The New Testament, Gospel of Luke

The Gospel of Luke, one of the four canonical New Testament Gospels, is the primary scriptural source for its distinctive infancy narrative material, including the Annunciation, the Visitation and the Presentation in the Temple, episodes found nowhere else in the New Testament in the same form. Its strength is that it is the actual primary text itself, the correct source for what Luke's narrative states rather than a later paraphrase or a different Gospel's account. Its limit is that it is a primary scriptural text, not a scholarly commentary on its own composition, sources or historical context, questions genuinely debated among New Testament scholars regarding when Luke wrote, what sources he used, and how historically to read the infancy material specifically; a claim addressing those questions needs a critical scholarly source such as Raymond Brown's The Birth of the Messiah rather than the Gospel text alone.