Gospels of Thomas and Philip and Truth - Syriac Christian Church

celibacy indeed entered Christianity early; we find it already in the churches of Paul.
But it is entirely foreign to Jesus. || It is most obvious that [Paul] does not appeal to
the words of the Lord in support of his strictly theological, anthropological and
soteriological views.... When the essentially Pauline conceptions are considered, it is
clear that there Paul is not dependent on Jesus. Jesus' teaching is— to all intents
and purposes— irrelevant for Paul.
Franz Kafka, The Castle (1926): Barnabas is certainly not an official, not even
one in the lowest category.... One shouldn't suddenly send an inexperienced
youngster like Barnabas ... into the Castle, and then expect a truthful account of
everything from him, interpret each single word of his as if it were a revelation, and
base one's own life's happiness on the interpretation. Nothing could be more
mistaken.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Divine Milieu (1927): The mystical Christ, the
universal Christ of St Paul, has neither meaning nor value in our eyes except as an
expansion of the Christ who was born of Mary and who died on the cross. The
former essentially draws his fundamental quality of undeniability and concreteness
from the latter. However far we may be drawn into the divine spaces opened up to
us by Christian mysticism, we never depart from the Jesus of the gospels.
José Carlos Mariátegui, Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality (1928):
The missionaries did not impose the Gospel; they imposed the cult, the liturgy.... The
Roman Church can consider itself the legitimate heir of the Roman Empire.... This
compromise in its origin extends from Catholicism to all Christendom.
Mahatma Gandhi, ‘Discussion on Fellowship’, Young India (1928): I draw a
great distinction between the Sermon on the Mount and the Letters of Paul. They are
a graft on Christ's teaching, his own gloss apart from Christ's own experience.
Kahil Gibran, Jesus the Son of Man (1928): This Paul is indeed a strange man.
His soul is not the soul of a free man. He speaks not of Jesus nor does he repeat
His Words. He would strike with his own hammer upon the anvil in the Name of One
whom he does not know.
Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West (vol II, 1928): Paul had for the
Jesus-communities of Jerusalem a scarcely veiled contempt.... ‘Jesus is the
Redeemer and Paul is his Prophet’— this is the whole content of his message.
John Langdon-Davies, A Short History of Women (1928): It was through [St
Paul] that the offensive attitude towards women was finally expressed in the Catholic
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