1) Luke wrote 2 documents of note: The Gospel of Luke, and the Acts of the Apostles. One recorded the life of Jesus, the other the histories of the Christians and their Church.
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M*W: There is no proof that Luke wrote anything. There is also no proof that the Luke of the new testament even existed. The "Gospel of Luke" is the title of a book.
2) Luke was Paul's apostle. He did not (I believe) meet Jesus before he died. Secondhand witness.
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M*W: No one met Jesus before he died. Jesus didn't exist, so he didn't die.
Unfortunately, I think you have very, very little grasp of what historical evidence is like. For one thing:
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M*W: You need to do some reading yourself.
A historian is not counted by the number of his works, but by their accuracy. Luke's account contains incredible detail, and ALL conflicts with other historians or with traditional histories have now been settled IN FAVOR of Luke by archaeologists. In fact, I believe, but am not 100% sure, that Luke is one of the few historians we know of who has never been proven wrong in any of his writings, no matter how trivial.
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M*W: Taken from
A short history of forgery and heresy in the Bible
by Brent Herbert Wednesday, Apr. 05, 2006:
Forgery and Heresy in the Gospel of Luke
"The Gospel of Luke and the related ‘Book of Acts' incorporate such extensive
forging of the historical record and multiple heresies, and I will focus on only a few of the most notorious examples here. The sad truth of the matter is that as far as history is concerned, the whole document was written for the express purpose of forging history, which means that a full discussion of the agenda of the author would be quite lengthy, since it involves almost the entire manuscript, which is replete with history forged and distorted for ideological purposes and heresies introduced for reasons of particular ideology."
"The most damnable heresy propagated by the author of Luke and Acts is to suggest that Jesus was a conservative, Torah observant Jew, who practiced the Law of Moses and encouraged others to do so. He was not in the line of continuity with the Jewish prophets, but rather he carried on the traditions of the Jewish priests, which would then mean that Jesus was hostile to the message of the prophets, and would have joined with the priests in damning the prophets. The book of Luke and Acts are the product of later developments in a growing trend towards priestly religion, and it is the fact that Luke is peddling the development of a religious hierarchy that the author turns to such damnable heresy."
"The first evidence that we have of this heresy can be found by comparing the Gospel of Luke with the Gospel of Mark. The attack on the food laws is strangely absent in Luke's account. Any criticism of the law of Moses is purged and disappears. You will notice a large gap, the white space where the author of Luke has taken the knife and sliced away any criticism of the law of Moses."
"It is here that we encounter questions about historical accuracy. Is it acceptable to base a ‘theology' upon historical inaccuracies? Is some fictional delusion considered acceptable to theologians? Apparently so, for even when something is historically inaccurate it can still be incorporated into a system of theology, since it would appear that the criteria of theology is not truth but rather utility. If it was true that Jesus preached the message of the Jewish prophets, which is what we can discern through a critical reading of the Gospel of Mark, then it becomes clear that the agenda of the author of Luke and Acts was to deliberately distort history by causing us to believe that Jesus did not preach the message of the Jewish prophets, but rather he preached the message of the Jewish priest. If this was true, then it means that no one should listen to Jesus, because Jesus was brainless enough to preach the message of a Jewish priest, thus getting everyone involved in sterile ritual, not to mention a big pile of murderous genocide and theft. However if it is true, as the earliest gospel suggests, that Jesus did preach the message of the Jewish prophets, and thus rejected the religion as a forgery, then what we can discern here is that the author of the Gospel of Luke and Acts was the moron, while it was Jesus was who the intelligent one. So therefore, we are left with a stark choice. Either Luke was a moron or Jesus was a moron. If it is true that Jesus was a first class moron, then that means that both Jesus and Luke were harmful morons who did nothing to benefit humanity, and instead saddled everyone with the rotten superstitions and the harmfully poisonous violence of religion, and therefore we can forget about ‘the historical Jesus' at the same time we forget about the ‘historical Luke', since they were both first class jackasses. However if Mark's account is more historically accurate, then we need only consider Luke to be the first class jackass, and it turns out that Jesus was a sensible and decent human being, who did, after all, attack that revolting priestly forgery as one would expect to be done by a decent human being. It would then be Luke who was indecent, and not Jesus."
"Now it is bad enough in that the heretic who produced the Gospel of Luke felt brave enough to take a bar of soap to the mouth of Jesus, and wash away all criticism of priestly religion. Having done this dreadful deed, the author then plunges head long into what I regard as the most damnable heresy, by leading the church down into the ditch by persistently working to convince the reader that the ‘Law of God' was of divine origin and brought down by Moses. Even the genocidal laws are washed clean and polished by this particular author, for whom, it would seem, nothing priestly is to filthy to be crumpled into a ball and tossed into a garbage can."
"Among the many gifts left to the world by that heretic is the religious right, for whom Luke paved a road, and the fundamentalism and all the backwardness of Christian theology that have followed in the ages past, since it was the unique contribution of that heretic to prepare the church to be polluted by this particular forger of Gospels." [/QUOTE]
