Funny thing about Acts... (Paul's trial)

[RandyHelzerman]

The trial of Paul is very weird. But no weirder then the trial of Stephen, who launches into a harangue about the Old Testament, which everybody in the anudience already knew anyways, and also had nothing to do with Jesus really.

As for history? It passes the criterion of embarrassment, but you gotta remember that we are the ones who are embarrassed, not necessarily the author of Acts.

Acts reads to me like it’s meant to be truer than literally true, not literally true. Like a parable or fable. Or an allegory. Acts is clearly trying to portray the rulers, not Paul or Stephen, to be the ones who are not right with scripture.

[RandyHelzerman]

The question is, was this narrative a reliable account or was it itself a fabricated story?

Ah. Your main question is how to show there was a pre-existing narrative about Paul's life. Historicity of the trial accounts is a secondary question, in service of answering the first question. Sorry for misunderstanding in the other post.

Some of this comes down to figuring out what parts of the narrative are original to the source and what parts were made up by the final author.

RE: Luke and his sources: We do have Mark and we do have Galatians, so we actually can get a pretty good read on how Luke handles his sources, because we can see how he used them in his gospel and in Acts. Unfortunately, when we do so, what we find is very bad news for your program.

Let's start with Galatians. Think about mustering super-hyper text-critical skills and reconstructing the text of Galatians from Acts. Think about how skeptical you would be of anybody who claimed they could do such a thing.

Even the more modest task of claiming that there *was* a source, but you only claimed that you could prove a few lines of Acts was in it, is harder than it looks. E.g. Say we *didn't* have Paul's letters, only Acts (all you sons of James the Just out there, try not to get toooo excited and start gee-whizzing all over the screen).

But say we were living in an Ebionite paradise, we only have Acts, and somebody claimed they could prove that Luke must have used, as a source for Acts, a letter, written to a region called "Galatia," and that it contained a narrative about Paul's life, written by Paul himself.

Which he actually did, and it actually does, but think about how skeptical you'd be of that claim, with only Acts in hand, where Paul is a letter-carrier, not a letter writer. And why in a letter to Galatia, not Phrygia, Macedonia, or umpteen other places? Why an encyclical letter, not a letter to a specific city? How could you possible tease all that out of Acts?

On to Mark. I've heard it said by some qualified synoptic-problem-q-questor (don't remember who) that if we didn't have Mark, it would be impossible for us to reconstruct the text of Mark from Luke. Which is amazing, because Luke did take Mark very seriously, copied so much of it, and structured his whole gospel around it. The problem is that Luke was sooo damn good at weaving sources together, and at homogenizing their grammar, phrasing, style, etc that there's just no way they could identify the voice of Mark and pick it out from the rest of Luke. This from a guy who makes his living claiming he can extract Q from Luke, but only because he has both Mark and Matthew.

Luke tells us literally on the tin that he uses many sources for his books, so we know they are there. But apparently, extracting them is like trying to unstir cream from coffee.

If you *really* want to go down this road, and *really* nail your case, I think your best bet is to write some computer software (I seem to recall your are a data scientist) which could go through the text of Luke and with 90% or greater reliability, identify which parts came from Mark. It would have to focus on features which were a) particular to mark, that b) were robust enough to withstand the rephrasing that Luke did, and c) were not just blatently ad hoc, like we know Mark has a baptism story, so look for a baptism story, that kind of thing.

That would show that you could successfully pick out features which could identify voices clearly enough to unweave one of the sources, and would give great credibility to your results in extracting another one. You actually have a fighting chance to do so, because it does seem that Acts was not written with as much mastery as Luke, and perhaps even from the hand of a very aged Luke who died before he could narrate the martyrdom of Paul--which is to say, he died before he could really re-edit and homogenize all of his source material to the high standards we see in Luke. E.g. the "we" passages stick out like a sore thumb, but even at that, we already knew that and there still is no consensus on what the implication of this source being there is, or even whether there is more of it in Acts that was more skillfully woven into Acts.

Absent doing that, however, its hard to see how you could make anything other than a very hand-wavy, and ultimately unpersuasive case. Not because the available evidence is so constraining that it could refute the hypothesis, its because the evidence is so lose it can't rule out anybody's hypothesis, so there's nothing really to show than one person's conjectures are much better or worse than anybody else's.

Alas, nobody really thinks it's possible to untangle Lukes sources yet. The current methods we have of extracting sources are just are not powerful enough extract them from Luke/Acts. Its like reading the Herculaneum scrolls: you will have to break some new ground here to really convince anybody. I have no doubt you could do it, but it would be a major project.

The prize would be huge though. If there *were* a pre-existing narrative about Paul, Luke would have used it in a heartbeat, and perhaps even structured Acts around it in the same way that he structured his gospel around Mark. There could be a lot more of it there than anybody suspects, if we could just view Acts through the right lens.

[RandyHelzerman]

Wait… did I just post on a 2-year old thread? Who resurrected this thing anyways?