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Genetic characterization of the body attributed to the evangelist Luke - PubMed

  • ️Mon Jan 01 2001

Genetic characterization of the body attributed to the evangelist Luke

C Vernesi et al. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2001.

Abstract

Historical sources indicate that the evangelist Luke was born in Syria, died in Greece, and then his body was transferred to Constantinople, and from there to Padua, Italy. To understand whether there is any biological evidence supporting a Syrian origin of the Padua body traditionally attributed to Luke, or a replacement in Greece or Turkey, the mtDNA was extracted from two teeth and its control region was cloned and typed. The sequence determined in multiple clones is an uncommon variant of a set of alleles that are common in the Mediterranean region. We also collected and typed modern samples from Syria and Greece. By comparison with these population samples, and with samples from Anatolia that were already available in the literature, we could reject the hypothesis that the body belonged to a Greek, rather than a Syrian, individual. However, the probability of an origin in the area of modern Turkey was only insignificantly lower than the probability of a Syrian origin. The genetic evidence is therefore compatible with the possibility that the body comes from Syria, but also with its replacement in Constantinople.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1

Possible itinerary of the evangelist Luke and of his body. Dates are based on ref. .

Figure 2
Figure 2

The two teeth analyzed. Two laboratories (University of Arizona, Tucson, and Oxford University) independently estimated that the PB belonged to a person who died between A.D. 72 and A.D. 416 (95% confidence interval; G. Molin and V.T.W.M., personal communication).

Figure 3
Figure 3

Synthetic representation of the relationships among 12 samples and the PB sequence. Sy, Syria; Gr, Greece (present study). The other 10 samples (with their sizes in parentheses) are Al, Albanians (42); Ba, Basques (106); Dr, Druzes from Israel (45); Is, Southern Italians (37); It, Italians from Tuscany (49); Ne, Arabs from the Near East (42); Sa, Sardinians (73); Si, Sicilians (63); Sp, Spaniards (74); Tu, Turks (96).

Figure 4
Figure 4

Distributions of pairwise sequence differences (broken lines) within the Greek (Top) and the Syrian (Bottom) samples. x axis, pairwise sequence difference; y axis, frequency of that difference. The thick vertical lines indicate dPB, the average difference between the sequences of either population sample and the PB sequence.

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