Obviously i can't answer from a religious perspective, but i can give you textual criticism explanation.
Acts is a complete fantasy. The writer of Acts had no contact with Paul at all, and made up everything about him. We know this because of several reasons, not the least being that the travel itinerary for Paul described in Acts doesn't match the itinerary Paul gives himself - in other words, when Paul says he went to such and such places and never went to such and such places, Acts has a different story. There is also the fact that Paul, in his letters, says he never spoke with Jesus... yet in Acts he has a conversation with him (although, some apologists weasel around this by saying he was talking to "God or the Holy Spirit" and not specifically Jesus, so it doesn't count).
So Acts is just a fairy tale. Biblical fan fiction, if you like. The Pauline letters are the only authentic record of Paul and his ministry we have. (And, take caution, because some of the "Pauline letters" weren't actually written by Paul, like Hebrews for example. Romans probably was, though.)
Very interesting perspective Indi. But even with that as a possibility, most writers of fantasy even are capable of writing in a consistant manner. Self contradiction is a huge red flag. To me it either indicates sloppiness in putting together the script or arrogance in thinking that readers are not capable of catching the many inconsistancies.
I truly find it interesting that Paul whom I consider more the founder of christianity than a Jew named Jesus would have been allowed to have such writings attributed to him by the church who created the canon.
Well now you're asking questions about 2,000 year old people, with a modern mindset. ^_^;
When dealing with "scholarly" texts from that long ago - and especially religious texts - there are some things you have to keep in mind that are very different from contemporary thinking. For starters, people back then had no qualms whatsoever about flat-out lying to make a point. Even in Christian writing, some of the greatest Christian thinkers of the ancient world said it straight up: it's OK to lie in order to get Truth (that is, religious "truth") across. (Arguably, many Christian writers today maintain this tradition.) Another thing that was very different from today was that back then, authority was the last word on anything. If two guys wrote about about something, and one guy said "A happened" then listed a hundred logical reasons for why, and the other just said "B happened, and we know it's true because Irenaeus said so"... then B was the official conclusion. So it was perfectly normal practise to write something about your own beliefs while putting them in the mouth of a famous person - and that wasn't just religious practise! Plato did the same thing - putting his later theories in Socrates' mouth.
You also have to take Acts into perspective: when it was written and by whom. The writer was likely the same Luke who wrote the Gospel of Luke, a Christian apostle who travelled a little with Paul, writing Acts for his patron Theophilus a couple years after Paul was murdered. Very likely Luke was seen as a sort of expert on Christianity - at least by Theophilus - because he had travelled with Paul (it is likely that Paul even mentions him in Philemon 1:24). Theophilus must have asked Luke to record the history of Christianity in his (Theophilus's) name, and Luke was only to happy to comply (he was likely paid very well, after all).
We know that Luke "wrote" the Gospel of Luke by plagiarizing and combining two sources: the Gospel of Mark and a lost source now known as "Q". He had no part in any of the events in that book (that i can recall), and he wasn't a witness. But he had sources to plagiarize, so he was safe. But when it came time to write what happened after the Gospel of Mark ended... he was stuck. His only sources then were the Pauline letters he had - probably most if not all of them - and his memory of what Paul had told him and what they had done together. And let's be clear: Luke was no meticulous researcher, he was a story teller. He had a knack for taking a bunch of sources and weaving a nicely consistent narrative out of them... but clearly he wasn't perfect at doing that (just look at the contradictions between Mark and Luke, for example). Using his memory and the Pauline letters (along with other sources probably, which are now lost, and hearsay from rumours and myths about the other early Christian apostles), he put together the narrative of Acts. But again, it wasn't perfect. It was good enough at a cursory glance (you really have to lay out Paul's track in detail to catch the mistakes), but not perfect.
You say "most writers of fantasy even are capable of writing in a consistant manner"? i call bullshit. You don't seriously believe that, do you? Have you ever seen a movie or a book that tells a detailed story about a historical event or person that doesn't have some historical gaffes? Especially stories intended to thrill or romanticize some event or person!
No, Luke was just a writer drawing on as much facts as he could get his hands on and trying to create a consistent, historically correct narrative out of it. Even with the capabilities of research we have today, it's almost impossible to do that without introducing some mistakes... and back then? Wow. You can only catch Luke's gaffes if you read the Pauline epistles very carefully and take the time to meticulously plot out every single detail of his travels. On a cursory read, he did alright. Certainly Theophilus - who was probably pretty bright himself - bought it. So did centuries of Christian scholars.
Methinks you're being a tad too judgemental here.
Incidentally... you do know that Paul was a Jew, too, right? ^_^;
