Introduction

The Evangelist and the Third Gospel

Theophylact begins, as always, with the traditional life of the Evangelist: Luke of Antioch, a physician by training, the companion of the Apostle Paul on his journeys, and, though not himself an eyewitness of the Lord’s ministry, a careful gatherer of the testimony of those who were, as the Gospel’s own opening lines declare. That opening—Luke’s address to Theophilus, promising to have “followed everything closely from the start” and to “write them out for you in order”—is for Theophylact a signal of the whole book’s character: Luke writes as an historian concerned with sequence, occasion, and detail, more so than any of the other three Evangelists. It is Luke alone who supplies the infancy narrative in full, with its censuses and genealogies and precise notices of time; Luke alone who preserves parables found nowhere else, among them the prodigal son and the good Samaritan; and Luke alone who continues the story past the resurrection into the Acts of the Apostles, of which this Gospel is expressly the first half.

Theophylact and Cyril of Alexandria

For most of the New Testament, Chrysostom is the patristic voice Theophylact leans on most heavily; for Luke, the deeper debt runs to Saint Cyril of Alexandria. Cyril had preached an extensive series of homilies on this Gospel, works of considerable theological weight that survive today mostly through Syriac translation and through scattered Greek fragments preserved in the later catenae—the chains of patristic comment that Byzantine compilers built up around each verse of Scripture. The principal Greek catena on Luke, assembled by Niketas of Heraclea, draws so heavily on Cyril that editors piecing the fragments back together have had to sort Cyril’s own words from passages contributed by other commentators woven into the same chain, Theophylact among them—a sign of how closely the two men’s readings of this Gospel were felt to run together.

Cyril’s homilies, where they survive complete, are the more celebrated achievement: dense, doctrinally exacting, alert above all to what each verse establishes about the person of Christ. Theophylact’s commentary is the more modest one, but also the more complete and the more approachable—a continuous, verse-by-verse exposition of the whole Gospel where Cyril’s homilies exist only in part, absorbing Cyril’s Christological precision, especially in the infancy narrative and the parables, while setting it out in a plainer voice for a wider readership. A Latin scholar of the thirteenth century, gathering a chain of his own from Cyril, Chrysostom, and Theophylact together for the whole of Luke, would cite Theophylact well over four hundred times in that single volume—more than in any of the other Gospels—a rough measure of how much of Luke’s Gospel this commentary alone carried forward in continuous form.

Argument and Structure

The commentary follows Luke’s twenty-four chapters in sequence: the announcements to Zechariah and to the Virgin Mary and the birth and childhood of the Lord; the preaching of John the Baptist and the beginning of the Galilean ministry; a long central section, often called the travel narrative, in which Luke gathers teaching and parables loosely around the Lord’s journey toward Jerusalem; the final days in the city; and the Passion, resurrection, and ascension. Theophylact gives particular care to the parables unique to this section—the lost sheep, the lost coin, the prodigal son, the rich man and Lazarus, the publican and the Pharisee—drawing out in each the same pastoral concern that runs through his commentary generally: not simply what the parable teaches about God, but what it demands of the one who hears it.

Two further features draw Theophylact’s sustained attention. The first is Luke’s care for those the world of his day counted least—the poor, the sinful woman who anoints the Lord’s feet, the Samaritan, the tax collector Zacchaeus, the penitent thief on the cross—a concern Theophylact reads as belonging to the very center of the Gospel rather than to its margins. The second is the resurrection narrative proper to Luke, above all the two disciples on the road to Emmaus, who recognize the risen Lord only “in the breaking of the bread”; Theophylact lingers here over what it means that their eyes were first “holden” and only afterward opened, and draws from the episode a broader lesson about how faith and recognition of Christ are granted, not simply achieved by looking.

How to Read This Commentary

Because Luke shares so much material with Matthew and Mark while also containing a great deal found nowhere else, it helps to notice, as Theophylact himself notices, when he is treading ground already covered in the earlier Gospel commentaries and when he is working with material that is Luke’s alone. The parables and the infancy narrative reward the closest attention, since it is here that the commentary’s debt to Cyril shows most plainly and its doctrinal reach is greatest. Above all, a reader should keep before them Luke’s own announced purpose—an orderly, verified account, written so that Theophilus, and every reader after him, “know with certainty the truth of the things you were taught”. Theophylact’s commentary serves that purpose still: it is written to settle the reader in the certainty of the Gospel, not merely to inform.