gnosis92

Acts of the Apostles depicts Paul orally preaching a historical Jesus, of course MJ'ers are committed to the position Acts has nothing to say about Paul, a position I am skeptical of. Whoever wrote Acts knew Paul quite well, either personally or through people who did know him personally, and there is no support for a mythical Spiritual Savior interpretation of Paul. Acts depicts Paul meeting the disciples who did know HJ, as do Paul's letters himself (i.e Cephas, James brother of the Lord), and presumably learning details in this manner. Acts allows us to understand the Pauline corpus by giving us a window on Paul

Acts has the "we" passages of himself and Paul, and scholars have been able to match up the authentic Pauline epistles to places Paul did his missionary work as described by Acts. Acts may record Paul's preachings, if not word-for-word, the general spirit. It's pretty clear that the Paul described in Acts is the same Paul as the Pauline epistles, and that there is significant corroboration between Paul as he describes himself and the Paul of Acts. If Paul understood and preached a mythical Savior figure, I would have expected some themes of this in Acts, which we do not.
In other words, if Paul understood himself as preaching a purely spiritual savior, and his immediate audience understood Paul as preaching a purely spiritual savior, I would think some of this would be reflected in Acts, which it is not. Paul's foremost promoter, Marcion, also believed in a historical Jesus.

So an overriding reason not to say more about Jesus was that Paul would be repeating himself, given he already said it orally. Another possibility is that the congretations had a Q/Thomas like collection of sayings and pericopes of Jesus to rely on.

There are what Doherty calls "human like" references such as Brother of the Lord, Born of a woman, Born under the Law, on the night he was betrayed, "words of the Lord", etc cetera.

DaBuster

But couldn’t the reasoning that “he already said it orally” apply to much of what is written in Paul’s epistles? In his letters, significant portions of what Paul writes involves either reinforcing or clarifying a gospel he’s already delivered. Thus, it seems unlikely that he didn’t mention details about the historical Jesus to avoid repeating himself, when in fact he is to some extent repeating himself throughout the epistles, at least from the perspective of the intended recipients of his letters.

gnosis92

The letters were written to specific congregations, and only much later collected together.

Toto

This may be because the author of Acts had Paul's letters as a source.

Even historicists accept the idea that the speeches recorded in Acts were probably not delivered. It was a convention of ancient historians to put their own words in the mouths of historical characters.

But if you think that the Paul of Acts is the same as the Paul of the Epistles, you are probably the only one. The Paul of Acts is a team player with no ego who preaches the gospel. The Paul of the Epistles is a braggart with some hostility towards those who don't follow his gospel.

Marcion was a docetist. He would probably not have described Jesus as having come "in the flesh."

Roland

Oh yeah, right, and I suppose Paul (and all the other disciples) performed all those miracles this-person-who-knows-Paul-so-well records in this account. If the person writing Acts could include that obviously fictional nonsense, on what basis do we believe that anything he says is true? Acts is about as clear a piece of fictional storytelling as one could possibly imagine.

Take a look at this site and tell me we have any reason to believe that the author of Acts was even slightly concerned with writing truth or history.

http://www.christiancourier.com/arti...e_book_of_acts

Doug Shaver

Moby Dick has a lot of "we" passages, too. Does that prove it's not a work of fiction?