Actually, the twelve (Jesus' disciples) are mentioned in the whole of Acts only at 6:2 as "the twelve" without "apostles" or "disciples". "The twelve" (Jesus' disciples) without "apostles" or "disciples" is written in the four canonical gospels."The story of Paul in the Book of Acts is not evident in Paul’s epistles. Acts contains fanciful “miracle-mongering” motifs, including a resurrected Jesus who walks through walls and people who can make earthquakes happen through prayer. In fact, only in the Book of Acts do we have twelve apostles. Paul’s letters mention more apostles, some of them female. In the early Christian church, there were other sources of information about Paul which were for a time canonical, including Acts of Paul and Acts of Paul and Thecla ...
"twelve apostles" appears in gMatthew and Revelation.
And in Acts 14, Paul & Barnabas are called "apostles".
Am I missing something or Price is dead wrong?
If Acts was written much later than the Pauline epistles, we can expect added embellishments and fiction on the life of Paul. However Paul had to be more careful about lies about his life because his audience knew about him, at least in part.
That comment would put the "Pastorals" and 1 Clement and the Ignatian "to the Ephesians" and the Epistula Apostolorum and Marcion's canon, etc. written after Justin Martyr."Some of the early Church Fathers, such as Justin Martyr, never even mentioned Paul in their extensive writings, so it is debatable whether or not Christians in Justin’s day had heard of Paul ...
See http://historical-jesus.info/64.html
Most of the time, anyone's life can be described as an amalgam of biographical details derived from others."In the final analysis, according to Price, the canonical writings are not only infused with the hand of Marcion and Polycarp, as many scholars would acknowledge*, but are an amalgam of biographical details derived from the other Christian martyrs’ lives ..."
However, that alone would not prove (or disprove) that "anyone" did not exist.
There are ample evidence that some of the Pauline epistles (7 canonicals minus interpolations & editing) were written in real time when Jerusalem was still existing and, because of Romans 13:11-12, before Nero's persecution of Christians in Rome (64 AD).
Cordially, Bernard