Contemporary study of the Gospel of Luke takes its starting point from the mid-twentieth-century publication of Hans Conzelmann's redaction-critical study, The Theology of St Luke. In Conzelmann's hands, the distinctive voice of Luke the evangelist emerged, leaving in its wake earlier judgments of Luke as the voice of Paul (who sometimes misunderstood the Pauline message) or as one so slavishly devoted to his sources that he was incapable of any theological contribution of his own. Arguably, the pillars of Conzelmann's perspective on Luke – for example, his emphasis on the delay of the Parousia, his apology for Rome, or his presentation of Jesus' ministry as a Satan-free period – have been felled, one by one, by subsequent scholarship. Nevertheless, Conzelmann's work altered the course of historical study of the Third Gospel, paved the way for what would become first composition – and then literary-critical analysis of Luke – and set the interpretive agenda in ways that would open the door to a wide array of other, especially social-scientific and political, approaches to reading Luke.

If, in retrospect, Conzelmann was the catalyst for these new pathways in interpreting Luke, it is also true that he shared this role with many others in biblical studies more generally. Similar work on the other Synoptic Gospels dates to the same period, for example, with Günther Bornkamm and his students' work on the Gospel of Matthew and Willi Marxen's work on Mark.