I believe people miss important truths when they fail to understand context, audience, purpose and place for the different truths revealed in Scripture. Jesus said repeatedly that he "came for lost sheep of the house of Israel" and Peter admitted he was the Apostle to the Circumcision and Paul to the Gentiles. That's just Scripture, Mark, not interpretation.
You are still missing out on the mathematical operand 'and'. Peter was the Apostle to not only the Jews, but to the Gentiles as well - witness not only the mass conversion in Acts, which was overseen by Peter, but also the first individual as well. Paul spent more time with the Jews than the Gentiles - if you follow his Epistles and Acts, you will see.
Jesus came for the Jews, certainly, and will always, but His Church was trained to teach and baptize the whole world and bring them to Christianity. Unless you don't believe the closing lines in Matthew, that is.
You cannot "accept" the teachings of the epistles in light of the Gospels just as the Jews could not interpret the Prophets by the Pentateuch. It was continuing revelation just as the epistles continued further than the Gospels. Yet they did not ever contradict each other nor could they because they all come from the same source - God.
This is what you guys have been denying all along - that you believe that Paul's epistles are the pinnacle of the revelation of God.
The Old Testament was fulfilled by the New Testament. Just as you can't interpret the Gospels by the Torah, you can't interpret the epistles by the Gospels. One follows the other and reveals more truth.
See? In your own words, you tell us that the Epistles are more important than the Gospel because they follow the Gospels and therefore are better or more important. This is not Christianity, and never has been. That is Paulianity and has been condemned as heresy by a number of different Councils as a part of a number of overall heresies.
But, you can go ahead and try to make everything fit within the four accounts of the life of Jesus and his limited time teaching the multitudes. You will find yourself at a disadvantage explaining quite a bit and you will miss out on the truths intended for us all to know. Some things may not even make much sense, and may quite easily lead to error. Taken as a whole, the Bible is our source of all truth - just as God intended it to be. It is the Sword of the Spirit and, like Jesus did, is the offensive weapon in our armory that defeats the lies of Satan.
The Bible itself says - your Messiah Paul says - that the Church is the pillar and source of truth, not the Bible. The Lord God Almighty is the pinnacle of revelation to man - this is traditional Christianity from the very beginning and something that we Christians will never ever compromise on. Our doctrines come from the entire Bible and from the Apostles.
The Gospel writer Luke even wrote (painted) the first icon - that of Our Lady. We will not compromise the Faith; the efforts after Vatican II to water it down have failed, and we are reclaiming the Faith. We are grateful to our Orthodox brethren who have kept the Faith closer, and reject the attempted Protestantization of the Faith.
There is Christianity and then there is the doctrines of the individual. We choose Him and the mighty gifts that He has given us - including the Church.
See? In your own words, you tell us that the Epistles are more important than the Gospel because they follow the Gospels and therefore are better or more important. This is not Christianity, and never has been. That is Paulianity and has been condemned as heresy by a number of different Councils as a part of a number of overall heresies.It's a kind of replacement theology with Paul replacing Christ. Christ's whole ministry, gone.
To me this is just additional evidence that the handful here are far off the mark of both Catholicism and Protestantism, orthodox Christianity as a whole. And, if they add Calvinism to this replacement theology, it's far enough astray to be a different religion. While claiming Christ, they are still as far off, in a different direction, as JW, LDS, Oneness Pentecostals.