Toto

There is not much that is compelling. But I am having a hard time parsing your question. The overlaps between Luke's Paul and Paul's Paul are because "Luke" based the Saul/Paul character in Acts on what she or he knew of the historical Paul from the epistles.

chrisengland

I think I,m getting muddled up.
Acts is written after The Gospel of Luke isn't it.
In that case you do have more scholarly support than I first thought.
I do apologise.
Chris

chrisengland

Although I still think it is a minority.

Peter Kirby

It is a minority position, as Steve Mason would be the first to admit. That does not mean in any way that it is wrong or wrong-headed, however.

It has long been my position that the Acts was written by a sometimes companion of Paul, and that has not changed. There are long and sometimes revealing discussions on this subject in BC&H's archives, particularly concerning the Acts' own evidence on the subject. (Which, of course, agrees with the external evidence.)

gnosis92

Peter if we assume arguendo that your position was right, would we expect, if Doherty's thesis that Paul was a Christ-mythicist, that the author of Luke would have known Paul as a Christ-mythicist, and written his account of Paul accordingly?

I think that the credibility of a Christ-mythicist interpretation of Paul rests on the historical credibility of the author of Act's depiction of Paul.

DCHindley

Putting aside for the moment the issue of whether the author of Acts used Josephus (actually I do happen to think he was aware of the Antiquities), I would like you to be more specific about your claim that "the author of Acts knew the epistles and at times drew on them, at times riffed on them."

As I had promised earlier, I am pulling together the speeches in Acts and comparing them to the epistles to see what correlations there actually are. While I am starting to see a couple already, I'd appreciate some specific examples from you to get the discussion going.

Will these be your own observations or will you be relying upon an authority or authorities?

Thanks,

DCH

aa5874

Well, I think the author of Acts is either responsible for the invention of the name "Paul" or knew who fabricated the name.

The fact that it has been deduced that the epistles were written by different authors using the name "Paul" and these forgeries went undetected or was never admitted by the Church fathers, and that an author wrote Acts riddled with erroneous information, then having these canonised, all indicates to me that this author, the so-called Luke, invented his stories about "Paul" probably somtime in the 2nd century.

Toto

I haven't spent time on this issue in some time, but there is an old thread here It started when Layman (Chris Price) published a long list of correspondences between the epistles and Acts, which he tried to use to prove that the two validated each other as independent sources. I reacted to this by pointing out how the author of Acts could have known the epistles and felt free to reshape the information. The one instance that sticks in my mind is Damascus - there is a reference to Damascus in the epistles in which Paul is persecuated by Aretas and escapes through being let down through a hole in a wall, which turns into an incident in Acts where is he persecuted by "the Jews" and escapes in a similar manner.

Peter Kirby

Everything is historical data that requires explanation.

If the author of Luke-Acts were a sometimes companion of Paul, it becomes an important source of information on Paul, even more than it would be without that direct connection. And there is data that leaves us with the hypothesis of a connection between the author and Paul as being a probable explanation.

In that case, I would agree, it becomes remarkable that the author could so misrepresent Paul's thought and preaching on the assumption that the author was familiar with some part of it face-to-face. So remarkable, as to serve as evidence against the idea that Paul didn't take Jesus to have been a man.

It is not by mistake that Doherty subscribes to a Knox-type view of Acts that places it post-Marcion and removes all possibility of personal familiarity with Paul. And it is not on accident that most who are familiar with the case and come down for a Jesus-myth hypothesis would join him in similar views. And it is not without conviction that others who are familiar with the case can come down against a Jesus-myth hypothesis given how their views do not coincide with the ones seen as necessary to (or, highly likely given) the Jesus-myth hypothesis.

(And, finally, it is not entirely unfair to draw a reverse argument from confirmation of the necessary hypotheses--such as a post-Marcion Acts--to the presumption of the coherent hypothesis--that is the Jesus-myth hypothesis--so long as that argument is drawn inductively from several cases in which the genuine merit of the necessary hypotheses is shown, and in no case is the necessary hypothesis shown up. To be fair to myself, this is one case in which the necessary hypothesis for the Jesus-myth hypothesis seems to me to have been shown up as wanting.)

Doug Shaver

Is it? Where is this debate going on?

And, what was that reason, according to the people who think they had a reason?