neilgodfrey

How could the author of Acts not know them? To even ask the question is to implicitly acknowledge that it just does not work to approach the canonical literature through the perspective of the Christian ideology of church harmony. The assumption is that if the author of Acts knew Paul's letters then he would want to conform his historical account to them. The documentary evidence does not support this orthodox ideology.

Both the letters and Acts portray Paul in relation to the same sorts of issues but from different points of view. Both write of the same person, and the same "hot topics" central to how others viewed that person. That looks like they are, as they say, "in dialogue" with each other.

The letters stress Paul's independence from the apostles and the Jerusalem church and Acts repeatedly demonstrates his subordination or deference to the Twelve and Jerusalem:

So in the letters Paul goes to Jerusalem as a result of a revelation from heaven but in Acts he is sent by folks on the ground;

in the letters Paul rejects the authority of Jerusalem and any other apostle, but in Acts he defers regularly to both;

Both Paul's letters and Acts address up front Paul's attitude towards circumcision and other legalistic customs:

the letters flatly oppose touching circumcision with a 40 foot barge pole; Acts has Paul endorsing it;

the letters reject anything to do with any Jewish traditions; Acts has Paul keeping the sabbaths and taking vows.

(I know, the letters also say Paul pretended to be a Jew to the Jews to win the Jews and this is meant to explain away the disharmony in the canon. But that means we have, as Detering says, a schizoid Paul, one "unstable in all his ways", one who speaks as if he's a gentile one moment and a Jew the next ... Better the divine madness or a writer who can't get his citations to gell with his true thought than to dispose of the ideology of church and canonical harmony.)


The Letters and Acts are both interested in Paul's autonomy and status in comparison with the Twelve:

the letters can't stop repeating Paul's equality with the Twelve and total independence from them, including the nature of his calling and witnessing of the resurrected Christ, while Acts three times stresses that Paul's calling was from heaven and that he thus never had experience with Jesus in the same way the Twelve had.

Have a read of pages 61-68 (beginning page 63 in the pdf counter) of Detering's Falsified Paul where all this is covered in more detail.


Neil Godfrey

http://vridar.wordpress.com

Malachi151

Actually though Paul never mentions "The Twelve", just the apostles in general, plus a few named apostles.

"The Twelve" only appears one time, in the 1 Corinthians account of the sighting of Jesus after his crucifixion, which is a major point in the case that this passage is interpolated.

Toto

The thread I was thinking of is in the Archives:

Confirmation and Correlation in Acts and the Pauline Epistles, started by Layman (Chris Price, who may have turned this into an article on his ChristianCadre blog.)

Layman wrote a long thesis to argue that it was generally agreed that the author of Luke-Acts did not have access to Paul's letters, but that the many points of correlation between them acted as verification of the historicity of Acts. I argued that the points they had in common meant that the author of Acts had access to Paul's letters, and sometimes used facts in them, or reshaped them, for his or her own theological purposes.

There are these sources who claim that the author of Acts had access to Paul's letters:

The Gospels for All Christians: Rethinking the Gospel Audiences (or via: amazon.co.uk), edited by Richard Bauckham

"Toward Tracing the Gospels' Literary Indebtedness to the Epistles," by Thomas Brodie, in Mimesis and Intertextuality in Antiquity and Christianity (Studies in Antiquity & Christianity) (or via: amazon.co.uk) edited by Dennis R. MacDonald.

Also in the archives: Did the author of Acts have access to Paul's letters?