There is -- collating "conventional arguments" -- a reasonable case that we know much more of Luke's sources for Paul than often mentioned. Much of the Acts life of Paul in the second part of Acts has been argued as a kind of doublet of Peter's life in the first part; and the trials of Paul have also been argued in conventional publications as doublets of the trials of Jesus. Our author of Acts likewise appears to have drawn heavily upon other textual sources, most notably the OT, for rewriting, just as he appears to have done as the redactor of Luke.andrewcriddle wrote: ↑Mon Sep 27, 2021 11:05 amIrish1975 wrote: ↑Mon Sep 27, 2021 10:14 am . . .
What materials or information Luke had at his disposal, in addition to his colorful imagination, is of course unknown, although some have inferred that he must have known Josephus. It is a plausible hypothesis that he knew the epistles and was deliberately reacting to them and in many places contradicting them, although he pretends not to know anything of Paul as a writer of letters. But I wouldn't call that "constructing his story with the epistles as historical evidence." He would have been more faithful to their contents if he had regarded them as evidence in the manner of a historian.
Given the evidence for these kinds of intertextuality in the Acts account of Paul one must wonder if Luke was indeed writing creatively and had no knowledge of a historical life to draw upon.
Even if we date Acts at the time the epistles were being written this conclusion does not follow. We speak of Paul's epistles as if that word places them in the same category as the bulk of other epistles anybody wrote back then, but the epistles are not like other epistles at all.andrewcriddle wrote: ↑Mon Sep 27, 2021 11:05 am
What I was trying to argue is
a/ If Luke knew the epistles then there was a historical Paul. (unless you date Acts very late)
The fact that the author of Acts appears to use the epistles in ways that run counter to the agenda of those epistles raises questions that must leave us uncertain about the nature, function, provenance of those epistles.
Is not this kind of begging the question?andrewcriddle wrote: ↑Mon Sep 27, 2021 11:05 am b/ If Luke knew a substantial ancient tradition about Paul apart from the epistles then there was a historical Paul (again unless you date Acts very late).
My scepticism, I might add given another point raised recently about "mythicists" (though I have problems with being classified as a "mythicist"), comes without hostility against Christianity per se. I have just completed blogging another lengthy work on mythicism in which the author, another one, acknowledges in a way similar to other scholars who have argued with the same scepticism of origins, that major historical positives Christianity has and continues to contribute to the world. (The question becomes: Why do some critics believe one must explain an intellectual inquiry in terms of some sort of psychopathology.)