Toto

No, this is not independent attestation. The events in Acts are a twisted version of the letters, and the twist has meaning - the author of Acts knew of the letters, riffed off them, but subverted them.

The only historians who think that Acts and the epistles are independent attestation of the underlying events are evangelicals who feel the need to argue for a historical basis for Acts.

LegionOnomaMoi

That's the point. It's one thing to look at letters or texts in general attributed to this or that author. However, whenever we find a tradition of pseudepigraphical texts, it's based on a historical individual. There is no "epistle of Herakles to the Mycenaens" or the equivalent. Why? Because there's no point in inventing a character in a letter. The fully fictional letters occured in the context of larger texts, and were singular (not traditions). History is about the most plausible explanation. We have a series of letters by someone claiming to be Paul. The manuscript attestation for these letters surpasses any other letter writer from the ancient world. Some are clearly spurious. Others debatable. But unless we have any evidence of anyone ever just inventing a character and writing a series of letters under that character's name, then why consider it plausible? Except, of course, to fit it into some radical skepticism which one only applies to christian sources. Because if there was no one named Paul writing these letters, then we have no reason to think that virtually ancient author existed.

LegionOnomaMoi

How does one show literary dependence? If the criteria involve similar names and events, then there is no such thing as independent attestation. The reason it is widely accepted that Matthew and Luke relied on Mark and Q isn't because they talked about the same events, but because the lexical and syntactic parallels are too close.

I was not aware that Atkenson, who writes that the author of Acts "did not have a copy of any of the epistles" (p. 127) was an evangelical. Which "non-evangelical" historians are talking about?

spin

The problem is more that such sources are assumed to be independent attestations, when we are dealing with literature within the one ideological community (which includes the scribes who copied useful classical texts, bringing references into that ideological community, as evinced by christian interference with the TF, as well as the fabrication of Paul/Seneca letters). It's not just the philological manifestations of the synoptic gospels, but the participation within the same community. It's like the police being suspicious of testimonies that say the same sorts of thing being rehearsals. To give a good modern example, the issue of a new stamp in Britain commemorating the life of Marie stopes triggered a wave of spleen across internet that rehash the same inane nexus of deception which tie together her supposed Nazi sympathy, her support of eugenics and the false claim that she supported abortion in order to purvey the notion that Stopes's birth control clinic was a sinister plot to experiment on working class women. Blogs and web pages sprang up apparently independently to tell different versions or selections of the same material all with the same intent at character assassination, thousands of attestations that Stopes was at a congress on population studies in Berlin in 1935 and had written sympathetic letters to Hitler to attest to her Nazi sympathy. No sources are ever given. But the same memes are used over and over again. What a multiplicity of attestation! But there is no independence of attestation. We are dealing with the one tradition in the attack on Stopes, obviously the British catholics, who she had a running feud with for the last 38 years of her life and which raised their heads over a stamp commemorating a woman who did more for British working women that anyone else in Britain for a decade.

People operating within the one ideological community don't make for independent attestations. In such conditions independence must be demonstrated rather than assumed.

tanya

Mark, yes. Q ?

Q doesn't exist. How does one establish the proximity of "lexical and syntactic parallels" between two texts, one genuine and one imaginary?

Who is widely accepting such analysis?

How is analysis of Matthew, Luke and Mark relevant to a discussion of confusion in an epistle of Paul?

I have never yet encountered any data demonstrating that the synoptic gospel authors had any acquaintance with Paul's letters.

Further, I note that Justin Martyr never mentions Galatians or any other epistle. That is one of the reasons why I suspect that Paul's letters, including Galatians, were written in the second half of the second century.

The Valentinians reference Paul, as do a couple of other ancient authors, including, supposedly Marcion, though we have no documents from him. My question is this: Is the confusion in Galatians 1 due, at least in part, to some attempts to modify the original text in conformance with prevailing political trends? Any studies there on parallel syntactic expressions, i.e. with the aim of highlighting interpolation?

PhilosopherJay

Hi LegiionOnomaMoi,

It is clear Paul was a legendary character by the early 2nd century from the novel "Paul and Thecla" It would not have taken much ingenuity to take a bunch of letters written by a Jew in the first century arguing against circumcision of gentiles as a rite of initiation and against literal interpretation of Mosaic laws and change them into the letters we have now. Since the novel Paul and Thecla shows no knowledge of the epistles and restricts Paul's travels to a small area in Asia Minor, we may take it that the Myth of Paul the upright Apostle who seduced virgins to the faith by the charm of his words was well known in Jewish circles before the epistles were constructed.

Warmly,

Jay Raskin

Toto

No one is claiming direct copying. But there is a parallel use of themes and names. However, the different stories of how Paul escaped from Damascus in the letters and Acts is an obvious retelling, recasting the villains from Aretas to "the Jews."

I had this discussion before with an evangelical who posted here. I will try to track it down when I get more time.

LegionOnomaMoi

Only we aren't. At all. Paul's letters alone attest to ideological differences within the Jesus sect congregations long before acts was written. From Paul onwards, we don't find evidence of a "unified" ideological community but schism within communities holding (usually) similar core beliefs.


The interpolation or alteration of the TF is anything but evidence of "one ideological community." You might as well say "Marcion, the Ebionites, the Johannine community, the Valentinians, Origen, etc., all share the same ideology, because it doesn't matter if their belief systems radically differed and they even took pains to make that evident, they are all the same." You are projecting a later unification and understanding which didn't exist. Marcion, for example, accepted his edited gospel of Luke and the letters of Paul, but not Acts.

Duvduv

I was thinking along the lines that the authors of Acts and Galatians did not know of the other text, each originating from different sources.

hjalti

Joseph Hoffmann writes this regarding the "brother of the lord"-issue:I personally, don't have a clue about what he's saying. Does anybody else here get it?

Since Paul talks about "some from James", then "brothers" wasn't used to "nullify any form of literal biological relationship". What? :huh: