Well I think the author of Acts was a reliable narrator in the sense that he was passing on information he thought to be true. Because we don’t know anything about the author we are almost forced to take what he says at face value, “face value” here being defined as the assumption that he was not deliberately attempting to deceive. Because if he was attempting to deceive we would simply have no way of ever knowing it. We can evaluate and interpret but we can’t read his mind or know his intentions. We’re either going to do historical criticism or not. If you assume the author is deliberately lying you shut the whole project down.
Of course that is a different issue than if his account is at all historically plausible. We can compare Acts with Paul’s own writings and we find serious discrepancies, for example.
There are some interesting hints we can take though. Acts tries to present the early Christian movement as one big happy family but the fact it cannot elide the conflict between the different approaches to evangelizing the gentiles reveals at least that this must have been a big issue for them. Acts has Peter agree with Paul but in Paul’s letter to the Galatians we see the dietary laws were still a real bone of contention.
In fact Paul went even further in teaching that gentiles definitely should not convert to Judaism.
I wonder how much this was motivated by the imminence of the Parousia? Torah observance was above all a lifestyle, part of a system that was shortly to be cast away, along with gender and ethnicity and culture.
But how radical was Paul’s view in the milieu of Second Temple Judaism, which was, as I’ve been discovering in my reading of the Book of Enoch, wild and woolly. Do we have any evidence that Paul ever advised a Jew to stop being Torah observant? That would be radical.
Robert said
BruceRMcF said
Robert said
Stephen said
I suspect Paul and Mark had some overlapping ideas but then by the mid and later first century wouldn’t all Christians have had some overlapping ideas?Sure, but if Ehrman is right about Paul being the first to not insist on gentile converts converting to Judaism and following kashrut, this would be a rather isolated idea. By the way, of the three positions of Bart mentioned above, this one is the one that I am least sure of.
According to Acts 15, after Paul and Barnabas were sent back to Antioch with the decision of James that Gentiles could convert provided they followed the laws of Noah, without conversion to Judaism, Barnabas then split from Paul over the question of John aka Mark’s participation in a following missionary journey. And of course, Acts puts glosses over the to and fro in the discussion and puts the deciding argument on Peter’s lips, beginning by reminding them that he (Peter) had been chosen by God to bring the message of the gospel to the Gentiles.
Setting aside the issue of this as testimony about the middle of the 1st century, this seems like circumstantial evidence that at the time that Acts was written, there were faith congregations of Christian gentiles who traced their founding to Paul and those who traced their founding to Peter, and there possibly might have been some who traced their founding to Barnabas.
If Acts is a reliable narrator insofar as the church in Jerusalem writing to Gentile converts to clarify that conversion to Judaism was optional for Gentiles becoming Christians (though respect for the Laws of Noah was not), that pretty much opens the door for any evangelist from the church in Jerusalem from that time on teaching gentiles, whether in primarily gentile Christian faith communities or as “god fearing” gentiles part of a primarily Jewish Christian faith community, that respect for the Laws of Noah was sufficient, and circumcision and following the entirety of the Law in the Tanakh was only required of Jews.
And if Acts is an unreliable narrator, then it would seem to be composing a reconciliation between different gentile faith communities in conflict on these questions, and putting the argument that carries the decision on the lips of Peter suggests that the Law of Noah reconciliation was the one that at least some of the faith communities who traced their founding back to Peter had arrived at.
This does not speak directly to the question of this thread, but it relates to issue I brought up of Bart’s contention that Paul was the first to not insist that gentiles become Jewish,* which, if true, does relate indirectly to whether or not the gospel of Mark was created from within the sphere of Paul’s influence.
Yes, but Paul was the first to do so according to the testimony of Acts, and the same acts is testimony that Peter had a mission to the Gentiles, and that there was a time when the leader of the Jerusalem church decided that compliance with the entirety of the rules under Judaism is not required of Gentile converts to Christianity, and also that Barnabas split away from Paul’s missionary work over a dispute on whether John aka Mark ought to be allowed to come along.
And the letter’s of Paul appear to offer evidence that aspects of Paul’s evangelizing were controversial, but being correspondence, seem like that couldn’t offer testimony over whether anyone else who was not insisting that Gentile converts to Christianity needed to convert to Judaism … it does suggest that if they were doing so, that would generate the same controversy.
In principle, I don’t think Acts is a reliable narrator, but it does give us a look at what was considered a plausible presentation of history in the eye’s of Luke and his audience.
Yes, as I referred to at the outset … it is a narration about an early period, but it is a material fact that people were sufficiently willing to engaged in the laborious and time consuming process of copying it out by hand that it survived to be used by enough later churches to make it so widely used that it was the sole book of Acts of early church fathers to be entered into the canon. So it is might be considered to be more directly evidence about aspects of its time (whenever that was) than about the time period it recounts.
Matthew had already proposed a rather different two-step solution, which may have been a better historical representation of Jesus’ own approach and the subsequent diversity of thought in the early church communities.
I presume this is a different problem than the problem that there were evidently a relevant number of Gentiles who were more inclined to join a faith community around the evolving gospel regarding Jesus believe in the gospel for whom conversion to Judaism was a roadblock.
Participants in the Acts Seminar 2001-2011 moved the dating of the text of Acts to the years 100-150 CE. The lower limit was adopted due to the availability of the Pauline Corpus from 100 CE. They concluded that the author of Acts must have been familiar with Paul’s letters, and that they were not available before 100 CE. Considering that the first confirmation of the Gospel’s existence comes from Papias around 110-130 CE, the whole dating game based on voting results, known as consensus, is completely unreliable. The NT has value as a source of moral, ethical, and social teaching. However, in the realm of narrative, our dear authors are true bullshit artists, creating texts with a historical political agenda, wrapping their invented situations and invented characters in powerful rhetoric and drama. Great poetry does not lie because poets do it professionally.
Robert said
Jarek said
Participants in the Acts Seminar 2001-2011 moved the dating of the text of Acts to the years 100-150 CE. The lower limit was adopted due to the availability of the Pauline Corpus from 100 CE. They concluded that the author of Acts must have been familiar with Paul’s letters, and that they were not available before 100 CE. Considering that the first confirmation of the Gospel’s existence comes from Papias around 110-130 CE, the whole dating game based on voting results, known as consensus, is completely unreliable. The NT has value as a source of moral, ethical, and social teaching. However, in the realm of narrative, our dear authors are true bullshit artists, creating texts with a historical political agenda, wrapping their invented situations and invented characters in powerful rhetoric and drama. Great poetry does not lie because poets do it professionally.So, Jarek, my friend, you would have us accept the consensus of the Acts Seminar as reliable but reject the larger consensus around dating the gospels as completely unreliable in dating true bullshit artists? Why the acceptance of one scholarly consensus and total rejection of an even wider consensus of critical scholars. You’ve never given us adequate reasoning for such widely divergent judgments of the credibility of critical scholars.
Personally, I have no difficulty accepting a date of Acts in the 2nd-century, but why accept that growing consensus but reject an even much more widely accepted critical consensus regarding the dating of Mark and Matthew? Is it just a personal preference for what you would like to believe?
I also have zero difficulty in recognizing the New Testament texts as having their own historical political agenda, wrapped in invented situations and invented characters in powerful rhetoric and drama. But I’ve yet to see any evidence or sound argumentation for accepting your imagined agenda.
Help me out, my dear friend, Jarek or Darek, why should anyone accept your thesis? Surely you must be able to present convincing arguments, right?
And, if you don’t mind, could you better relate your ideas expressed here to the topic of this thread? Your argument seems to relate only to a widespread collection of Paul’s letters, not specifically to Marek’s awareness of any of Paul’s letters or perhaps a more attenuated relation to Paul’s sphere of influence.
Robert, my friend, you have a subtle technique for twisting my statements. I don’t take any dating by biblical scholars seriously because it’s beyond their expertise. And I don’t want anything. Out of my journalistic duty, I cited what I’ve read. I neither support nor deny the conclusions of the Acts Seminar.
It’s your problem that you’re choosing answers where there aren’t any. 1 Clem is dated by biblical scholars from 60 CE to 140 CE. So, it could be an early-dated inauthentic one, a middle-dated one, or a late-dated inauthentic one. All of these theses have relevant research reviewed by eminent scholars. How many beautifully contradictory books can be written on this?
I look primarily at the date of the first confirmation of the existence of a given text.
And there is no early Christian text that we are certain of before the end of the first century.
You see, Christianity left us nothing from the first century. No material trace. We have texts pretending to be testimonies. Biblical scholars themselves have excluded 90% of them.
Christianity began at the end of the 1st century, several decades after the events described in the Testimonium Flavianum. The first artifacts appeared in the form of papyrus scraps, graffiti, symbols, intaglios, oil lamps, and pottery. Writers creatively filled the empty informational space between Jesus’ death and their own time using New Testament texts and the Apocrypha.
And this is a situation where biblical scholars create artificial entities, not me. How do we know this? Consider Mormonism, Scientology, and Marian apparitions. First, a miracle, and then its content development. Once a project begins, it must have its own dynamics to survive. A miracle is the spark, but content fuel must be provided immediately to keep the flame burning. Out of 100 Marian apparitions, only 10 are successful. A church is formed. Out of 100 such churches, only one apparition is officially recognized by Rome.
After many years, there is no trace of anything happening in the first century. One could write literary fiction. Confirming it is worse. The lack of any trace is what debunked the Exodus myth and now debunks the myth of first-century Christianity.
Mythicists presented a weak alternative to the origins of Christianity – some undocumented Joshua mystery cults, some form of Jewish-Hellenic-Buddhist gnosis.
And here, the expected news simply arrived with a 65 years delay – God had sent the long-awaited messiah from among the people. A message with an interesting narrative idea – a messiah who died only to win by rising again. And it was well-received And successfully developed
Robert said
BruceRMcF, I’m having difficulty following your line of argumentation here. Could you please distill it down to a few relatively simple statements so it’s clear (for me at least, I’m old and somewhat feeble-minded 🤔) what points your contesting or defending?
On this point:
Robert said
Stephen said
I suspect Paul and Mark had some overlapping ideas but then by the mid and later first century wouldn’t all Christians have had some overlapping ideas?Sure, but if Ehrman is right about Paul being the first to not insist on gentile converts converting to Judaism and following kashrut, this would be a rather isolated idea. By the way, of the three positions of Bart mentioned above, this one is the one that I am least sure of.
… I (1) don’t see Paul being first on its own implying that it’s a rather isolated idea and (2) note that the strongest attestation that he is first comes from Acts, and the same attestation suggests that following the “first council in Jerusalem”, there were multiple missionary efforts in addition to Paul’s which would not insist on gentile converts converting to Judaism.
Of course, Acts directly contradicts Galatians. One contradiction is where in Galatians Paul states that his mission is to preach the gospel to the Gentiles, while Peter’s mission is to preach the gospel “to the circumcised”, while in Acts, Peter clearly states that he was chosen from among the apostles and elders so that the Gentiles would hear the gospel “from his lips”. The other contradiction is where in Galatians Paul says the only thing asked of him was that he continue to remember the poor, where in Acts the decision was that Gentile converts who followed a version of the Laws of Noah would not be required to convert to Judaism.
Hence the open question on the relative reliability of Paul’s recounting of the decision by James as leader of the Jerusalem Church and Acts recounting of the same.
Still, the Acts account was accepted well enough at the time it was composed to survive and then to become entrenched as a canonical work. That suggests to me that at that time, there were likely multiple strands of Gentile faith communities, not all of them tracing their founding to Paul, so it is possible that the same might have been true at the time of the composition of “Mark”.
Robert said
BruceRMcF said
Robert said
… if Ehrman is right about Paul being the first to not insist on gentile converts converting to Judaism and following kashrut, this would be a rather isolated idea. By the way, of the three positions of Bart mentioned above, this one is the one that I am least sure of.… I (1) don’t see Paul being first on its own implying that it’s a rather isolated idea and (2) note that the strongest attestation that he is first comes from Acts, and the same attestation suggests that following the “first council in Jerusalem”, there were multiple missionary efforts in addition to Paul’s which would not insist on gentile converts converting to Judaism.
Of course, Acts directly contradicts Galatians. One contradiction is where in Galatians Paul states that his mission is to preach the gospel to the Gentiles, while Peter’s mission is to preach the gospel “to the circumcised”, while in Acts, Peter clearly states that he was chosen from among the apostles and elders so that the Gentiles would hear the gospel “from his lips”. The other contradiction is where in Galatians Paul says the only thing asked of him was that he continue to remember the poor, where in Acts the decision was that Gentile converts who followed a version of the Laws of Noah would not be required to convert to Judaism.
Hence the open question on the relative reliability of Paul’s recounting of the decision by James as leader of the Jerusalem Church and Acts recounting of the same.
Still, the Acts account was accepted well enough at the time it was composed to survive and then to become entrenched as a canonical work. That suggests to me that at that time, there were likely multiple strands of Gentile faith communities, not all of them tracing their founding to Paul, so it is possible that the same might have been true at the time of the composition of “Mark”.Regarding 1) & 2)
The author of Acts allows us to tentatively infer that maybe Peter and his host Cornelius did not observe kosher for the few days that Peter and his fellow Jews were provided lodging at the home of Cornelius. The contents of Peter’s vision strengthens this inference. But this is not said explicitly, and I am not inclined to ascribe much in the way of historical accuracy to Acts in general or the Cornelius story specifically. There are also the anonymous Jewish men of Cyprus and Cyrene who, on coming to Antioch, successfully proclaimed the Lord Jesus to the Greeks (possibly Jewish Hellenists). This is why Barnabas was first sent from Jerusalem to Antioch (11,22). We might also presume that these Greek-speaking converts were possibly not observing kosher. …
In my view, Acts is stronger evidence as circumstantial evidence regarding the situation in the early Church at the time that Acts was being copied in sufficient numbers and circulated to a sufficient number of faith communities to survive being lost and then eventually to be used as scripture in enough churches to have to be accepted into the canon.
However, I was not referring to Acts narrative regarding whether or not Peter observed kosher, but to the Acts recounting of the decision by James, leading the Church of Jerusalem, that Gentile converts need not be circumcised and need not keep kosher, but only need to keep to the looser Noahibite proscription against eating blood or meat from animals killed by strangling in combination of an early version of the other Naohibite rules.
The vision of Peter obviously cannot appeal to the Criterion of Inconvenience, but the recounting of the “First Council” in Jerusalem is clearly inconvenient for Churches using the epistles of Paul in Peter clearly self-identifying himself as having a mission of bringing the gospel to the Gentiles and in laying more conditions on converted Gentiles than Paul recounts as the decision of the Council in Galatians.
One interpretation is that there was in fact a decisive split only later papered over by Acts’ “one big happy family” viewpoint. Maybe what actually happened historically is that Paul got shown the door. The Romans’ not so gentle response to the first Revolt eliminated the Jerusalem home church as a locus of authority. “Jewish” Christianity was dispersed to the four winds and only survived as a marginal presence. The gentile dominated church, the winners, wrote the history. (But, tellingly, they could not ignore the original conflict in their account. The proverbial mountain was transformed into the equally proverbial molehill.)
I surely would have liked to have been a fly on the wall at the Jerusalem Council, assuming it actually happened of course.
Robert said
BruceRMcF said
In my view, Acts is stronger evidence as circumstantial evidence regarding the situation in the early Church at the time that Acts was being copied in sufficient numbers and circulated to a sufficient number of faith communities to survive being lost and then eventually to be used as scripture in enough churches to have to be accepted into the canon.Let’s say Acts was written around 120ish (or earlier, if you like), how long would it take to be accepted as canon?
It seems like you’ve erased the first clause and jumped immediately to the second one. It would take an infinitely long time to be accepted as canon if it was not received by some faith communities as worthy of being copied and disseminated. Paper wasn’t so cheap and the time of members of the faith community with the ability to do the copying wouldn’t have been so abundant that they would just copy anything that came into their possession. They had to make a choice.
Robert said
BruceRMcF said
Let’s say Acts was written around 120ish (or earlier, if you like), how long would it take to be accepted as canon?
It seems like you’ve erased the first clause and jumped immediately to the second one. It would take an infinitely long time to be accepted as canon if it was not received by some faith communities as worthy of being copied and disseminated. Paper wasn’t so cheap and the time of members of the faith community with the ability to do the copying wouldn’t have been so abundant that they would just copy anything that came into their possession. They had to make a choice.
No, in that question posed to you, I’m merely setting up what I think is a reasonable time frame (you can propose a different timeline if you like), as an introduction to the first historical evidence we have in the writings of Justin and Irenaeus, and the Muratorian fragment. You may want to make your argument stronger by defending a much earlier dating of Acts–is that the case? I don’t want to put words in your mouth.
The core argument, which comes later in my post is the same, regardless of the timeframe. Would a devotee of Paul, aware of Paul’s version of events, be more inclined to reject or accept an account that showed that Peter, James, and all the apostles and elders in Jerusalem eventually agreed with Paul about the most important things? Or would they see the text of Acts of the Apostles as presenting a contrary presentation of the facts, a cause of embarrassment because of their allegiance to Paul, because they knew Paul to be wrong and the account in Acts to be factually correct?
The first proposition seems much more plausible to me than the latter. The account in Acts would only be an embarrassment to those embracing the letter to the Galatians if they had previously considered Paul’s version in Galatians to be true, and now they had to begrudgingly accept the fact that they were wrong and the account in Acts must be right. How did they know that Acts was right? If they were so close to the actual events, and they already knew it to be true, then there is no embarrassment. I don’t think your argument based on a Criterion of Inconvenience works very well and I don’t see how to strengthen it.
But in what circumstances is this the choice that they face?
In the circumstances that most Greek speaking faith communities are self-consciously Pauline, there is no need to accept some embarrassment on the second count in order to gain the support of the Acts of the Apostles in the first count, and the embarrassments on the second count can fall away copying. After all, all scribes know that errors are made in copying documents of this length, so one or two of them in the copying chain correcting one of the mistakes where the text contradicts an earlier source is not surprising.
The circumstances in which there is the less embarrassment is if Greek speaking faith communities that are self-consciously Pauline and those that are self-consciously Petrine are in interaction, in which case the Acts account putting the compromise decisive (and only quoted) argument in the Council on Peter’s lips is placing Peter on Paul’s side in the argument. The circumstances in which there is the least embarrassment is if an early form of the Noahibite Law was the compromise used in the Petrine churches for converted Gentiles, so that the Council decision provides justification for what they have been doing while Peter’s vision provides justification for what the Pauline faith communities have been doing.
Aside from the inner logic of the argument, is it built on the hypothesis of a very early dating of Acts? Is it built upon the hypothesis that churches using Paul’s letter to the Galatians were primarily responsible for getting the ball rolling on copying the text of Acts?
I mean, as I have repeatedly said, it is about looking at using Acts as circumstantial evidence regarding the conditions in which it is so much more widely disseminated and relied upon than other Acts that it is the form of the early history of the Church that ends up being canonized.
I should acknowledge that in your presentation you’ve focused more on the idea that Acts and its account of the Jerusalem Council contradicted Galatians in that it gives a role to Peter in the mission to the gentiles and in the council laying more of a burden on the gentile churches than what Paul did. While Paul did say in letter to Galatians that at some point it was he who was the apostle to the gentiles with Peter as the apostle to the circumcised, we know from the same letter to the Galatians that Peter had already been present living as a gentile in Antioch so that’s not much of a contradiction. With respect to the burdens laid upon the gentile churches, the council did not impose circumcision, the primary issue, and the minimal food restrictions regarding blood, strangling, and perhaps meat offered to idols, this is not so different from Paul’s own advice about not endangering the conscience of believers who might be scandalized by these things.
“We know” here is “Paul claims to advance his argument”, which would be the epitome of a “Principle of Convenience”.
Assuming, as I believe we should, that the argument regarding eating the less expensive meat on the market that was offered to idols was not made by the heroic Paul appearing in Acts but rather by the cantankerous, argumentative, divisive figure that we see in the Pauline epistles, the question is who is the third party in the argument including Paul and the “circumcision party”, with Paul strenuously arguing that he is correct that there is no intrinsic issue with a “strong” believer eating the meat offered to idols, but it is ethically warranted to refrain if necessary to avoid, as you say, avoiding endangering the conscience of believers who might be scandalized by these things.
This suggests a group who are not of the circumcision party, but whose conscious would be scandalized by the consumption of meat offered to idols, and therefore are not of Paul’s party either, and unlike the circumcision party, this third group seems to be one that Paul is willing to accommodate, although casting those who can eat the meat of idols without the risk of falling into idolatry as being the “strong believers” and those who must be accommodated by refraining from doing so as “weaker” believers.
BDEhrman
FreedomBen
evgendob
Robert