No, contra ZanillaMilla in this post, "Saul" was not a Greek signum, then Paul a Roman cognomen he later switched to, namely because Paul wasn't a Roman citizen, as I told Naugrith the Nazi 2 years ago, along with others.
Contra other commenters there, the one verse in Acts that's mentioned is way too slender a reed to lean on for any particular interpretation of "Luke's" comment.
The Sergius Paulus idea otherwise is "tenable" but likely?
To me, the interpretation that does the least violence to the text and the most support to Luke's thought as we know it is that this is a deliberate wordplay, with Paul as a cognomen, as foreshadowing Luke's later claim that Paul was a Roman citizen.
Paul himself, of course, only identifies himself as Paul. Was that his actual name? Per other comments in that thread, maybe Paul changed his own name. Maybe, per my link, he was, without actually claiming Roman citizenship, trying to imply he had the "Latin right." (That would be like a "stolen valor" move today, claiming to have served in combat but staying vague on details.)
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Jesus' burial would have been held for both midrashic reasons on passages in the Tanakh and for New Testament theological reasons of refuting the normal Roman treatment of a condemned criminal, contra this post. Contra the one commenter at the time I first saw it, why does Ehrman think his "mass grave burial" is a minority view among critical scholars? (I assume that's that the "minority view" references and doesn't also include fundagelicals.)
And, no, the idea of Jodi Magness and another of James Tabor that Jesus was buried twice, also at that post, is even stupider, especially Tabor. He, of course, ties this to his Jesus Dynasty schtick.
The last commenter there, noting that Acts and apocryphal materials support an alternate tradition of a "hostile" burial is indeed interesting, but the commenter doesn't carry it further. It, too, would ultimately be apologetic, to explain away the lack of bodily resurrection evidence. (Maybe, because the family of Dives in the Lukan story, that's the ultimate point: Behind Abraham telling Dives that if his family won't listen to Moses and the prophets, they won't listen to him from the dead, is maybe another twist on Jesus' "no sign shall be given.")
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An interesting and generally informative Ask Me Anything with James McGrath, mainly about John the Baptizer. That said, was the John movement and the Jesus movement both part of the same "Way" at the time of Acts? Since I believe McGrath has early datings on NT books in general and the gospels and Acts in particular, that should be looked at critically. (I have had run-ins with him on Facebook about datings before.)
He also probably could have gone into a bit more detail about how close, or distant, Mandean thought is from that of John, and was from John by, say, CE 400, but he does later postulate multiple social and theological "flows" creating Mandeanism.
I used to think it was closer to the Johannine movement myself, but have read works in the past few years leading me to reassess that.
As for John's alleged "cosplay" as Elijah? Who says that he was doing that? Only Christian scriptures midrashing.
And, with that, and noting that McGrath, a conservative critical scholar, calls his biography/history of John "Christmaker," I stopped reading.
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