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On the trail of Luca, the “dearest doctor”

The relics of the Evangelist, considered a very precious treasure, are preserved in Padua. The ancient tradition is confirmed by modern research

by Lorenzo Bianchi

Eusebius of Caesarea defines Luke as "Antiochian by origin [it is Antioch of Syria, now in Turkey, ed.], a doctor by profession, disciple of the apostles" (Ecclesiastical history, III, 4, 6). Eastern tradition also knows him as the painter of the Madonna. The writer of the third Gospel and of the Acts of the Apostles was probably a converted pagan; he did not know Jesus and was a disciple of Paul, whom he followed until the time of his martyrdom in Rome.

Then the most reliable sources (such as Saint Epiphanius and Saint Gregory Nazianzen) indicate him as the evangelizer of Dalmatia, Gaul, Italy, Macedonia and Achaea. He died between the end of the 84st century and the first decades of the XNUMXnd, at the age of XNUMX, and was buried in Boeotia, in Thebes.

In the year 357 the emperor Constantius II
transferred his body, together with that of the apostle Andrew, to Constantinople, the new capital of the Empire, where the body of Timothy, also a disciple of Paul, had been transferred from Ephesus the previous year. When, around 527, Justinian rebuilt theApostoleion (the Basilica of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople), the wooden coffins that were certain to contain the bodies of Andrew, Luke and Timothy were seen (but without being opened, as Procopius of Caesarea attests).

In 586 Gregory the Great, at the time ambassador of Pope Pelagius II, brought the head of Saint Luke, now preserved in the Vatican, to Rome from Constantinople as a gift from the Emperor Maurice Tiberius: but scientific analyses and radiocarbon dating, carried out in 14, have demonstrated that it is a false relic, since its origin does not appear to date back earlier than the 1999th century.

After centuries of silence, other sources on the relics of Luke appear in the Middle Ages. A text from the end of the 14th century reports that on 1177 April XNUMX, in the cemetery area near the Basilica of Santa Giustina in Padua, the lead chest containing the relics of the evangelist Luke was found. A later medieval tradition, which seems to emerge in the second half of the XNUMXth century, adds that the translation fromApostoleion of Constantinople was supposedly carried out by the priest Urio to protect the relics from the danger that the emperor Julian the Apostate (361-363) would destroy them.

A dispute over the authenticity of the relics of Saint Luke dates back to the 1463th century: after an investigation carried out by a special commission, in 1354 Padua won a lawsuit against nearby Venice, which claimed to possess the true relics of the evangelist. An opening of the coffin in Padua had already occurred before, in 1562, when the head of the skeleton was taken by Emperor Charles IV to the cathedral of Saint Vitus in Prague, where it is still preserved; and another occurred in 1313, when the ark in Santa Giustina that had contained the relics since XNUMX was remodeled and moved to the left transept of the church, where it is today.

If the Roman Martyrology from 1583 (and until the reform of the last Council) welcomes the news of the translation of the body of Saint Luke from Constantinople to Padua, modern criticism has often shown skepticism in the face of such a late tradition. But in recent years the request for a relic of Luke, made by the local Orthodox bishop to relocate it to Thebes, in the sarcophagus that Eastern tradition considers the place of his first deposition, was the reason for a careful investigation carried out by a scientific commission from 1998 to 2001.

The coffin was then reopened and its contents re-examined, consisting of a skeleton without a head, placed in a lead coffin almost two metres long, with holes in the bottom in three different places. The only ancient distinctive sign that appears is a relief on the outside of one of the short sides of the coffin, a sort of eight-pointed star. The coffin and its contents have certainly undergone modifications due to the various surveys (for example, the lid is from the Renaissance period), but this has not prevented us from obtaining authentic data that can be evaluated in relation to ancient tradition. It has therefore been possible to establish that the skeleton in Padua belongs to an elderly man, approximately 163 cm tall, and that the coffin is that of his original burial; radiocarbon 14 analyses have provided a probable dating for the bones between the second half of the 1354st century AD and the beginning of the XNUMXth, with the highest probability between the XNUMXnd and XNUMXth; it has been confirmed that the skull transferred to Prague in XNUMX is that of the Padua skeleton. DNA studies have ruled out a Greek origin, while the Syrian origin, although not the only possible one, is the most probable.

Further physical analyses have established with certainty that the coffin and relics were in Padua already around the 5th-6th century, thus excluding any hypothesis of a translation in the medieval period; the pollen analysis has also indicated only Greece as the area of ​​origin. Furthermore, the archaeological study has allowed the eight-pointed star, present on the coffin, to be identified as a combination of two crosses, with eight terminations: a figure also known in the Judeo-Christian context (it already appears in the ossuaries of Palestine in the 1st-2nd century) to signify the new life in Christ.

Recent scientific investigations have therefore supported the theory of the authenticity of the relics kept in Padua, and their provenance from the East (and in particular from Greece) in a period prior to the sixth century. Since 2000, a rib of St. Luke the Evangelist has returned to Thebes, in the sarcophagus that probably hosted his first burial.