Memory, Acts, and the Letters of Paul

Memory, Acts, and the Letters of Paul December 4, 2016

I sometimes wonder if I am unusual in not always remembering things that I have done and experienced at times in the past, about which others appear to have a clear recollection. I suspect that this is just the way that memory works, and that the other individual had recalled the event in the intervening period whereas I had not.

I am also often sketchy on precisely when things happened, and the order in which they occurred.

And so, assuming that I am not alone in this, it seems to me that it would be a worthwhile experiment to compare the relationship of Acts to Paul’s authentic letters on the one hand, with other instances of biographical narrative about individuals from whom we also have correspondence. Including among these should be cases in which the author of the biography knew the subject and was involved in at least some of the events, cases in which the author interviewed the subject, and the range of other possibilities. The best comparative material would be from past centuries, when written records were harder to come by.

What I’m most interested in is whether there are cases in which an individual wrote about events that he or she and the biography’s principal subject experienced together and/or talked about, without access to that individual’s correspondence. It seems to me entirely possible that a situation such as we find in the case of Acts could come about even with eyewitness testimony and/or involvement, because of the nature of human memory. Indeed, I could imagine writing an autobiography myself, and future historians combining that with letters (and e-mails) that I wrote, and finding discrepancies between when I said things happened trying to remember much later, and what was indicated in things I wrote at the time.

This would not prove the historicity of Acts, nor a relatively early date. It would just highlight the weakness of certain arguments that are sometimes used.


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