On "Luke the Historian in Light of Research" by A. T. Robertson ****

I came to this book rather oddly. Someone handed me a copy of Robertson's Harmony of the Gospels, a book my father had on his shelf for many years. I perused it--have found it useful in many ways--but I was intrigued by the fact that Robertson had a list of other books he'd written. Harmony is quite old, so I figured these books might well be in public domain, might well be available online, and indeed they were. This was the one that seemed the most intriguing--and indeed, it proved to be very handy. Admittedly, it's a bit dry and in some ways a bit hagiographic, but I like the Robertson takes Luke the writer seriously and that he dispels many of the ideas, still current to this day, that Luke is not the author of the two books credited to him in the New Testament, that those books were written far later. In fact, Robertson has good answer for most of the critics of Luke, as a writer and as a reliable source of information.

What's admirable here also is that we get something of a biography of Luke, as much as one can glean some two millenia later when pretty much all we have for data are the books he penned. Robertson also provides some useful background information--on Roman law, nauticals terms, written speeches, and first-century medicine. Read over the course of months, the book has given me a slight desire to look at one or two other titles by Robertson, still useful these many decades after their original publication. You can find this book on Google Books here.