The conclusion of "The Amazing Colossal Apostle" by Price.
By the way, A Canticle For Leibowitz is much better literature than any of this paul shit.
Quote:Protestantism is based on Martin Luther, and Luther’s theology is based on Paul, but Paul stands based on nothing at all. Paul does not have a unitary voice, is not a single author whose implied opinions might be synthesized and parroted. He is not even a single historical figure. He is certainly not a divine apostle who received his gospel, not from man nor through men, but directly from God one climactic day on his way to Damascus. That story, as we saw, is pure fiction, based on 2 Maccabees and Euripides’s Bacchae.
No author, no authority, only texts—and finally not even texts but fragments. All we can do, it seems to me, is read them for what they have to say, or seem to be saying, and let them strike us as they may. Very likely, many of them will open our eyes to interesting new possibilities, may unveil responsibilities we tried our best to forget we had. Some will edify and some will challenge, and it will no doubt prove to have been well worth reading them, but we cannot hide behind the artificial figure of Paul with his “apostolic authority.” We are used to hearing fundamentalists appropriate Paul’s mantle to thunder dogmas and whisper pieties unattested in the texts. Today we witness the same spectacle in politically correct New Testament scholars with their own Pauline ventriloquist dummies issuing screeds against American imperialism and capitalism. The role of the Pauline texts in these endeavors is like that of the grocery list in Walter M. Miller Jr.’s novel, A Canticle for Liebowitz, in which survivors of a nuclear holocaust venerate the only cryptic text surviving from the pre-bomb era.
One cannot help thinking it is all quite as cynical and manipulative as any self-appointed Grand Inquisitor’s work ever was. Like the scams of television preachers, it is a shameless use of the Bible for ulterior ends. Like the pseudepigraphists of old, today’s Paul-quoters usurp authority for themselves. Inevitably one must suspect they do it because they lack confidence that their ideas, carefully attributed to Paul, will convince anyone unless ramrodded home with his backing. But the amazing colossal apostle to whose sky-filling authority they appeal turns out to be no more real than the radioactive giant in the old science fiction movie, The Amazing Colossal Man: it was all just a trick of the light with cheap special effects.
By the way, A Canticle For Leibowitz is much better literature than any of this paul shit.
