Luke 8 is the eighth chapter of the Gospel of Luke in the New Testament of the Christian Bible. The book containing this chapter is anonymous but early Christian tradition uniformly affirmed that Luke the Evangelist, a companion of Paul the Apostle on his missionary journeys, composed both this Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles. This chapter mentions the women who supported Jesus and records some of the great miracles he performed, as well as several parables told by him. Text The original text was written in Koine Greek. This chapter is divided into 56 verses. Textual witnesses Some early manuscripts containing the text of this chapter are: Papyrus 75 (175–225) Codex Vaticanus (325–350) Codex Sinaiticus (330–360) Codex Bezae (~400) Codex Washingtonianus (~400) Codex Alexandrinus (400–440) Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus (~450; extant verses 29–56) The women who sustained Jesus (8:1–4) Jesus continues his itinerant ministry within "every city and village" within Galilee. In verses 2 and 3, Mary called Magdalene, Joanna the wife of Chuza, and Susanna are named as women who provided material sustenance to Jesus during his travels, along with other unnamed women. While Matthew, Mark and John mentioned the names of the women present at the cross. At the cross, Luke only refers them as "the women that followed him [Jesus] from Galilee" (Luke 23:49), but he names them at the end in the story of the women's visit to the empty tomb ("It was Mary Magdalene and Joanna, and Mary the mother of James, and other women that were with them, which told these things unto the apostles." Luke 24:10). The two passages with the names of some women alongside the mention of the "twelve" and "apostles", respectively (Luke 8:1–3 and Luke 24:10), "form a literary inclusio" which brackets the major part of Jesus' ministry (leaving out only the earliest part of it). According to Richard Bauckham, this surely implies that Luke receives his special information from "one (most likely Joanna) or more than one of" the women. Verse 4, a great crowd was gathered, and people were coming to Jesus from every town, suggests that in each city or village those who lived there were joined by a multitude who travelled with Jesus to hear him preach. Protestant writer Heinrich Meyer interprets καὶ τῶν κατὰ πόλιν, kai tōn kata polin as meaning also those coming city by city. Parable of the sower (8:5–15) Jesus tells