World Blog by humble servant.Gentiles only know the scripture thru hearsay. Paul never met Jesus.Given the extremely strong prohibition of idol worship in any form, which is at the base of Mosaic law, it is almost certain that any tendency to deify Jesus would have been strongly resisted by the Jerusalem apostles. This could well have been the basic cause of the rift between Paul and the original apostles. Brandon argues (Ibid., p. 154): According to Paul’s own testimony, his ‘gospel’ was repudiated and his authority as apostle was rejected by his opponents. This the leaders of the Jerusalem Church could effectively do, because Paul had never been an original disciple of Jesus, nor had he learned the faith from them. However, the irony of the situation, from our point of view, is that it is Paul’s ‘gospel’ that has survived and is known to us from his own writings, whereas the ‘gospel’ of the Jerusalem Christians can only be reconstructed from what may be inferred from Paul’s references to it and what may be culled, also by inference from the Gospels and Acts. This apparent triumph of Paul’s version of the faith is surely to be traced to the Jewish overthrow in A.D. 70....