The following are quotes from other sources on issues concerning Judaism, Christianity, and the false apostle Paul.
“… Paul is in effect the first Christian heretic, and his teachings, which become the foundation of later Christianity, are a flagrant deviation from the ‘Original’ or ‘pure’ form extolled by the leadership. Whether James, the ‘Lord’s brother,’ was literally Jesus’ blood kin or not (and everything suggests he was), it is clear that he knew Jesus…personally. So did most of the other members of the community or ‘early Church,’ in Jerusalem, including of course, Peter. When they spoke, they did so with first hand authority. Paul had never had such personal acquaintance with the figure he’d begun to regard as his ‘Savior.’ He had only his quasi-mystical experience in the desert and the sound of a disembodied voice. For him to arrogate authority to himself on this basis is, to say the least, presumptuous. It also leads him to distort Jesus’ teachings beyond recognition, to formulate, in fact, his own highly individual and idiosyncratic theology, and then to legitimize it by spuriously ascribing it to Jesus.”
“As things transpired, however, the mainstream of the new movement gradually coalesced, during the next three centuries, around Paul and his teachings. Thus, to the undoubted posthumous horror of James and his associates, an entirely new religion was indeed born, a religion that came to have less and less to do with its supposed founder.”
From the book,“The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception”by Michael Bajgent and Richard Leigh (Corgi Books, London, 1991)
“Paul was the great Coryphaeus, and first corrupter of the doctrines of Jesus.”
-Thomas Jefferson, From a letter to W. Short published in The Great Thoughts by George Sildes (Ballantine Books, New York, 1985, p.208).
“Where possible he (Paul) avoids quoting the teaching of Jesus, in fact even mentioning it. If we had to rely on Paul, we should not know that Jesus taught in parables, had delivered the sermon on the mount, and had taught His disciples the ‘Our Father.’ Even where they are specially relevant, Paul passes over the words of the Lord.”
-Albert Schweitzer (The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle, p. 171)
“It rests with every professor of the religion of Jesus to settle within himself to which of the two religions, that of Jesus or that of Paul, he will adhere.”
-Jeremy Bentham, The renowned English philosopher, from his book Not Paul But Jesus
“What kind of authority can there be for an ‘apostle’ who, unlike the other apostles, had never been prepared for the apostolic office in Jesus’ own school but had only later dared to claim the apostolic office on the basis on his own authority? The only question comes to be how the apostle Paul appears in his Epistles to be so indifferent to the historical facts of the life of Jesus….He bears himself but little like a disciple who has received the doctrines and the principles which he preaches from the Master whose name he bears.”
-Ferdinand Christian Baur, theologian, in his Church History of the First Three Centuries,
“Paul’s words are not the Words of God. They are the words of Paul- a vast difference.”
-Bishop John S. Spong (Episcopal Bishop of Newark) (Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism, p. 104, Harper San Francisco, 1991)
“Paul hardly ever allows the real Jesus of Nazareth to get a word in.”
-Carl Jung (Psychologist) (U.S. News and World Report, April 22, 1991, p. 55)
“Paul, not Jesus, was the founder of Christianity as a new religion which developed away from both normal Judaism and the Nazarene variety of Judaism.”
-Hyam Maccoby (Talmudic Scholar) (The Mythmaker, Barnes & Noble, p. 16)