Who was Luke?

So we received the assignment to talk about the Luke this week in class, the challenge will be not using any outside sources, only what we can find in the Bible, so here we go.
Historically speaking Luke first appears in the books of Acts in the city of Alexandra Troas. It was here that he joined Paul on some of his journeys. We know that he was probably a convert from the area and would spend at least a period of two years in Judea when he was not with Paul.
Luke was really the first of the Gospel writers that was really a historian piecing together the story as a commissioned work for a man named Theophilus. I say this because Mark was really jus trying to preserve the memoirs of Peter, and Mathew was trying to prove to the Jews that Jesus was the Christ; Luke was trying to share a complete and whole story to the Gentiles, a group from whom he himself was a convert. Although much of what is contained in the Gospel of Luke comes directly from the Gospel of Mark there is some unique Lukeian material. It was during his time in Judea that he would have collected much of that material from the eye witnesses and the church leaders in the area. We learn this in chapter 1:2.
Luke was a doctor, and it is interesting to note that of the stories that Luke focuses on he puts a strong emphasis on the healing nature of Christ, and the miracles that occurred with the human body. Here are a few examples: During the healing of the women who has the hemorrhaging issue, we see Luke saving face for his profession a little bit, for when he is quoting Mark verbatim, he leaves out the line about how the doctors who had visited the woman had left her worse off then before they came. Luke is also the only gospel writer to mention the bloody sweat of Christ in the garden.
Luke also had a fascination with the role that gender played in Christ' life. He almost always pairs his stories to show both a man and a woman. I think he was amazed, that in a world where women were treated so very poorly, that Christ would teach women and deem them as equals in his kingdom> Often showing how women are more receptive to the things of God, even about that and beyond that of men who should know better. The story of Zacharias and the announcement of the Christ Child by the angel Gabriel is a good example of this. Zacharias fails to believe the words of the angel, and he a priest that should know better, juxtaposed to the young maiden who readily and humbly accepted that which was told to her by an angel.
While Luke never saw the Lord while he was on the earth in mortality, nevertheless, he had an interesting title which I assume was bestowed upon him by the leadership of the church at the time, and this title can only be found in the JST version of the first verse. It states that he is “a messenger of Jesus Christ". A title that I feel was not given lightly to Luke, but rather I think he knew his special calling that he would have as a Gospel writer and that his gospel would be one of the few that would survive the millennia.