Novel: Dear and Glorious Physician

Overview
Taylor Caldwell's Dear and Glorious Physician imagines the life and mind of Luke of Antioch, the physician traditionally credited with the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles. Set across the Mediterranean world of the first century, the narrative follows a cultivated, reflective doctor who becomes drawn into the tumult of the early Christian movement. Caldwell combines close medical observation, cultural and political detail, and a devotional sympathy for her protagonists to create a portrait that moves between clinics and catacombs, marketplaces and martyrdoms.
The novel treats Luke as both healer and historian: a man trained in classical medicine who seeks precision of observation and truth of record while confronting questions of faith, suffering, and the cost of allegiance. Caldwell renders the ancient world with vivid, sometimes ornate, descriptive passages that emphasize sensory detail, illuminating illness, ritual, speech, and landscape, while threading a steady moral and theological concern through Luke's inner life.

Plot Summary
Luke's story begins with his upbringing and medical apprenticeship in the cosmopolitan city of Antioch, where Greek learning, Roman order, and diverse religious practices converge. A natural observer, he is drawn to the practice of healing as a discipline that demands empathy and exactitude. His professional skill opens doors across social boundaries, bringing him into contact with slaves, magistrates, Jews, and Gentiles, and sharpening an ethical sensibility that will inform his later choices.
As events unfold, Luke becomes increasingly involved with the early Christian community, traveling with Paul and others on missionary journeys. He performs surgeries, tends the wounded, records testimony, and acts as a steadying presence amid doctrinal disputes and violent opposition. The narrative follows key episodes of the apostolic age, preaching in synagogues and marketplaces, confrontations with civic and religious authorities, scenes of conversion, and the slow accumulation of written testimony, culminating in Luke's attempt to assemble an accurate, compassionate account of the movement's origins and spread.

Themes and Character
A central theme is the reconciliation of reason and faith. Luke embodies a pursuit of empirical truth, medical diagnosis, careful observation, precise record-keeping, alongside a deepening spiritual conviction. Healing serves as a recurring metaphor: restoring bodies mirrors the attempt to heal souls and communities fractured by fear, violence, and betrayal. Caldwell explores questions of vocation and conscience, portraying Luke's choices as the product of intellectual rigor braided to moral courage.
The novel also engages with the costs of discipleship. Loyalty to the nascent Christian cause places Luke and his companions in repeated danger, testing their fidelity and forcing painful compromises. Caldwell contrasts personalities, Luke's measured compassion with Paul's fiery zeal, Peter's earthy impulsiveness, to dramatize the variety of temperaments that shaped early Christianity. The portrayal emphasizes human vulnerability and courage rather than abstract theology, making the emergence of the Gospel a human drama of witness, suffering, and perseverance.

Style and Reception
Caldwell writes in a lush, narrative-rich style that privileges sweeping description and emotional intensity. Medical scenes are drawn with technical confidence, lending authenticity to Luke's vocation, while religious and philosophical debates are rendered with rhetorical force. The tone often leans toward the elegiac and the didactic, reflecting Caldwell's strong convictions about moral order and divine purpose.
Readers interested in historical-religious fiction find the novel rewarding for its immersive atmosphere and its compassionate treatment of early Christians. Critics have noted the book's melodramatic tendencies and Caldwell's tendency toward moral certitude, but many praise the careful blending of historical detail, medical realism, and spiritual inquiry. Dear and Glorious Physician stands as a notable mid-20th-century attempt to humanize an evangelist and to imagine the lived experience behind foundational Christian texts.