T. C. Robinson posted a couple of suggestions on his blog of things that wished I had said about Paul in a recent post, but did not. One was the “new perspective” on Paul, and I was rather astonished to discover that I had not really addressed that topic here on the blog for several years! So for now, let me link to the only two posts I found of mine that focus directly on the topic – one about “mirror reading” the “works of the Law,” the other responding to an article by Simon Gathercole on the subject. And in the near future – when I get to Romans in my Sunday school class in a few weeks’ time, if not sooner – I will try to address that topic more directly.But that having been said, the evidence of Acts is very important for discussion with Jesus-mythicism, because it is the second volume of a two-volume work that also includes a story of Jesus. And so unless we want to argue that Luke was right about the historicity of major characters in his second volume, but completely wrong about the historicity of the main character in his first volume, then Luke-Acts provides yet another bit of evidence for the historicity of Jesus.
If we’re honest, if we only had Luke’s account of Paul being lowered over a city wall to safety, we’d treat it as a fantastic bit of hagiographical fiction. But Paul himself confirms that such an event happened (2 Corinthians 11:33), while providing enough different details so as to make it unlikely that Luke is simply deriving information from Paul’s letters. And so Luke can be shown to preserve a grain of historical reminiscence even in a story about which we’d naturally be skeptical.In the modern era, it has become possible to situate a fictional story in a real place and, through research, get some names and descriptions right – Bram Stoker’s Dracula is an example, being set in Transylvania, a place Stoker had never been (but where I, on the other hand, have spent a significant amount of time and never encountered a vampire, unless you include the rather ferocious mosquitos in Oradea). To do that in the ancient world, without the same sort of access to libraries and reference works, would be quite a feat. And so once again, we have to ask about the balance of probability: Is it more likely that someone writing later on the basis of hearsay and oral tradition got numerous things wrong, or that someone writing pure fiction managed to set the story in the past and get as many details about places and political realities right as the Gospel authors seem to have?
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