We have been considering two books in the New Testament (NT) purported to have been written by the same author, Luke. There was a practical reason that the author wrote this single work in two volumes. In the ancient world, the   maximum length of a scroll was about 30 feet (interestingly, the world “volume” comes from the Latin word for “scroll”). Anything longer was heavy and awkward to use.  Finding a text meant unrolling the scroll to the appropriate place. And so the author wrote two volumes, each a scroll about 30 feet long. More of the NT was written by him than anybody else. Luke and Acts are about 30 percent of the NT – longer than the letters of Paul combined, and 80 percent as long as Matthew, Mark and John combined.

Scholars do not know who the author was. The documents do not name him. Second-century Christians assigned authorship to “Luke” and identified him with the “Luke” who was a companion of Paul in the 50s. This would make the author an eyewitness to some of what is narrated in Acts. It would also affect the dating of Luke-Acts. But the majority of modern scholars are skeptical or at least very uncertain that Luke-Acts was written by a companion of Paul.

For about a century, conventional wisdom suggested that Luke and Acts were written in the late 80s or 90s. But in the last decade, a growing number of scholars have dated them significantly later, in the first decade or two of the second century. Thus there is no consensus about their dating, though probably at least a slight majority still favor the 80s or 90s. They see Luke, like Matthew, as written a decade or two after Mark and thus as a voice from   a generation or so later. In this view, there is no compelling reasons to date Matthew earlier than Luke or vice versa. Thus Luke and Acts would belong in the first half of the NT when considered chronologically – not long after Mark, roughly contemporary with Matthew and before John, Revelation and several other letters. Dating them later is the exception to the rule, which is to reflect consensus conclusion when possible and, when there is no consensus, to follow majority opinion.

Some conservative Christian traditions date Luke and Acts even earlier, to the early 60s rather than the 80s or 90s. They correctly note that Acts ends without mentioning the death of Paul, who was executed in Rome around the middle of the 60s.

Hopefully this helps us understand the NT better!