By Water & Blood

Luke fills what the others left

But since such things were being accomplished among such mindless people, the Holy Spirit compels and goads holy Luke to raise up from the lowest depth the mind of the deceived and to take up again what had been left by the others.

And so that none of those who had gone astray might think he had set forth the birth in a mythical way, he carries the work up to what is earlier,

and for the precision of truth he introduces as witnesses those who had become servants of the word, saying, “Since many have undertaken,” in order to show that some are mere undertakers—I mean those around Cerinthus and Merinthus and the others.

Then what does he say? “It seemed good to me also, having followed everything carefully from the beginning—those who were eyewitnesses and became servants of the word—to write to you, most excellent Theophilus” (whether he said this writing then to some Theophilus, or to every human being who loves God), “so that you may know the certainty of the words about which,” he says, “you were instructed.”

And he said that the instruction had been set earlier, as if he had already been catechized by others, yet had not learned the precision securely from them.

Then he says, “There was in the days of Herod the king a priest named Zacharias, of the division of Abijah, and his wife was of the daughters of Aaron, and her name was Elizabeth.”

And he begins before Matthew. For Matthew indicated a period of thirty years from the beginning, while Mark set out what came after the thirty years—the events that truly took place at the Jordan—similarly to Matthew and Luke.

But Matthew made his narrative from a thirty-year span before the events at the Jordan and the baptism; Luke, however, indicated the time from six months before the Savior was conceived in the womb, and again nine months and a few days of the Lord’s conception, so that the whole time is thirty-one years and beyond.

And he also narrates the shepherds’ vision of God through the angels who brought good news, and how he was born in Bethlehem and wrapped in swaddling clothes in a manger and circumcised on the eighth day, and how in forty days according to the law they offered a sacrifice for him, and how Simeon received him in his arms, and how Anna the daughter of Phanuel gave thanks, and how he went away to Nazareth, and how each year he went up to Jerusalem with his parents as they fulfilled for him the things according to the law—none of which was worked out by Matthew or by Mark, nor indeed by John.