Vorkosigan

But doesn't it seem to you that Acts was written with Galatians in mind? They seem to be having a conversation of some kind. And ostensibly ignoring Paul's letters might seem to be good strategy if you wanted to paper over conflicts between Paul and Peter.

Vorkosigan

Toto

Layman (a Christian apologist who used to post here a lot) started a thread 2 years ago entitled Confirmation and Correlation in Acts and the Pauline Epistles, in which he argued that the correlations between Acts and Paul's letters independently established the accuracy of Acts. He assumed that Paul's letters were unknown to the writer of Acts (which doesn't make a lot of sense if you think that Luke wrote Acts, does it?)

I argued that these correlations showed that the author of Acts had access to Paul's letters and mined certain data from them, while not quoting them or agreeing with them.

The discussion went on for 5 pages. You can probably find an argument there for whatever position you want to take.

Regarding the argument that Paul was known as a letter writer - he is known as a letter writer to us, because that is all that survives of him. He might have been known as an orator/missionary/man-about-town in the early Christian era.

Besides, the author of Acts was writing an action tale. He has Paul traveling to Damascus to persecute Christians, escaping from mobs or from jail, preaching to the masses, getting shipwrecked, etc. It would break the flow of this action adventure if Paul had the leisure time to sit down and dictate or write his letters.

andrewcriddle

I agree that Acts and 2 Peter are different genres. But there are apparent discrepancies between the account of Paul's deeds in Acts and the account in letters such as Galatians that are surprising IMO if the author of Acts was using Paul's letters as a source. Some of this may be apologetic but for example the visit to Jerusalem by Paul mentioned in Acts 11:30 and 12:25 which is IMO the most difficult passage to reconcile with Galatians does not seem to fulfil a major apologetic purpose in Acts.

My main point anyway was to reply to the idea that Acts ignores Paul's letters because of their controversial content.

Andrew Criddle