference, however, to the possi- bility of this is made by Dr. McGiffert. He tells us, p. 239, that nowhere is the source used by the author of Acts marked by anything like the vividness, preciseness, and fulness of detail that characterise the « We” sections.! The writer of these sections was not Silas or Timothy, but ‘‘the unknown author of the ‘ We’ passages,”’ p. 239. This unknown author was evidently the intimate companicn of St. Paul, and of his other companions in Rome none is more likely to have written the personal notes of travel than Luke, who seems indeed to have been the nearest and dearest to the Apostle of all his friends (pp. 434, 435). The inference from all this, coupled with the tradition of
1 Tf there is one narrative of the N.T. which more than another contains internal proof of having been related by an eye-witness, it is the account of the voyage and shipwreck of St. Paul,” Salmon, Introd., p. 5, and this judgment based upon the valuable monograph of James Smith (himself a Fellow of the Royal Society) ot Jordan Hill, Voyage and Shipwreck of St. Paul, 4th edit., revised and corrected, 1880, has received fresh and remarkable confirmation, not only from English but from German and French sources of a technical and professional kind: e.g., Dr. Breusing, Director of the Seefahrtschule in Bremen, published in 1886 his Dre Nautik der Alten with a close examination verse by verse of the narrative in Acts
xxvii., and he has been followed precisely on the same lines by J. Vars, Professor in ' the Lycée of Brest in his L’Art Nautique dans Vantiquité, 1887. Both writers make constant reference to Smith’s work, although they often differ from him in technical details, and references to Breusing will be found in Blass and Wendt (1899). The latter writer also refers to a thoughtful article with a similar testimony to St. Luke’s accuracy by Von Goerne in the Neue Kirchliche Zeitschrift, p. 352, 1898, and allu- sions will be found to this, as to the above-mentioned works, in the commentary. Breusing’s testimony is very striking, p. xiii: ‘‘The most valuable nautical docu- ment of antiquity which has come down to us is the account of the voyage and shipwreck of the Apostle Paul. Every one can see at a glance that it could only have been composed by an eye-witness.” The strangest exception perhaps to this almost universal recognition of the value of the narrative in Acts xxvii~(cf., e.g., the remarkable testimony in its favour by Weizsacker, Apostolic Age, ii., p. 126 ff., E.T.) is Mommsen’s attack upon it in Sitzwngsber. d. berl. Ak., 1895, Ρ. 503; but, as Zahn justly remarks, Mommsen has not increased his reputation by alleging that “' Luke speaks of the Adriatic Sea by Crete and of the barbarians of Malta”; see answers to these objections in Zahn, Einleitung, Π., p. 421, and also in commentary, Acts XXVil. 27, and xxviii. 2.