willingtolearn

Here is a link that was recently shared with me that flies in the face of what I thought I knew. Anyone familer with these "experts" and arguments?

http://www.bethinking.org/bible-jesu...-testament.htm

PhilosopherJay

Hi Willingtolearn,

We are dealing with the evangelical echo chamber here.

There is no mention of Acts before the Third century. Therefore it is likely a late 2nd century invention. There isn't the slightest bit of real evidence to place it before this date, just pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking of pie-in-the-sky wishful thinkers.

Warmly,

Jay Raskin

aa5874

There is NOT a shred of evidence to date the Pauline letters BEFORE the Fall of the Temple since NOT one author of the Canon ever claimed Paul wrote any letters to the Churches and did NOT ever quote a verse from the Pauline revealed teachings of the Resurrected Jesus.

Even the author of Acts claimed it was the Church of Jerusalem that wrote letters and handed them to a Pauline group to have them hand delievered.

By the way, the letters from the Jerusalem Church were about 200 words and would only occupy about 10 verses.

When the author of Acts wrote he did NOT know of any Pauline letters at all and Acts of the Apostles was composed at least AFTER the mid 2nd century.

stephan huller

The most convincing argument for a second century dating of Acts is the fact that the Marcionites thought it was spurious. When I look at the list of arguments put forward from the link you supply I think the people that wrote this got it all wrong. When you look at the various points what is so striking is that Jerusalem as such is buried in Acts. In other words, Antioch becomes the new center of Christianity BECAUSE the author of Acts knows that Jerusalem has been destroyed and can no longer serve as the center of the Church.

The author of Acts - the guy writing to 'Theophilus' - is engaged in myth-making. Whatever used to be Christianity (presumably something which was rooted in Jerusalem and the Jews) has been cut off from the Christian community because of contemporary events. It's not that the author doesn't know about the destruction of Jerusalem, he has buried its significance because Christians as a whole in his estimation have to 'move on.'

There is also nothing specifically Jewish in Acts. White people think that by confessing your faith in the Jewish god is 'Jewishness.' Yet it's really reminiscent of going up to random black people on the street and telling them that you really think Michael Jackson was a great dancer.

A Jew did not write Acts. The author was not a Jewish convert and he likely did not know much about Judaism either. There is a bourgeois middle-class Roman sensibility which runs through the text. The person who wrote this text was a Gentile all of which makes it impossible that it was written in the first century.

Of course one could make the argument that because the author buries Jerusalem and Jewishness that the text could have been written after the destruction of 70 CE. Yet I think the milieu better fits the generation following the Bar Khochba revolt and before the reconstitution of the Jerusalem Church with Alexandrian refugees circa 175 CE.

My dates for the text then fall between 150 - 175 CE and the likely author is either Theophilus of Antioch or someone who wrote to Theophilus of Antioch. There is a strong interest in Antioch that runs throughout the text. It was likely connected with an effort to make Antioch the new headquarters of Christianity now that Jerusalem (and Judea) was forbidden from people of Jewish extraction to set foot in.

maryhelena

The interest in Antioch, from a historical perspective, would have resulted from the fact that the last King and High Priest of the Jews, Antigonus, was bound to a stake/cross, scourged, slain, and beheaded in that city. (37 b.c.). Herod the Great giving Marc Antony a great deal of money in order to have Antigonus killed. It is in Antioch, according to Acts, that Christians were first called by that name. So, whatever are the arguments against an early date for Acts - the considerable emphasis this text gives to Antioch is not one of them.

Tertullian says that 'this name of ours' has it's origin in the days of Augustus (27 b.c. to 14 c.e.) - long before the time of Pilate. (19 - 26 -36 c.e.) and long before the fall of Jerusalem in 70 c.e. And, since there was no historical gospel JC - the Jerusalem NT story is just that - a story setting. A retelling in symbolic, or mythological terms, of what the NT writers deemed to be relevant in Jewish history.

la70119

Here are some good ones!

Given the criteria that can be spawned by these "findings," I can argue that Chereas and Callirhoe was written just after the Peloponnesian War!

sotto voce

Therefore it is much too punchy for false teachers. Even today.

willingtolearn

Where do you have a resource showing the this fact on Acts?

Doug Shaver

I am.
That tells you pretty much all you need to know. The arguments Geisler is peddling have been around for ages, and they're no more cogent now than they ever were. They're not meant to convince skeptics of anything. They're meant to assure believers that they musn't pay any attention to skeptics.

Consider the arguments he opens with:
The Acts narrative ends with Paul's imprisonment in Rome, which according to Christianity's story line was from 61 to 63 CE. It is pure question-begging for Geisler to argue that the author doesn't mention anything later only because it hadn't happened yet. One could just as well argue that a book about the Cold War cannot have been written after 1989 if it ends with the opening of the Berlin Wall.

PhilosopherJay

Hi willingtolearn,

It is pretty common knowledge that Irenaeus is the first writer to know and quote Acts in "Against Heresies."

This is acknowledged by Jim West:

This singular work is usually dated to the year 180 based on material in Eusebius, but Eusebius says that Irenaeus lived to the early 200's.

"Against Heresies" is extraordinarily similar to works by Tertullian, who is early Third Century, and extraordinarily dissimilar to other Second century works, so I see no reason not to date it to the early 200's.

We thus have Acts suddenly appearing in Christian discourse for the first time around the year 200. It is hard to imagine that a hundred or so Second century Christian writers could have not known anything about it, if it was written in the First century.

Warmly,

Jay Raskin