Gospels of Thomas and Philip and Truth - Syriac Christian Church

Pauline Church— which indeed has also disseminated worldwide the very OT which
Paul himself had disparaged. On the other hand, the Petrine/Apostolic Church
(which one could only join by a complete personal renunciation; see #16 above)
seems not to have survived the persecutions of the first centuries.
Paul was personally in charge of the stoning of Stephen (Ac 7:58-8:1), since
according to Dt 17:7 the ‘witnesses who laid their cloaks at his feet’— i.e. were
under his direct authority— were obliged to cast the first stones. Was he also ‘the
captain of the Temple guard’ who arrested Kefa and John in Ac 4:1? Might one even
ask as to his involvement the night Christ himself was arrested? (Remember that Lk
22:6365 takes place at the hands of the Temple guard, not those of the Romans.)
Thus perhaps the puzzling II-Cor 5:16, ΕΓΝΩΚΑΜΕΝ ΚΑΤΑ ΣΑΡΚΑ ΧΡΙΣΤΟΝ: ‘We
have known Christ according to the flesh.’ This would certainly explain Paul's
subsequent obsession with unmerited forgiveness!
In any event, my purpose here 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 pragmatic!) rather than a factual
issue. This in turn may hopefully serve to stimulate in the reader a reconsideration of
the apostolic status of Saul of Tarsus. For he evidently never joined Christ's
Discipleship at all— which would indisputably have meant accepting Peter's spiritual
authority— much less became an Apostle.
These basic questions can no longer be papered over, nor can they be settled
by institutional fiat. For their illuminating implication is that traditional Christianity—
as defined by the classical NT canon including both the Gospels and Marcion’s
collection of Paul's Epistles— is logically self-contradictory and hence inherently
unstable. Or, in a contemporary analogy, we might say that Paul's writings are like a
computer virus: a surreptitious theological reprogram which, downloaded with the
Gospels, changes their basic message, rendering it not gibberish but rather
transmuted into another doctrine altogether— historical Church Christianity instead
of the original Messianic Brother/Sisterhood.
Appendix: Quotations regarding Paul
(in chronological order; suggestions: edit@metalog.org)
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