C

Ernst Haenchen, himself an Acts luminary, once called Henry Cadbury ‘the doyen of Anglo-Saxon research on Acts’ (Haenchen 1971: 43). Such acclamation, echoed by many others over the past half century, is certainly richly deserved. Cadbury’s first major work, The Style and Literary Method of Luke, focused, as the title suggests, on the vocabulary and literary style of the Lukan author in the context of Attic Greek. Cadbury showed that Luke’s so-called medical vocabulary was not exclusively or uniquely used by medical writers of antiquity, thus, disproving the then widely-held thesis that Luke’s ‘medical’ vocabulary could be taken as evidence that Luke was a physician. Despite the fact that Cadbury’s students used to jest that Cadbury had gained his doctorate by taking Luke’s away, he also clearly argued that neither did the evidence prove that Luke was not a physician. The tradition that Luke the physician was the author of Luke and Acts would have to be examined on different grounds.