How much of St Luke did Cyril of Alexandria actually comment on?

The 130 surviving sermons of Cyril on St Luke set out 719 of the gospel's 1,151 verses — 62.5%. Chapters 14, 15, 18 and 19 are covered verse for verse; chapters 1, 5 and 24 get nothing at all. Six of the eight longest silences sit exactly where some of the 26 lost sermons once stood.

Chapter by chapter

Every surviving sermon in Cyril on St Luke opens by setting out the passage it will expound — Sermon 2 begins with Luke 2:8–18, the shepherds. Collect those passages and lay them over the 1,151 verses of St Luke, and this is what is covered.

The middle of the gospel is nearly complete. Chapters 14, 15, 18 and 19 are covered verse for verse, and 16, 20 and 22 lose one to three verses each. The beginning and the end are where the commentary falls silent.

Why does Cyril say nothing about the first chapter of Luke?

Because the sermon that dealt with it is gone. The numbering of the surviving sermons starts at 2, and Sermon 2 starts at Luke 2:8. Everything before it — the dedication to Theophilus, the annunciation, the visitation, the Magnificat, the Benedictus, the birth of John and the census of Augustus, eighty-seven verses in all — falls inside the lost Sermon 1 and whatever it contained. The Greek original of the whole commentary is lost, and the Syriac manuscript copied out in 588, from which Payne Smith translated in 1859, does not contain it.

Why do the Luke pages show Cyril on 23 of 24 chapters?

Because they answer a different question. The “What the Fathers said” box on each chapter of St Luke points to the sermon a reader would be in when they reach that chapter, so chapter 5 points at Sermon 12 (on Luke 4:1–2) and chapter 24 at Sermon 153 (on Luke 23:32–43). Counted by the passages the sermons actually set out, three chapters get nothing — 1, 5 and 24 — and a fourth, chapter 4, gets two verses.

The silences are mostly the missing sermons

Of the 156 sermons Cyril preached, 26 are absent: numbers 1, 8, 9, 13–20, 24, 26, 28, 30–32, 97, 98, 113–116 and 154–156. Put the eight longest uncovered stretches of the gospel beside that list and six of them sit exactly where sermons are missing.

So the shortfall is overwhelmingly a matter of survival, not of choice. The two exceptions are passages Cyril moved past between one surviving sermon and the next: the genealogy of Christ (Luke 3:24–38), where Sermon 11 stops at 3:23 and Sermon 12 picks up at 4:1, and most of the discourse on the end of Jerusalem (Luke 21:14–36), between Sermon 139 and Sermon 140. The resurrection, the road to Emmaus and the ascension — all of chapter 24 — went with the last three sermons.

Which passage did Cyril preach on most?

The Lord's Prayer. Eight surviving sermons, 70 to 77, are given to the four verses of Luke 11:1–4: one on the passage as a whole and then one on each petition in turn — four on verse 2 alone. Together they run to about 11,600 words. Outside those verses, no four consecutive verses of the gospel have more than three sermons starting in them.

And he said to them: When you pray, say: Father, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come.Luke 11:2

That is the Douay wording on this site; Payne Smith gives Cyril's text in his own translation from the Syriac, so the two do not read alike. You can search the shelf for “hallowed” to see both.

Does a verse outside these passages never appear in the commentary?

No, and this count does not claim that. It measures only the passages each sermon sets out at its head. Cyril quotes the gospel freely inside his sermons, and a sermon on one verse can touch the next; none of that is counted here. What the figure does tell you is how much of St Luke has a surviving sermon built on it — 719 verses — and where the rest went.

How it compares

Of the five commentaries on the shelf, Cyril's is the only one that does not reach every chapter of its book, even by the generous chapter count. Chrysostom on St Matthew, Augustine on St John, Chrysostom on the Acts and the Catena Aurea on St Mark all do. Chrysostom on Matthew is missing four homilies of ninety — 53, 54, 58 and 79 have no heading anywhere in the volume — and Cyril is missing twenty-six of 156. The surviving 130 sermons still run to 266,241 words, which you can read from the beginning or see against the rest of the library.

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