When Was The Gospel of Luke Written? I have been trying to search this on the web and it seems I keep getting conflicting information. Apparently, modern scholars believe the Gospel of Luke was written in the second century AD. If this is true then why do we include it in our Bibles? Why do people read it if it was written much later? And then, I read some info about it being written in the 60s AD. I tried to search this on StackExchange but no luck. Could you help me out?
If you accept its own testimony then Luke was written:-

Before the Acts of the Apostles and by the same author as the writer of Acts (compare Acts 1:1 with Luke 1:1-4);

The author of Acts was, at times, a companion of Paul on his missionary journeys:
about 49 AD, Acts 16:10-18;
about 54-57 AD, Acts 20:4-21:19; and
about 59-62 AD, Acts 27:1-28:30.


All these passages are the &quot;we&quot; passages.
There is so much detail in Acts which has been confirmed by archaeology that it has been said that it would need a bigger miracle for it to have been made up than for the author to have genuinely accompanied Paul on his journeys.

Seeing as Paul died about 65 AD it is obviously not possible that Acts was written mid 2nd century.  It seems a compelling argument to me and many others that Acts was written before certain events which would have been included in it if it had been written later.  These events include possibly:
The death of Paul, the death of Peter, the death of James the first Pastor of the church at Jerusalem 62 AD; the first Jewish Roman War 66-70 AD; the change in attitude of the Roman authorities towards Christianity with the beginning of the Roman persecutions under Nero; the Great Fire at Rome.

The most natural explanation why these events are not included in Acts is that Acts was written before these events.
What Acts presents is the prevailing situation before Nero.  The persecutors of the church were the Jewish authorities who struggled to get the Roman authorities to be interested in trying to suppress the new &quot;sect&quot;.

The author of Luke claims to have &quot;had a perfect understanding of all things from the very first&quot; Luke 1:3.  In other words he is claiming that he is in a perfect position, he is ideally qualified to tell Theophilus the history of the events from his perspective, making use of eyewitness accounts.

The author is at pains to warn his readers of the coming destruction of Jerusalem, that when they see certain things happening then they should flee from Jerusalem. (Jerusalem was destroyed at the end of the Jewish-Roman War, 66-70 AD.)  Obviously such warnings are superfluous and disingenuous if Jerusalem has already been destroyed.  On this understanding Matthew, Mark, and Luke were written before 66 AD and John's Gospel was written after 70 AD.

Supporting such a view, in 1972, a Spanish-Catalan Jesuit scholar, Father Jose O'Callaghan of Barcelona claimed that the Dead Sea Scroll papyrus 7Q5 was a fragment of Mark's Gospel, it was from Mark 6:53.  Seeing as the community at Qumran was destroyed by the Romans about 66 AD this means that Mark's Gospel must have been written before 66 AD.  In other words 7Q5 is evidence of the early authorship of at least Mark's Gospel.  And if Mark could predict the coming destruction of Jerusalem then why not Luke and Matthew?

The dismissal of scholars of the possibility of Matthew, Mark, and Luke being written before the destruction of Jerusalem betrays a fundamental failure on their part to appreciate that this prediction of our Lord could have easily been a product of his understanding of the Old Testament.  The prediction of the destruction of Jerusalem is not merely in these three gospel accounts: it is also found in the book of Daniel:



and after three score and two weeks shall the Messiah be cut off, but not for himself: and the people of the prince shall come and destroy the city and the sanctuary, and the end thereof shall be with a flood (i.e. &quot;an overwhelming&quot;)... Daniel 9:26.

Though conservative evangelicals would say it was written about 535 BC, even the generally accepted date for the writing of Daniel amongst &quot;the scholars&quot; is about 165 BC.  There were many portions of the book of Daniel found amongst the Dead Sea Scrolls dateable to more than 100 BC.
There is no compelling reason to suppose the three Synoptic Gospels were written after the destruction of Jerusalem.  Our Lord could have been merely quoting the book of Daniel.
For more on 7Q5 see &quot;The Jesus Papyrus&quot; by Carsten P. Thiede and Matthew D'Ancona or &quot;The First New Testament&quot; by David Estrada and William White.
Finally, a related question and answer is found here:  Who assigned the gospel authors originally?