Gamera

I believe the Greek verb ecleuazon has a semantic field that includes jeering, derisive laughter. But I think it's a distinction without a difference. The point is many in the audience found his speech absurd.


I'm just quoting Paul as to his claim that he spoke not with fine rhetoric, but with "power":

1 Corinthians 2:4 - and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power,

1 Thessalonians 1:5 - for our gospel came to you not only in word, but also in power and in the Holy Spirit and with full conviction. You know what kind of men we proved to be among you for your sake.

1 Corinthians 4:20 - For the kingdom of God does not consist in talk but in power.


Thus Paul claims his own sermonizing was "implausible" and absurd by worldly (i.e., Hellenistic) standards, but spiritually powerful. Hence the reaction among the Athenians. They didn't just disbeleive. They mocked, jeered, derided.

I would note that the speech to the Athenians is a bit odd. It's not really the gospel message. It says nothing about Jesus life really. Rather, it claims that Jesus' resurrection was "proof" of God's coming judgement. This is a bit off kilter and I think Paul wasn't preaching the gospel in that speech but just providing a little prolegomena to the gospel, which he apparently gave to those who "wanted to hear more"

Julian

Slippery stuff here, be careful. What is the 'gospel' of Paul in the epistolary legacy? What was it that was 'γεγραπται' for Paul? It was the old testament. Paul does not have any knowledge of the gospels as you know them. We do know what his 'gospel' was, contrary to your assertion. He is quite clear about it, he goes to great lengths to explain it, all without the words of Jesus, which is weird, don't you think? Considering that Jesus should have been his primary authority, having received the goods directly from him and not from an ordinary human being. With the noted exception of the end of 1 Cor., which I dispute as genuine but that's for another time and place. Like you said, Paul's letters aren't the gospel. Like you said, they don't even preach a gospel. Why is that? Consider his relationship to Peter according to Galatians and then look at Acts and tell me that they correlate just fine...? They contradict each other and you will need to fall back on the 'argument from silence' for your defense, an argument normally not allowed when it is inconvenient. Just sayin'...

The purposes of Acts and the epistles do, indeed, diverge. But since that constitutes the sum total of your evidence you are forced to speculate and assume how they can be reconciled because of your prior assumptions that there must be a harmony. As a non-believer I am free to conclude what is immediately obvious and irrefutable given our current evidence: the accounts cannot be reconciled evidentially and, hence, shouldn't be until the emergence of new evidence. Simple.

Julian

Gamera

Being a poststructuralist, I think the search for consistency among texts, or even in the same text, is not very useful. The essence of a text is difference, and trying to reconcile texts is an attempt to create a metatext, which is a fiction in itself.

Having said this, the gospel is the narrative of Jesus and nothing else. Paul makes that clear in I Cor. 15. To the extent that Paul is reported as saying different things in different texts by different authors, I don't find that to be evidence that those authors didn't know Paul. I would expect that any pastiche of texts about any person (especially one as complex as Paul) would result in millions of contradictions, even if the texts were all written by the same person, much less a witness to that person's conduct.

I guess I would ask, where do we get the standard that texts about a person's life would add up to a coherent whole? I think the standard is fictional, so the use of it to disentangle Paul for Luke seems unpersuasive to me.

Julian

I agree entirely. Well, mostly. Well, somewhat. While I don't think that any text will be completely consistent, internally or externally, I do believe that certain trends can be discerned once biases have been accounted for. We are talking about consistent contradictions here. Since I study a decent amount of history and try to read primary sources whenever possible I do notice when external references are directly contrary for reasons only clear once the context is understood (the Borgias being one of my favorite examples). When combining the letters of Paul and acts we should expect to see an agreement on one side or the other of the orthodox mean, even if there may be large disagreements. But we don't. What that tells me is that whoever wrote acts didn't know Paul and didn't care about his opinions. What he did care about was conscripting Paul to fight for the side of orthodoxy and, Paul being dead/imaginary/unverifiable/fill-in-the-blank, he went ahead and added Paul's authority to his writings, presumably knowing that no one who could contest that would be in a position to do so.
1 Cor. 15 and the preceeding few verses are not written by Paul as far as I am concerned. Like I said earlier, that discussion is for another time and place.
Oh, come on. In Galatians Paul has no respect for Peter. He actually uses him as a negative example (re Antioch), but in Acts they are bosom buddies? Sorry, but consolidating the two seems entirely desparate and wholly unworthy of your generally scholarly and reasonable approach to things.
The issue here is that we are probably talking about non-fictional epistles and a fictional political account by Luke.

Julian

Ben C Smith

If the disagreement between the epistles and the Pauline speeches in Acts is as great as you seem to think, then anybody who had access to the epistles would be in a position to contest the Pauline authority appropriated by Acts. Yet you say that the author presumably would have known that nobody would do this, which would seem to imply that the author of Acts not only chose not to use the epistles of Paul but was indeed unaware of their very existence. Is that your position?

Ben.

Gamera

I guess I would query whether there would be any difference if the author did know Paul. If the author has an agenda, and you think he does, and I think he does too, and if you are willing to assume he would simply make up a Paul for that purpose, it follows that even if he knew Paul he would be willing to create a semifictional, serviceable narrative Paul for the text. My point is, following your premise (The author of Acts has an agenda he's going to further come hell or high water), then the content of his text become nonprobative as to his relationship to Paul, if any. I mean, if he's willing to invent a Paul, he's willing to distort a Paul he knew. I think the latter is more likely for a variety of reasons.

I don't know if that matters to either your position or mine. The author "Paul" is the sum of the works attributed to him, and certainly I Cor is one. In any case, I used the reference in passing. The gospel is a narrative, the narrative of Jesus. That's clear from, well, the Gospels.

I"m really perplexed at this argument. In a fictional work, people have fictional arcs and make sense. In the real world, people's lifes don't have arcs and there is no coherence to their biography. I don't think it at all implausible that Paul at one time saw Peter as an enemy and at another time a friend -- or even that he saw him as both enemy and friend at the same time! People are infinitely more complex than narratives about them.

That's possible. I'm only saying that there is nothing in the depiction of Paul in Acts that is probative of that conclusion. Whatever characterization one makes of Luke's depiction of Paul can be explained equally well by the author knowing Paul or not knowing Paul. Though I think the former is somewhat labyrinthine.

neilgodfrey

no it don't. Philippi is the only Roman outpost (a colony) in Acts.

(also "there's more" that really belong to a separate thread: Virgil had Aeneid visiting a "little Troy" outpost on his way to Rome -- from Lydia with Lydians -- and meeting a royal woman praying by a river, and next meeting a man who had the power of prophecy ... remind one of Lydia selling purple and the little ensuing episode of meeting one with the power of prophecy? -- Bonz* gives an overview of the epic framework of Acts without mentioning this sort of detail which I'm working out elsewhere, but I wonder...)

* -- moderator: insert amazon link to Bonz here :-)

The Past As Legacy: Luke-Acts and Ancient Epic (or via: amazon.co.uk)

Ben C Smith

You mean that it is the only one that Luke actually calls a colony, right?

How does the we voyage to Assos on the way to Jerusalem relate to your thesis? To Samos (still on the way to Jerusalem)? To Miletus near Ephesus (same trip)?

Ben.

neilgodfrey

Well the author is calling the shots, telling the story, setting the parameters. That's how stories work. If you want to read it like history with the author as a historian who has to be studied for his weaknesses and biases and much of the important thing is the "historical data" we glean behind the text then that's fine. But as I recently said in another thread:

Ben C Smith

When one stretch of the we passages deals with a voyage to Rome, you interpret the we passages as some kind of proxy for the Roman church. When another deals with a voyage to Philippi, you call Philippi a Rome substitute. When yet another deals with a voyage to Jerusalem via several nondescript ports, well, that is just how stories work.

I think this thesis says a lot more about the personal preferences of its originator than about anything to do with the book of Acts.

I think that the we passages are self-evidently a claim that the author himself participated in the events so narrated, whether that claim be true or false. This, at last, is a thesis that fits the facts.

Ben.