Gospels of Thomas and Philip and Truth - Syriac Christian Church

doomed to disappointment.... The Bible student is soon, and perhaps unconsciously,
caught up in the personal ministry of Paul. Peter, though prominent at first, is later
ignored, as the Acts unfolds for the reader the story of Paul and his friends.... There
is absolutely no evidence that Paul ever recognized the ‘primacy’ of Peter.
Ronald Brownrigg, The Twelve Apostles (1974): The letters of Paul present a
marked contrast to Luke's writings [in his Gospel and the Acts]. Whereas Luke
suggests that the Apostles were a closed corporation of twelve governing the whole
Church, Paul disagrees, claiming his own Apostleship to be as valid as any of the
twelve.... Certainly Paul knew no authority of the twelve.... The qualification for
Apostleship, at the election of Matthias [Ac 1:15-26], had been a divinely guided
selection and a constant companionship with Jesus throughout his [active] lifetime.
Elaine H. Pagels, The Gnostic Paul (1975); The Gnostic Gospels (1979): Two
antithetical traditions of Pauline exegesis have emerged from the late first century
through the second. Each claims to be authentic, Christian, and Pauline: but one
reads Paul anti-gnostically, the other gnostically.... Whoever takes account of the
total evidence may learn from the debate to approach Pauline exegesis with
renewed openness to the text. || One version of this story [of Paul's conversion]
says, ‘The men who were traveling with him stood speechless, hearing the voice but
seeing no one’; another says the opposite,... ‘Those who were with me saw the light,
but did not hear the voice of the one who was speaking to me.’
Paul Johnson, A History of Christianity (1976): The Christ of Paul was not
affirmed by the historical Jesus of the Jerusalem Church.... Writings ... by Christian
Jews of the decade of the 50's [AD] present Paul as the Antichrist and the prime
heretic.... The Christology of Paul, which later became the substance of the
universal Christian faith,... was predicated by an external personage whom many
members of the Jerusalem Church absolutely did not recognize as an Apostle.
Irving Howe, World of our Fathers (1976): The view that sexual activity is
impure or at least suspect, so often an accompaniment of Christianity, was seldom
entertained in the [east-European Jewish] shtetl. Paul's remark that it is better to
marry than to burn would have seemed strange, if not downright impious, to the
Jews.
John Morris Roberts, History of the World (1976): The reported devotional
ideas of Jesus do not go beyond the Jewish observances; service in the Temple,
together with private prayer, were all that he indicated. In this very real sense, he
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