In what community did Luke write his gospel?

Answer 1

We know little about the community in which Luke his Gospel, but we can infer some things. The Gospel was written in Greek Koine, long after 70 CE and very possibly in the first decade of the second century. It was therefore, no doubt, intended for a community somewhere in the Middle East around the end of the first century.

There is no reason to believe that Luke's Gospel was written by Luke, the companion of Paul, an attribution that was only made later in the second century. It is possible to establish that this Luke knew nothing about the gospel Jesus, other than what he found in an incomplete copy of Marks' Gospel. Whenever Luke agrees with Mark, the text is almost identical in Greek, something that could not happen unless one Gospel was being copied. We also have the "Missing Block", a section of text that was obviously missing from the copy of Mark that Luke was using. That he was trying to follow Mark faithfully and did not know that there were missing sheets in his copy, is demonstrated by the fact that he unintelligibly merged the verses from Mark, before and after the Missing Block. Given the importance of material in the "Missing Block", particularly the miracle of walking on water, we could expect that Luke would have added this material from his other sources, if any such sources were known to him. If Luke knew nothing of the gospel story, we can infer that Luke's community knew nothing about the gospel Jesus before Luke began to preach from his Gospel, although they might have received the 'Q' document, which contained sayings attributed to Jesus.

So we can build a picture of a Greek-speaking, gentile community in the Middle East, with no knowledge of the gospel stories, but which could have read and followed the sayings of Jesus from the 'Q' document, and wondered about the great man behind those sayings.