Christians believe that Paul of Tarsus is the ‘Apostle’ of Jesus(P), whom he met in a vision on his journey to Damascus. Paul is also claimed to be the author of the Epistles to the Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, 1 and 2 Thessalonians, 1 and 2 Timothy, Titus, Philemon and Hebrews. It is therefore strange that this self-confessed ‘Apostle’ of Jesus Christ fails to pay more attention to the words of Jesus (P) himself in his epistles. To what extent has the Pauline letters shaped the selection of the gospels of the New Testament as canon today ? This article will examine the evidence and present its conclusions on the matter, insha’allah.
While Christians would prefer to allude to the notion that Paul, the self-acclaimed “apostle” of Jesus, was “inspired” when he wrote his epistles, the evidences we have researched states otherwise. We have seen how Paul had cited a verse from the “apocryphal books of Elijah” but claimed that he was citing from the book of Isaiah. Apparantly this citing of quotations from apocryphal or Rabbinic writings was not alien to Paul, for in the epistles of Paul, there are abundant signs that he was extremely familiar with Rabbanic material and constantly refers to them. This is not surprising since Paul himself had admitted to familiarity with Jewish traditions under the tutelage of Gamaliel (Acts 22:3).
In response to our argument that Paul’s fumbling of the Epimenides paradox is proof that the ad-hoc “apostle” was not inspired after all, one Christian has raised an objection. The attempted rebuttal acknowledges the paradoxical nature of Epimenides’ statement, but then makes the bizarre claim that Paul’s statement is true nonetheless due to other elements attributed to the Cretan “prophet” by the “apostle”.
There is an interesting observation made by a pro-Torah Christian and he has issued a “challenge” to Pauline Christians regarding Paul’s (mis)understanding of the…
We read the following teachings of the so-called “apostle” from Tarsus, Paul, written in his epistles as follows : If possible, so far as it depends…
Nabeel Qureshi died at the age of 34 years old in 2017 from a “rare and deadly form of stomach cancer” on 16th of September 2017 with mixed reactions.
But the first of the four gospels, i.e., the Gospel according to Mark, apparently did not receive Paul’s memo. And this is a very important point as we keep in mind that each of the gospels were initially divorced from each other and were written in different localities for different audiences.
So which is the correct Gospel account concerning the choice of Jesus’ first apostles ? The following Bible contradiction was extracted from an unpublished thesis entitled Ibn Hazm On The Doctrine of Tahrif which cites Kitab al-Fasl fi al-Milal wa al-Ahwa’ wa al-Nihal and insha’allah this will be part of an ongoing series to reproduce extracts of Ibn Hazm’s criticisms of the Bible and Christianity.