sotto voce

It's a sweltering, sultry afternoon down in Sleepy Hollow. We're in a meeting of the Sleepy Hollow Fishing Club. The assembled members, having lunched well, are in shirt sleeves, some of them dozing, some of them struggling to stay awake. One of them staggers to his feet, and reads out a prepared motion: 'This Club proposes that doubling of the water right fees in Sleepy Hollow is not acceptable, and that the Council be thus informed.' Except that, poor fellow, he blinked rather sweatily when he got to 'not', and omitted the word. The motion was duly passed, recorded, and passed on, and within weeks, the shocked membership found that the cost of their fishing had doubled, and not one of them had an inkling of its coming.

This is how humanist ideas can have got into the church. It's the only way.

Sheshbazzar

__and the Christian gawd didn't so much as open its mouth or lift a finger to intercede, or to put a stop to the mistake?

Was your gawd shepherd also sleeping?

Or is it that the Christian gawd really doesn't watch out for the welfare of Christians?

Or perhaps it was because your loving Christian gawd really wanted his Hell to contain a few hundred millions more of the Christians?

What a worthless ass of a gawd it is you got. Might as well be worshiping a dead tree trunk or any old hunk of rock.

sotto voce

Well, quite. The whole notion is too preposterous to deserve scholarly attention.

aa5874

Toto, you did say that "if the Pauline writings were written before the fall of the Temple, you might expect some reference to to the Temple."

Now, After examining the Pauline writings there is ZERO reference to the Jewish Temple.

In the Pauline writings, Paul claimed he was a Hebrew of Hebrews, a Pharisee and of the Tribe of Benjamin yet he does NOT ever show the significance of the Jewish Temple in his writings.

I really don't need anything you wrote Toto--I have Sources, Sources, Sources......Evidence, Evidence , Evidence from antiquity that the Pauline writings were written AFTER the Fall of the Temple and After Acts of the Apostle.

The Pauline writings are the most Significant Doctrinal texts in the Canon yet the author of Acts who wrote EXCLUSIVELY about Paul, Traveled and Prayed with the Pauline faction did NOT mention the supposed letters of Paul and the Doctrinal Signifcance of the Pauline Letters.

The Pauline letters MUST have taken an ernomous amount of Paul's time yet the author of Acts, the very supposed companion of Paul, wrote Nothing of his companion letters.

The Pauline letters were SO significant that there were supposedly READ in many Churches in the Roman Empire.

The author of Acts just did NOT know any Pauline Epistles when he wrote Acts of the Apostles.

Acts of the Apostles was written BEFORE the Pauline writings.

What!!!!! You do not have any credible evidence or corroboration from antiquity for your claims about Paul. I don't deal with Presumptions and Imagination.

I do not accept your blatant presumption that Paul did NOT write from Jerusalem.

The very Pauline writings state that Paul, the Jew and Pharisee, was in Jerusalem on at least two occasions.

It is just absurd that Paul could NOT write a letter in Jerusalem or Visit the Temple because he operated in the "diaspora".

What verb? What subject? I suggest that you point out the exact subject and the exact verb so that I can know whether or not I agree with you.

But, please do so in another thread.

I really don't have time to waste with people who are looking for "tipos" to win an argument.

Right now my position is that Acts of the Apostles was written BEFORE the Pauline Epistles using ALL the evidence and sources of antiquity I have found.

Duvduv

And I am highly interested to know why you think the authors of the epistles did not integrate elements from Acts into the epistles if not that they originated from two different sources.

Toto

Paul did a lot of boasting in his letters. Nothing there should be taken at face value. He himself said that he adapted himself to his audience.

This is but one reason that scholars who have studied the matter give for thinking that the author of Acts was not in fact a companion of Paul, and was writing a fictionalized account.

There is no basis for concluding this.

Unlikely for most letters, although Detering thinks that Galatians was written or edited in response to Acts.

He visited there at least once (one of the visits might be a later interpolation) but he doesn't record writing any letters there.

It's not whether he could have, but whether he did. Paul is generally associated with the area that is modern day Turkish Anatolia and northern Greece. If he doesn't report anything about the Temple, one possibility is that he wrote after the Temple was destroyed. But another possibility that you need to consider is that the trips to Jerusalem were later additions to his letter, or that Jerusalem was a stand in for some other location (just as Babylon in the NT does not mean the actual city of Babylon.)

Another possibility is that Paul was so identified with his gentile mission that he deliberately refused to talk about any clearly Jewish symbols.

If you could get the idea out of your head that documents from the first or second century have to be read literally, you might be able to make more sense of this whole question.
You wrote "The evidence suggest that ..." where a native speaker of English would write "The evidence suggests that ..."

I am not looking for typos. I am trying to figure out why communication with you is so fraught with difficulty.

Toto

Who is this addressed to?

I do not think that the author of most of the epistles had access to Acts.

There is a case to be made that Galatians is a response to Acts. See Did Paul write Galatians and other articles on Deterings site.

Duvduv

It was to aa7854 but thank you for your reply. Would that mean that the author any epistles saw Acts in time to take it into consideration? There were many different epistles.

Toto

All of the NT books could have been under continuous revision and reediting for most of the 2nd century or even later. Textual critics spend a lot of time trying to figure out when changes were made.

You will read that there are seven epistles of Paul that are generally agreed to be "authentic" meaning that they show evidence of having been written by the same person, although this can be challenged. It is generally agreed by everyone who is not a conservative evangelical that the so-called "Pastoral" epistles to Timothy and Titus were not written by Paul, and might in fact have been written by the author of Luke-Acts as the third volume of his Trilogy.

aa5874

And that is one of the best of piece of evidence that suggest that Acts of the Apostles was written BEFORE the Pauline writings.

If the author of Acts of the Apostles was PRETENDING to be Paul's companion, was PRETENDING to have Traveled and Prayed with him and KNEW of all the Pauline writings to Churches ALL over the Roman Empire and had ONLY known of Paul by reading the Pauline Epistles then we would expect him to also PRETEND that he was with Paul when he wrote the Epistles.

The author of Acts wrote about the ACTS of Paul EXCEPT the MOST SIGNIFICANT Acts--the writing of the Epistles.

Amazingly, the very Epistles that the author of Acts should have known about if he wrote decades AFTER the Epistles were composed and supposedly PUBLICLY circulated all over the churches of the Roman Empire are missing in Acts.

Acts of the Apostles was written BEFORE the Pauline writings.