Excerpt:
In the first theme’s third session I mentioned that Luke’s Acts of the Apostles gives us an image not of a radical Paul but of a liberal Paul. So, since you read Luke’s Acts of the Apostles before you ever get to read Paul in the New Testament order it is very important to understand how to read Luke for himself and then Luke for Paul.It is not going to work if you just enter Luke’s Acts and take what you like and leave what you don’t. That doesn’t have much integrity to it. So you have to focus first on Luke himself, that is, on the author of what we distinguish as The Gospel according to Luke and The Acts of the Apostles. And that is what we are going to do in this Session.We try to understand what Luke is doing maybe 50 years after the death of Paul, that is about three generations later. How Luke uses Paul will help us understand what we can take and what we should not take as Lukan information about Paul.
