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I wonder what we believe today that those in the future will find laughable.
If you checked out of scholarship in the 80s, I can see why you would think so. That is a less defensible sentiment today. Fifty years ago, people got away with saying that King David is a myth, now we have his coins. Excavations have revealed architecture described in the New Testament that has been hidden since the 2nd century. Where it gets hazy is where you would expect it to be hazy - what archaeological evidence would you expect the Exodus to leave behind? There is some evidence, nothing conclusive, but I wouldn't expect there to be given the short time length of the event and the amount of evidence nomadic peoples typically leave behind.
But that doesn't hold many problems for the Traditional Catholic, as the traditional view has viewed the Joshua and Conquest in an allegorical sense. Joshua as a Christ figure, demonstrates the importance of eradicating evil entirely and giving it no quarter. A large part of reading the Bible is knowing what the genre is of the book you're reading.
To the Christian claims, the important thing to get historically accurate is the Gospels, and the Gospels were written in the genre of Ancient Biography. They at least tried to get it right, and there is increasing evidence that they were written early and by eyewitnesses..
All attempts to date the Gospel after AD 70 rely in the logic of, "Well, we know Jesus wasn't God, so He can't have predicted the fall of the Temple ahead of time (never mind there were other people predicting the fall of the Temple in the decade leading up to it,) and so the Gospels all had to be written after AD 70." And dating the Gospels before AD 70 is more like, "The Gospels tell their readers to do things at the Temple, and that is a weird prescription if the Temple is already destroyed. And Acts leads up the climatic trial of Paul in Rome but doesn't cover it, which would seem to indicate that it was completed before his execution. And look here, and look there, at all these weird coincidences that only make sense if they were written in the 50s and 60s."
Which proof do you think relies on actual infinity being logically contradictory? St. Thomas famously believed we couldn't prove the universe was finite through just philosophy, and his Cosmological argument does not require the universe to have had a beginning. Maybe you're most exposed to Kalam's argument, which is impossible to defend on pure philosophical grounds, though people try to defend it still with a combo of scientific evidence and philosophy.
Which Exodus? Hundreds of thousands of people into Canaan? Or maybe just the Levites? Just between those two positions you have an incredible difference in how likely you'd be to find evidence.
Yeah, I'm more sympathetic to the view that the word for "thousand" meant something like "platoon" of indeterminate size. The link in that paragraph goes to a book where five different scholars argue five different positions on when the Exodus happened: early dating, late dating, no exodus at all, exodus as a cultural memory of multiple migrations from Egypt, etc. It was an interesting format, something like a long-form Reddit argument or written debate-brawl. I recommend the book if you are interested in the topic.
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PS. I don't think those arguments were laughable btw, I probably would have been convinced by them.
We probably are convinced by a bunch of bad research, given the replication crisis.
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Cute, however the world is not 6000 years old, Moses is a probably a fictional character and certainly not the author of the Deuteronomy, there was no widespread captivity in Egypt, etc etc
That where one scholar is going but not where scholarship in general is going, that would be the other direction. And no eyewitnessess, whoever wrote the cleansing of the temple probably didn't even have a passing familiarity with the temple, for example.
It doesn't matter when the prediction was made, it's that predictions only become relevant after they become true, it wouldn't have been written about. But beyond that it's how it's treated, as inevitable rather than a menace. And beyond that it's the lack of references to the gospels from other sources, consider how many times the authentic letters of Paul could have quoted Jesus from the gospels but didn't. That means they were written after.
The offering to the Temple was a big part of jewish religion, rabbis continued to debate the proper temple practices for centuries after the temple was destroyed under the assumption that it would soon be rebuilt. It is no surprise that christians, which at that point were a jewish sect, would do the same.
You should re-read the last chapter of Acts:
All versions of the cosmological argument and all of the five ways of St. Thomas.
Irrelevant.
Are you getting that from Ehrman or somewhere else?
Even with a "late" gMark date of 73ish, the author would have been in the temple as all male Jews were expected to travel to the Temple several times a year. Assuming the writer is older than 18, he would have familiarity with the Temple before its fall.
If you don't discount scholars just for being religious, arguments for early dating is becoming more acceptable. The arguments make sense. They made sense when critical historian Adolf von Harnack did the math in 1911, and they still make sense today. The historical investigation has the fatal flaw of needing to presuppose that nothing supernatural happened. If you approach without that presupposition, then the evidence points elsewhere.
I would not dispute that the letters of Paul were mostly written without the Gospels as reference. There are some parts of Paul's letters that have a certain rhyme with the Gospels, particularly in 1 Corinthians. But I think they were written separately, which isn't exactly a bad thing from an evidentiary-stand point. All that tells us is that the Gospels were not wide-spread reference material at the time Paul was writing and perhaps he did not have access to copies himself. He was an wandering preacher/tent maker. It's not the weirdest thing for him not to have had an extensive library.
Or it mattered because it was a warning to the Christians to flee Jerusalem for the hills, which they did. And not all the predictions came true by AD 80. And some things that would probably be critical details embedded in their memory, like that the Temple was melted to SLAG wasn't mentioned at all.
Yeah, and then Paul died. He died during Nero's reign, in AD 64/65. He arrived in Rome in AD 60. Acts ends saying, "He spent two years in Rome preaching." Then there is a gap of another couple years, and then Paul died. If Paul died before Acts was written, Luke would have included Paul's dramatic death. He did not, because Paul's dramatic death didn't happen for another two years.
Since gLuke is likely written before Acts, and Acts was likely written before AD 65, and gMark was written before gLuke unless you're crazy, gMark is older than AD 65. Give them each a couple years to write each book, and gMark is in the late 50s. Paul's letters were written in the 50s and the part of the 60s where he was alive, which goes to your point that he didn't have a copy of a Gospel to reference. It's all very nice and neat like the truth tends to be.
No they don't. This is just silly. If for the sake of argument we allowed that there could be an infinitely long hierarchical series— D actualized by C, which is in turn actualized by B, which is in turn actualized by A, and so on in infinity, there would still have to be a source of causal power outside the series to impart causal power to the whole. Consider a mirror which reflects the image of a face present in another mirror, which in turn reflects the image of a face present in another, and so on ad infinitum. Even if we allowed that there could be such a series of mirrors, there would still have to be something outside this infinite series— the face itself—which could impart the content of the image without having to derive it. What there could not be is only mirror images and never any actual face.
The argument does not rely on the non-existence of actual infinity.
I'm getting it from reading the thing.
The author of Mark wasn't a jew. What kind of line of argumentation is this? I'm bringing this as proof that the authors are far removed from the events and your response is "well, under the assumption that they are not far removed from the events this is impossible". You are making my point.
A prediction coming true is not supernatural, people predict things all the time. The problem is that correct predictions only become relevant after they become true. Suppose Mark was writing in the 50s, some guy said "the temple is going to be destroyed" 20+ years ago and it never happened, are you going to bring that up? And it's not just the prediction, it's how it's treated. You wouldn't write the parable of the fig tree if the destruction of the temple hadn't already happened: the jews have already failed to deliver and god has already punished them.
Or possibly because Paul dramatic death hadn't been invented yet. You are trusting sources written hundreds of years after the fact on this, farther from the facts than the most pessimistic estimates of acts. The ending of acts is truncated whichever way you look at it. Supposed it really was written while Paul was still in Rome you wouldn't say "it preached in rome for two years" you would also say "and he's still there" or "and he's now moved to spain" or "and then they arrested him again a second time".
What's causal power. Make me an example of causation. Feser makes arguments like this and I'm convinced that his idea of causation doesn't exist outside of his brain.
LIght travels at finite speed so at most there would have had to be, at some point, a face. But I don't think this is the case, I think there's actually nothing logically contradictory in an infinite series of mirrors you are tricking your brain into thinking there is because the brain thinks in aristotelian terms, with efficient and final causes, but those things don't exist. Suppose the universe was nothing but a single atom travelling forever at constant speed, is that impossible? Our brain wants to say no because everything that we experience moving is moved by something but actually there's nothing logically impossible in it. If the universe was nothing but an infinite series of mirrors reflecting a face infinitely in both directions that's just how it would be.
No, I'm not. Unless you hold to a later Mark date than most scholars today. And many scholars belive Mark was Jewish, such as William Arnal and Julie Galambush who are hardly Christian Fundamentalists.
Jesus is clear that is goal is to create a new Exodus and a new covenant. Will the Son of Man find faith when He returns? He came the first time, no faith, predicts destruction of the old practices. Establishes a new covenant, says he will return to see if it goes any better.
But just looking at events in the 40s, they match to the predictions better than the full Temple destruction? Atheist New Testament Scholar Maurice Casey argued that Jesus’s prophecy about the “abomination of desolation” where it does not belong is obviously a reference Caligula ordering a statue of himself be placed within the Temple around 39 CE. The portion about the destruction of the Temple is largely taken from Jeremiah 7, and Casey doesn’t see it as a reference to the historical destruction of the Temple by the Romans, but rather an eschatological threat of sorts about God destroying the Temple if it’s desecrated.
The ability to bring an effect into something else. Right now I do not have boiling water. If I were to fill a pot with water and put it on a stove and turn it on and heat made the water boil, all that chain of events was required to make the water boil. It's also clear that there was something about that chain of events that caused the water to boil, when otherwise the water would have stayed in my pipes without boiling. The heat of the stove had the causal power to change the water from liquid to gas.
I am not arguing that there is something logically contradictory in an infinite series of mirrors. The argument is, even with an infinite series of mirrors there would be no face if there was nothing imparting an image of a face.
Yes! The thing impossible isn't the speed of the atom, but the fact that the atom exists at all.
Mark is far removed from the events that he's narrating, either in time or in space or both. The belief that he was jewish is a minority position. Unfortunately like many things plagued by apologetics you can't even tell when some people are just mistaken or deliberately lying.
The water boils because of a transfer of energy not because of causal power.
The face is irrelevant? It's just light in some arbitrary pattern being reflected, are you saying that you can imagine infinite mirrors but not infinite light? That you can only imagine light in a pattern if there is something giving it that pattern (but the same isn't true of the atoms of mirrors)?
An infinite series of mirrors can exist but not a single atom? I'm not following. I don't find this persuasive at all, I think there's nothing impossible in imagining an universe comprised of a single atom.
If you think that this materially changes anything I said then I don't know how to reach you. Something had greater energy and it transferred this energy in the form of heat to the water. We can go deeper and talk about entropy and the average velocity of the molecules. I took Thermodynamics, too. The specifics doesn't change the fact that something acting outside the water caused it to heat up.
But there would be a reason why it's in one pattern instead of another. And mentioning light is actually more relevant to my argument! Because light is outside the infinite mirrors. There could be infinite mirrors and no face because no light! The infinity of the mirrors does not create an image.
An infinite series of mirrors cannot exist in reality, it's an analogy to the idea that claiming that an infinite amount of causes can explain itself. It cannot.
A single atom moving through space still needs an explanation. There are many things it could have been otherwise. For instance, the atom has a certain number of protons, electrons, and neutrons, but it would have been possible for it to have fewer or more. Why is it moving at this velocity and not another velocity? Why is there space for it to move in? A single atom has the potential to be something else, so something must have caused it to be as it is instead of in another way.
You're arguing for a kind of existential inertia, but that is a whole other can of worms than an argument for infinity.
I think it does change things because every time I've heard that argument it ends with "and that's why god needs to exist here and now" and you don't get there with energy transfers because once the energy is transferred the source doesn't need to continue existing.
I really don't know what you are even saying at this point. Usually these arguments are trying to prove the existence of god through a logical impossibility (i.e. non-existence of god is logically impossible thus god exists). I don't think there's anything logically impossible in the existence of an arbitrary arrangement of light, it doesn't need a cause.
I haven't laid out a proof for the existence of God here because I don't have the time to write one out. All I am doing is objecting to you saying that ALL proofs for God's existence rely on the non-existence of actual infinity. But based on what you're saying I'm not convinced you've understood a single proof in the slightest.
I'm going to try to write it out again without mirrors:
Imagine a circle of 100 robots facing each other. Each has a command to raise their hands if the robot next to them raises their hand first. Each robot starts with its hands down. After how many hours will every robot have its hands raised? They never will.
What if you made the circle bigger? 100,000 robots. 10^100 robots? Infinite robots? (Please understand, I am not implying that a universe of infinite robots is possible without God or anything like that. This is a thought experiment to demonstrate an aspect of a different argument.)
Just because there are infinite robots does not mean that they will all raise their hands with infinite time.
Now we come upon a circle where some robots have their arms up. We know that every robot is programed to not raise its hands until the one in front of it had its hands raised. What can we deduce from this?
Even if the robots had been there for an infinite length of time beforehand, the answer remains the same. There must have been something different from the chain of robots - like a robot that started off with raised hands.
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To expand on this. I know how Feser's argument typically goes and typically at some point you would say "no the first cause can't be the big bang because it needs to be present here and now". Boiling water (or energy transfers in general) are not good examples of this because you can remove the fire and the boiling will continue, you can interrupt the causal chain at various points without interrupting the consequences. That's my problem, I don't think that causation exists in the way that the argument needs it to exist.
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I'll grant you that an extremely early copy of gMark is very possible, but I don't think the same is true for Luke-Acts because of the details and purpose of those books. Luke-Acts is interesting because we can cross reference it with several other sources mainly Josephus and Paul to validate it's accuracy. And Luke gets several things wrong that we would expect an eyewitness and companion of Paul to get right. The most basic one being Paul's travel itinerary after his vision which Paul directly tells us about in Galatians. Additionally the author of Luke-Acts knows the Gospels as gLuke is one of the synoptics and essentially no one would say gLuke is the Earliest. It's an extremely tight timeline for the author of gLuke to be introduced to gMark or proto gMathew, after Paul has been sent to Rome but before his execution and as Paul was able to receive visitors and letter in Rome as stated in Acts and confirmed by Romans, it seems unlikely Paul would also not be introduced to one of these volumes.
The author of Luke-Acts is trying to ground his volume in history and does his best to set the the scene but when we look at Josephus there are some contradicting details. I think this enough to prove the author of gLuke wasn't basing his historical knowledge on Josephus but rather a shared understanding of the history being distorted by time. There a lot of hazy details and names that pop up in Acts especially the earlier part which indicate a half remembered history. This could be before Luke met with Paul and so the details are hazy but a lot of it directly concerns Paul and seems it would better match up with Paul's accounts of his exploits if Luke was his traveling companion. When I double checked some thing to write this post I found an intriguing book which argues both are true New Light on Luke by Barbara Shellard;
An interesting hypothesis and I'm definitely going to check it out. But even if the "We documents" are much older and perhaps even first person accounts. I think the bulk of the work as enough correctable errors of an eye witness and contemporary of Paul that it's extremely unlikely to be contemporary. For example Acts criteria for apostleship excludes Paul, and as we can see in his letters Paul emphatically argued that he was an apostle. This seems unlikely for a follower of Paul to omit or write.
If so why does the author leave off the execution of Paul? Well for one gMark leaves out half of the resurrection so ancient authors are not obligated to write texts in a way we would expect. But also think of the audience of Luke-Acts, in my view Luke-Acts was intended for a Roman audience explaining how Christianity went from Judea to them by way of Paul. A big part of it is explaining why their Christianity came from Paul and not one of the apostles, and this is for a Roman audience. Luke-Acts overall is extremely deferential to Rome. The enemies in the book are usually unnamed mobs or Jews. Occasionally the local authorities hassle him but he's almost always able to get out of it by appealing to his Roman citizenship. And he has long friendly dialogues with the Roman rulers of Judea again in comparison to "the Jews" It doesn't stretch the imagination to see why an author appealing to an audience of Romans might end the narrative of Paul triumphantly preaching in Rome rather than his execution. As well as why the author of a sporadically persecuted movement might shave off inconvenient details the Roman authorities wouldn't like and would comfort parishioners. If we assume a post Jewish revolt date as well distancing themselves from the Jews might not seem a bad idea as well and a significant theme in Acts is Paul appealing to the Roman civil authorities against Jewish mobs. Him then being executed by Caesar ruins this narrative.
We can also see from the other Gospels that the author of Luke-Acts was perfectly comfortable editing out or omitting uncomfortable details. He has gone to great lengths to minimize the role of Jesus' family multiple mentions of his brothers and mother in gMark are removed or made non-specific. The narrative in Acts around the Jerusalem council gets incredibly weird and jerky because despite talking about the Church in Jerusalem he has neglected to mention James (the brother of the Lord) until now but can't get around his role in the council so has to add him in. He's working with known facts but weaving a narrative out of them. I actually think that Acts belongs more in the Romance genre ala Pseudo-Clement and I don't think this would be a controversial opinion among believing or secular scholars if it hadn't been canonized it's contradictions with Paul's letters and parallelism between Paul and Jesus would be enough to put it there, if it had been found in a cash of documents in the desert instead of all our Bibles.
Why then is it in all out Bibles? Well I think Acts serves a very useful purpose in Christianity narrative wise but particularly towards a Roman audience, and that is answering how did Christianity come to me?
If we assume an early date than Acts is attempting to chronicle "the story of Christianity up until now" and I just don't think it does that. We can see from Paul's letters that there was a lot of grappling with heresies differing interpretations and that a significant portion of his work was trying to keep early church's on the straight and narrow as he saw it. Even towards the end of his life in Philippians where we see these issues have not been solved and in Philippians especially he comes off rather bitter at points. All of that is omitted in Acts an Christianity is presented as a unified triumphal force with Paul going from town to town in the Roman gaining converts and ending with him preaching in the Empire's capital. This is very much a story of how Paul and Jesus triumphed. Paul's opponents are rarely heretics they are magicians and Jews. And the work of Luke-Acts but especially Acts again and again separates Christians from Jews and features the Roman authorities saving Paul from the Jews and learnedly listening to Paul's teaching on Christianity. Early differences are papered over and instead of denouncements, the have a council where they Holy Spirit moves them and the faith emerges stronger than ever! Which likely did happen to some degree but Philippians shows us it wasn't nearly as wholly agreed upon as portrayed in Acts. Acts works very well as a story of how did Christianity come to me a Roman citizen (or rather my grandfather) and why did it come from this Paul guy and it works very poorly as an exhaustive history of the early church which is not what it is trying to be, which is why I don't think an early date works at all for Luke-Acts.
Can you expand on this? I don't recall Josephus mentioning Paul at all; I'm not sure what they could really contradict each other on.
I don't mean referencing Paul specifically but but rather the historical scene. Luke tries to give a historical "scene" for his gospels in a way the others don't by bringing up historical evens and timelines. places the census during the reign of Herod the Great. Josephus says the census under Quirinius occurred after Herod Archelaus was deposed, around 6 CE. So about a decade difference Luke also gives a different order for the failed messianic claimants of Theudas, Judas and "the Egyptian." Acts gets many local details right, titles of officials, geography(the sea travel times we mentioned*), Luke definitely tried for as much accuracy as possible. However, when it comes to larger historical events like the census or rebel leaders, Luke’s account diverges from Josephus. Which is why I don't think he used him as a source though they are related. I think the explanation can be Luke writing about widely known historical events or relying on the memory of someone, possibly even himself, who had read the book earlier.
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I'm not very sympathetic to what some consider contradictions between Galatians and Acts 9. It only seems to be a contradiction if you think each is supposed to include, step by step, everything Paul did right after his experience. But in the same source, Acts, you have two descriptions of the events internally, Acts 9 and Acts 22. It's clear that each depiction does not contain an exhaustive list of what Paul did immediately after his conversion. Instead, in Acts 9 we find phrasing like, "after days," and "after many days" leaving lots of room for Paul to make a trip.
Meanwhile, Acts has very detailed descriptions of Paul's travels and how long it took to get between each places, information that would be very hard to get without the author traveling from place to place themselves.
It's more like, gLuke is what Luke could gather about Jesus from those he talked to and Acts is the history of the people Luke spent time with - Peter, Priscilla and Aquila, and Paul.
Original gMark ended mid-sentence, which seems to me to indicate it was not finished because the author or scribe was interrupted. Acts has an ending, just one that places it before Paul's death. "And no one tried to stop him." That's just a lie if it is written after AD 70, and an obvious one. It definitely was written to a Roman (or Gentile more broadly) audience and the selection of what stories to include reflects that, but that does not mean it was faked.
I don't think Acts was "faked" I think the author did exactly what he said in his introduction, he conducted a investigation as best he could to prepare these documents. I just think that as we know Paul's letters we have better sources than the author and can see his errors. In almost all cases that we can cross reference he gets the gist right but the fine details wrong. He interviewed people collected stories and prepared his account. Acts looks like it should if the author did what he said he did. It looks like a document based on oral sources but not someone's firsthand account or who had access to Paul's letters.
I think that, many days, and three years are a bit more than a minor contradiction but regardless there are a lot more issues. For one the author of Acts carefully omits Paul seeing Jesus. The author of Acts says only that Paul saw a blinding white light and then could see nothing. Whereas Paul states emphatically many times that he has seen the risen Jesus and even uses this to claim his apostleship. Which Acts also denies him as he does not meet the criteria for apostleship given in Acts as well as not being included on the lists of apostles in speeches. In Acts it is the Jews trying to kill Paul and he escapes in a basket, Paul says it was the king, in Acts when Paul goes to Jerusalem he preaches boldly in the streets, in Galatians he writes he only met Peter, James and John. In Acts before his conversion he was going house to house pulling Christians out of their homes and arresting them, in Galatians his persecution is known to the Christians in Jerusalem only by reputation. And these differences are what we would expect if we have primary sources and the author doesn't.
I don't think the ship travel time is a smoking gun either. One of our earliest versions of gLuke whether redacted or not come to us through Marcion who was a mariner and commanded a fleet of merchant ships and would certainly have known all the travel times between the Mediterranean ports of Paul's voyages. Do I think Marcion wrote Acts? No not really but these things weren't state secrets nor particularly hard to find or accurately guess in the well connected world of the Roman Mediterranean. Also the author of Luke-Acts loved facts and tried to ground his scripture in the world much more than the other gospel authors so I'm not surprised that he has accurate ship times.
Finally we just need to take the author at his word, he lists his research process from the beginning, emphasis mine;
I see no reason to doubt his stated process, and the result seems to me is what you would get with that chain of transmission. If he himself was an eyewitness why not mention it in this introduction or his shorter introduction to Acts? Instead he references collecting handed down accounts and Acts looks exactly like someone who compiled it by doing that. It gets the big details right but messes up the specifics.
You're assuming that the Road to Damascus is the only time Paul had a vision of Jesus, while Acts itself contradicts this (Acts 22:17 has Paul seeing Jesus.)
The rest are likewise things that I don't see a contradiction with, but I'm not going to argue exhaustively each one.
Regarding Luke's stated process, there are two things he says to indicate sources. The first is that they were "fulfilled among us," something that seems to denote that he is a witness. The second is, as you highlighted, "those who from the first were eyewitnesses."
This statement is at the beginning of gLuke, not gActs. No one argues that Luke was an eyewitness himself of gLuke. It makes sense for gLuke to start with him indicating that it's a collection of eyewitness accounts passed on to him. In Acts he doesn't reiterate this. He just launches into it.
I don't want to nitpick those contradictions either my point for including them was about the "lens" Acts is using in comparison to the Pauline letters which I do think shows the author has the gist but not the specifics and is also trying to smooth over controversies in early Christianity.
Now going to Luke's intro, while no one thinks Luke was an eyewitness for gLuke, but don't you think if he was an eyewitness for Acts he would have said something? He's the only Gospel author that acknowledges he is an author including giving a little intro about his methodology. He even uses the phrase eyewitness, but doesn't include himself yes that's for gLuke but in Acts his intro is just basically a line that he's continuing the story of the church. If his methodology changed I think he'd tell us, especially if he was an eyewitness as it would extremely bolster his case. Now there is actually a (semi) synoptic gospel that does tell us it was recorded by an eyewitness the gospel of Thomas. Do you think that was recorded by an eyewitness?
And more importantly why do you think Luke-Acts was written by an eyewitness?
If it's the tense in the "We passages" we have plenty of personal pronoun use in scripture, the Apocalypses of Peter is written in the first person do you think Peter wrote it.
If it's Paul not dying at the end let me quite Bart Ehrman
I think that's very reasonable, all of the Gospels end on a hopeful note and as Acts is a sort of Gospel sequel it seems very reasonable for the author to end it with Paul proclaiming the faith unhindered in the heart of the Empire rather than his execution.
Gospel of Thomas is a different situation because it's young, likely 3rd Century, doesn't have 2nd century sources quoting it or talking about it, and the early Church did not treat it as of Apostolic origin. The early church treated Luke/Acts as having Apostolic origin and they had access to lots more sources than we do today.
Similar response to the Apocalypses of Peter. It's young and doesn't have popular attestation to Apostolic origin.
I am not arguing that every writing throughout history has been entirely honest, not propaganda, etc. The gnostic gosples are examples of people lying through their teeth to create their own cults where they have special knowledge people can't get through the (small-c intentional) catholic Church. A comparison might be made to the Book of Mormon in modern times.
However Luke/Acts does have popular acclimation of Apostolic origin. Luke uses "we" in Acts to describe him going on trips that match up with his presence in letters of Paul.
Another interesting thing, Paul quotes gLuke as scripture:
1 Timothy 5:17–18: Let the elders who rule well be considered worthy of double honour, especially those who labour in preaching and teaching; for the scripture says, “You shall not muzzle an ox while it is treading out the grain,” and, “The labourer deserves to be paid.”
Maybe you will argue that Timothy isn't a genuine Pauline letter but as you can imagine I'm not very persuaded by such arguments so far.
I've always felt like Bart Ehrman has just wildly different intuitions than I do to the point where we are reading completely different New Testaments. It's a personal failing of mine, but I saw him in a debate start to lose and then go on a rant saying (approximately): "If it were all true that would be horrible! It would mean gay people shouldn't get married and evil things happen and God lets them happen! It can't be true!" I wish I could find it again without watching dozens of hours of debates but his arguments haven't had the same credibility to me since then.
Acts has the martyrdom of Stephen and James in it. I disagree that Luke would shy away from Paul's martyrdom as some kind of defeat of Paul or his preaching, when so far he's treated martyrdom as a crown jewel on someone's life. Stephen gets one of the longest sermons recorded in the Bible before he "fell asleep."
Also something not explained by Ehrman's quote is why does Luke say Paul was in Rome for 2 years, instead of 5? It's almost certain that Paul was in Rome for more than 2 years.
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The endings of manuscripts get lost, it's quite common. What this means in this particular case has been debated for centuries with different scholars arguing for various interpretations (including the long ending being the original intended ending). Jumping directly to "the scribe was interrupted mid sentence" is quite the stretch.
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