Dale B. Martin’s notes on Luke and Paul, published

In early 2023 the late Dale B. Martin, who taught the New Testament at Yale for many years, sent me a set of notes. He had begun a book on the two portraits of Paul in the New Testament, the Paul of the Acts of the Apostles and the Paul of the letters, and had set the work aside for some time. He died in November 2023 with the book unwritten. The notes are now published on this site, with his permission and exactly as he left them: dale-b-martin-luke-versus-paul.

Their argument is simple to state and hard to answer. On the facts of Paul’s life, Acts and the letters disagree, and on matters no harmoniser can smooth away. By his own account Paul began his career in Damascus and was still unknown by face to the churches of Judaea three years after his call; Acts has him raiding their houses in Jerusalem before he ever sets out. His letters make him the apostle to the Gentiles, while Acts sends him first to the synagogue in city after city. His hearers in Corinth found his speech contemptible, and he conceded the point; Acts makes him an orator before governors. Martin judged that the two accounts of Paul’s beginnings “cannot responsibly be harmonized,” and of the founding of the church at Thessalonica as Acts tells it he wrote: “It is fiction.”

The notes break off at a heading that asks a question and gives no answer: “E. Why does Luke not seem to know Paul’s letters?” This site has taken the question up in why-luke-does-not-know-pauls-letters. Acts gives more of its length to Paul than to any other figure, yet it never mentions that he wrote a letter, and it calls him an apostle only twice, both times jointly with Barnabas. Its silences fall where the letters press Paul’s own claims, and its additions fall where the letters would forbid its portrait. That is the pattern of a writer who knew the letters and wrote around them.

Martin’s findings now also stand where they bear on the case: in A self-appointed apostle, on where Paul was known; in The Jerusalem Council and the parting with Barnabas, on the synagogue and on Thessalonica; in The Roman: name, tongue and citizenship, on the orator of Acts; in No prophet between me and ʿĪsā ibn Maryam, on the prophetic terms in which Paul described his call; and in The church that followed Paul, on the marks of a new religion that Acts records. The Answers page carries a fourteenth question, on whether the Book of Acts confirms Paul’s story, for readers who meet the claim in debate.

Martin wrote as a historian, and he did not share the conclusions this site draws from the evidence. He held that Paul remained a faithful Jew who never thought of himself as a convert. His notes are cited here only for what they argue: that the Paul of the letters and the Paul of Acts cannot both be true, and that the letters, written by Paul himself decades before Acts, are the better witness. That argument is enough. The church’s portrait of Paul was drawn by the author of Acts, and a careful scholar found it impossible to reconcile with Paul’s own words.

I remain grateful for his generosity in sending them, and for the plainness with which he wrote.