Case Study 1: The Council of Jerusalem

Acts 15: 1-31

¹ But some men came down from Judea and were teaching the brethren, “Unless you are circumcised according to the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved.” ² And when Paul and Barnabas had no small dissension and debate with them, Paul and Barnabas and some of the others were appointed to go up to Jerusalem to the apostles and the elders about this question. ³ So, being sent on their way by the church, they passed through both Phoeni′cia and Samar′ia, reporting the conversion of the Gentiles, and they gave great joy to all the brethren. ⁴ When they came to Jerusalem, they were welcomed by the church and the apostles and the elders, and they declared all that God had done with them. ⁵ But some believers who belonged to the party of the Pharisees rose up, and said, “It is necessary to circumcise them, and to charge them to keep the law of Moses.”

⁶ The apostles and the elders were gathered together to consider this matter. ⁷ And after there had been much debate, Peter rose and said to them, “Brethren, you know that in the early days God made choice among you, that by my mouth the Gentiles should hear the word of the gospel and believe. ⁸ And God who knows the heart bore witness to them, giving them the Holy Spirit just as he did to us; ⁹ and he made no distinction between us and them, but cleansed their hearts by faith. ¹⁰ Now therefore why do you make trial of God by putting a yoke upon the neck of the disciples which neither our fathers nor we have been able to bear? ¹¹ But we believe that we shall be saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus, just as they will.”

¹² And all the assembly kept silence; and they listened to Barnabas and Paul as they related what signs and wonders God had done through them among the Gentiles. ¹³ After they finished speaking, James replied, “Brethren, listen to me. ¹⁴ Simeon has related how God first visited the Gentiles, to take out of them a people for his name. ¹⁵ And with this the words of the prophets agree, as it is written,

¹⁶ ‘After this I will return,
and I will rebuild the dwelling of David, which has fallen;
I will rebuild its ruins,
and I will set it up,
¹⁷ that the rest of men may seek the Lord,
and all the Gentiles who are called by my name,
¹⁸ says the Lord, who has made these things known from of old.’

¹⁹ Therefore my judgment is that we should not trouble those of the Gentiles who turn to God, ²⁰ but should write to them to abstain from the pollutions of idols and from unchastity and from what is strangled and from blood. ²¹ For from early generations Moses has had in every city those who preach him, for he is read every sabbath in the synagogues.”

²² Then it seemed good to the apostles and the elders, with the whole church, to choose men from among them and send them to Antioch with Paul and Barnabas. They sent Judas called Barsab′bas, and Silas, leading men among the brethren, ²³ with the following letter: “The brethren, both the apostles and the elders, to the brethren who are of the Gentiles in Antioch and Syria and Cili′cia, greeting. ²⁴ Since we have heard that some persons from us have troubled you with words, unsettling your minds, although we gave them no instructions, ²⁵ it has seemed good to us, having come to one accord, to choose men and send them to you with our beloved Barnabas and Paul, ²⁶ men who have risked their lives for the sake of our Lord Jesus Christ. ²⁷ We have therefore sent Judas and Silas, who themselves will tell you the same things by word of mouth. ²⁸ For it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay upon you no greater burden than these necessary things: ²⁹ that you abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols and from blood and from what is strangled and from unchastity. If you keep yourselves from these, you will do well. Farewell.”

³⁰ So when they were sent off, they went down to Antioch; and having gathered the congregation together, they delivered the letter. ³¹ And when they read it, they rejoiced at the exhortation.

Commentary

A familiar New Testament passage, St. Luke’s description of the ‘first’ council of the Church must be read alongside St. Paul’s account in the second chapter of his Epistle to the Galatians. At issue is an emerging division between Hebraic and Hellenistic Jewish Christianity and Gentile Christians, for whom the weight of Jewish law and tradition constituted, as St. Peter put it, “a yoke . . .  which neither our fathers nor we have been able to bear.”

It is to the Christian community of Syrian Antioch that the origins of this dispute can most easily be traced. The third city of the Roman Empire, it housed a diverse community of Romans, Greeks and Jews and boasted a high degree of religious pluralism. Luke (himself a Gentile) made his home there and it was the first place to which Paul sought to bring the teachings of the ‘Way’ to the Gentiles, but Paul's approach did not commend itself to Jewish Christians who still believed in keeping the Mosaic Law. Early Jewish Christianity, while identifying Jesus as Messiah, existed in the context of Second Temple worship (something that ended only with its destruction by Vespasian in AD 70). Jewish nationalism (of an eschatological hue) affected early Christians as much as orthodox Jews, and was shaped by a commitment to ritual purity and abstention from unclean foods, and Gentiles who failed to observe the purity laws could not be admitted to table fellowship. Such strictures proved increasingly hard to sustain in mixed communities and even the Apostle Peter, taking account of his vision during the encounter with the Centurion Cornelius, permitted Antioch’s Jewish and Gentile Christians to hold fellowship meals in common until challenged by members of the “circumcision party.” This provoked Paul’s famous denunciation reported in Galatians 2: 11-12 and marked what James Dunn has suggested was the conclusion of Paul’s career as an apostle specifically of Antioch:

The Antioch incident therefore had incalculable consequences on the development of the Gentile mission, as a mission which was to a decisive degree independent of Jewish Christianity, and which from the outset was challenging and beginning to break away from the self understanding of Jewish Christianity. (Dunn 39)

The gathering at Jerusalem was in many ways an informal one, but it brought to a head the tensions that had been percolating through a Church now composed of an original Jewish constituency and a growing body of mixed or wholly Gentile communities in Asia Minor and Greece. While the debate nominally pitted Paul (and Peter) against St. James, who was viewed as a model of Jewish piety and the head of the Jerusalem community since the death of Stephen, Luke’s text indicates that it was representatives of the “party of the Pharisees,” zealous Messianic Jews, who precipitated the confrontation. At issue was not circumcision (which it had already been agreed was not required of Gentile converts), but the extent to which the Jewish purity laws must be observed by believers such that there was but one Christian community. As Charles Gore put it:       

The idea of two churches, or two eucharists, one for Jews and the other for Gentiles, is decisively rejected [at Jerusalem]. The unity of the Body of Christ must be a closer unity than that of mere federation. (Gore 359)

Fundamentally at issue among scholars is what the decree issued by the Council actually prescribed, a subject on which commentators are divided. Fahy calls it a letter “of brothers to brothers, not of apostles to their Christian subjects.” (Fahy 255) It reflected the unanimity with which the decision was reached and the fact that it was James who set the seal of approval indicates that Jerusalem and Antioch were in broad agreement. Ostensibly it gave support to the idea that Gentiles were obliged to observe only the moral law, abstaining from such things as fornication (unchastity) and murder (blood), but a closer reading suggests that it was intended to direct the Gentile believer to avoid any practice that might, however indirectly, connect them with pagan ceremonial, such as the banquets that frequently followed temple sacrifices. Furthermore, the observance of kosher practices (avoiding meat from which the blood had not been removed) constituted an effort to ensure that table fellowship between Gentile Christians and strict Jewish Christians could still achieved, by removing any cause for unease on the part of the latter, as Paul urged in First Corinthians 8:13. It was not intended by this injunction that a Christian who did consume such meat rendered his faith of no account.

There is much that can be said about the contemporary implications of Acts 15, but for now I will merely draw your attention to Doug Coleman’s 2014 article on the Insider Movement. Coleman offers the following understanding of how attempts to contextualize Christianity for other faiths have been shaped by this particular reading of Acts 15:

In other words, just as early Gentile believers were not required to align themselves with Judaism, Insider believers, while true disciples of Jesus, are not required to align themselves with what they consider to be a “godless Western institution called ‘Christianity,’ where (from a Muslim perspective) homosexuals enter the clergy, immodest women come to worship in scantily clad summer dresses, and people put the Word of God on the floor right next to their dirty shoes.” They can remain within their socio-religious communities (Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, etc.) as faithful followers of Jesus, although they will need to modify or reject certain elements of them. This remaining may look very different from place to place and person to person, but it can potentially include such things as continuing to participate in mosque worship, continuing to affirm Mohammad as a prophet in various ways, and ongoing affirmation and use of the Qur’an (again, in various ways). (Coleman n.p.)

As Coleman points out, such a reading of the text, while drawing upon the Council of Jerusalem’s emphasis on the manifestation of the gifts of the Spirit among the Gentiles, ignores the prescriptions on idolatry that were fundamental to the Council’s injunctions. While it is true that Paul himself continued to participate in Temple worship (as did many Jewish Christians), it is rather more difficult to avoid viewing the above conclusions as a form of syncretism, in which the uniqueness of the Christian message tends to be obscured. It does point, however, to the richness of the New Testament texts and the importance of their contribution to the present shape of Christian doctrine.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

D. Coleman, ‘The Jerusalem Council and the Insider Movement Paradigm.’ Global Missiology 1:12 (2014):

J. Dunn, ‘The Incident at Antioch (Gal 2: 11-18).’ Journal for the Study of the New Testament 18 (1983): 3-57.

T. Fahy, ‘The Council of Jerusalem.’ Irish Theological Quarterly 30:3 (1963): 232-261.

C. Gore et al, A New Commentary on Holy Scripture: Vol. 2, The New Testament (London: SPCK, 1958, orig. pub. 1928).

M. Green, Evangelism in the Early Church (Cambridge: William B. Eerdmans, 2003; orig. pub. 1970).

J. J. Scott, ‘The Church's Progress to the Council of Jerusalem according to the Book of Acts.’ Bulletin for Biblical Research 7 (1997): 205-224.