Before Luke tells us anything about Jesus, he tells us how he came to know it. 1"Many have undertaken to compile a narrative," he begins, which means he knows other accounts already exist, drawn from 2"those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word." Luke was not one of them. He was not in the temple with Zechariah, or in the stable at Bethlehem, or on the hillside with the shepherds. What he has is almost as valuable, access to the people who were.
"Delivered them to us" is the language of a trust passed down carefully, hand to hand. Paul uses the same structure years later about the Lord's Supper, "I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received" (1 Corinthians 15:3). It is the vocabulary of a formal handoff, used when something is too important to risk garbling in the retelling.
Into that stream Luke puts his own labor. He has 3"followed all things closely for some time past," and means to write an orderly account. "Followed closely" was the standard language of ancient historians for research, tracking down sources and verifying details before committing anything to the page. He is doing history, the careful kind, on purpose, so that what results is a narrative someone could check, anchored to named Roman governors, tetrarchs, and high priests, the same instinct behind Paul's later claim that "this has not been done in a corner" (Acts 26:26).
He writes for a particular person. 3"Most excellent Theophilus" is a formal title, the same one used of the Roman governors Felix and Festus later in Luke's second volume (Acts 23:26, 24:3, 26:25). Theophilus was probably a person of standing, someone whose good opinion mattered and whose skepticism, if he had any, would not be talked past with vague assurance. His name means "friend of God," and whether that was his given name or something Luke wanted a reader to notice, it fits the first person entrusted with this Gospel.
The word Luke uses for what he wants Theophilus to have is certainty, a word built from the idea of not stumbling, of ground firm enough to stand on without slipping. And the phrase before it matters as much. "The things you have been taught." Theophilus had already been instructed in the basic facts of the faith, likely by word of mouth, the way everyone in the first generation learned it. Luke is going underneath what Theophilus was told, laying a documented, investigated, orderly foundation beneath teaching he already believed. Faith does not have to choose between what was taught and what was proven. Luke gives him both, the second in service of the first.
That insistence is itself a kind of gospel. God did not ask the first believers, or Theophilus, or us, to take a leap into the dark. He grounded the good news of his Son in events, witnesses, and an investigation, as he grounded the incarnation itself in a moment in history, "in the days of Herod, king of Judea," as the next verse will say. The God who came in flesh and blood did not leave the record of that coming to float free of evidence. He let it be checked.
Come to this Gospel as Theophilus did, already having heard something of Christ and trusting in some measure, and let that trust be made firmer by an account built to hold weight. Bring your questions with you. Luke expected them.
Prayer
Father, thank you for a faith never asked to run ahead of the evidence. Thank you for Luke's patience, and for the eyewitnesses before him, and for a Savior willing to be born, live, die, and rise in a history that could be investigated and not only imagined. As we read this Gospel, give us Theophilus's certainty, ground firm enough to stand on, because you have already answered the questions that matter most. In Jesus' name, amen.