Just as Constantine had his publicist in Eusebuius, the Apostle Paul had his in Luke. They obviously had a very close relationship and I’m guessing Luke was a much younger man, and he acted as Paul’s personal physician. Paul seems to have suffered from “a thorn in the flesh,” that may have required daily attention and these two were inseparable.
Luke wrote the Gospel of Luke and the Book of Acts, and together they comprise about a third of the New Testament, while the texts attributed to Paul make up the bulk of the rest, so these two close associates represent the twin towers of the New Testament. But Luke also painted the first icons, and pioneered a blending of the Egyptian and Greek painting styles into one. Not only did he write the most dramatic parts of the New Testament (in Greek), but he created the first images of the saints. Paul may have been the brains behind the ministry, but Luke was the one carrying water and chopping wood.
Luke was born in the empire’s third largest city, Antioch in South-Central Turkey, near the mouth of the Orontes River, but he settled in the coastal town of Ephesus. He wrote in fluent, educated Greek with a flair for the dramatic, and was obviously influenced by The Aeneid, the original Bible for the Roman Empire, an epic poem by Virgil that traced the history of Rome as emanating from the ruins of Troy, and celebrated its imperial rise to grandeur up to Augustus Ceasar. The poem established the divine right-to-rule for Rome’s royal families, so it was a useful piece of mind control. The story mixed fact and fiction, with gods and goddesses jumping into the fray at will. It set the standard for creating an empire-justifying mythology, and took its cues from the success of Homer’s Iliad.
Similarly, Luke manifested a similar operation by drawing a direct line from Zechariah to Jesus to Paul, and anointing Paul as the true leader of the Christian ministry, with a divine right to lead the movement. It was a puff piece studded with lies and exaggerations undoubtedly fed by Paul in order to enhance Paul’s reputation and solidify his dominance over Christianity. And the story had angels and demons jumping into the narrative at will, like the Olympic gods in the Aeneid, but nothing like the other Gospels, especially the Gnostic Ones rejected by the Council of Nicaea, which concentrate on an examination of the origin of life, and do not have supernatural beings directing traffic on earth.
So if you pay attention to Luke’s story and realize his influences, then the appearance of these angels becomes a device deployed to conceal Paul’s hidden connections to Rome, the force really rescuing Paul in his hours of need. When you flip this switch, those fantastic stories take on new dimensions, and begin to resemble the UFO stories being circulated around the history of religion today, stories that may be planted to hold back the realization that an anointing oil manifested medical miracles in the time of Jesus, an oil written out of the New Testament, but one that is certainly experiencing a rebirth in our time.