Luke Was a Journalist: Seeing the Work of a Reporter in the Third Gospel

Luke was a journalist. That point is worth seeing because of what it reveals about the modernness and immediacy of a seemingly ancient text, the New Testament.

Something happened in the first century: a series of significant events in and around the life of the person named Jesus. The books we call the “gospels” are four works by four writers about those events. The books are based on different levels of access to the information about these events; indeed, one of the writers, John, was a close companion of Jesus and provided a biography drawing on that close access.

By contrast, the farthest removed of the four gospel writers would seem to have been Luke. Unlike the others, he never met Jesus personally. Luke therefore pioneered a previously unknown method of writing about what happened. That is, he studied assertions, interviewed eyewitnesses, and inferred the truth from where these sources lined up. Luke’s method of reporting was … reporting.

In calling Luke the first journalist, both of those words are defendable. On the possibility that he might have been “first”: Histories of journalism tend to begin with news documents developed and circulated during the Renaissance around the time of the invention of printing. There are no figures like journalists appearing in centuries prior, let alone in the ancient world. If Luke can be called a journalist, then he credibly can be viewed as the earliest of such to appear. As for “journalist”: While it is true that Luke was writing about past events, he was not doing so as a historian. Herodotus, the first historian and the progenitor of the field, was seeking to understand the course of past events and how they led to the present. Luke was doing something different, as his own work explained. His work ascribed no meaning to what he covered (though he no doubt held a sense of the meaning in common with his audience). Rather, he was seeking to document the truth of what happened.

Again, his own work attests to this. In the first three chapters of Luke’s gospel are three different facets of what I am arguing is the first work of journalism. That is, each of the first three chapters of this work offers detail distinctly recognizable as the practice of a journalist performing his craft. Here is what I mean:

Luke 1: Just the Facts

Many have undertaken to compile a narrative about the events that have been fulfilled among us…. It also seemed good to me, since I have carefully investigated everything from the very first, to write to you in an orderly sequence, most honorable Theophilus, so that you may know the certainty of the things about which you have been instructed. —Luke 1:1-4

In opening lines of Luke’s gospel, we read that he is writing to his patron, Theophilus. Others have written accounts, Luke notes. He was not the first writer to tackle the subject. But he is a writer going about the work in a different way. Before penning any word, he has “carefully investigated everything … to write … in an orderly sequence.” His word “orderly” suggests assertions of fact, unvarnished by hearsay or opinion. “Sequence” suggests a search for the proper context, beginning with the correct timing of events. This kind of writing requires and begins with fact-finding research, which entails travel, effort, and time. The fact of the existence of a patron reveals a valuable point, arguably relevant to our moment today. Namely, journalism is a profession, the practice of which deserves and needs support.

Luke 2: Reliable Sources

But Mary was treasuring up all these things in her heart and meditating on them. —Luke 2:19

Then he went down with them and came to Nazareth and was obedient to them. His mother kept all these things in her heart. —Luke 2:51

If Luke was not witness to the events he is recounting, then how did he get his information? The answer I am offering is perhaps obvious to us: He interviewed witnesses. However, that this is the course Luke is taking is not obvious from the text, because none of the signifiers we would look for to indicate attribution had yet been invented. For Luke, writing in his time, there was no understandable means for lapsing into first-person narrative to describe whom he met and what they said. Indeed, there was no method for indicating quotes from a source. Quotation marks had not yet been invented.

But in chapter 2 of his gospel, we see how Luke is making fairly clear the source of his information. A long passage describing the birth and childhood of Jesus includes two clear statements about what Mary was keeping or treasuring in heart, what she was thinking about. Of all who are mentioned in the account, she is the only one whose inner life is described—and no one could have definitively stated what was in her heart except her. Luke is conveying as best he can that Mary was his source for this information. The mother of Jesus was a teenager when Jesus was born, and might not yet have been even fifty when Jesus died. She very reasonably could have been alive while Luke was doing his reporting. Luke interviewed eyewitnesses, seemingly including Jesus’ mother.

Luke 3: Who, What, When, Where, How

In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, while Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, Herod was tetrarch of Galilee, his brother Philip tetrarch of the region of Iturea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias tetrarch of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, God’s word came to John the son of Zechariah in the wilderness. He went into all the vicinity of the Jordan, preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, as it is written in the book of the words of the prophet Isaiah: “A voice of one crying out in the wilderness: Prepare the way for the Lord; make his paths straight.” —Luke 3:1-4

The reason the work of a journalist is so germane to the Christian faith is because that faith presents itself as nothing more than facts and their implications. The facts asserted are these: The creator of the world lived as a mortal human being; he spoke words and performed actions that were recorded; he died a specific death; he rose, moving among people, revealing aspects of the nature of a resurrection that is to come; and hundreds of people saw this, people who would have discredited any falsehood about Jesus in circulation at the time. The gospels thus are not religious texts in the way typically expected, because none of the gospel writers claims any special revelation about Jesus or his will. All of them instead simply sought to write down what happened, including the work and teaching of Jesus and the events surrounding his life, to the best of their recollection or that of their sources. The holy texts of the Christian faith are, in this sense, not mysterious at all. They are grounded in time and place.

We see this most clearly in Luke 3. John the Baptist was a famous local preacher who spoke of the coming of God living as a man. Luke’s reporting makes clear this was no mythical figure, but a person. Luke documents precisely when and where he preached, and what he said. If these clear statements of fact were false, they could have been refuted, and this document would not have survived to reach us in this form.

Luke 24: Strange but True

All this affects the way we read the third gospel and the trust we can give to the work. In particular, Luke’s insistence on sticking to the facts he can impart with confidence, without adding finesse or interpretation where those facts are strange, serves us well at the end of Luke’s gospel, chapter 24. This is where the account comes to Jesus’ appearances after death, and his interactions with others in the type of bodily form that (apparently) comes following resurrection. Thanks to Luke’s straight reporting, we get perhaps the clearest glimpses the Bible offers of the nature of the existence we will have after death is done.

The overall take is one of weirdness. Luke does not know what to make of the accounts and, to his credit, does not try to make anything of it. Jesus in his post-resurrection form is simultaneously recognizable and not (Luke 24:31); he has a relationship with time and space that lets him appear and disappear (Luke 24:36); yet he also has a physical form fully capable of being seen and touched (Luke 24:39). He even eats (Luke 24:43).

Luke was a clear-thinking, logical man. His writing makes this much plain. Therefore, these details that sound so odd and incredible likely struck him as odd and incredible as well. He could have dismissed these tales. He could have left them out. However, they were conveyed by credible witnesses whose stories corroborated one another.

And now we have this text. Luke had set out to convey the events of the life of Jesus in an orderly sequence based on his own investigation. The fact that the work circulated, that it was not disproven as a falsehood by other clear-thinking and logical people who evaluated it, stands as evidence of his success. In the apparent strength of the accuracy of this text’s assertions, as seen in the fact that many read the work and passed it along, one inference is that this writer—this reporter, if you will—faithfully followed the investigation where it led.

Photo: “Moleskin Reporter Notebook” by Jack-Benny Persson