Gospels of Thomas and Philip and Truth - Syriac Christian Church

esurrected 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.’
Charles Seltman, Women in Antiquity (1956): This man of Tarsus, being
somewhat hostile both to women and to mating, began to advocate both the
repression of females and the intemperate practice of perpetual virginity,... greatly
degrading women in the eyes of men.... Nonsensical anti-feminism was due, in the
first instance, to Paul of Tarsus.... For Paul sex was indeed a misfortune withdrawing
man's interest from heavenly things.... As the Church increased in influence within
the Roman Empire, it carried along with it the corpus of Pauline writings, and the
implicit subordination of the female. The dislike, even the hatred, of women grew to
be pathological.... [Paul's] teaching about women as interpreted by his successors
continues even today to shock thoughtful persons.... The Galilean ... was himself
displaced by the Church Militant on earth, disobedient to Jesus, seeking new ways
to power.... It had overthrown the precepts of Jesus. The theology of Love,... having
been recast as Christendom, borrowed from the simpler nature religions Fear as the
finest instrument for the attainment of power.
G. Ernest Wright & Reginald H. Fuller, The Book of the Acts of God (1957):
The earliest Church glossed over the death of Jesus and concentrated its attention
on the resurrection,... [whereas] much prominence is given in the Pauline epistles to
the notion that [it was] by his death [that] Christ won the decisive victory over the
powers of evil. This mythological notion was not a feature of the earliest preaching....
[Furthermore,] both the theology and the practice of baptism underwent a number of
changes. For the primitive Church, baptism had been performed in the name of
Jesus, and its benefit defined as the remission of sins and ... the gift of the Holy
Spirit,... [but] St Paul can speak of baptism as a symbolical participation in Christ's
death and resurrection;... such ideas have been frequently ascribed to the influence
of the mystery religions, in whose rites the initiate sacramentally shared the fate of
the cult deity.... [Moreover,] the Pauline churches were the first to detach the
[eucharistic] rite with the bread and cup from the common meal.... All three synoptic
gospels are the products of the non-Pauline ... churches.
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