Acts 15 - Introduction

Excursus A.

On the Great Question which was decided by the First Church Council.

In the first years which succeeded their Master's ascension, the disciples evidently, while following out the line of conduct traced for them by their Divine Friend and Teacher, remained in all outward observances strict Jews . During these early years there was no sign in the growing Church of Jerusalem and Palestine that the followers of Jesus of Nazareth would ever be different from the rest of the widely-scattered chosen people, save that the Nazarene Jew would hold that Messiah had appeared, and had shown Himself to His people. No bar, indeed, existed between the outer Gentile world and the little Church of Jesus. Any one might enter the fold of Christ and join the brotherhood which called on the Crucified, but in that case the converted one must become a Jew.

The Samaritans converted by the preaching of Philip the Ethiopian treasurer, and Cornelius the centurion, are hardly exceptions to what seems to have been the early rule of the believers in Jesus. These had been connected more or less closely with Judaism before their admission into the brotherhood, and no doubt, after their conversion to the faith of Christ, more closely cemented their connection with the Hebrew race, its ritual, and its hopes.

But the rise of the Church of Antioch, and the successful missionary efforts of Barnabas and Paul in Asia Minor, brought the older disciples the men who had been with Jesus during His early life face to face with great questions which were stirred up by this rapid and (apparently by them) undreamed-of increase in the number of foreign believers in Jesus.

Was the great Gentile world, then beginning to listen to their Divine Master's voice, to be told that before they might join the new society which Jesus had founded, they must submit to the laws and ordinances of the Hebrew race, to rites and customs which would effectually separate them for ever from the rest of the world? Or, in other words, must the Gentiles be told if they would become Christians they must first become Jews? The Church of Antioch and their famous missionary teachers, Barnabas and Paul, had already practically answered the question when they offered the privileges of the brotherhood to all who chose to take upon them the easy yoke and light burden of Jesus Christ. Their offer they hampered with no conditions of ceremonial, no obligation of virtual separation from the peoples around; any one, Greek, Roman, or Asiatic, if he would promise to live the pure, noble life Christ taught, might become a Christian without becoming at the same time a Jew.

But there were men in the Jerusalem Church, men dwelling under the shadow of the temple, in daily contact with the rigid and exclusive Pharisee party, not improbably Pharisees themselves still, though believers on Jesus, to whom this brotherhood with Gentiles, uncircumcised and untaught in the stern, exclusive Mosaic ritual, was a thought abhorrent and unbearable. Some such fanatic spirits, we read in chap. 15 ver.1 of the Acts (Acts 15:1), went down most probably uncommissioned by the apostles to Antioch, to endeavour to force a stricter practice on the daring and innovating church of the great Syrian city.

This interference of the mother Church of Christianity with the powerful and energetic Gentile Church of Antioch, called for prompt and immediate action on the part of those who presided over the Syrian communities. The question was indeed a vital one; then or never must it be decided, was Christianity to be preached to all peoples as a world religion, or was belief in Jesus to be merely a tenet of a Pharisee sect of the great Jewish nation? No thought of a schism seems to have for an instant clouded the minds of the Antioch leaders. They felt the deep importance of the crisis. They would seek out of themselves the honoured fathers of the Jerusalem Church; would tell them of the mighty victories already won in their common Masters name; would describe to them the vast fields opening out before them, already white for harvest; and then would appeal to their great, loving hearts, if such a work ought to be marred, or at least narrowed, by the rigid enforcement of any stern Hebrew rites and laws. This mission the object of which was lovingly to conciliate the Jewish Christian leaders was entrusted by the Antioch brotherhood to the generous Barnabas and the enthusiastic Paul.

It was completely successful. The story of Paul's work at Antioch and Iconium, in Lystra and Derbe, told with the warm, bright eloquence of the noble and devoted missionary, at once won over to what we may term the Gentile side the old companions of the Lord, Peter and James and John, the pillars of the mother Church. A spirit of loving conciliation brooded over this first and chiefest of Church Councils. Paul and Barnabas gladly offered for the Gentiles to give up practices specially repugnant in the eyes of a pious Jew, while Peter and the apostles for ever sanctioned the admission of stranger peoples into the brotherhood of Christians, without requiring from the peoples so admitted any submission to Jewish rites or obedience to Jewish ceremonial laws.

But while the leaders of the Jerusalem community took a broad and generous view of this vital question, upon which the future of Christianity depended, there were others in the same Hebrew Church who clung to the old distinctions, and persisted in regarding their Gentile fellow-believers as unclean. These, and the men who thought with them, were those relentless Judaizing antagonists who embittered Paul's long and successful career. With scarcely an exception, the letters of the great missionary all refer, in terms more or less anxious, to this sleepless, intense hostility on the part of a Jewish section of Christians. After the death of Paul, for some time we have some difficulty in exactly defining the relations between the Gentile and Jewish parties in the Christian Church. The fall of Jerusalem, however, shortly after the apostle's martyrdom, and the destruction of the temple, no doubt was a fatal blow to the Judaizing section of the Christian communities in all countries. The reprisals which closed the bloody episode of the rebellion of Barcochba, ‘the son of the star,' in Palestine some sixty-three years after the fall of the city, when Rome stamped out the remains of Judaism with crushing seventy, completed the ruin of the Jewish Christian Church. The practice of circumcision, the observance of the Sabbath, and other marks of Judaism were visited with extreme penalties. Henceforth their numbers were so diminished, and their influence in consequence so weakened, that their existence could no longer be deemed a serious danger to the Christian Gentile Church. Still, with that strange tenacity which characterizes the Hebrew race, the broken and ruined sect held together, and we can trace its life as far as the fifth century of our era. They were divided into two sects. The smaller, known as Nazarenes, while clinging to the old Mosaic law with a passionate love, were for the most part orthodox in their creed, and held communion with Catholic Christians. These for the most part dwelt in Palestine or the neighbouring countries. The larger and most important sect were usually termed Ebionites, and were not confined to Palestine, but were to be found in Rome and in most of the great cities where Jews lived and traded.

These Judaizing Christians rigidly observed the ordinances of Moses, and refused to acknowledge as brethren any who declined strictly to conform to the old Jewish law. These naturally rejected as false and heretical the writings of St. Paul, whose memory they held in abhorrence; as was to be expected in these unhappy descendants of the first rebels in the Christian camp, they gradually changed the fundamental articles of faith delivered to the Church by those men whom the Lord Himself had taught. We read even how these Ebionite Christians held the Redeemer of the world to be a mere man, the son of Joseph and Mary.

These heretics formed a powerful and numerous party in the second and third centuries of our era. In the dim twilight of these early days, we constantly catch sight of these enemies, ever bitter and hostile to the orthodox Christians; we even in the so-called Clementine writings the Homilies and Recognitions possess fragments of their literature.

Towards the close of the fourth century, though still numerous in many of the great cities of the empire, the number of the Ebionites was gradually diminishing; and after the first half of the fifth century, the heresy, which we first read of in the fifteenth chapter of the ‘Acts,' threatening the very existence of the Gentile Church of Antioch, seems to have died out.

Bishop Lightfoot, in the dissertation which closes his commentary on the Galatian Epistle, well sums up the lesson which Christians of our time may learn from this history of the first ages of the gospel. ‘We may well take courage,' he writes, ‘from the study. However great may be the theological differences and religious animosities of our own time, they are far surpassed in magnitude by the distractions of an age which, closing our eyes to facts, we are apt to invest with an ideal excellence. In the early Church was fulfilled, in its inward dissensions no less than in its outward sufferings, the Master's sad warning, that He came not to send peace on earth, but a sword.'

Excursus B.

The Members who composed the Council.

The Council was probably of a much more representative character than has been usually supposed, or than appears from the brief notice of Acts 15. It was more than a mere meeting of certain chosen delegates from two churches, Jerusalem and Antioch, presided over by two or more of the older apostles. The Church of Antioch, in the persons of Paul and Barnabas, represented the thoughts and feelings of far distant Gentile churches; for many of those congregations gathered together in the centre of Asia Minor must have been mainly composed of Heathen, not of Jewish element. The Church of Jerusalem, again, represented the thoughts and feelings not merely of the Palestine Jews, but of the Jews scattered over the whole known world. The Hebrew Christians of Jerusalem and of the Holy Land were only a portion of that community of believers which made up the Jerusalem Church. From the statement of Acts 6, we learn that each of the great foreign Jewish colonies possessed a synagogue at Jerusalem. No doubt many a foreign Jew was drawn by motives of religious attachment to settle in the famous historical centre of this race, so that a large colony of strangers found a permanent home in the neighbourhood of the Jerusalem Temple. This colony of foreign Jews was made up and constantly recruited from world-renowned marts like Alexandria or Rome, from famous cities like Cyrene and Tarsus; and at certain seasons, at the Passover, for instance, these colonies of foreign Jews at Jerusalem were largely increased. These strangers of the people, when they visited the land and home of their fathers, found a welcome in the various foreign synagogues established in Jerusalem, where they heard the law read and expounded in the language or dialects familiar to them, and even listened to Rabbis trained in the peculiar school of teaching to which they were attached. From these varied centres of Jewish thought, the Nazarene, or as it was subsequently called the Christian, brotherhood was of course largely recruited.

Among the ‘elders' assembled that day with the apostles, we can well imagine representatives of each peculiar rabbinic school, men who, even after their conversion to Christianity, still ordered their lives in strict conformity to the traditions of the school to which they formerly belonged. There were some, doubtless, of that rigid and exclusive Pharisee sect which declared glass vessels and the very soil of Gentile lands unclean; these set their faces not merely against encouraging proselytes from the Gentile people, but even declined all social intercourse with the hated stranger. There were others who must have once listened to the teaching of Philo of Alexandria, the leader of Jewish thought in that great Egyptian city, the home of so many of the chosen people. These must have heard a far broader interpretation of the law and the prophets than their Pharisee brethren in the Holy Land were accustomed to receive from the famous Palestine teachers; and the thought of a great Gentile Church sharing the same privileges as they enjoyed, could hardly have been a strange idea to men who had heard a teaching which attempted ‘to make their sacred records of the remote past of the patriarchal age speak the thoughts of the schools of Greece.'

Some of the ‘elders' who assisted at that Council must have been pupils in the school of that famous Hillel who taught his disciples to love and to bring all men into communion with the law, a law which, he explained, was comprehended in a generous, all-embracing love.

An assembly thus composed of representatives of the principal Jewish schools then existing in Palestine and in foreign countries, as well as of the new Gentile communities of Antioch and of Asia Minor, may well be termed a ‘General Council.' Such an assembly only could have put out authoritatively, decrees at once so practical and conciliatory, and at the same time acceptable to all except those bigoted and fanatical Jews who wished to exclude every Gentile soul from all religious privileges in this life, and from all share of blessedness in the life to come.

Excursus C.

The Canons of the Council.

The Canons of the first Christian Council must always command a peculiar and especial interest. This Council was held at Jerusalem, about the year 50 of our era. Christianity had already spread to a wide extent among the Gentile peoples; the great missionary who had mainly accomplished this work was St. Paul of Tarsus. A bitter opposition on the part of the Jews had sprung up in Antioch and in other centres against his teaching and his practice. To defend himself, his teaching and his acts, and to prevent, if possible, anything like a schism among the followers of Jesus of Nazareth, St. Paul came to Jerusalem and there publicly met the original teachers, the universally-acknowledged ‘pillars' of Christianity. Among the most prominent were St. Peter, St. James, the Lord's brother, and St. John.

The rough abstract of the decision which these venerable elders of our faith came to on this memorable occasion, has excited much controversy. The Gentiles who had turned unto God were not to be troubled with any Jewish obligations; they were to be received into the Christian brotherhood on the condition simply of abstaining from four practices peculiarly abhorrent to the Jewish mind.

Now, it is the broad gulf which separates one of these four (fornication) from the other three which constitutes, in great measure, the difficulty we speak of. Why, it is asked, is this deadly sin joined to and apparently placed on the same platform with three comparatively indifferent acts? On consideration, it appears that two great points were involved in these simple canons- (1) The relations of the Gentile converts to the great mass of the Heathen peoples around them; (2) The relations of these same converts to the Jewish Christian community in whose society in many places they would be constantly thrown. The four commands, we shall see, fall naturally into two groups. The first, involving the relation of Christians to the heathen world, contains the warning against pollutions of idols and fornication. The second has exclusively in view the necessary connection between Gentile and Jewish converts, and selects from the elaborate system of Hebrew ordinances the two which would most nearly affect all intercourse between these two classes of Christian converts.

In the first group, ‘the pollution of idols' involved far more than the mere eating of meats offered in an idol temple. The inspired framers of these primitive decrees well knew that ‘an idol was nothing in the world, and that there was none other God but one;' but they knew, too, that the idol-worship of the first century of our era, the age in which they lived, poisoned the whole life of society in Greece, in Italy, in the East. One who certainly would paint no over-coloured picture of the degradation of Pagan life well writes: [1] ‘The voluptuous worship of Aphrodite gave a kind of religious sanction to their (Courtesans') profession. Courtesans were the priestesses in her temples, and those of Corinth were believed by their prayers to have averted calamities from their city. Prostitution is said to have entered into the religious rites of Babylon, Byblos, Cyprus, and Corinth; and these, as well as Miletus, Tenedos, Lesbos, and Abydos, became famous for their schools of vice which grew up under the shadow of the temples.' Another writer tells us: [2] ‘If we wish to realize the appearance and reality of the complicated heathenism of the first Christian century, we must endeavour to imagine the scene of the “Daphne” suburb of Antioch, with its fountains and groves of bay trees, its bright buildings, its crowds of licentious votaries, its statue of Apollo, where under the climate of Syria and the wealthy patronage of Rome all that was beautiful in nature and art had created a sanctuary for a perpetual festival of vice.' To the warning respecting ‘pollutions of idols,' the council added a command to abstain from fornication, a deadly group of sins closely associated with much of the current idol-worship of the day; and, indeed, it was time to call the attention of mankind to the imperative duty of gravely renouncing those sins which the popular religion of the day had not only condoned, but had even glorified with the halo of a sacred sanction.

[1] Lecky, Hist, of European Morals, chap. 5.

[2] Conybeare and Howson, St. Paul, chap. 4.

The second group contains what may be termed ceremonial charges to abstain from the flesh of animals which had been strangled (that is, whose blood was not poured forth), and generally from the eating of blood. Neglect of this simple injunction in a state of society where Jewish and Gentile converts were so frequently and so intimately thrown together, would have been a fruitful source of bitter hate and recrimination, for the pious Jew from time immemorial had been trained to regard blood as a sacred thing. The symbolic holiness of blood was taught to Noah the patriarch; it was repeated with strange persistence among the desert laws to Moses; it is reiterated in Deuteronomy. The perpetually-recurring sacrifices ever kept alive in the homes of Israel the same solemn mysterious truth, that it was ‘the blood that maketh an atonement for the soul' (Leviticus 17:11). This strange Hebrew reverence for blood, the command reiterated so often in the law, [1] that no blood be mixed with their food, bore witness to the deep-seated belief in the heart of Israel, that in some mysterious way blood was the agent of the purification of all things, ‘that all things were to be purged with blood; that without shedding of blood there was no remission'(Hebrews 9:22). Nor could this people be expected to see as yet, that their holiest type, their most sacred symbol, was for ever done away with, now that men and angels had seen poured out once and for ever THE BLOOD of the sinless Sufferer.

[1] Genesis 9:4; Leviticus 17:13-14; Deuteronomy 12:16; Deuteronomy 12:23.

It is exceedingly doubtful if these primitive Canons were in any way founded on the so-called seven precepts of Noah; for of the four articles in which the decisions of the Council were embodied, only one, ‘the eating of the blood,' is directly named in these seven precepts. Neither is it probable that the apostles and elders proposed to convert the Gentile converts into ‘proselytes of the gate,' men who, while remaining uncircumcised, became worshippers of the one true God, and observed the seven precepts of Noah which forbade blasphemy, idolatry, murder, incest, theft, disobedience to magistrates, and eating flesh with the blood in it, for the very existence of this class of ‘proselytes of the gate' in the time of the apostles rests on doubtful authority. The four articles seem rather to have been dictated by the needs of the times. How could the Gentile be received into the brotherhood of Christ with the least possible disturbance of his everyday life in the busy world, with the least possible shock to the prejudices of those Jews with whom he would come in contact, due regard being had, on the one hand, to the pure life commanded by Jesus, and, on the other, to that love and mutual forbearance which are the spirit of Christianity? The Council of Jerusalem answers these questions by the four commands they sent out to all Gentile converts. Two of these charges tell them, if they would be Christians, then they must separate themselves from the impure licence of the Pagan life. The other two forbid them rudely to shock the consciences of their fellow-believers, the redeemed of Israel.

The spirit of these first decrees of the Christian Church, which enjoined purity of life, brotherly forbearance and love, on its earliest disciples, was meant to be lasting; but the decrees themselves were intended only to be in force while the causes

which called them forth endured. As Christianity spread and its doctrines became generally known, the old Pagan life withered away, its gods became universally discredited, its temples were deserted without the aid of laws and decrees forbidding men to frequent their polluted courts; while those Jews who welcomed the knowledge of Christ became merged in the new society, and as years passed on, gradually came to see that all symbols of the great sacrifice were useless, and might be laid aside, now that the great sacrifice itself had been offered. [1]

[1] The Catholic Church, till nearly the time of St. Augustine, complying with the decree of this first Council, abstained from eating blood; but, in the days of St. Augustine, this practice seems to have ceased altogether in the African Church (see contra Manich xxxii. 13, quoted by Meyer). Strict rules on this point were enacted in the Council of Gangra, and again in the Council of Trullo. It is also strictly prohibited in the so-called Apostolic Canons (see Bingham, Chr. Ant. xvii. 5)