How the Book of Acts Shows Scripture's Reliability - Allen Hainline

Allen fills in for Dr. Justin Bass, who will be joining us November 19.

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Very good. Generally informative, inspiring, and generally thought provoking. I don't think there's a need to pick on Ehrman so hard. He is a good scholar and, honestly, you kind of admit yourself in your rebuttal to his criticism that Luke is taking liberties with the facts of the history to tell the narrative in a way that was more convenient at the time, which is exactly what Ehrman said, albeit towards a different end. It's a fair point, but, of course, Ehrman surely renders his opinion on Luke/Acts based on far more criteria than simply one observation. Off the top of my head, for example, I can think of a few points in disfavor for Luke: 1. How about how Luke not only borrows textually directly from Mark 2.but also changes the order of events from Mark 3. AND this reordering of events doesn't line up and contrasts with Mark/Matthew. 4. Luke's birth narrative has what, in a straightforward reading at least, appear to conflict with Matthew's, similar but I think more profound than the apparent contradiction between Luke/Acts mentioned above 5. Luke's geneology is different from Matthews and both claim to be of Joseph 6. The resurrection narrative is wildly more elaborate than Mark's, containing more angels, more details, ect. 7. There are more miracle stories than Mark, in general, which I think does indicate a certain amount of elaboration. Ultimately, I think it could very well be that the physician Luke, himself, did write Acts, based on eyewitness sources, but I do think we have to admit that there does appear to be a certain amount of fictious-ness in the telling. It's not impossible for legendary material to crop up in relation to a legend-worthy character, like Jesus, and, indeed, we should expect it.

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I think the young man made an interesting point at the end: namely that the dating of Acts after 80 is interesting in that the book of Acts ends abruptly after Paul arrive in Rome, making only a short note about Paul's stay in Rome. That's actually an interesting argument, but after thinking for a moment, it doesn't make much sense. The argument seems to be something like that the author of Acts would have given more information about Paul if he had known it. First of all, if that logic is true, then the author of Mark can't have known about Jesus' resurrection since he didn't provide an account of that in his gospel (before the added longer ending). Second, the argument itself doesn't seem to be self-consistent. The author of Luke ends with a statement that Paul spent 2 years in his rented house welcoming all who came to see him. Does the proponent of this argument think that Luke is therefore writing during Paul's stay at this rented house? If so then how could he write that Paul "spent" two years, instead of "Paul now lives at his rented house in Rome". Speaking past tense about Paul's residency implies that the author thinks he knows this information as something that's already happened. Surely then, that also implies that he knows that other things either are happening or did happen with Paul after his residency if he knows that Paul's residency was only two years, but the author makes a choice to not tell us what happened. Arguably, this could for the same reason that the author of the gospel of Marc ends his gospel with an empty tomb and not with resurrection appearances: he knows that people already know about these. Additionally, Acts is primarily a story about the formation of the early Christian church foremost and a story about Paul in consequence.

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And just for fun here is Ehrman on the history of Paul described by Acts and as described by himself: "Sometimes the differences really matter. When Paul himself talks about his conversion in Galatians 1 he insists that after he had his vision of Jesus he did not - he absolutely and positively did not (he swears to it!) - go to confer with the other apostles in Jerusalem. Not for years. And what happens when Paul converts according to Acts 9? What is the first thing he does after he leaves Damascus? He makes a beeline to Jerusalem to confer with the other apostles. In Acts he does precisely what he himself swears in Galatians 1 that he didn’t do."

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To the un-designed coincidences argument: couldn't you simply suppose either one or both of the following is true to explain these? 1. Writing letters of introduction and taking land routes were common in the ancient world? 2. The author of Luke/Acts is known to have used Mark and Q in his writing of Luke. Isn't it possible that he was familiar with the letters of Paul as well and simply wished to make his story as compliant as possible?