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There is a thing we've been taught to do at Anderson University (all the way from freshman introductory Bible courses to grad school exegetical papers) called the hermeneutic or the exegetical circle. When we are considering a passage of scripture, we start with the question, What exactly was actually written? If we are mistaken about what was written, how can we be confident of the meaning we that derive from it? The second question is, What did this mean to the person who originally wrote it? Next we ask, What would this mean to the people it was originally addressed to? And finally, What lessons can we draw from this today? When the Protestants of the 1500s cried "scriptura sola", there were some unintended consequences. One such is the impression that all scripture has but one writer, and that just isn't true. The meanings behind all scripture may well have been inspired by the same God, but the people who did the actual writing and editing were all unique individuals in unique life situations, and the ways they expressed the ideas being given to them by the Holy Spirit were peculiar to those conditions. Protestant theology, especially evangelical protestant theology, tends to homogenize the writings, to make them all the same, when there is very, VERY much to be learned from studying the differences. A big case in point would be the gospels. There are four of them for reasons, and attempts to harmonize them destroy the depth perception of Jesus that we get from "quad-ocular" vision. Harmonizing the gospels does nothing but make Jesus just too flat. How this stuff comes into the discussion on this thread is this: Paul wrote things about the law to the Romans that are different from the things he wrote about the law to the Galatians. Are these differences "contradictions," in a sense that would negate their "god-breathed-ness"? or are they differences in Paul's own expression, brought on by frustration at the seeming mindlessness of the Galatians, Paul's own "babes" in the Word? Our professor of L&HOT and Hebrew has the highest regard for Paul. He is not a scribe or Pharisee seeking to trip Paul up. He actually has a compassion for Paul that most of us miss, because Paul ALSO was a deep scholar of the Tanakh. Another way this idea comes up is in the question of whether or not the writer of Acts could have known Paul personally. The theology that is attributed to Paul in Acts seems to differ from the theology Paul expressed in his own letters, and there are serious difficulties to squaring the chronology in Acts to the chronology in the letters. These differences do not prove that Luke could not have been one of Paul's companions at various times. Luke had his own theological agenda that he was promoting to his audience which was different from the theological aganda Paul was promoting to the readers of his letters. Luke was also willing to emphasize certain parts of Paul's journeys and de-emphasize others, in order to fit the events into Luke's narrative of how the gospel moved from Jerusalem to Rome. None of these things argue against Luke having a personal acquaintance with Paul. All for now... more later... Love, Steve