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The Female Spirit

  In a remarkable entry of the Philip Gospel, particular attention is drawn to the fact that 'spirit' is a feminine concept in the Semitic languages (Hebrew: , ruakh ): 'Some say that Mariam was impregnated by the Holy Spirit . They are confused, they know not what they say . Whenever was a female impregnated by a female? ' ( Ph 18 ) And indeed this fundamental point, traditionally obscured in scriptural translation and ignored by commentators, recurs thematically in both Thomas and Philip as well as the Gospel of Truth . It clearly has the most far-reaching theological implications.

Suffice it to recall that PNEUMA in Greek is neuter and PARAKLHTOS masculine, while SPIRITUS and ADVOCATUS in Latin are both masculine in gender . Hence starting from the earliest versions of both the Old and New Testaments in non-Semitic tongues, the very point was lost which Philip is here emphasizing . Thus for example we have 'el Espíritu' instead of 'la Espíritu' in Spanish, ' der Geist' in place of 'die Geist' in German, and in English 'he/him' in place of 'she/her' referring to the Helpmate (Hebrew , me- nakhem: participle, and thus without gender) in Jn 16:7 ff.

We need hardly remind ourselves of the confusions, schisms and even religious machismo to which this gender-shift has given rise across the centuries, as theologians struggled to make sense of a presumably all-male Trinity Thus most notably the Orthodox/Catholic rupture of 1054 AD resulted from a controversy about the 'procession' of the third member of the Trinity . With the Holy Spirit as a female figure, however, the underlying idea is considerably elucidated: Father God and Mother Spirit and Incarnate Son as the basic mystery of three-in-one, the threefold Godhead . Here the concept is clearly that of a transcendental holy family, in which the divine Christ-Child—and indeed each child ( Mt 18:10, Jn 11:52 ) —is eternally born of the mystical union between the paternal and maternal aspects of the selfsame Divinity:

  or indeed

Herewith are the other passages in Thomas, Philip and Valentine which directly concern this topic: My mother [bore] me, yet [my] true [Mother] gave me the life . ( Th 101; cf. also 15 & 46 ) In the days when we were Hebrews we were orphans, having only our Mother . Yet when we become Messianics the Father joins with the Mother . (Ph 6 ) She alone is the truth . She makes the many, and for us she teaches this alone in love through many . (Ph 12 ) His (true) Mother, Sister and Mate is called ' Mariam' . (Ph 36 ) A Disciple one day made request of the Lord for something worldly; he said to him: Request of thy Mother and she will give to thee from what belongs to another . (Ph 38 ) Wisdom is barren [without] the Son—hence she is called [his Mother] . But in the place of salt [...] the Holy Spirit has many Sons . (Ph 40 ) The wisdom which humans call barren is the Mother of the Angels . (Ph 59 ) She is the One who is above . (Ph 74 ) Adam came into being through two virgins—through the Spirit and through the virgin earth . (Ph 90 ) The Mother is the truth, yet recognition is the union . (Ph 116 ) He assumes the face-form of every one, purifying them, bringing them back—within the Father, within the Mother, Yeshua of infinite kindness . The Father uncovers his bosom, which is the Holy Spirit, revealing his secret . His secret is his Son ! ( Tr 17)

In numerous entries in the latter part of Philip, reference is then made to the holy NUMFWN or bridal-chamber wherein the Son is born of the mystical union of the Father with the Spirit—thus for example: "If it is appropriate to tell a mystery, the Father of the totality mated with the Virgin who had come down — and a fire shone for him on that day . He revealed the great Bridal-Bed . Thus his body came into being on that day . He came forth in the Bridal-Bed as one issuing from the Bridegroom with the Bride . This is how Yeshua established the essence of the totality. " (Ph 89 ) That primal mystery is then celebrated in the apostolic sacrament of the holy Bridal-Chamber ( , kheder ha- qodesh ) .

It will be of value to list here the fourteen female Disciples who appear in the scripture: (1) the Virgin Mariam, also called the mother of Joseph and Jacob [ Mt 13:55, 28:1, Mk 15:40, Ac 1:14 ], (2) Mariam the sister of Yeshua [ Ph 36 ], (3) Mariam Magdalene [ passim ], (4) Mariam the wife of Cleopas [ Lk 24:18, Jn 19:25 ], (5) Mariam the mother of John Mark [ Ac 12:12 ], (6,7) Mariam & Martha of Bethany [ Lk 10:38-42, Jn 11 ], (8) the sister of the Virgin [ Jn 19:25 ], (9) Salome [ Mk 15:40, 16:1, Th 61b ], (10) Susanna [ Lk 8:2 ], (11) Johanna wife of Chuza [ Lk 8:2, 24:10 ], (12) the wife of Zebedee [ Mt 20:20-23, 28:56 ], (13) Tabitha [ Ac 9:36-43 ], and (14) Rhoda [ Ac 12:13-17 ].

Angel and Image

Th 5 19 22 50 52 76 83 84 91 111 ||Ph 26 30 47 65 71 81 85 93 95 112 130 143 ||see Mt 18:10 & Jn 5:19

The extraordinary angel/image analysis contained in these passages proposes replacing [a] the 'worldly' frame of reference (paradigm, model, vocabulary) with [ b] a 'celestial' frame of reference (paradigm, model, vocabulary) . According to the former, we are living bodies in a material universe; according to the latter, we are eternal spirits in the mind of God, contemplating his imagination in our five senses.

In his superlative study, Claude Tresmontant presents "the Hebrew conception of the sensible insofar as it differs from the Greek: the biblical world is a world in which the idea of 'matter' does not occur . ... Hebrew is a very concrete language .... It has no word for 'matter' nor for 'body' [as contrasted with 'soul'], because these concepts do not cover any empirical realities . Nobody ever saw any 'matter' nor a 'body', such as they are defined by substantial dualism . The sensible elements—wood, iron, water—are not 'matter'; they are sensible realities. " (Bibliography #16, above)

Starting with this implicit axiom that there can be no such thing as 'matter' (that being an essentially non-referential term), the texts proceed to designate our entire sensory field as 'imagery' (including memories, emotions and fantasies, as well as those perceptions which comprise one's individual incarnation) . This whole realm—the entire film, so to speak, of everyone's life—is then reinterpreted by the Logos to be our immediate personal perception of the transcendental imagination of God (so Gen 1:26, 'in our imagination and likeness') . There is a lovely word-play here on EIKWN : our sensory images are themselves holy icons.

One's correspondingly-juxtaposed and eternally-witnessing individual ego—space and time being merely relations among the images—is then designated as an 'angel' (or 'Child of God') . Thus it is said that we the angels contemplate, manifest (or 'mirrored') in our very perceptions, the imagination of the Spiritual Father/Mother—of whose union we are eternally born.

Such an analysis has significant parallels with George Berkeley 's philosophy of Subjective Idealism, Ludwig Wittgenstein 's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (5.6 ® 5.641) and Notebooks 1914-1916 (7.VIII.16 & 2.IX.16) , Martin Buber 's I and Thou, Hans Reichenbach 's The Philosophy of Space & Time (Dover Books, New York, n/d), and much traditional Oriental thought—Hindu, Buddhist, and Taoist.

The Paul Paradox

PERIPATWMEN KATA TAS ENTOLAS AUTOU (II- Jn 6)

I

Those who study the New Testament may well note the fact that popular ' red-letter' editions of the text, with Christ's words thus highlighted, contain virtually no such rubrics throughout the Epistles of Paul . With the sole exception of the eucharistic formula at I- Cor 11:24-25, he does not quote any sayings of the historical Yeshua/Jesus . Indeed furthermore, he never even once alludes to the detailed biographical panorama, from the Nativity up to the Passion, which fills the pages of the canonical Gospels . This is, on the face of it, a most puzzling omission.

Beyond this remarkable lack of historical concern, however, there is an even more enigmatic aspect of Paul's record in the New Testament . For an objective, philosophical reading of the documents would seem to reveal a number of logicalcontradictions, both within his biography and also between his theology and that of the Evangelists . It must be emphasized that these anomalies are conceptual rather than factual in nature . For although they of course occur in interwoven historical, theological, and normative contexts within the NT, they nevertheless present themselves as a priori problems of analytical consistency between various texts—regardless of the truth or falsity of any factual claims being made or presumed by those texts . Furthermore, these discrepancies must be similarly distinguished from logically posterior issues concerning the ancient composition, editing, redactions, or dating of the New Testament writings, all of which are factual/historical topics.

In sum, and stated more formally: the Pauline antinomies are logical contradictions and therefore cannot in principle be resolved by means of either historical investigation or textual criticism, both of which are empirical methodologies.

Neither is this the place to provide a retrospective survey of the many past commentaries on these complex questions . I shall only append a series of quotations from a number of modern figures—starting with Santa Teresa of Ávila and John Locke—who are in general agreement that Paul's views appear to be seriously at odds with the Gospel message . These excerpts suffice to show that what might be called 'the Paul paradox' has been recognized by a remarkably wide spectrum of eminent individuals in recent times.  

II

Here then is the matrix of antinomies, along with a brief statement of what I take to be the logical contradiction in each case:

1. Ac 9:7 || Ac 22:9

In the propositional calculus of modern logic, 'p & not-q' is the truth-functional negation of 'q & not-p' . Thus 'they heard but did not see' directly contradicts 'they saw but did not hear' . Yet this famous event on the Damascus road was the original justification for Paul's supposed commission in independence of Peter/ Cephas and the other Apostles.

2. Ac 9:26-29 || Gal 1:17-2:1

Did Paul then travel immediately—or seventeen years later!—from Damascus to Jerusalem in order to meet with the entire Apostolic circle?

3. Ac 1:15 || I- Cor 15:6

How can Christ have appeared to over 500 Brothers at a time (prior to the ascension) when the whole Discipleship numbered only 120?

4. Mt 10:2&40, 16:15-19 || Gal 2:11-13

The explicit designation of Simon Peter as the foremost Apostle, with all the delegated authority of the Lord himself, logically precludes any other Disciple or Apostle opposing him 'to his face' and calling him a hypocrite.

5. Mt 28:16-20, Ac 10:1-11:18 || Gal 2:6-9

The Gospel doctrine is clearly that, after the resurrection, the remaining eleven Apostles were sent forth to evangelize the whole world . Paul nevertheless claims to be the one and only Apostle to the gentiles ('the' Apostle as he is often called), while Peter and the others according to this view were to be restricted to proselytizing among the Jews.

6. Mt 5:48, Jn 1:14, 6:53-56 || Rom 8:8

The incarnation of the Logos, and also the injunction to be perfect, entail that those who are in the flesh can indeed please God.

7. Lk 24:36-43, Jn 11:43-44, 20:27, Ac 1:9-11, Ph 25 || I- Cor 15:50

The evangelists proclaim an incarnate resurrection and parousia (second coming), whereas Paul takes an anti-corporeal, gnostic position.

8. Lk 4:5-8, Jn 18:36, 19:18, Ac 4:26 (Ps 2:2) || Rom 13:1-5

The heavenly kingdom is described in the Gospels as of another order from the entire realm of the nations, which are ruled by Satan and whereby Christ was crucified . On the other hand, the secular authorities with their weaponry (including Mk 16:15 ff. ??) are stated by Paul to be God's own army.

9. Mt 22:21 || Ac 25:11

Christ cedes taxes to Caesar, Paul cedes his personal security to him (Nero, no less!).

10. Dt 23:15-16, Mt 23:10-12, Jn 8:31-36 || Col 4:1, I-Tim 6:1-2, Philem 10-19

The re-conceptualization in the Gospels promises to emancipate the believers from oppressive relationships, while Paul literally endorses slavery within the Discipleship.

11. Mt 12:46-50, 23:8-9, Lk 14:25-26, Jn 1:12-13, 3:1-8, 11:52 || Col 3:18-21, I-Tim 5:8

Christ teaches that family ties are to be renounced in favor of—that is, replaced by—the Father/Motherhood of God together with the Brother/Sisterhood of their incarnate Sons and Daughters, while Paul adamantly defends the traditional family structure.

12. Mt 19:10-12, Lk 14:20-26, 18:28-30, 20:34-36 || I- Cor 7:2-16 & 9:5 (?!), Eph 5:22-24, I-Tim 3:1-4:3

The Gospels stipulate that those worthy of salvation must transcend matrimony (note that Lk 18:28-30 occurs after Lk 4:38-39) . Paul notwithstanding permits a continuation of marriage among the Disciples.

13. Num 6:5, Lev 19:27, Mt 2:23 (Jud 13:5), Tr 21 || I- Cor 11:14

The Hebrew tradition was that long hair on male or female is a sign of holiness and special devotion to God . Indeed the word at Mt 2:23 is NAZWRAIOS (the LXX or Septuagint term for Nazirite), not NAZARHNOS (i.e. someone from Nazareth) . Were not John the Baptist and Christ both thus consecrated from birth?

14. Mt 6:24-34, 10:8, Mk 10:13-31, Lk 14:28-33, Ac 4:32-36 || I- Cor 11:34, II- Thes 3:6-12

Christ decrees a cessation of working for mammon, giving all private possessions to the poor and living thereafter communally—childlike and without anxiety day-to-day like the birds and the flowers, with all shared possessions being distributed equitably among those who have need—thus lifting the curse of toil from mankind (Gen 3:17-19) . Paul's advice is to 'eat at home' and avoid idlers, who must either work or go hungry.

15. Mk 7:14-23, Lk 7:34 || Rom 14:21, I- Cor 8:13

Either we ought, or we ought not, to observe some particular diet for religious reasons . Yet Paul agrees with neither the OT's dietary rules ( kashrut) nor the Savior's remarkable midrash (commentary) thereupon.

16. Mt 12:19 (Isa 42:2), Lk 10:7 || Ac 17:16-34, 20:20

Paul preaches house-to-house, as well as in the streets and squares—contrary to Christ's paradigm.

17. Mt 6:5-6 || I-Tim 2:8

Paul demands the very same outspoken prayer which Christ condemns as exhibitionist.

18. Mt 18:1-4, Mk 9:33-35, Lk 14:7-11 || II- Cor 11:5-12:13

Paul's recounting of his travels is insubordinately boastful and rivalrous—rather than humble, respectful and obedient—toward those who preceded him in the Discipleship.

19. Mt 5:43-48, 7:1-5, 9:10-13, 18:21-35, Jn 8:2-11 || I- Cor 5, Gal 5:12, Tit 3:10-11

The Gospel attitude toward wrongdoers is merciful, yet Paul's is frankly inquisitional . Is 'turning someone over to Satan for the extermination of the flesh' intended to mean delivering him to the secular authorities for execution (as in Jn 19:17-18) ? Are we to love our enemies or excoriate them?

20. Mt 23:8-12 || Ac 20:28, I- Cor 4:15, I-Tim 3:1-13

Paul introduces the terms 'father' and 'deacon' and 'bishop' to designate religious leaders—the very sort of title (along with 'pastor', 'minister', etc.) which Christ had explicitly prohibited . Indeed, the passage in Matthew would seem to preclude any kind of hierarchy in the Discipleship other than simple seniority (thus PRESBUTEROS , 'elder', in Ac 21:18, Jas 5:14, I-Pet 5:1, II- Jn 1—by which criterion Paul was obliged to submit to the original Apostles, quite contrary to II- Cor 11:5 & Gal 2:6).

21. Gen 17:10, Lk 2:21 || Ac 16:3 ( ?!), Phlp 3:2, Gal 5:2, Tit 1:10-11

Saying that it is necessary 'to gag ( EPISTOMIZEIN ) circumcisionist dogs' is completely out of place in an Apostolic context . In any event, even if Christ referred to that custom parabolically—as in Th 53—he certainly did not forbid its physical practice.

22. Lk 11:27-28, Jn 4:1-30, 11:20-35, 20:11-18, Th 21 || I- Cor 14:33-35, I-Tim 2:11-15

Various women speak up boldly to the Savior . Later, Mariam Magdalene as first witness (!) of the resurrection is sent by Christ to angel ( AGGELLW : p66* À * A B) his rising to the other Disciples and to the Apostles themselves . This is not a teaching of female submissiveness or keeping quiet in the convocation.

23. Lk 7:36-8:3, 10:38-42, 23:55-24:11, Jn 12:1-3, Th 61b, 114 || I- Cor 7:1-2, Eph 5:22-24

The Gospels represent women as an intimate part of Christ's entourage—thus rescinding the punishment of husband-domination in Gen 3:16 . Paul emphatically opposes any liberated role for females.

24. Mt 5:17-19, 19:16-19, Lk 16:29-31, Ac 21:17-24 ! || Rom 7:6, Gal 3:10, 5:18

If the entire Torah—the decalogue in particular, but also the remaining mitzvot (moral rules) such as Lev 19:18 et passim —is in effect until sky and earth pass away, then it is not an obsolete curse from which believers are discharged . This was the very topic at issue when, after he completed his three missionary journeys, 'all of the Elders' (!) in Jerusalem required Paul to take the Nazirite vow—to prove his continuing adherence to the Mosaic Law.

25. Mt 7:21, 19:16-19, 25:31-46, Jn 13:34 !, 14:21, 15:10, Jas 2:14-26 || Rom 3:28, 10:9, I- Cor 15:35-44

Christ says that one's calling him 'Lord' is not enough, but rather that the Disciple's total obedience is required; both the OT and the Gospels require adherence to a plenitude of divine commandments with resultant fruitful deeds . Paul on the other hand states that a mere confession of faith, along with a belief in Christ's (merely spiritual, not corporeal) resurrection, suffices—a thoroughly antinomian doctrine . (This subject must be carefully distinguished from that of forgiveness—both among humans and between God and humankind—as a pre-eminently innovative tenet in the Gospels . For of course absolution logically presupposes a transgression of the rules, not their abrogation; compare e.g. Ezek 18 with Mt 6:14-15.)

26. Gen 49, Jud 2:16 ff., Mt 19:28, Ac 1:13-26, Rev/ Ap 2:2, 21:14 || I- Cor 9:1-2, II- Cor 11:5-13

Finally, we must observe the fact that the permanent tally of the Apostles was established by the Savior at exactly twelve (for obvious reasons of historical symbolism—note the symmetry at Rev/ Ap 21:12-14), and moreover that Paul was never numbered in that circle.

III

The canon of the New Testament was not ecclesiastically established until the Third Council of Carthage in 397 AD . Precisely what transpired during the preceding four centuries is notoriously obscure, as the original Gospel Messianics were eventually supplanted by the Pauline 'Christians' (Ac 11:25-26)—see in this regard Walter Bauer 's epochal study, Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity ( T übingen 1934, Philadelphia 1971 ).

My purpose has been merely to format a set of scriptural dichotomies which exhibit the underlying logic of the ancient Messianic/ Paulianity schism, as essentially a conceptual (and of course personal) rather than a factual issue . This in turn may hopefully serve to stimulate a discussion both of the apostolic status of Saul of Tarsus and of his inclusion in the canon.

These basic issues can be neither papered over nor settled by institutional fiat . For their illuminating implication is that traditional Christianity—as defined bythe classical NT canon including both Gospels and Epistles—islogicallyself-contradictory and hence inherently unstable . In order to avoid this dilemma, one or the other component must be omitted and 'the Discipleship' defined in terms either of the evangelists or of Paul, but not both . The corresponding primal community centering on the historical Christ and Simon Peter may then for the sake of clarity be distinguished as ' Messianics' or ' Christics' or ' Apostolics' .

Appendix: Modern Quotations regarding Paul

( in chronological order of original publication date)

Santa Teresa of Ávila , 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 could 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): Judaizing Christians seem to have argued with some degree of plausibility from the divine origin of the Mosaic law ... that 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, would [like Paul] have published to the world the abolition of those useless and obsolete ceremonies.

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.

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'].

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.

Mark Twain , Notebooks (n/d): If Christ were here now, there is one thing he would not be—a Christian.

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.

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); 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 . || 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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Walter Bauer , Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity (German edition 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.

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.

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 (editor), 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.

Erich Fromm , The Dogma of Christ (n/d): 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.

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.

W.D . Davies , 'Paul and Jewish Christianity', in J. Daniélou, 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.

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 gentile Christian 'ecclesiastical doctrine' that represents what is primary, but rather a Jewish Christian theology.

Helmut Koester , 'The Theological Aspects of Primitive Christian Heresy', in James Robinson (editor), 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.

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 [public] 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.

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'.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.  

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—The Gospel of Philip, 73

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