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Notes -
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.
You're right that posting 1 Timothy doesn't convince me as the consensus is it isn't and I don't have any reason to doubt that. I did see a very interesting argument on the Academic Bible subreddit which pretty much convinced me that 2 Timothy is genuine based on AI and Paul's language. Of course it's hard to really know without doing it in the original Greek but that and another article posted in that thread really flipped me on it.
I don't think having other martyred people effects the ending it's quite normal to want a story to have a happy ending even with struggles along the way.
That's a bit how I feel in our discussion haha. I just feel Acts is so obviously part of the romance genre and so obviously written by someone who didn't know Paul, just the fact alone that it denies him his apostleship seems enough to me. well anyway we may just need to agree to disagree on this.
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