Gospels of Thomas and Philip and Truth - Syriac Christian Church

into the Christian sect. Paul felt that pagans should become Christians directly,
without first being converted to Judaism.... Slowly he changed early Christianity into
a new Pauline Christology.... Christianity was no longer a Jewish sect, for Paul had
abandoned the Mosaic tradition.
Nils A. Dahl, ‘The Particularity of the Pauline Epistles as a Problem in the
Ancient Church’, Neotestamentica et Patristica: Eine Freundesgabe, Herrn
Professor Dr. Oscar Cullman (1962): The particularity of the Pauline Epistles was felt
as a problem, from a time before the Corpus paulinum was published and until it had
been incorporated into a complete canon of New Testament Scripture. Later on, the
problem was no longer felt,... when they served as sources for reconstruction of a
general ‘biblical theology’ or a system of ‘paulinism’.
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.
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (1963): The only trouble was, Church, even the
Catholic Church, didn't take up the whole of your life. No matter how much you knelt
and prayed, you still had to eat three meals a day and have a job and live in the
world.
William H. McNeill, The Rise of the West (1963): A question which immediately
arose in the Christian communities outside Palestine was whether or not the Mosaic
law remained binding. Paul's answer was that Christ had abrogated the Old
Dispensation by opening a new path to salvation. Other followers of Christ held that
traditional Jewish custom and law still remained in force.... Neither Peter and James,
the leaders in Jerusalem, nor Paul ... could persuade the other party.
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
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