Deus Ex

Dr. Victor Reppert

and

Timothy McGrew. PhD

jgoodguy

In short, no one has traveled the seas of first century CE and is currently alive to provide first person narration. All evidence is second hand. Dr. Reppert seems to be trying to assert as evidence that which he is trying to prove.

aa5874

Was Dr. Reppert's works peer-reviewed. Please say NO.

How did such irrationality get printed and published in the first place?

Steven Carr

McGrew is now claiming that Tacitus says Celer and Helius were proconsuls.

McGrew's proof '....who were in charge of the imperial revenues in Asia'

aa5874

The Pauline missions cannot be stitched together from the epistles at all. The Pauline writers hardly if ever state their exact location when they were writing. There is virtually NOTHING at all about his actual travels except for ambiguous statements and there are NO dates given by the Pauline writers for their missions.

Without Acts of the Apostles the Pauline writings are a chronological disaster and Acts is fundamental fiction or not credible.

mountainman

An earlier thread Acceptance of Luke's dependence on Josephus is relevant here.

Discussion of this matter appears to have proceeded with usual caution. The logical implications of the dependence are twofold. The first is a very late chronology for Luke, but the second is that the genre of Luke may be suspected as being historical fiction.


Luke and Josephus (2000) by Richard Carrier has been mentioned a few times in different threads, and I have had another read through it.

And proceeds through the details to the conclusion ....

It seems clear that Richard Carrier is being cautious here in regard to the first issue of the late chronology.

Another author GJ Goldberg - 1995 - pointed out The Coincidences of the Emmaus Narrative of. Luke and the Testimonium of Josephus. The conclusion of this analysis, among other options, yielded the following ...


This significantly points to Eusebius, and not just as the "fabricator" of the TF. All these analyses of the evidence in combination strongly suggest that an assembly of historical fiction could have been undertaken much later than the second century.

spin

I noticed this being discussed here:
This seems to be a flight of fancy, based on nothing but the writer's desire. The two basic problems:

1. To be a proconsul, you had to have served as a consul. Neither P. Celer nor Helius had served as a consul, so obviously they couldn't be proconsuls. (M. Junius Silanus was consul in 46. Incidentally, L. Iunius Gallio was only consul in 56, so when could he have been the proconsul of Achaia in Ac 18:12?) But worse:

2. To be a consul, you had to be a patrician. According to Tacitus, P. Celer was an equestrian and Helius was a freedman. Their respective situations rendered them ineligible to be consuls. (I can imagine the vague possibility of some wiggle-room for an equestrian, but for a freedman it was impossible.)

And what evidence exists that either of these men were ever "proconsuls", besides the writer's conjecture?

Further, let me add, for someone to propose something like two people serving together, I would expect that they had a precedent to back up the claim.

One might expect that Helius was a procurator appointed following the precedent of Claudius to administer the finances of the province, but that either of these men were ever proconsuls seems unjustifiable. It seems like another christian stretching the facts for apologetic purposes, seen with the explanations regarding Aretas having control of Damascus at the time of the Pauline basket case (when it seems he had no such control), or the rubbish about Lysanias being around in the 15th year of the reign of Tiberius (when he lived 80 years earlier).


spin

aa5874

Another indication that the author of Acts wrote late is his blatant errors concerning events during the VERY time the author supposedly lived.

Examine Acts 2.1-2 So the taxing was done during the time of Augustus when Cyrenius was governor or around 6 CE.

Now, the author of Acts claimed that BEFORE these days rose up Teudas, but Theudas was DURING the reign of Claudius, when Fadus was the procurator of Judea between 44-46 CE.

Theudas was supposed to be DURING the days of the author of Acts.

And, it gets FAR worse.

The author of Acts appears to have COMPLETELY forgotten when the TAXING occurred.

The author of Acts would claim that AFTER Theudas, AFTER 44-46 CE, rose up Judas of Galilee in the days of the TAXING when the TAXING in Luke 2 and Antiquities of the Jews 18. 1 was in the days of the Augustus, NOT Claudius, when Cyrenius, NOT Fadus, was governor in 6 CE.

Acts 5.36-37 The author of Acts have placed the TAXING during his OWN time, during the time of Cladius.

Based on Josephus, Theudas was in the time of Fadus procurator during the reign of Claudius.

"Antiquities of the Jews" 20. The author of Acts if he was ACTUALLY living in the time of Claudius when FADUS was procurator and when Theudas the magician was alive, would have recognized his BLATANT ERRORS about the TAXING and JUDAS the Galillean.

Judas the Galillean was BEFORE Theudas by almost 40 years.

The author of Acts appear to be historically inaccurate and wrote VERY LATE since he placed the TAXING of Cyrenius and Judas during his supposed own lifetime and did NOT recognize his BLATANT ERRORS.

bacht

David Trobisch accepts a 2nd C date for Acts:

"The sharp-eyed Trobisch accepts the thinking of John Knox (Marcion and the New Testament, 1942) and Hans von Campenhausen (The Formation of the Christian Bible, 1968) that the New Testament in the form we have it is largely a counterstrike against the Marcionite Sputnik: already a counter-testament to Marcion’s Apostolicon. It was already evident that the inclusion of Matthew, Mark, and John was an attempt to lose the Gospel of Marcion (a shorter predecessor of Luke) in the shuffle, as was the padding out of Luke to make it Catholic (not to mention the “ecclesiastical redaction” of John, originally heavily Gnostic and Marcionite, as Bultmann showed). Acts and the Pastorals were the product of whoever padded Luke and (according to Winsome Munro) added a domesticating Pastoral Stratum to Marcion’s Paulines. Acts, of course, parallels Peter and Paul in order to heal the breach between Catholicism (=Peter) and Marcionite Christianity (= Paul), or rather to co-opt the latter in the interest of the former. The grab bag of the Catholic Epistles was simply ballast, counterweight to the Pauline letter corpus."

[from R. Price's review of The First Edition of the New Testament]


http://www.robertmprice.mindvendor.c...isch_first.htm

aa5874

Once it is suggested that the Pauline writings were BEFORE the Gospels because they wrote nothing about the life of Jesus then Acts of the Apostles is BEFORE the Pauline writings since the author of Acts did NOT write anything or virtually ZERO about the Pauline Epistles.

The author of Acts gave no indication of where Saul/Paul was ACTUALLY located when he a wrote any Epistle.

And further, the author of Acts seemed NOT to be aware that a Pauline writer had ALREADY given a chronology of his travels to Jerusalem from Damascus and Arabia.

The mere idea that the Pauline writers needed Acts, a work of fiction, is a CLEAR indication that both the Pauline writings and Acts of the Apostles are non-historical and written later than the Church writers would have us believe.