How did Luke talk to Mary and learn everything about the birth of Jesus?

Answer 1

Luke, the physician and companion of Paul, is unlikely to have met Mary, only coming onto the Christian scene in the fifties of the first century, when Mary would have been well into her seventies, an age few people reached in biblical times. Paul, in his epistles, never mentioned ever having met Mary and showed no interest in learning about the family and early life of Jesus, and Luke is unlikely to have known any more about Mary than did Paul.

The Gospel of Luke was originally anonymous and was only attributed by the Church Fathers to the apostle Luke later in the second century. However, there is no good reason to believe that the gospel was really written by Luke. Moreover, scholars say that Luke was actually written around the end of the first century, more than a century after the birth of Jesus. Clearly the author could not have met anyone who had even known Mary or Jesus.

Luke 1:1 tells us that the author was writing "those things which are most surely believed among us." In other words, at best he was telling what came from sources thought to be accurate accounts of Jesus. The most important of these is now known to have been Mark's Gospel, but he also relied on sayings material from the hypothetical 'Q' document, as did the author of Matthew. Neither Mark nor Q tells anything about the birth of Jesus, and the source of Luke's information about the births of John the Baptist and Jesus is entirely unknown. If indeed the author of Luke had a source that he relied on for his nativity account its historicity is suspect, not the least because Matthewtells a quite different story.