Corpus-Paul

["David C. Hindley" <DHindley AT compuserve.com>]

Richard fellows wrote (under the thread "Paul's Citizenship"):

>>Are we to speculate that Acts was written at a time so distant from the
historical Paul that Luke could invent his Roman citizenship without fear
of contradiction? This is possible, of course, but I would wonder how the
collective memory could have forgotten such a basic fact about Paul, while
remembering many inconsequential details. For example, Paul's itinerary
round the Aegean, which I mentioned in an earlier post, is something of no
interest to anyone but the driest historians ;-) , but it was remembered.
Luke also knew about all of Paul's major companions, without exception.<<

Speculation can sometimes be good. 

Collective memory would be a problem only if Paul's history closely 
approxomates what we find related in Acts. What if he were involved with 
the kinds of Gentile circles which later became the core constituants of 
Christianity (say, after the war of 66-70)? By the end of the 1st century, 
Paul could have been a warm and fuzzy memory of those who were converted 
from his circle to later 1st century Gentile oriented Christianity.

The author of Acts could then easily imagine that Paul held citizenship, 
even if he did not, or represent that Paul did so for the sake of dramatic 
effect. It would also be tempting for him to "update" those memories 
(legends might be a better term) to anachronistically make Paul an advocate 
of the form of Christianity then current in the circles for which Acts was 
written.

Where could his source materials come from? I would suggest that after the 
war one or more caches of materials related to Paul, or someone he knew, 
surfaced. The epistles indicate that such caches did indeed once exist 
(e.g., the trunk that Paul left at Troas). These then came into the 
posession of the author of Acts.

These may have been letters or other correspondence to or from Paul. If the 
person who stored the material had been a travelling companion, the 
material may have consisted of a diary. Alternatively, the author of Acts 
could have made use of an unrelated person's travel diary, much like what 
Philostratus represented as the travel diary of Apollonius' travelling 
companion Damis.

Such a diary and/or correspondence, coupled with those vague traditions 
from pre-war days, could easily account for all the sources the Author of 
Acts would need.

Dave Hindley
Cleveland, OH
Dhindley AT compuserve.com