Rick,

maybe I am missing something, but would not Prisca and Aquila have to be the eyewitnesses here if this passage is analogous to the cases in the gospels that Bauckham cites? It is possible, incidentally, that other companions of Paul were with him, such as Timothy, Luke, or Sosthenes.

You've probably noticed that the phrase "I will return to you if God wills it" sounds very much like Paul (e.g. 1 Cor 4:19; 16:7).

You wrote, "There are some rough spots, notably that of why Luke would use the device in this portion of Acts when he tends to remove it from shared Marcan material in his gospel." Maybe again I am missing something, but surely there is no problem here. The idea is that the plural to singular phenomenon often occurs when the writer has received an eyewitness account directly from the eyewitness. Luke's removal of the phenomenon from the matterial that he got from Mark is consistent with this and surely only serves to highlight the incidents of the phenomenon in his texts.

Many have questioned the historicity of the chronology of Acts and of Acts 18 in general, but I am increasingly convinced that Luke is accurate here, in view of the Crispus-Sosthenes hypothesis.

Richard.

Hi Richard.

Thanks for the comments; you're giving me things to think about; and that I greatly appreciate. I'm still working through a lot of this.

One of the issues in the text is the ambiguous pronoun in v. 20, "When _they_ asked _him_ to stay ... ". What is the referent of "they"? There are two possibilities: First, 'they' refers to the Jews in the synagogue asking Paul to stay for awhile and 'reason' with them. Alternately, 'they' refers back to Prisca and Aquila (P&A), and that they're the ones asking him to stay.

The commentaries I've checked that discuss this aspect (ICC, UBS Handbook, Baker NT Comm. and some others I don't have to hand at present) have the Jews as the referent -- that they wanted Paul to stay and hang out. Paul's response (very Pauline, as you mention) is "I will return to you if God wills it".

I think Paul's separation from P&A happens in v. 19 and that it is underscored by the pronoun modifying 'went' ("he himself went" or "he went by himself"). If that's the case, there is no way that P&A could've witnessed Paul's saying.

In short, I don't think that the plural-to-singular device precludes the subject himself from being the witness that reported the event. Paul & Luke certainly spent time together (cf. the 'we' passages, Col 4.14; 2Ti 4.11; Phm 24) so I'd think Paul could be the source as much as anyone else; particularly in light of the speech reported in Paul's name.

Of course, the paper will discuss this further.

Interesting. Thanks for that.