Dear and Glorious Physician: A Novel About Saint Luke

Taylor Caldwell

Apr 2024 · Open Road Media

About this ebook

A bestseller “alive with the bustle of ancient times” that “movingly reconstructs St. Luke’s search for God” (The New York Times).

Two millennia ago, a Greek man known as Lucanus traveled to Alexandria to study medicine. He would become one of the greatest doctors of his time and heal the sick all throughout the Mediterranean world.

But his extraordinary work as a physician is not his greatest legacy. Today he is known around the world as St. Luke—author of the third Gospel of the New Testament. He never laid eyes on Jesus, but he heard about Christ’s life and death, and saw God in Him. He retraced Jesus’s steps and sought out those who had known Him—including His mother, Mary. The resulting account is a cornerstone of Christianity and world history.

From the celebrated author of Captains and the Kings and Great Lion of God comes this stirring and deeply inspiring story, counted “among the bestselling religious novels of all time” (The New York Times Book Review).

“A portrait so moving and so eloquent I doubt it is paralleled elsewhere in literature.” —Boston Herald

“Magnificent. . . . [Caldwell] has made St. Luke a real and believable man and recreated on a vast canvas the times and people of his day. You see as large as life all the glory and decadence of Rome and all the strife, turmoil and mysticism of Africa. . . . A glowing and passionate statement of belief.” —The Columbus Citizen

About the author

Taylor Caldwell (1900–1985) was one of the most prolific and widely read authors of the twentieth century. Born Janet Miriam Holland Taylor Caldwell in Manchester, England, she moved with her family to Buffalo, New York, in 1907. She started writing stories when she was eight years old and completed her first novel when she was twelve. Married at age eighteen, Caldwell worked as a stenographer and court reporter to help support her family and took college courses at night, earning a bachelor of arts degree from the University of Buffalo in 1931. She adopted the pen name Taylor Caldwell because legendary editor Maxwell Perkins thought her debut novel, Dynasty of Death (1938), would be better received if readers assumed it were written by a man. In a career that spanned five decades, Caldwell published forty novels, many of which were New York Times bestsellers. Her best-known works include the historical sagas The Sound of Thunder (1957), Testimony of Two Men (1968), Captains and the Kings (1972), and Ceremony of the Innocent (1976), and the spiritually themed novels The Listener (1960) and No One Hears But Him (1966). Dear and Glorious Physician (1958), a portrayal of the life of St. Luke, and Great Lion of God (1970), about the life of St. Paul, are among the bestselling religious novels of all time. Caldwell’s last novel, Answer as a Man (1981), hit the New York Times bestseller list before its official publication date. She died at her home in Greenwich, Connecticut, in 1985.