Come and study Holy Scriptures with us as Father Stephen DeYoung teaches verse by verse on the podcast,

The Whole Council of God. Father Stephen is a former Protestant pastor and Bible teacher in the Reformed Church,

but now an Orthodox priest serving at St. George Orthodox Cathedral in Charleston, West Virginia. So tonight we are starting Luke, so tonight you get the long, tedious introduction,

rather than the short, quick review of the introduction that I'll do later in subsequent weeks.

So as you can see, I've already changed on the board.

We're now in the gospel according to St. Luke.

And I'll reiterate here the importance of that title.

The title is not just Luke, the way we refer to it, or even Luke's Gospel, because there's one gospel there's one Christ he lived

one life and suffered and died once that's the gospel the gospel is what Christ did so what we have in

each of what we call the four gospels plural sort of the shorthand is actually the gospel according

to St. Matthew, the gospel according to St. Mark, the gospel according to St. John. It's

the same story, it's the same history, it's the same gospel, but from four different perspectives.

Four different perspectives, perspective of four different

authors.

And as we've said before, it's important that we remember that this is the way that the church

has chosen to give us the gospel is to give us four separate versions, four

separate authors, four separate treatments. The church certainly could have just chosen one

of them. I could have picked one and said, well, Luke has most of the stuff we like, right?

It's one that includes the most extensive information about Christ's birth.

Sort of goes the farthest from front to back.

And as we're going to talk about in a minute, it has Acts as sort of the second volume, so it sort of continues.

You could have just said, well, we'll just make Luke

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