stephan huller

I am not questioning that the works could have made their way elsewhere. But why would Irenaeus have been so influential living in the ancient equivalent of Cleveland? I saw the Social Network. The bottom line on the success of Facebook was that it started at Harvard. There were dozens of Facebooks being created in Orlando, Florida and Little Rock, Arkansas. The difference was that Facebook was created in the center of the academic universe just like the Moscow manuscript of the Martyrdom of Polycarp and the internal evidence from Against Heresies (as well Irenaeus volatile relationship with Florinus and even Victor) suggests he wrote from Rome.

Toto

Lugdunum was perhaps more like Chicago than Cleveland.

stephan huller

Really? If we were to rank Imperial cities starting with 1. Rome, 2. Alexandria, 3. Antioch where do you think Lyons would end up? I'd say after 10.

In the United States Chicago is identified as the 'second city' after New York. Whether or not this is true I am not so sure Lyons is the ancient equivalent of Chicago.

The fact that Irenaeus makes such a strong and consistent argument for Roman primacy makes me think he was writing from Rome when making these arguments.

andrewcriddle

Hi Stephan

I think there are 2 issues
1/ In the case of Galen Acts and Irenaeus we would require Galen to write On Prognosis in 177 Acts to be written a few years later by someone who had read what seems to have been one of Galen's less popular works, then Irenaeus to know of Acts a few years after that. In the case of Hegesippus written c 177 we only require Irenaeus to read Hegesippus ie the chain is shorter.
2/ It is not just an issue of Irenaeus knowing of the existence of Acts (the issue with Hegesippus' work) Ireneaus treats Acts as a first century work of apostolic authority. I am doubtful if Irenaeus would have done this if no-one had heard of Acts until after 175 CE. With Hegesippus the work is obviously recent, it is just a question of Ireneus having access to it, not of him misunderstanding its origin.

(As another argument against a very late date for Acts the Epistula Apostolorum (Epistle of the Apostles) probably before 180 CE seems to know Acts.)

Andrew Criddle

aa5874

The authorship and date of writing of Epistula Apostolorum (Epistle of the Apostles) are unknown.

Epistula Apostolorum (Epistle of the Apostles) is worthless as an argument for dating Acts of Apostles.

skepticdude

Acts 15 is very likely nothing but fiction. If the apostles truly lived with Jesus for three years, there is no way they could have been so ignorant regarding Jesus' view on Gentile salvation, that theological chaos ensued requiring a council to officially declare what's what.

If Jesus taught that Gentile Christians should fellowship with Jewish Christians, then anybody who taught otherwise would not have been able to infect the original church to the point of needing a council to decide the obvious.

If Jesus taught that no Gentiles could be saved, or that they needed to be circumcised to be saved, this too would have been clear to his original apostles, and therefore the following they created would have held that view and those with a different view would not have been able to infect the church enough to the point of needing a church council to decide the obvious.

Acts 15 simply does not jive with common sense, and qualifies as one great big fat LIE. Correctly naming a thousand people and cities could not undo the damage done by this pious fraud.

But let's assume Acts is generally trustworthy. So what? I don't see why the apologists think it is any big deal to show that Acts gets the names of places and persons correct, except to refute skeptics who have denied same. Let us assume a real man named Luke really did travel around with Paul in the first century, and that Acts is based on his own memories.

Ok...so?

Does that mean the miracle stories are true? No, to argue that the miracles are true because other parts of the story that can be checked turn out to be true is to make most of ancient fable true. We'd have to believe an octopus and a shark really did talk to each other in fluent human language merely because the sea really does exist. The arguments against miracles would continue to have the same impact on ancient Christian stories, no matter how many pronouns the ancient authors correctly named.

Does accuracy in naming people and places argue against Luke being at best a propagandist for Paul? No. Many german documentaries from circa World War 2 named many places and persons accurately, but they were most often propagandist to the point of distorting history against the Jews. For that matter, some american documentaries from WW II era got all cities and persons correctly named but still distorted what "really" happened.

Worse, since the Christians say Luke was with Paul and that's how Acts has all these amazingly accurate historical details, they cut themselves off from the possibility that Luke was a disinterested writer. Now, Luke is Paul's good friend, and is just as unlikely to preserve for posterity any of Paul's bad points as any friend of George Bush Jr. who wants to write his biography. And indeed, no fundamentalist will ever be showing you the place in Acts where Luke drew the reader's attention to any imperfection in the post-conversion Paul. After he saw God, he could do no wrong. Acts is very far from the kind of objectivity we might see today in a newspaper that balances a person's good points with their bad.

In Acts 15, the author of Acts writes of the split between jewish and gentile Christians, which required a meeting of Christianity's finest. While the author spills much ink in recording details of the sermon-like answers of Paul, James and Peter, the author dismisses what the judiaziers had to say with two sentences. It is as clear as crystal that the author of Acts was prejudiced in favor of the Paulist position to the point of being dishonest.

How is recording only two sentences of the judiazers at the Councel of Jerusalem "dishonest"? Easy, in Galatians Paul laments that most of his churches have fallen to the "other" gospel of the Judaizers. Unless one wishes to say Paul's churches were filled with idiots, then the fact that the Judaizers were so successful at turning Paul's converts against him shows that they had rather powerful arguments for their legalistic position. Luke could have preserved the best arguments of the Judaizers from Acts 15, but doesn't. Obviously, Luke was in no mood to just plainly and simply tell history the way it actually unfolded, but writes in a way that deceptively minimizes the Judaizers and makes Paulism appear to prevail. A very false and deceptive thing to write, making Luke even less reliable than an ancient historian who got the names of a couple of cities wrong.

Oh, by the way, the apologists have the burden of showing that Luke intended Acts to go beyond his addressee Theophilus. it just might be that Acts was never intended by Luke for widespread use, but only wanted his pious lies to benefit a single addressee.