Gospels of Thomas and Philip and Truth - Syriac Christian Church

primary, but rather a Jewish Christian theology.
Jorge Luís Borges, ‘The Theologians’ (1964): The Historionics ... invoked I-
Corinthians 13:12 (‘For now we see through a glass, obscurely’) in order to
demonstrate that everything we see is false. Perhaps contaminated by the
Monotonists, they imagined that each person is two persons and that the real one is
the other, the one in Heaven.
Gilles Quispel, ‘Gnosticism and the New Testament’, in J. Philip Hyatt (ed.),
The Bible in Modern Scholarship (papers read at the 100th meeting of the Society of
Biblical Literature, 1964): The Christian community of Jerusalem ... did not accept
[Paul's] views on the [Mosaic] Law.
Helmut Koester, ‘The Theological Aspects of Primitive Christian Heresy’, in
James Robinson (ed.), The Future of our Religious Past (1964); Introduction to the
New Testament (1980); Ancient Christian Gospels (1990); with Stephen Patterson,
‘The Gospel of Thomas: Does It Contain Authentic Sayings of Jesus?’, Bible Review
(1990): Paul himself stands in the twilight zone of heresy. || The content of Paul's
speeches in Acts cannot be harmonized with the theology of Paul as we know it from
his letters.... Neither is it credible that he affirmed repeatedly in his trial that he had
always lived as a law- [i.e. Torah-]abiding Jew.... From the beginning of Acts to the
martyrdom of Stephen, the central figure in the narrative has been Peter. At this
point, however, Paul is introduced for the first time.... Peter is always presented as
an apostle, since he belongs to the circle of the Twelve. But in Acts 15 Peter is
mentioned for the last time, and Luke has nothing to report about his journey to
Rome or his martyrdom. Even more peculiar is the presentation of Paul. He is
neither an apostle nor a martyr.... Furthermore, Luke takes great care to
demonstrate that the originator of the proclamation to the gentiles was not Paul (or
Barnabas), but Peter. || One immediately encounters a major difficulty. Whatever
Jesus had preached did not become the content of the missionary proclamation of
Paul.... Sayings of Jesus do not play a role in Paul's understanding of the event of
salvation.... The Epistle of James also shares with the Sermon on the Mount the
rejection of the Pauline thesis that Christ is the end of the [Mosaic] law. || Paul did
not care at all what Jesus had said.... Had Paul been completely successful, very
little of the sayings of Jesus would have survived.
Emil G. Kraeling, The Disciples (1966): The peculiar, unharmonized
relationship between Paul and the Twelve that existed from the beginning was never
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