Navigating Gospel Truth: A Guide to Faithfully Reading the Accounts of Jesus's LifeSýnishorn

The Eyewitnesses

Today, we’ll meet some of the eyewitnesses the Gospel authors point us to. Many of those witnesses traveled with Jesus from place to place, watching His acts and learning His teachings. It was their full-time job. After Jesus’s death and resurrection, they spent their time proclaiming what they’d heard and seen. All four Gospels contain testimony of named eyewitnesses, but today, we’ll focus in particular on some of the eyewitnesses in Luke’s Gospel.

Read Luke 1:1-3. What did Luke say the original eyewitnesses and servants of the word had done (vv. 1-2)? What did Luke say he had done (v. 3)?

One of the first eyewitnesses Luke pointed us to is Jesus’s mother, Mary. In particular, Luke recorded a private conversation Mary had with an angel, who told her she was going to be the mother of God’s own Son (Luke 1:26-38)! Most of the other named witnesses in the first two chapters of Luke—such as Elizabeth, Zechariah, Simeon, or Anna—were already old at the time of Jesus’s birth. But Jesus’s mother Mary would almost certainly have been a teenager. We know she was still alive after Jesus’s death and resurrection (Acts 1:14). So, Luke may have heard Mary’s story of meeting the angel from her own lips!

Have you ever thought about Mary the mother of Jesus as a source of eyewitness testimony for the Gospels? Imagine Mary telling her story of meeting the angel and hearing she’d be the mother of God’s Son.

After Luke described Jesus ascending into heaven in the book of Acts (Acts 1:9-11), he listed the names of the twelve apostles, minus Judas Iscariot who had betrayed Jesus. Then Luke wrote, “All these with one accord were devoting themselves to prayer, together with the women and Mary the mother of Jesus, and his brothers” (Acts 1:14, ESV). Jesus’s male and female disciples, including His mother Mary, were Luke’s eyewitness sources for his Gospel account of Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection, and they were praying together again after Jesus’s ascension! When Luke came to write his Gospel, many of these first eyewitnesses would still have been alive. They’d been telling their stories for decades, and Luke captured their testimony for us!

Praise God that He worked through the lives of individual men and women who knew Jesus well to enable us to learn about His life, death, and resurrection.

Spend some time praying that the Lord would give you the courage to be a witness to Jesus in your own community.