This is a charming painting of St. Luke the Evangelist who is in turn painting Jesus and his mother. Luke is the most accessible of the Gospel writers because he was writing for a non Jewish audience and was addressing a reasonably sophisticated people of the first century who have a lot in common with us.
Tradition tells us that Luke was a colleague of St. Paul. He was a doctor by profession which might explain why his Gospel is regarded as the most compassionate. He also was a painter. The picture he paints of Christ in his Gospel is a compelling and haunting one. It is the Jesus of the poor, of the Gentiles, of a Jesus comfortable with women and children but withering in his condemantion of hyporcisy and empty religious rites.
God willing and with a bit of luck we will gather a number of people on Monday mornings interested to see what Luke tells us about Jesus Christ with the help of the excellent commentary written by William Barclay. My hope is to be able to read it like any other book for the first time, without the baggage of sixty years of half hearing and half reading it and to cherish it on its own merits.
Post script 2025. Over the intervening 13 years I have read much, perhaps too much about the origins of the New Testament. It seems generally accepted by modern scholars that we cannot with any certitude identify the authors of the Gospels, that for the most part they were oral collections assembled by the early church and eventually written down. So it seems the charming world of William Barclay has been upstaged by new scientific discoveries. How sad.
