The Amazing Colossal Apostle Quotes

“Goodspeed noticed that Christian writings dating before circa 90 CE betrayed no evidence of familiarity with Paul’s letters or influence by him.”
― Robert M. Price, The Amazing Colossal Apostle: The Search for the Historical Paul

“For instance, Justin Martyr never mentions Paul in his voluminous writings. When he is mentioned by other writers, Paul has nothing distinctive to say: he is a pale shadow and obedient lackey of the Twelve, as in Acts. When Ignatius, Polycarp, and 1 Clement (all too blithely taken for genuine as early second-century writings) make reference to Pauline letters, as Bauer noted, they sound like ill-prepared students faking their way through a discussion of a book they neglected to read.”
― Robert M. Price, The Amazing Colossal Apostle: The Search for the Historical Paul

“The first commentators on the epistles were the Gnostics Valentinus, Heracleon, and Basilides.”
― Robert M. Price, The Amazing Colossal Apostle: The Search for the Historical Paul

“Tertullian called Paul “the apostle of Marcion and the apostle of the heretics,”
― Robert M. Price, The Amazing Colossal Apostle: The Search for the Historical Paul

“The historical background of the epistles, even of the principle epistles, is a later age. ... Everything points to later days—at least the close of the first or the beginning of the second century.”
― Robert M. Price, The Amazing Colossal Apostle: The Search for the Historical Paul

“Romans 9-11 speaks of the rejection of Israel in a manner impossible before the fall of Jerusalem in 70 C.E.”
― Robert M. Price, The Amazing Colossal Apostle: The Search for the Historical Paul

“Why do the Synoptic Gospels seem to attest a more primitive Christology than Paul? If Van Manen is right, it is because they are earlier than the Pauline epistles.”
― Robert M. Price, The Amazing Colossal Apostle: The Search for the Historical Paul

“Both Thessalonian epistles are false, written perhaps by the same hand. The writer of 2 Thessalonians might have been embarrassed into correcting his own initial apocalyptic enthusiasm by dismissing his earlier work as that of some crank and not his own. The referent of 1 Thessalonians 2:16 must be the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE. The writer must therefore have lived after this event. Once one stops insisting the text is the work of a man who died in 62 CE (Paul), it begins to make more sense.”
― Robert M. Price, The Amazing Colossal Apostle: The Search for the Historical Paul

“Luke’s picture of Paul receiving his gospel in one gulp on the road to Damascus is the same sort of theological cameo as the story of Moses getting the whole Torah on Mount Sinai. This is narratized theology, not history.”
― Robert M. Price, The Amazing Colossal Apostle: The Search for the Historical Paul

“and others all agreed that Acts was pretty much an historical novel, much like the so-called Apocryphal Acts, and that it was written in the second century. There is virtually no historical value to it, but it is rich in edifying propaganda, its author having extensively rewritten sources that seem to include Homer, Virgil, Euripides, Josephus, and the Septuagint, creating a revisionist version of early Christianity in the golden age of its origin.”
― Robert M. Price, The Amazing Colossal Apostle: The Search for the Historical Paul