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APPENDIX I

ST. LUKE THE PHYSICIAN 1

In the midst of what has been called the "higher criticism" of the Bible in recent times, one of the long accepted traditions that has been most strenuously assailed and, indeed, in the minds of many scholars, seemed, for a time at least, quite discredited, was that St. Luke the Evangelist, the author of the Third Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles, was a physician. Distinguished authorities in early Christian apologetics have declared that the pillars of primitive Christian history are the genuine Epistles of St. Paul, the writings of St. Luke, and the history of Eusebius. It is quite easy to understand, then, that the attack upon the authenticity of the writings usually assigned to St. Luke, which in many minds seemed successful, has been considered of great importance. In the very recent time there has been a decided reaction in this matter. This has come, not so much from Roman Catholics, who have always clung to the traditional view, and whose great Biblical students have been foremost in the support of the previously accepted opinion, but from some of the most strenuous of the German higher critics, who now appreciate that destructive, socalled higher criticism went too far, and that the traditional view not only can be maintained, but is the only opinion that will adequately respond to all the new facts that have been found, and all the recently gathered information with regard to the relations of events in the olden time.

1

Paper read before the first meeting of the American Guild of St. Luke.

By far the most important contribution to the discussion in recent years came not long since from the pen of Professor Adolph Harnack, the professor of church history in the University of Berlin. Professor Harnack's name is usually cited as that of one of the most destructive of the higher critics. His recent book, however, "Luke the Physician,"1 is an entire submission to the old-fashioned viewpoint that the writer of the Third Gospel and of the Acts of the Apostles was a Greek fellow-worker of St. Paul, who had been in company for years with Mark and Philip and James, and who had previously been a physician, and was evidently well versed in all the medical lore of that time. Harnack does not merely concede the old position. As might be expected, his rediscussion of the subject clinches the arguments for the traditional view, and makes it impossible ever to call it in question again. It is easy to understand how important are such admissions when we recall how much this traditional view has been assailed, and how those who have held it have been accused of old-fogyism and lack of scholarship, and unwarranted clinging to antiquated notions just because they thought they were of faith, and how, lacking in true scholarship, seriously hampering genuine investigation, such conservatism has been declared to be.

The question of Luke's having been a physician is an extremely valuable one, and no one in our time is better fitted by early training and long years of study to elucidate it than Professor Harnack. He began his excursions into historical writing years ago, as I understand, as an historian of early Christian medicine. Some of his works on medical conditions" just before and after Christ are quoted confidently by the distinguished German medical historians. From this department he graduated into the field

1 Published by Putnams, New York, 1909.

of the higher criticism. He is eminently in a position, therefore, to state the case with regard to St. Luke fully, and to indicate absolutely the conclusions that should be drawn from the premises of fact, writings, and traditions that we have. He does so in a very striking way. Perhaps no better example of his thoroughly lucid and eminently logical mode of argumentation is to be found than the paragraph in which he states the question. It might well be recommended as an example of terse forcefulness and logical sequence that deserves the emulation of all those who want to write on medical subjects. If we had more of these characteristic qualities of Harnack's style, our medical literature, so called, would not need to occupy so many pages of print as it does-yet would say more. Here it is:

St. Luke, according to St. Paul, was a physician. When a physician writes a historical work it does not necessarily follow that his profession shows itself in his writing; yet it is only natural for one to look for traces of the author's medical profession in such a work. These traces may be of different kinds: 1, The whole character of the narrative may be determined by points of view, aims, and ideals which are more or less medical (disease and its treatment); 2, marked preference may be shown for stories concerning the healing of diseases, which stories may be given in great number and detail; 3, the language may be colored by the language of physicians (medical technical terms, metaphors of medical character, etc.). All these three groups of characteristic signs are found, as we shall see, in the historical work which bears the name of St. Luke. Here, however, it may be objected that the subject matter itself is responsible for these traits, so that their evidence is not decisive for the medical calling of the author. Jesus appeared as a great physician and healer. All the evangelists say this of Him; hence it is not surprising that one of them has set this phase of His ministry in the foreground, and has regarded it as the most important. Our evangelist need not therefore have been a physician, especially if he were a Greek, seeing that in those days Greeks with religious interests were disposed to regard religion mainly under the category of healing and salvation. This is true, yet such a combination of characteristic signs will compel us to believe that the author was a physician if, 4, the description of the particular cases of disease shows distinct traces of medical diagnosis and scientific knowledge; 5, if the language, even where questions of medicine or of healing are not touched upon, is colored by medical phraseology; and, 6, if in those passages where the author speaks as an eyewitness medical traits are especially and prominently apparent. These three kinds of tokens are also found in the historical work of our author. It is accordingly proved that it proceeds from the pen of a physician.

The importance of the concession that Lake was a physician should be property appreciated. His whole gospel is written from that standpoint. For him the Saviour was the healer, the good physician who went about curing the ills of the body, while ministering to people's souls. He has more accounts of miracles of healing than any of the other Evangelists. He has taken certain of the stories of the other Evangelists who were eye-witnesses. and when they were toid in naïve and popular language that obscured the real condition that was present, he has retoid the story from the physician's standpoint, and thus the miracle becomes clearer than ever. In one case, where Mark has a slur on physicians, Luke eliminates it. In a number of cases the correction of Mark's popular language in the description of ailments is made in terms that could not have been used except by one thoroughly versed in the Greek medical terminology of the times. As a matter of fact, there seems to be no doubt now that Luke had been, before he became an Evangelist, a practising physician in Malta of considerable experience. His testimony, then, to the miracles is particularly valuable as almost a medical eye-witness.

In medical science, St. Luke's time was by no means barren of knowledge. The Alexandrian school of medicine had done some fine work in its time. It was the first university medical school in the world's history, and there dissection was first practised regularly and publicly for the sake of anatomy, and even the vivisection of criminals who were supplied by the Ptolemei for human physiology, was a part of the school curriculum. A number of important discoveries in brain anatomy are attributed to Herophilus, after whom the torcular herophili within the skull is named, and who invented the term calamus scriptorius for certain ap

pearances in the fourth ventricle. His colleague, ✓ Erasistratus, the co-founder of this school at Alexandria, did work in pathological anatomy, and laid the foundation for serious study there. For three centuries there is some good worker, at or in connection with Alexandria, whose name is preserved for us in the history of medicine. Other Greek schools of medicine in the East, as, for instance, that of Pergamos, also did excellent work. Galen is the great representative of this school, and he came in the century after St. Luke. A physician educated in Greek medicine at that time, then, would be in an excellent position to judge critically of the miracles of healing of the Christ, and it would seem to have been providential that Luke was called for this purpose.

The evidence for his membership of our profession will doubtless be interesting to all physicians. Some of the distinctive passages in which Luke's familiarity with medical terms to such an extent that to express his meaning he found himself compelled to use them, will appeal at once to these, for whom such terms are part of everyday speech. The use of the word hydropikos, which is not to be met with anywhere else in the New Testament, nor in the non-medical Greek literature of that time, though the word is of frequent occurrence as a designation for a person suffering from dropsy (and always, as in Luke, the adjective for the substantive), in Hippocrates, Dioscorides, and Galen is a✔ typical example.

Where such vague terms as paralyzed occur Luke does not use the familiar word, but the medical term that meant stricken with paralysis, indicating not any inability to use the limbs, but such a one as was due to a stroke of apoplexy. We who, as physicians, have heard of so many cures of paralysis from our friends, the Eddyites, are prone

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