Luke the Evangelist, MD extraordinaire

ἀσπάζεται ὑμᾶς Λουκᾶς ὁ ἰατρὸς ὁ ἀγαπητὸς καὶ Δημᾶς. 

(Colossians 4:14 BNT)

The Apostle Paul calls his "beloved" ally as iatros (Greek for physician) -- professional designation I suppose. The "iatr" in "pediatrics" comes from that Greek root; hence, paedo is Greek for child = "pediatrics" is  "branch of medicine dealing with children and their diseases."  In the time of Paul, that's what they call a doctor: iatros. Shepherd wrote in Luke: Physician and Apostle

• Luke was a physician. He used a medical vocabulary instinctively. In the incident where the boy is said to be "thrown down" (English text) by his affliction, the Greek word Luke uses was the current medical term for convulsions. In the incident where the distraught father cries to Jesus, "Look upon my son!", the word Luke uses for "look upon" is the current medical term used of a physician seeing a patient. Like most physicians Luke was understandably defensive of the medical profession. When the menorrhagic woman approaches Jesus, Matthew and Mark tell us she had exhausted all her savings on physicians but was no better. Dr. Luke tells us the same story, but chooses to omit the part about costly medical treatment that has proved ineffective.

Doctors in ancient times were given lofty status. The article Medical Community of Ancient Rome discusses

• At the top was the equivalent of a surgeon general of the empire. He was by law a noble, a dux (duke) or a vicarius (vicar) of the emperor. He held the title of comes archiatorum, “count of the chief healers.” The Greek word iatros, “healer”, was higher-status than the Latin medicus.

Such was the regard given to doctors in those days. Moreover, the education leading up to a practice in medicine was also a rigorous one that involved a wide range of subjects that included grammar, philosophy and rhetorics. A student might be able to reach the learning tier of the rhetor

• The rhetor was the final stage in Roman education. Very few boys went on to study rhetoric, and early on in Roman history it may have been the only way to train as a lawyer or politician. This is where spokesman, the original translation of orator, comes from. (in Education in Ancient Rome)

This could be the reason why we have our Evangelist as a good literary writer. We all know that

• Luke's writings are the single largest contribution to the New Testament. His written gospel is the longest book in the NT; when we add his second volume, the Acts of the Apostles, we have over one-quarter of the NT. Luke wrote excellent Greek; in fact his Greek is the best in all of scripture." (Shepherd)

This is not at all surprising to some historians like Jo-Anne Shelton. She explains,

• Tacitus pointed out that during his day (the second half of the 1st century AD), students had begun to lose sight of legal disputes and had started to focus more of their training on the art of storytelling. (As the Romans Did: A Sourcebook in Roman Social History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998)

So we have here a good storyteller who is also a topnotch doctor. See my sermon where I mentioned some of the data in this feature here.

J.P.R. Pesebre
Quezon City
2013

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See:
The Greeks May Have the Last Word but Who Has the First?