Well, it’s pretty much that nobody ever saw any of the manuscripts that Szekeley claimed to have translated, both the Vatican library and the Austrian library that he claimed to have found the documents in deny they exist, Szekeley didn’t mention his finding of a Hebrew fragment of the supposed gospel in the Monte Cassino library until after World War II, when the Monte Cassino monastery had been destroyed by Allied bombing.
Further, the documents were supposedly in Old Slavonic, Hebrew, and Aramaic, but there’s not any evidence, other than his own claims that he had ever studied any of those languages. He published the work twice, in 1937 and 1977, and the story he gives in the preface is different each time. In 1937, he says the Aramaic text is from the first century. In 1977, he says the Aramaic text is from the third century.
The 1937 book is called "The Gospel of Peace of Jesus Christ by the Disciple John. After the Dead Sea Scrolls were found, and the Essenes became popular, he changed the name to the Essene Gospel of Peace.
In addition, in 1928, he founded the International Biogenic Society, which held as its principles that we’re all the children of the earth mother, and that people should get frequent enemas and eat a vegetarian, raw food diet. Interestingly enough, in the Gospel of Peace, Jesus says that his followers are children of the earth mother, and that you’ll only go to heaven if you get frequent enemas and eat a vegetarian, raw food diet.
Gnosticism is incompatible with the principles of Christianity laid down in the New Testament. Paul arguably advanced the path to salvation through grace alone. Christianity was unusual for a religion in that it required not just adherence to behavioral dictates, but required belief that God loves you, and you love God. It also advised behavior: turn the other cheek, love thine enemy, etc. These provided salvation, and not second class salvation. Everybody knew it and it was to be told to everyone. Gnosticism, by its definition, is about secret knowledge leading to various special benefits not available to people without the secret knowledge. It is like the Open Source movement compared to copyrighted and encrypted source code.
There were a number of Gnostic gospels, including the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, found about 100 years ago, which survives today. I believe the recently discovered Gospel of Judas is Gnostic. They are available in books stores. Mary and Peter have also had attribution of apocryphal works that did not make it into the canon.
I think you’ll find that the church still kept a pretty strict lock on deciding what a person had to do to be saved, for the next thousand and some odd years.
But say that someone who’s only ever talked to a level 1 member of Scientology went off to another country and started his own church. He’ll have never heard of Xenu or any of the other knowledge that’s kept to the higher levels. As he expounds upon what he does know, adding in tidbits of material to flesh it out, he ends up coming up with something that becomes largely incompatible with Scientology and yet he still calls his version Scientology. Does this prove that the original Scientology is unrelated to his religion?
Everyone else was Jesus’ student. Paul received all of Jesus’ teachings by direct revelation.
Essentially, this means that where everyone else might have mistaken Jesus’ meaning, Paul could not because his understanding was innate and magical, not limited to the pitfalls of oral communication.
Let me give a better answer than I did in my previous post.
Let’s say that there’s a guy named Alfred. His dad died 2 years ago.
I walk up to Alfred and I tell him that his dad is talking to me from beyond the grave. Alfred now needs to decide whether I’m the world’s biggest asshole, or I’m actually receiving direct communication from his deceased father. If he doesn’t punch my lights out, then he’s accepting that I know more about what his dad thinks than he does, so long as I don’t say anything that he can directly disprove.
In the case Paul, he doesn’t claim that Jesus taught him about his life, just his teachings. No one has any recourse to test that his knowledge of Jesus is divinely inspired, so long as he can make a convincing argument that anywhere he diverges from everyone else’s understanding of Jesus’ teachings is their misunderstanding. Being a lawyer, and having done at least some study of Christian teaching, I suspect that he could do that. And the instant they accept him, instead of punching his lights out or stoning him to death, they’re agreeing that he received divine revelation and knows more accurately what Jesus wanted than they do. There is no middle-path when it comes to accepting magical communication. It either is 100% or it isn’t.
Yes, I don’t see any practical way for someone who is carrying divine knowledge to not outrank those who only received it second hand. If you understand my point and my reasoning, then it’s up to you from there. If you see some practical way to get around this standing then, well, good on ya.
Personally, I don’t see any way to get around it even as a hypothetical. That would mark it down as something more than opinion but, hey, anything can be handwaved away, hypothetical workarounds being non-existent or not.
Go back and read Acts again and you’ll see why this doesn’t work.
If you had anything in the way of a passage that indicated Paul thought he outranked the other apostles then I’d be interested.
Scripturally speaking your assumption that Paul’s knowledge was from a divine source and the other apostles wasn’t is a glaring error. Not only did most of them receive their instructions directly from Jesus, who they considered …what?..divine,both before the crucifixion and after he rose from the dead, Jesus also promised them the coming of the Holy Spirit which happens pretty dramatically in Acts. I’d say that qualifies as divine as well.
I’m not handwaving it away. I’m dismissing it because even a somewhat superficial knowledge of the scriptures such as mine shows it to be incorrect. That’s why I was interested in the possibility of some passage I wasn’t familiar with, which you evidently don’t have.
Finally, a voice of reason. Diogenes, even though we come at Christianity from different PoVs and disagree on the interpretation of the facts, I appreciate your detailed knowledge and historical detatchment in these threads.
How can you say the other disciples received it second hand? They received their teaching straight from Jesus - just like Paul claimed to. Paul even refers to him self as “one abnormally born; for I am the least of the apostles.” (I Corinthians 15).
To expand on FriarTed’s answer, in Acts 10 Peter has that dream where he sees a sheet being lowered down from heaven filled with unclean animals, and God orders him to eat. Peter refuses, because the food is unclean. God tell him, “Do not call anything impure that God has made clean.”
Immediately after the dream, Peter is approached by men sent from a Roman Centurian named Cornelius, a devout Roman who says the Spirit of God told him to summon Peter. Peter goes to his home and says “I now realize how true it is that God does not show favoritism but accepts men from every nation who fear him and do what is right.” And he baptizes Cornelius and his family. Acts 10.
You know how they say a picture is worth a thousand words? Pretend that you had to describe a photograph down to every single blade of grass, just by speech. It’s not even remotely possible. It necessarily will be a simplified and quite likely be misinterpreted by your listeners to some extent. But if you do have a photograph, and hand it over to one guy, he’ll just blow away everyone else who only got the verbal description.
Jesus might have told the Apostles what they needed to know, but only Paul had Jesus’ teachings implanted directly into his head. There is no room for misinterpretation when the knowledge has been perfectly copied in whole. Paul wasn’t taught. He was programmed. Jesus went down, shuffled around the bits in his brain exactly how he wanted them, and set him loose. If you’re to say that Jesus fiddled with everyone else’s brain as well, then why did he have to teach them for months or years, instead of just doing it instantaneously like he did with Paul? If everyone had a perfect understanding, why did they have to meet and debate Jesus’ intent after the fact? If none of them had perfect understanding, then why did Jesus instantaneously provide incorrect divine revelation directly into Paul’s brain?
There’s nothing in Acts or in Paul’s writing that indicates this is how Paul acquired his knowledge of Jesus. He was familiar with the church in Jerusalem as a prosecutor (and persecutor), and after his conversion he spent time in Damascus with the disciples there. In his letter to the Galations, he says he then went to Arabia for three years before beginning his mission to the Gentiles. So it took three years to for Jesus to “implant… directly into his head”? You’re inventing that theory with no evidence.
Actually, in Galatians, Paul does mention that he got his knowledge not through men…but directly form Jesus. And it does seem he is suggesting it came as a revelation…directly and quickly.
The fact that he went to Arabia for three years does not mean that the revelation took that long to be completed…but rather that as a result of the revelation…he went to do the work of converting gentiles. He even seems to be suggesting that there was no need for him to seek out the apostles and people who had actually known Jesus…because his knowledge was complete without doing so.
ASIDE: Paul got things done…and he was “into himself.”
It is my experience that one of the requirements of being someone who “gets things done”…is “to be into one’s self.”
He also, earlier in the same letter, far from seeing his mission as superior, defensive, and trying to prove that he’s as good as the Jerusalem community of Jesus’s original disciples:
And even earlier in the same letter, argues that there isn’t any division in Jesus’s message, and that none of groups of the apostles have superior knowledge of Jesus’s teachings.