Quote:
Originally Posted by Archaea
Some of the research I've been studying makes Acts, which is not too bad to read in Greek, to be a later composition because it downplays the conflicts between Peter and Paul, but instead tries to paint a unified position of the apostles.
This aside got me thinking, that such a position is almost identical to the position which the LDS Church takes with regard to its internal dissent.
Some of the Pauline letters highlight the conflicts between Peter and Paul and they seem to support the more confrontational real world that existed during the first century.
Thoughts?
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We know a fair amount about Luke and about how he (one commentator, Helms, builds a circumstantial case that Luke could have been a she) went about writing his books (Luke and Acts, that we know of). Luke 1:1-4 tells us that Luke investigated accounts of what happened and thought he had figured out the right of things. Luke's approach seems very scholarly to me--he doesn't claim to have had a vision or even inspiration--he's just figuring things out as best he can.
*mullahs may now go bezerk*
In that sense, Luke is a redactor, and one with some strong themes he wants to empasize:
1. History has profound theological moments
2. Christianity is legitimate, ethical, and international
3. The Acts of the Apostles are really the acts of Jesus and the Holy Spirit
In that sense, I think it's fair to suspect that Luke and Acts were "vetted" (to use the fashionable buzzword) in a way that, say, Paul's letter to the Galatians was not.
There are strong arguments that Galatians, for instance, is much older than Luke and Acts. I remember that there's a fairly wide range for dating Luke and Acts, anywhere from 70 (which seems too early to me) to as late as 100 or so.