Questioning What We Assume
The search for
knowledge must never cease, but more critically, we must question the
assumptions we once held as true without ever examining them, until new
information challenges a viewpoint we never thought was in dispute.
Last night, I found
myself at the end of an interesting discovery. Although I know a great deal
about the Bible, in theory, by osmosis, through tradition, and sometimes
through an application that makes the reality of God and the salvation of Jesus
Christ the most heartwarming experience of my faith, I remain just as ignorant
of some fundamentals.
The Twelve Apostles
13 At daybreak he called together all of
his disciples and chose twelve of them to be apostles. Here are their names:
14 Simon (whom he named Peter),
Andrew (Peter’s brother),
James,
John,
Philip,
Bartholomew,
15 Matthew,
Thomas,
James (son of Alphaeus),
Simon (who was called the zealot),
16 Judas (son of James),
Judas Iscariot (who later betrayed him).
[Luke
6:13-16, reference Matthew
10:1-4]
There are four
gospels of the Lord Jesus Christ, attributed to the named authors in the Bible
and traditionally accepted to have been written in the order of Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John, between AD 66 and
110. Luke also wrote the Acts of the Apostles.
[Wikipedia: Life of Jesus]
An Overlooked Detail
What I never bothered
to check, and what you, the reader, might already know, is that Mark and Luke
are not in the list of apostles. They were not apostles at all. Luke was known
as the physician who travelled with Paul the Apostle, and Mark is mentioned
too. [Colossians
4:14, Philemon
23-24]
This is not an
exposition of the facts, which have been dealt with extensively and with a
scholarly and academic expertise I cannot expect to match. The theological
debates belong elsewhere.
A Discovery Worth
Sharing
This is, however, a
note in my journal and an introduction to a YouTube channel I discovered a few
months ago, Deep
Made Simple.
Its short videos, which deal with topical elements in the scriptures, have
brought me insight and enlightenment I cannot keep to myself. The video "The Gospel of
Luke: Why a Doctor Wrote the Bible’s Longest Book "
had me scrambling for information.
The shock, the
realisation, the quest for more knowledge: the small hours of the morning crept
upon me as I listened to the video again before playing back the dramatised New
Living Translation of the gospel. [Google
Play: NLT Bible with Audio]
Luke could have been
a gentile, and he was indeed a journalist, a correspondent, and a meticulous
historian.
One last thing, I was
on YouTube that I learnt to recall the Ten Commandments by
counting fingers and hand signals, in 5 minutes.
Note: All Biblical references are taken from the Bible Gateway.
Luke's Place in
Scripture
The Gospel according
to Luke is not the longest book in the Bible; by English word count, that
distinction belongs to the book of the prophet Jeremiah.
However, the gospel
is the longest book in the New Testament, and taken together with the Acts of
the Apostles, Luke would have contributed more to the standard Bible, in
English word count, than any writer except Moses.
Patterns
of Truth: Why Are Mark and Luke Not Named as Disciples?
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