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St. Luke Feast Day October 18 From the Book of St. Jerome, Priest, A physician of Antioch who knew Greek, as his writings indicate, Luke was a follower of the Apostle Paul, and his companion in all his journeys. He wrote a Gospel of which Paul says, "We have sent along with him the brother whose services to the Gospel are praised in all the churches." In the Epistle to the Colossians he says, "Luke, our most dear physician, sends you greetings," and in a letter to Timothy, "Luke only is with me." Luke wrote another famous book entitled "The Acts of the Apostles," which brings their history down to Paul's two-year stay in Rome, that is, to the fourth year of Nero; and we may take it from this that the book was written in the same city. But Luke learned his Gospel not only from the Apostle Paul, who had not been with the Lord in the flesh, but also from the other Apostles, as he himself states at the beginning of his book, saying, "As they who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word have handed them down to us." Therefore he wrote his Gospel from what he had heard and the Acts of the Apostles from what he had seen. He lived eighty-four years, and did not marry. His bones were taken from Achaia together with the remains of the Apostle Andrew, in the twentieth year of Constantine's reign, and were buried at Constantinople. (From the Second Nocturn of Matins of the feast of St. Luke) |