In September I’m going to be hosting an online conference of Bible scholars discussing their work for laypeople at a level that most anyone will be able to follow easily.  This will be the second of our conferences, “New Insights into the New Testament” (if you don’t know about the first one from this past year, focused on the Gospels, you can learn about it here: New Insights into the New Testament Conference).  The topic will be The Life, Letters, and Legends of Paul, and we’ll have 8 or 10 scholars making presentations with Q&A for each.

We’ll be announcing the course later (date, etc.), but just now as I’ve started thinking about it, I’ve been reflecting on some of the issues involved with trying to figure out what Paul actually preached.  In addition to his hints and statements in his surviving letters, we have actual speeches allegedly delivered by him in the book of Acts in the NT.  But do these accurately reflect what he really said?

I’ve addressed the question on and off over the years, and thought it might be useful to devote a couple of posts to it here.  This is taken from my book Peter, Paul, and Mary Magdalene (Oxford, 2006).

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A friend of mine once pointed out that there are two kinds of people in the world: those who think there are two kinds of people in the world and those who don’t.⁶⁰  I’m definitely of the former persuasion.  Since the 1980s, teaching graduate students year in and year out, I’ve found two different kinds of students.  Some of my students look at a range of ancient Christian texts and everything looks the same.  All the texts are mashed together into one big mega-text, so that, basically, at the end of the day, each text is saying the same thing.  Others of my students look at a range of texts and everything looks different.  Every text is taken as its own discrete entity with its own author, its own message, its own assumptions so that, basically, at the end of the day, every text is saying something different.

I must confess that when I was in college and a bit later, when I was a beginning graduate student myself, I belonged to the first set of people.  Everything looked pretty much alike.  When it came to the New Testament, the Gospel of Mark seemed a lot like Luke which was very much like John, which had a good deal in common with the writings of Paul, which reflected the things said in the book of Acts, and so on.  But the more rigorously I was trained in reading these texts in their original languages, the more I developed a refined sense of just how different they really are from each other.  I guess this was a conversion experience of my own, away from thinking everything is basically the same to seeing that everything is richly unique.

The Message of Paul in Acts

Nowhere is this more clear to me today than in the comparisons and contrasts I see between the book of Acts and the writings of Paul.  As I’ve indicated before, my basic assumption now is that Paul is the best authority for knowing about Paul; and that if an author living thirty years after Paul indicates that Paul said or did something that contradicts what Paul himself says, then it is probably Paul who has gotten the facts right and the other author has given a modified version.  I don’t mean to say that this modified account is therefore of no value: it is extremely valuable, but principally for what it is, not for what it is not.  It is less valuable for knowing what Paul was actually like, what he really said and did.  But it is more valuable for knowing how Paul was remembered in the generation after his death.  That too is a historical matter and of real interest to anyone concerned to know about the development of the Christian religion in its formative years.

It is relatively easy to contrast what Paul says about his proclamation of the gospel with how Acts portrays it.  Simply take one of Paul’s speeches in Acts and see how it stacks up against Paul’s own statements.  We have already seen some points of contrast, when I noted the differences between what Paul allegedly said about pagan idolatry in the book of Acts in his speech on the Athenean Areopogus (Acts 17) with what he himself says in the letter to the Romans 1:18-32.  The perspectives of these two passages are not simply different, they are at odds with one another.  In Acts, “Paul” indicates that God overlooks the error of the pagans in committing idolatry, since, after all, they are ignorant of his existence and don’t know any better.  In Romans, Paul says just the opposite: God does not forgive the pagans, but pours his wrath out on them, because they know full well that he is the only God and they reject this innate knowledge in order to worship idols.

 

 

60. Dale Martin, who scribbled comments all over a first draft of this book in a vain attempt to make me improve it, has asked me to tell you, the reader, that he is the one who came up with this keen, compelling, and life-transforming insight.

 

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I’ll continue these thoughts in the next post