Did Luke Copy His Prologue from Pedanius Dioscorides?

 

"Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us, ² just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word. ³ With this in mind, since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, I too decided to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, ⁴ so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught." (Luke 1:1-4 ESV)

"Dear Areios, Even though many writers, not only ancient but also modem, have written about the preparation, properties, and testing of drugs, I shall try to show you that it is neither a vain nor a foolish impulse that possessed me to undertake the present work. I have done so because some of them did not give complete accounts, while others based their disquisitions for the most part on written sources." (Pedanius Dioscorides, De Materia Medica, Preface. 1)

Some enemies of biblical reliability have put forward the claim that Luke copied the prologue to his gospel from Pedanius Dioscorides (in particular, some Muslims on the EFDawah channel's "Historicity of the New Testament" video series have put forward this claim), and this is what explains the high verbal similarity between the two prefaces.

In response to this, I quote the words of James W. Scott, from the University of St. Andrews. He wrote a PhD dissertation titled "Luke's Preface and the Synoptic Problem." In this dissertation, he dedicates a couple of pages to address the claim that Luke copied his preface from Pedanius Dioscorides:

"It has been suggested to the contrary by P. de Lagarde and J. Moffatt that Luke may have imitated the preface of De materia medica, by the botanist and pharmacologist Pedanius Dioscorides. But F. Blass and T. Zahn have shown that the resemblances between the two prefaces are too slight to warrant such an inference. We would agree with Lagarde against Blass, however, that the general thrust of both prefaces is the same; that is, both authors refer to the unsatisfactory literature in their field in order to account for their writing on the subject. (Blass denies that Luke does this.) But direct literary dependence can hardly be deduced from this similarity. Furthermore, it is by no means clear that Dioscorides' treatise had been written, copied, disseminated, and brought to Luke's attention before he wrote his gospel. Dioscorides came from Anazarbus, near Tarsus in Cilicia, and dedicated his work to a certain Areios, who was undoubtedly the physician Laecanius Areios of Tarsus. Areios took the name Laecanius from his patron, C. Laecanius Bassus, who was consul in 64 and died in the year that Pliny the Elder began his Natural History, which would have been several years before the completion of that work in 77. Dioscorides says that from his youth he pursued botanical-pharmacological studies, and that while traveling with Roman armies (evidently as a physician) he collected drug specimens and took notes on their properties and native uses in much of southern Europe. After retiring from military service, he combined his accumulated data with information derived from older books (notably from the identically titled work by Sextius Niger, who lived in the days of Augustus), and produced a large, five-volume work. From these facts it has been inferred that he was a military doctor during the reigns of Claudius (41-54) and Nero (54-68) and wrote his treatise during the reign of Vespasian (70-79), although these inferences are obviously somewhat problematic. Now Dioscorides was probably younger than Areios, and Areios than Bassus. This may be inferred from the fact that Dioscorides' dedication to Areios was probably an expression of respect and affection for an older physician of his own country, and from the fact that Areios took his name from Bassus. If these relative ages are correct, then Bassus's dates imply that Areios flourished in the sixties and seventies, and probably into the eighties. He would have been an esteemed elder physician, then, in the eighties, and perhaps into the nineties. Since Dioscorides probably wrote his treatise no earlier than in his late middle age, when Areios was somewhat elderly, we may date it in the eighties, or perhaps even in the nineties. A date in the seventies would perhaps be possible, but an earlier date would seem to be excluded. A date between 80 and 85 would seem most likely. A. H. Buck, evidently followed by the Encyclopaedia Britannica, dates the treatise around 77, for which the only basis seems to be the date of Pliny's Natural History. Now if one dates Luke's gospel at 90 or later, or perhaps in the eighties, it is possible that he may have read Dioscorides and been impressed by his preface. But an earlier date, especially one before 70, would put Luke's, date of publication before Diosorides' date. Thus, if there was any imitation, it may well have been Dioscorides who imitated Luke. It is certainly true that there are some verbal and conceptual similarities between Luke's pl. face and some other prefaces of antiquity. Scholars have, of course, given these parallels considerable attention. In order to properly evaluate their significance, it must be borne in mind that when two writers treat the same subject and express themselves in the same literary idiom, correspondences in thought and expression occasionally appear. This simply reflects the fact that human thought and experience, for all their variety, often follow similar patterns. Now since Luke dealt with matters in his preface which many other writers dealt with in theirs, usually at much greater length, it should come as no surprise that an occasional word or clause in another preface, especially one written in the Hellenistic idiom of Luke's day (e.g., one written by Josephus) bears some resemblance to a word or clause in Luke's preface. But the resemblances in thought are so brief and so general, and the verbal correspondences are so slight and so often disconnected, that it is unwarranted to deduce from them that Luke is repeating conventional motifs. If there were any particular remarks that writers included in their prefaces for the sake of convention, they would be found in many prefaces, yet no statement in Luke's preface is paralleled by one in even several other prefaces, let alone many others. Indeed, apart from one- and two-word parallels, if those can be called parallels, one is hard-pressed to find more than one or two other prefaces which have the same combination of like words. And in no case does another preface as a whole, or even a paragraph in another preface, resemble Luke's preface at all closely. So, in the absence of any pattern of similarity among the parallel passages in other prefaces, and in view of the unremarkable character of those parallels that do exist, we must conclude that the correspondences between Luke's preface and various other prefaces show only that Luke followed the broad conventions respecting the subject matter of prefaces, that his circumstances and ideas were not entirely different from all those of all other writers, and that he had a good command of literary diction, all of which leaves the seriousness and historical value of his statements untouched. " (James W. Scott, Luke's Preface and the Synoptic Problem, pgs. 11-14)