Paul: A Heretic?

Quotations - Articles

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica I-II, Q.103, Art.4, Reply Obj.2 (1272): According to Jerome, Peter [in Gal 2:6-14] withdrew himself from the Gentiles by pretense, in order to avoid giving scandal to the Jews, of whom he was the Apostle; hence he did not sin at all in acting thus. On the other hand, Paul in like manner made a pretense of blaming him, in order to avoid scandalizing the Gentiles, whose Apostle he was. But Augustine disapproves of this solution.
• Teresa of Avila, Accounts of Conscience, XVI (1571): It seemed to me that, concerning what St. Paul says about the confinement of women--which has been stated to me recently, and even previously I had heard that this would be the will of God--[the Lord] said to me: 'Tell them not to follow only one part of the Scripture, to look at others, and [see] if they will perchance be able to tie my hands.'
• John Locke, The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695): It is not in the epistles we are to learn what are the fundamental articles of faith, where they are promiscuously and without distinction mixed with other truths.... We shall find and discern those great and necessary points best in the preaching of our Savior and the Apostles ... out of the history of the evangelists.
• Thomas Morgan, The Moral Philosopher (1737-40): St. Paul then, it seems, preach'd another and quite different Gospel from what was preach'd by Peter and the other Apostles.
• Peter Annet, Critical Examination of the Life of St. Paul (letter to Gilbert West, 1746): We should never finish, were we to relate all the contradictions which are to be found in the writings attributed to St. Paul.... Generally speaking it is St. Paul ... that ought to be regarded as the true founder of Christian theology,... which from its foundation has been incessantly agitated by quarrels [and] divisions.
• Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, 'Paul' (Varberg edition, 1765): Paul did not join the nascent society of the Christians, which at that time was half-Jewish.... Is it possible to excuse Paul for having reprimanded Peter?... What would be thought today of a man who intended to live at our expense, he and his woman, judge us, punish us, and confound the guilty with the innocent?
• Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776): The Messiah himself, and his disciples who conversed with him on earth, instead of authorizing by their example the most minute observances of the Mosaic law,... [should, like Paul,] have published to the world the abolition of those useless and obsolete ceremonies.
• Juan Josef Hoíl, The Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel (compiled by Hoíl in his native Mayan language 1782, 3rd Spanish edition by the UNAM 1973): Only in the crazed times, thru the mad priests, did it happen that sadness entered into us, that 'Christianity' entered us. Because these same 'Christians' were those who brought here the true God; but this was the beginning of our misery, the beginning of the taxes, the beginning of 'alms', the cause from which arose hidden discord, the beginning of the battles with firearms, the beginning of the outrages, the beginning of the plundering of everything, the beginning of slavery for debt, the beginning of debts glued to one's back, the beginning of the continuous quarrelling, the beginning of suffering,... the Antichrist upon the Earth, tiger of the villages, wildcat of the villages, leech on the poor [American] Indian. But the day will arrive when the tears of their eyes reach unto God, and the justice of God comes down upon the world in a single blow.... Brothers, little brothers, sons of servants come to the world! When the King comes and is recognized, the face of the Son of God will be crowned. And the Bishop, which is called the Holy Inquisition, will come before Saul to beg concord with the Christians, so that oppression will cease and misery will end.
• Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Characteristics of the Present Age (1806): [The] Christian System ... [is] a degenerate form of Christianity, and the authorship of which ... [must be] ascribed to the Apostle Paul.
• Thomas Jefferson, 'Letter to William Short' (1820): Paul was the ... first corrupter of the doctrines of Jesus.
• Jeremy Bentham, Not Paul But Jesus (1823): It rests with every professor of the religion of Jesus to settle with himself, to which of the two religions, that of Jesus or that of Paul, he will adhere.
• Ferdinand Christian Baur, 'The Christ Party in the Corinthian Church, the Opposition between Petrine and Pauline Christianity in the Ancient Church, and the Apostle Peter in Rome' (1831); The Church History of the First Three Centuries (1853): What kind of authority can there be for an 'Apostle' who, unlike the other Apostles, had never been prepared for the Apostolic office in Jesus' own school but had only later dared to claim the Apostolic office on the basis of his own authority? || The only question comes to be how the Apostle Paul appears in his Epistles to be so indifferent to the historical facts of the life of Jesus.... He bears himself but little like a disciple who has received the doctrines and the principles which he preaches from the Master whose name he bears.
• Ralph Waldo Emerson, 'The Lord's Supper' (1832): It does not appear that the opinion of St. Paul, all things considered, ought to alter our opinion derived from the evangelists.
• Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849): It is necessary not to be Christian to appreciate the beauty and significance of the life of Christ.
• Søren Kierkegaard, The Journals (1849,'50,'54,'55): In Christ the religious is completely present-tense; in Paul it is already on the way to becoming doctrine. One can imagine the rest!... This trend has been kept up for God knows how many centuries. || When Jesus Christ lived, he was indeed the prototype. The task of faith is ... to imitate Christ, become a disciple. Then Christ dies. Now, through the Apostle Paul, comes a basic alteration.... He draws attention away from imitation and fixes it decisively upon the death of Christ the Atoner. || What Luther failed to realize is that the true situation is that the Apostle [Paul] has already degenerated by comparison with the Gospel. || It becomes the disciple who decides what Christianity is, not the master, not Christ but Paul,... [who] threw Christianity away completely, turning it upside down, getting it to be just the opposite of what it is in the [original] Christian proclamation.
• Benjamin Jowett, The Epistles of St. Paul to the Thessalonians, Galatians and Romans (1855): Our conception of the Apostolical age is necessarily based on the Acts of the Apostles and the Epistles of St. Paul. It is in vain to search ecclesiastical writings for further information.... Confining ourselves, then, to the original sources, we cannot but be struck by the fact, that of the first eighteen years after the day of Pentecost, hardly any account is preserved to us.... It seems as if we had already reached the second stage in the history of the Apostolic Church, without any precise knowledge of the first.
• Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit (1857): There was the dreary Sunday of his childhood, when he sat with his hands before him, scared out of his senses by a horrible tract which commenced business with the poor child by asking him, why he was going to perdition?,... and which, for the further attraction of his infant mind, had a parenthesis in every other line with some such hiccoughing reference as 2 Ep.Thess. c.iii v.6&7 ['Keep away from any brother who travels about in idleness'].
• John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859): The Gospel always refers to a pre-existing morality,... the Old Testament.... St. Paul, a declared enemy to this Judaical mode of interpreting the doctrine ... of his Master, equally assumes a pre-existing morality, namely that of the Greeks and Romans;... even to the extent of giving an apparent sanction to slavery.
• Ernest Renan, Saint Paul (1869): True Christianity, which will last forever, comes from the Gospels, not from the epistles of Paul. The writings of Paul have been a danger and a hidden rock, the causes of the principal defects of Christian theology.
• Feodor Dostoyevsky, The Diary of a Writer (1880); The Brothers Karamazov (1880): If slavery prevailed in the days of the Apostle Paul, this was precisely because the churches which originated then were not yet perfect, as we perceive from the Epistles of the Apostle himself. However, those members of the congregations who, individually, attained perfection no longer owned or could have had slaves, because these became brethren, and a brother, a true brother, cannot have a brother as his slave. || This child born of the son of the devil and of a holy woman:... they baptized him 'Paul'.
• Friedrich Nietzsche, The Dawn (1881): The story of one of the most ambitious and obtrusive of souls, of a head as superstitious as it was crafty, the story of the Apostle Paul--who knows this, except a few scholars? Without this strange story, however, without the confusions and storms of such a head, such a soul, there would be no Christianity.
• Leo Tolstoy, My Religion (1884): The separation between the doctrine of life and the explanation of life began with the preaching of Paul who knew not the ethical teachings set forth in the Gospel of Matthew, and who preached a metaphisico-cabalistic theory entirely foreign to Christ; and this separation was perfected in the time of Constantine, when it was found possible to clothe the whole pagan organization of life in a Christian dress, and without changing it to call it Christianity.
• James George Frazer, The Golden Bough (1890): If Christianity was to conquer the world, it could not do so except by relaxing a little the exceedingly strict principles of its Founder.
• Frederick Engels, 'On the History of Early Christianity' (1894): Attempts have been made to conceive ... all the messages [of John's Revelation/Apocalypse] as directed against Paul, the false Apostle.... The so-called Epistles of Paul ... are not only extremely doubtful but also totally contradictory.
• William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (Gifford Lectures, 1901): This is the religious melancholy and 'conviction of sin' that have played so large a part in the history of Protestant Christianity.... As Saint Paul says: self-loathing, self-despair, an unintelligible and intolerable burden ... [--a] typical [case] of discordant personality, with melancholy in the form of self-condemnation and sense of sin.
• William Wrede, Paul (1904): The obvious contradictions in the three accounts [of Paul's conversion in Ac 9 & 22 & 26] are enough to arouse distrust of all that goes beyond this kernel.... The moral majesty of Jesus, his purity and piety, his ministry among his people, his manner as a prophet, the whole concrete ethical-religious content of his earthly life, signifies for Paul's Christology--nothing whatever.... If we do not wish to deprive both figures of all historical distinctness, the name 'disciple of Jesus' has little applicability to Paul.... Jesus or Paul: this alternative characterizes, at least in part, the religious and theological warfare of the present day.
• Albert Schweitzer, The Quest for the Historical Jesus (1906); Out of My Life and Thought (1931); The Mysticism of St. Paul (1931): Paul ... did not desire to know Christ after the flesh.... Those who want to find a way from the preaching of Jesus to early Christianity are conscious of the peculiar difficulties raised. ... Paul shows us with what complete indifference the earthly life of Jesus was regarded by primary Christianity. || The rapid diffusion of Paul's ideas can be attributed to his belief that the death of Christ signified the end of the Law [of Moses]. In the course of one or two generations this concept became the common property of the Christian faith, although it stood in contradiction to the tradition teaching represented by the Apostles at Jerusalem. || What is the significance for our faith and for our religious life, of the fact that the Gospel of Paul is different from the Gospel of Jesus?... The attitude which Paul himself takes up towards the Gospel of Jesus is that he does not repeat it in the words of Jesus, and does not appeal to its authority.... The fateful thing is that the Greek, the Catholic and the Protestant theologies all contain the Gospel of Paul in a form which does not continue the Gospel of Jesus, but displaces it.
• Mark Twain, Letters from the Earth (1909); Notebooks (date?): Paul ... advised against sexual intercourse altogether. A great change from the divine view. || If Christ were here now, there is one thing he would not be--a Christian.
• Gerald Friedlander, The Jewish Sources of the Sermon on the Mount (1911): Paul has surely nothing to do with the Sermon on the Mount.... The Sermon says: 'Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly are ravening wolves' (Matt.vii.15). This is generally understood as a warning against untrustworthy leaders in religion.... Does the verse express the experience of the primitive Church? Might it not be a warning against Paul and his followers?
• Miguel de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life (1913); The Agony of Christianity (1931): Paul had not personally known Jesus, and hence he discovered him as Christ.... The important thing for him was that Christ became man and died and was resurrected, and not what he did in his life--not his ethical work as a teacher. || During Christ's lifetime, Paul would never have followed him.
• George Bernard Shaw, Androcles and the Lion, Introduction (1915): There is not one word of Pauline Christianity in the characteristic utterances of Jesus.... There has really never been a more monstrous imposition perpetrated than the imposition of Paul's soul upon the Soul of Jesus.... It is now easy to understand why the Christianity of Jesus failed completely to establish itself politically and socially, and was easily suppressed by the police and the Church, whilst Paulinism overran the whole western civilized world, which was at that time the Roman Empire, and was adopted by it as its official faith.
• Martin Buber, 'The Holy Way' (1918); Two Types of Faith (1948): The man who, in transmitting Judaism to the peoples, brought about its breakup,... this violator of the spirit,... [was] Saul, the man from Tarsus.... He transmitted Jesus' teaching ... to the nations, handing them the sweet poison of faith, a faith that was to disdain works, exempt the faithful from realization, and establish dualism in the [Christian] world. It is the Pauline era whose death agonies we today [in World War I] are watching with transfixed eyes. || Not merely the Old Testament belief and the living faith of post-Biblical Judaism are opposed to Paul, but also the Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount.... One must see Jesus apart from his historical connection with Christianity.... It is Peter [rather than Paul] who represents the unforgettable recollection of the conversations of Jesus with the Disciples in Galilee.
• Thomas Edward Lawrence, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1919): Christianity was a hybrid, except in its first root not essentially Semitic.
• Carl Gustav Jung, 'The Psychological Foundations of Belief in Spirits' (1919); 'A Psychological Approach to the Dogma of the Trinity' (1940): Saul's ... fanatical resistance to Christianity,... as we know from the Epistles, was never entirely overcome. || It is frankly disappointing to see how Paul hardly ever allows the real Jesus of Nazareth to get a word in.
• Herbert George Wells, The Outline of History (1920): St. Paul and his successors added to or completed or imposed upon or substituted another doctrine for--as you may prefer to think--the plain and profoundly revolutionary teachings of Jesus, by expounding ... a salvation which could be obtained very largely by belief and formalities, without any serious disturbance of the believer's ordinary habits and occupations.
• James Joyce, Ulysses (1922): Robbing Peter to pay 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.
• Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (1929): That Saint Paul.... He's the one who makes all the trouble.
• Rudolf Bultmann, 'The Significance of the Historical Jesus for the Theology of Paul' (1929): 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.
• Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, Essays in Zen Buddhism (Second Series, 1933): Te-shan (780-865 [AD]) ... was very learned in the teaching of the sutra and was extensively read in the commentaries.... He heard of this Zen teaching in the south [of China], according to which a man could be a Buddha by immediately taking hold of his inmost nature. This he thought could not be the Buddha's own teaching, but [rather] the Evil-One's.... Te-shan's idea was to destroy Zen if possible.... [His] psychology reminds us of that of St. Paul.
• Walter Bauer, Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity (1934): As far as Paul is concerned, in the Apocalypse [Rev/Ap 21:14] only the names of the twelve apostles are found on the foundations of the New Jerusalem--there is no room for Paul.... For Justin [Martyr in the mid-second century], everything is based on the gospel tradition.... The name of Paul is nowhere mentioned by Justin;...not only is his name lacking, but also any congruence with his epistles.... If one may be allowed to speak rather pointedly, the apostle Paul was the only arch-heretic known to the apostolic age.... We must look to the circle of the twelve apostles to find the guardians of the most primitive information about the life and preaching of the Lord.... This treasure lies hidden in the synoptic gospels.
• Herbert A.L. Fisher, A History of Europe (1935): Paul of Tarsus ... drew a clear line of division between [the] two sects.... Christian and Jew sprang apart.
• Henry Miller, Black Spring (1936): That maniac St. Paul.
• Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (1980, notes from 1937): The spring which flows gently and limpidly in the Gospels seems to have froth on it in Paul's Epistles.... To me it's as though I saw human passion here, something like pride or anger, which is not in tune with the humility of the Gospels.... I want to ask--and may this be no blasphemy--'What might Christ have said to Paul?'... In the Gospels--as it seems to me--everything is less pretentious, humbler, simpler. There you find huts; in Paul a church. There all men are equal and God himself is a man; in Paul there is already something like a hierarchy.
• Kenneth Patchen, The Journal of Albion Moonlight (1941): We were proceeding leisurely down the main street in St. Paul when suddenly, without warning of any kind, an immense octopus wrapped his arms around our car.
• Will Durant, Caesar and Christ (1944): Paul created a theology of which none but the vaguest warrants can be found in the words of Christ.... Through these interpretations Paul could neglect the actual life and sayings of Jesus, which he had not directly known.... He had replaced conduct with creed as the test of virtue. It was a tragic change.
• Paul Schubert, 'Urgent Tasks for New Testament Research', in H.R. Willoughby (ed.), The Study of the Bible Today and Tomorrow (1947): As regards Paul and his letters there is no notable agreement [among modern theologians] on any major issue.
• Robert Frost, A Masque of Mercy (1947): Paul: he's in the Bible too. He is the fellow who theologized Christ almost out of Christianity. Look out for him.
• Herbert J. Muller, The Uses of the Past (1952): Saul of Tarsus, who became St. Paul,... knew Jesus only by hearsay, and rarely referred to his human life.... Paul preached a gospel about Jesus that was not taught by the Jesus of the synoptic Gospels.... Setting himself against [the] other disciples,... he was largely responsible for the violent break with Judaism.... He contributed a radical dualism of flesh and spirit unwarranted by the teachings of Jesus.
• Nikos Kazantzakis, The Last Temptation of Christ (1955): The door opened. A squat, fat hunchback, still young, but bald, stood on the threshold. His eyes were spitting fire.... 'Are you Saul?' Jesus asked, horrified.... 'I am Paul. I was saved--glory be to God!--and now I've set out to save the world....' 'My fine lad,' Jesus replied, 'I've already come back from where you're headed.... Did you see this resurrected Jesus of Nazareth?' Jesus bellowed. 'Did you see him with your own eyes? What was he like?' 'A flash of lightning--a flash of lightning which spoke.' 'Liar!... What blasphemies you utter! What effronteries! What lies! Is it with such lies, swindler, that you dare to save the world?' Now it was Paul's turn to explode. 'Shut your shameless mouth!' he shouted.... 'I don't give a hoot about what's true and what's false, or whether I saw him or didn't see him.'
• W.D. Davies, 'Paul and Jewish Christianity', in J. Daniélou (ed.), Théologie du Judéo-Chriantianisme (1958): Jewish-Christians [opposing Paul] ... must have been a very strong, widespread element in the earliest days of the Church.... They took for granted that the gospel was continuous with Judaism.... According to some scholars, they must have been so strong that right up to the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70 they were the dominant element in the Christian movement.
• Lawrence Durrell, Clea (1960): For a brief moment [freedom] looked possible, but St. Paul restored ... the iron handcuffs.
• Hans Joachim Schoeps, Paul: The Theology of the Apostle in the Light of Jewish Religious History (English translation 1961): [Drawing a] stark contrast between the religion of the law and the religion of grace,... Paul had lost all understanding of the character of the Hebraic berith [covenant] as a partnership involving mutual obligations, [and thus] he failed to grasp the inner meaning of the Mosaic law.
• Paterson Brown, The Logic of 'God' (PhD dissertation, London, 1963): It cannot be said that Christ was a Christian.
• Erich Fromm, The Dogma of Christ (1963): Paul appealed ... to some of the wealthy and educated class, especially merchants, who by means of their adventures and travels had a decided importance for the diffusion of Christianity.... [This] had been the religion of a community of equal brothers, without hierarchy or bureaucracy, [but] was converted into 'the Church', the reflected image of the absolute monarchy of the Roman Empire.
• James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (1963): The real architect of the Christian church was not the disreputable, sun-baked Hebrew who gave it his name but [rather] the mercilessly fanatical and self-righteous St. Paul.
• Georg Strecker, 'On the Problem of Jewish Christianity', Appendix 1 to Walter Bauer, op.cit. (1964 ed.): Jewish Christianity, according to the witness of the New Testament, stands at the beginning of the development of church history, so that it is not the [pauline] gentile Christian 'ecclesiastical doctrine' that represents what is primary, but rather a Jewish Christian theology.
• 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 (German edition 1964); 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. || 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 fully adjusted.... Modern Biblical research in particular has made it difficult to put the religion of the New Testament (to say nothing of the Bible as a whole) into the straightjacket of Paulinism.
• Bruce Vawter, The Four Gospels (1967): We have no authentic information about the activity of most of the Twelve after the first days of the Church in Jerusalem, but it is likely enough that they remained identified with Jewish Christianity, particularly, perhaps, with the Galilean Christianity about which we know practically nothing.... This Christianity ... all but disappeared.
• Gershom Scholem, 'The Crisis of Tradition in Jewish Messianism' (1968): The religious strategy of Paul ... [is] downright antinomian.
• Paul Tillich, A History of Christian Thought (1968): The [Mosaic] law was not evaluated in the negative way in which we usually do it; for the Jews it was a gift and a joy.... The way of despair ... was the way of people like Paul, Augustine, and Luther.... Paul's conflict with the Jewish Christians did not have to be continued. Instead of that, the positive elements in the faith, which could provide an understandable content for the pagans, had to be brought out.
• Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: Creative Mythology (1968): The reign in Europe of that order of unreason, unreasoning submission to the dicta of authority:... Saint Paul himself had opened the door to such impudent idiocies.
• Günther Bornkamm, Paul (1969): Above all there results the chasm which separates Jesus from Paul and the conclusion that more than the historical Jesus ... it is Paul who really founded Christianity.... Already during his lifetime Paul was considered an illegitimate Apostle and a falsifier of the Christian message.... For a long time, Judeo-Christianity rejected him completely, as a rival to Peter and James, the brother of the Lord.... Paul does not connect immediately with ... [the] words ... of the earthly Jesus. Everything seems to indicate that he didn't even know them.
• David Ben-Gurion, Israel: A Personal History (1971): Jesus probably differed little from many other Jews of his generation. The new religion was given an anti-Jewish emphasis by Saul,... [who] gave Christianity a new direction. He sought to uproot Jewish law and commandments, and to eliminate Judaism as a national entity striving to achieve the Messianic vision of the Prophets.
• William Steuart McBirnie, The Search for the Twelve Apostles (1973): Why did Jesus choose only twelve chief Apostles? Obviously, to correspond to the twelve tribes of Israel.... Paul stoutly maintained that he also was an Apostle.... Yet there is no evidence that he was ever admitted to that inner circle of the original Twelve.... Those who expect the Acts to be the complete early history of Christianity are 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): 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.
• 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.
• Edward Schillebeeckx, Christ (1977): There is a difference between the theology of the early Jewish Christian congregations in Jerusalem which are oriented on Jesus of Nazareth, and Pauline theology, which knows only 'the crucified'.
• Mircea Eliade, History of Beliefs and Religious Ideas (1978): Paul would have to be seen as fatally opposed to the Judeo-Christians of Jerusalem,... a conflict of which Paul and the Acts (Gal 2:7-10, Acts 15:29) give contradictory versions.
• Thomas Maras, The Contradictions in the New Testament (1979): In disagreement with [Matthew and Luke], who wish him to be a direct Son of God, Paul says to us [in Rom 1:3-4] that in the flesh Jesus is the descendent of David, and only in power is the Son of God.
• Patrick Henry, New Directions in New Testament Study (1979): There remains in the popular mind a strong suspicion ... that Paul corrupted Christianity (or even founded a different religion).... Jesus [was] a teacher in the mainstream of Jewish prophetic piety,... while Paul ... takes the irrevocable step away from Judaism of rejecting the [Mosaic] law.... Paul imported into the Christian community a form of religion characteristic of the 'mysteries',... religious movements of initiation into secret rites and esoteric knowledge.
•  Juan Luis Segundo, The Person of Today confronting Jesus of Nazareth (1982): Within less than thirty years of the events narrated by the synoptics concerning the life and proclamation, death and resurrection of Jesus, Paul permits himself to compose a long and complex exposition of what this means, retaining, apparently, only the two final specific events, the death and the resurrection. Jesus' words are not cited (with the exception of those pronounced over the bread and wine at the Last Supper), his teachings are not remembered. The key terms have disappeared which he employed to designate himself, his mission and his immediate audience: the Son of Man, the Kingdom of God, the poor.
• Jürgen Moltmann, Political Theology [&] Ethical Theology (1984): The theology of Paul and that of the Reformation interpreted the death of Jesus theologically as a victim of the law [of Israel]; and they made it very clear that the resurrection and exaltation of Christ signified the abolition of [that] law with all its demands.... [But] Jesus did not die by stoning, but rather by Roman execution.
• Yigael Yadin, 'The Temple Scroll--the Longest Dead Sea Scroll', Biblical Archaeology Review (Sept/Oct 1984): We must distinguish between the various layers, or strata, to use an archaeological term, of early Christianity. The theology, the doctrines and the practices of Jesus, John the Baptist and Paul ... are not the same.
• James Michener, Legacy (1987): Women ... will no longer kowtow to the fulminations of St. Paul.
• Paula Fredriksen, From Jesus to Christ (1988): Scholars, their confusion facilitated by Paul's own apparent inconsistency,... do not agree even on what Paul said, much less why he said it.
• Jostein Gaarder, Sophie's World (1991): Was Christ a Christian? That also can certainly be debated.
• Jon Sobrino, Jesus Christ Liberator (1991): Paul's ... Christology is centered on the resurrected Lord, and he does not make a detailed theological appraisal of the life of Jesus.
• Stephen Mitchell, The Gospel according to Jesus (1991): Paul of Tarsus ... [was] the most misleading of the earliest Christian writers,... [and] a particularly difficult character: arrogant, self-righteous, filled with murderous hatred of his opponents, terrified of God, oppressed by what he felt as the burden of the [Mosaic] Law, overwhelmed by his sense of sin.... He didn't understand Jesus at all. He wasn't even interested in Jesus; just in his own idea of the Christ.
•  Paulo Suess, 'Acculturation', in Ignacio Ellacuría & Jon Sobrino (eds.), Mysterium Liberationis (1991): The allegorical exegesis of Philo (13 BC-45/50 AD), Jewish philosopher and theologian, is present in the writings of Paul,... [who] was in many respects a figure atypical of the primitive Church,... due to the transition from an agrarian context--very much present in the parables--to an urban world ... of the great cities.
• Shlomo Riskin, The Jerusalem Post International Edition (March 28, 1992): Saul of Tarsus ... broke from Jewish Law, and the religion thereby created was soon encrusted with pagan elements.
• Dennis J. Trisker & Vera V. Martínez T., They Also Believe (1992): While many persons believe that Christianity was founded by Jesus Christ,... it is due to Paul that there exists the organization called Christian.... In the New Testament, we can see how Paul ... was in disagreement with the church in Jerusalem and even held in suspicion by them.... He did not emphasize the Jewish aspect of the teaching, and this brought about the first separation within the church. Across the years this separation widened, making the church more pagan and less Jewish.... Paul was no Apostle.
• Xavier Zubiri, The Philosophical Problem of the History of Religions (1993): There is absolutely no doubt that much of St. Paul's terminology derives from the Mystery Religions.
• Bart D. Ehrman, The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture (1993): Whether seen from a social or a theological point of view,... Christianity in the early centuries was a remarkably diversified phenomenon.... Matthew and Paul are both in the canon.... Many of Paul's opponents were clearly Jewish Christians ... [who] accepted the binding authority of the Old Testament (and therefore the continuing validity of the [Mosaic] Law) but rejected the authority of the apostate Apostle, Paul.
• Raymond E. Brown, The Birth of the Messiah (Supplement 1993); The Death of the Messiah (1994): [Regarding] Paul's statement that Jesus 'was descended from David according to the flesh' (Rom 1:3),... one may ask whether the evangelists who wrote of the virgin conception would have chosen such phrasing. || Paul ... does not quote Jesus or cite his individual deeds.
• Ian Wilson, Jesus: The Evidence (1996): [The] interest [in Paul's letters] lies in their apparent ignorance of any details of Jesus' earthly life.... [Paul] reflected the attitudes of contemporary society towards women rather than what we may now believe to have been Jesus' own ideas.... We seem to be faced with a straight, first-century clash of theologies: Paul's on the one hand, based on his other-worldly [Damascus Road] experience; and James' [in his epistle], based on his fraternal knowledge of the human Jesus. And, despite the authority which should be due to the latter, it would seem to be Paul's that has been allowed to come down to us.... Particularly significant is [James'] gentle but firm stance on the importance of Jesus' teaching on communal living.
• Alan F. Segal (for Eugene Schwartz), 'Electronic Echoes: Using Computer Concordances for Bible Study', Biblical Archaeology Review (Nov/Dec 1997): We can easily quantify allusions by measuring whether a passage in one Biblical work merely repeats a few words of another or whether it directly quotes several words running.... The results of our research seemed to confirm ... very few clear parallels between Paul and the Gospels.... [They] almost always express [even] the same ideas in completely different words.... I am unconvinced by the myriad rather weak parallels between the Gospels and Paul. Rather,... the [computer] word study seems to show that the two are definitely unrelated.

Articles

• Paul: Apostle or Heretic?

• What did Sha'ul, called Paul teach concerning circumcision?

•  Historical Views on Paul

• What did Sha'ul, called Paul teach about marriage?

•  How are we to understand Peter's endorsement of Paul?

• Paul: Apostle or Heretic?

•  The Church That Paul Built....

•  An Explanation of Paul..

•  Why Did The Apostles Reject Paul

•  James, Paul and the Dead Sea Scrolls

•  The Gospel Myth of Christianity

•  Melech-Tsedeq .... Melchisedec.... has come?

• Is It Heresy To Call Apostle Paul A Heretic?

• WHO WAS PAUL?

• The Paul Paradox

• More Evidence Concerning Paul

• WHAT JESUS ACTUALLY TAUGHT and LATER CHANGES

• Rabbi Paul of Tarsus The 1st Heretic

• THE MESSAGE OF THE PROPHETS AND THE TEACHINGS OF PAUL OF TARSUS 

•  Was the Paul Apostle or an Anti Christ?   Surprisingly not all Christians have the same views about the "Saint"

• What about Paul ? "Answering Islam" tries to convince Muslims that Paul did not corrupt the teachings of Jesus Christ (Pbuh). Check their articles.