Matthew the apostle

This study had been done before I started blogging, but I recently noticed that the relics of St. Luke the Evangelist had been subjected to DNA analysis. The article is: Cristiano Vernesi et al., “Genetic characterization of the body attributed to the evangelist Luke,” Proc. Natl. Acad.

Luke the evangelist dna lyrics Historical tradition records his death in Thebes around AD. His body was first buried in Constantinople. Later it was brought to Padua in Italy. Here his remains were compared with the DNA of Syrian and Greek individuals, confirming his Syrian ancestry. The evangelist Luke belonged to haplogroup H in the maternal line. Order DNA origin analysis.

Sci. USA 98 (): –; on-line: Oct Here is the abstract:

Historical sources indicate that the evangelist Luke was born in Syria, died in Greece, and then his body was transferred to Constantinople, and from there to Padua, Italy. To understand whether there is any biological evidence supporting a Syrian origin of the Padua body traditionally attributed to Luke, or a replacement in Greece or Turkey, the mtDNA was extracted from two teeth and its control region was cloned and typed.

The sequence determined in multiple clones is an uncommon variant of a set of alleles that are common in the Mediterranean region. We also collected and typed modern samples from Syria and Greece. By comparison with these population samples, and with samples from Anatolia that were already available in the literature, we could reject the hypothesis that the body belonged to a Greek, rather than a Syrian, individual.

However, the probability of an origin in the area of modern Turkey was only insignificantly lower than the probability of a Syrian origin. The genetic evidence is therefore compatible with the possibility that the body comes from Syria, but also with its replacement in Constantinople.

Further details are found in the Telegraph: Olga Craig, DNA test pinpoints St Luke the apostle&#;s remains to Padua (Oct.

Luke the evangelist biography DNA could be retrieved from the teeth. Only the whole tooth yielded sufficient amounts of DNA for the successive steps of the analysis; other biological material proved impossible to obtain. The 5 amplicons were cloned, and from 5 to 13 clones for each amplicon (39 in total) were sequenced. As is common with ancient DNA (4, 5), nonreproducible.

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The upshot is that the body of the old man in the tomb alleged to be of Luke could be Syrian or Anatolian in origin, but unlikely to be Greek. I cannot evaluate the science of the article except to note that it does not appear to support the breathless claims of the Telegraph.

I am a little troubled, however, by the historical confusion in the introduction:

According to historical sources, the evangelist Luke was born in Antioch, in the Roman province of Syria, and died in Thebes (Greece) at age 84, around anno Domini (A.D.) (1).

His body was initially buried in Thebes, but then it was transferred to Constantinople in the second year of the reign of emperor Constantius (A.D. ) and eventually to Padua, Italy, at an unspecified time before , possibly under the reign of Julian the Apostate (), or during the iconoclast controversy (; Fig. 1; ref. 2).

I’m not aware of a single historical source that dates the death of Luke to CE.

Though Munck’s commentary on Acts was cited (without page number), it does not state that.

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In fact, the closest Munck I can find to this topic is found on p. xxix:

The earliest church tradition, from the second half of the second century, states that Luke and Acts were written by Paul’s fellow worker, the physician Luke (see p. xxxii).

Accordingly, all Munck is saying is that the , not Luke’s body, dates to CE and later.

Assessing whether the article’s science is as good as its biblical scholarship, however, is beyond the scope of this blog (or my abilities).

UPDATE: Antonio Lombatti, Saint Luke’s genuine relics? (Mar. 1, ), says that this is one of several bodies claimed to be of Luke, and he lists the ones he is aware of.