The Council of Jerusalem
The Council of Jerusalem is the meeting of the apostles and elders described in Acts 15, held (by the Orthodox Church in America's reckoning) about AD 49, to decide whether non-Jewish believers had to be circumcised and keep the Law of Moses; the Orthodox Church in America calls it the prototype of all later Church councils.
For Inquirers
Picture the very first Christians. Jesus was a Jew, His twelve apostles were Jews, and so were the first thousands who believed in Him. They kept the Sabbath, ate according to God's commandments, and circumcised their sons, because God Himself had given them those laws. Then something nobody had planned began to happen: people who were not Jewish, men and women of the surrounding nations, heard the good news and believed it too. The question could not be put off. Did these newcomers have to become Jews first, taking on the whole way of life of Moses, before they could belong to Christ?
It sounds like a small matter of customs until you remember what was at stake for everyone in the room. For the Jewish believers, the Law was a gift they loved. For the newcomers, it was a heavy, foreign load laid on people who had simply trusted Christ. So the leaders of the Church came together in Jerusalem and did something simple and hard: they listened. They heard from the men who had watched God give His Spirit to people outside Israel with no ceremony at all, and they went back to the Scriptures to see what God had said about the nations. Their answer was that no one should lay that burden on the newcomers, and that they should ask only a few things of them: stay away from food offered to idols, from sexual immorality, from blood, and from the meat of strangled animals. That list can seem odd to us, and working out why it was chosen is part of the story.
What they wrote in their letter is as memorable as what they decided: "it seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us." They did not claim to have thought up a solution. They said the Spirit and the gathered Church had come to one mind together, and later councils pointed back to the way this meeting went about its work: together, slowly, and under God.
Overview
- The Council of Jerusalem was a meeting of the apostles and elders in Jerusalem, recorded in Acts 15, that decided what the Church should require of non-Jewish converts to Christ.
- It was occasioned by teachers who came to Antioch from Judea and told the Gentile believers they could not be saved unless they were circumcised according to Moses (Acts 15.1).
- St. Peter, Barnabas and St. Paul, and St. James the Just spoke, and the assembly agreed that Gentile believers would be freed from the Law and asked only to abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols, from blood, from what is strangled, and from sexual immorality (Acts 15.28-Acts 15.29).
- The Orthodox Church in America dates the council to about AD 49, and OrthodoxWiki to about 50.[^dates]
- The Orthodox Church in America calls the council the prototype of all later Church councils, and the Second Council of Constantinople cites the apostles' example as the model for its own way of proceeding.[^oca-proto][^const2]
Summary
The Church was born inside Israel: Jesus and His apostles were Jews, and the first believers lived as Jews. Acts 10 and Acts 11 had already shown that this could not be the whole story, when God gave the Holy Spirit to the household of the centurion Cornelius before anyone had asked him to be circumcised. The question became pressing when Paul and Barnabas began to welcome non-Jews in Antioch and the cities of Asia Minor, and men arrived from Judea telling those converts that they could not be saved unless they were circumcised (Acts 15.1). The matter was carried to Jerusalem, where the apostles and elders met, Peter recalled what God had done at Cornelius' house, Barnabas and Paul reported the signs God had worked among the nations, and James showed that the prophet Amos had spoken of the very thing. The assembly sent a letter to the Gentile believers of Antioch, Syria, and Cilicia saying that no further burden would be laid on them beyond four necessary things. The letter did not close every question. Paul's letter to the Galatians describes a Jerusalem visit that Chrysostom and the Jewish Annotated New Testament both read as the same occasion, though Acts and Galatians tell it differently; the four prohibitions were read in several ways by the Fathers; and the later Church kept the abstention from blood and strangled meat in some places and let it lapse in others. What the council left the Church was a method and a verdict. The question was settled by apostles and elders together with the whole assembly, in a letter that says "it seemed good to the Holy Spirit, and to us" (Acts 15.28), and it was settled in favor of the Gentiles' freedom from the Law of Moses as a condition for salvation. The Second Council of Constantinople later cited the apostles' example as the model for its own way of proceeding, and the Orthodox Church in America calls the council the prototype of all later councils.
How the quarrel began
Some men "came down from Judea and taught the brothers, 'Unless you are circumcised after the custom of Moses, you can't be saved'"; Paul and Barnabas "had no small discord and discussion with them"; and the church at Antioch appointed the two, with others, to go up to Jerusalem "to the apostles and elders about this question" (Acts 15.1-Acts 15.2).[^acts15] On the road the delegation told the believers of Phoenicia and Samaria of "the conversion of the Gentiles," and "caused great joy to all the brothers" (Acts 15.3). At Jerusalem the delegation was welcomed and gave its report, and then the other side spoke: "some of the sect of the Pharisees who believed rose up, saying, 'It is necessary to circumcise them, and to command them to keep the law of Moses'" (Acts 15.5).
Acts has already shown the Gentiles welcomed into the people of God in chapters 10 and 11 and in the mission of chapters 13 and 14, and now, the Jewish Annotated New Testament says in the note that opens its treatment of the chapter, the church faces the question of whether these believers should observe what the Torah commands for Israel. The same note observes, a little later, that the Pharisees of verse 5 understand believers in Jesus to be Jews, and for that reason think circumcision is owed.[^jant-15] The commentary also notes that Jews trace circumcision to Abraham (Genesis 17.9-14), so the Pharisees in the room could point to the covenant sign itself. Chrysostom, preaching on the opening verses, looks at the men who came down to Antioch and reads their motive differently. He notes that Jerusalem had no Gentile believers to be troubled over, whereas Antioch did, and he diagnoses the visitors as men "yet laboring under this disease of the love of rule, and wishing to have those of the Gentiles attached to them." He also points out how much worse their claim was than a demand for circumcision: they said the Gentiles "cannot even be saved," while the truth was the opposite, "that receiving circumcision they could not be saved."[^chrys-32]
Galatians 2 and Acts 15
Anyone who reads Acts 15 beside Galatians 2.1-10 meets a puzzle at once. Paul writes that after fourteen years he "went up again to Jerusalem with Barnabas, taking Titus also with me," that he went "by revelation," that he laid his gospel before those who were respected "privately," that "not even Titus, who was with me, being a Greek, was compelled to be circumcised," and that James, Cephas, and John "gave to Barnabas and me the right hand of fellowship" (Galatians 2.1-9).[^gal2] The company is much the same as in Acts, with Paul, Barnabas, Peter, and James all present, and the issue is the same, circumcision of Gentiles. But Paul describes no public assembly, no speeches, and no letter, and the only thing he says the leaders asked was that he "remember the poor" (Galatians 2.10). Chrysostom and the Jewish Annotated New Testament both read this passage as Paul's own account of the visit that Acts 15 narrates, and neither offers a different identification.
The Jewish Annotated New Testament's note on Galatians 2.1-10 says that Acts 15 gives a different account of these events, and its note on Acts 15 adds that Luke presents the issue as "easily and amicably" resolved while Paul's letters offer a different picture; it observes that Paul says his journey came by revelation rather than by a committee's appointment, and it remarks that the "great compromise" of the Acts decree is "conspicuously missing" from the list of what the Jerusalem leaders asked of Paul.[^jant-gal] Acts itself gives a different cause for the later parting of Paul and Barnabas: Barnabas wanted to take John called Mark with them, and Paul would not (Acts 15.37-Acts 15.39). The commentary, in its note on those verses, proposes instead that the two disagreed over Jews and Gentiles sharing meals, the dispute Paul recounts at Antioch in Galatians 2.11-14.
Chrysostom takes the two accounts to describe one occasion, though he speaks with caution. In his homily on the end of Acts 15, after the letter has reached Antioch and the messengers have been let go in peace (Acts 15.33), he writes: "On this occasion, I suppose, it was that they received the right hand, as he says himself, They gave to me and Barnabas right hands of fellowship."[^chrys-33] The "I suppose" matters, because he offers the placing as his own judgment, and he puts the handshake at the close of the council's business rather than in its debate.
In his commentary on Galatians Chrysostom explains why Paul went to Jerusalem at all, and why he went privately. Paul knew his gospel was true, so he went for the sake of others: to silence suspicious people who thought the leaders at Jerusalem disagreed with him, and to provide Barnabas and Titus as witnesses "that the Apostles found no discrepancy in his preaching, but confirmed it." Because the believers at Jerusalem would have been offended if the Law were publicly transgressed, Paul conferred with the leaders in private, and Titus' freedom from circumcision stood as proof that the apostles did not condemn Paul's practice. Chrysostom then reads the quarrel at Antioch as the other half of one agreement, and sums it up in a line: "as Paul had yielded to the Apostles at Jerusalem, so in turn they yield to him at Antioch."[^chrys-gal2]
Augustine, writing to Jerome about Peter's conduct at Antioch, weighs both orders. If it came after the council's decree, he says, Paul could still have urged Peter to declare freely a decree that Peter remembered framing with the other apostles at Jerusalem; but he adds that he is "more inclined to think" Peter acted so before the council, and that Peter and Paul were already of one mind on the question.[^aug-82]
The Orthodox Church in America gives "about 49 AD," and OrthodoxWiki says the council took place "around the year 50"; its article on the Church of Jerusalem gives a wider range of about 49-52.[^dates] The Jewish Annotated New Testament adds only that it is not clear from what point Paul's "fourteen years" are to be counted.[^jant-gal]
Peter, Barnabas and Paul, and James
When the apostles and elders had gathered and "much discussion" had passed, Peter rose and began with his own history: "God made a choice among you that by my mouth the nations should hear the word of the Good News and believe" (Acts 15.7). He was recalling Cornelius. In his vision of the sheet of animals a voice had told him, "What God has cleansed, you must not call unclean" (Acts 10.15), and when he preached in the centurion's house "the Holy Spirit fell on all those who heard the word" (Acts 10.44); asked by the believers in Jerusalem why he had eaten with the uncircumcised, he answered, "If then God gave to them the same gift as us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I, that I could withstand God?" (Acts 11.17).[^acts1011] In the council he draws the same conclusion in a sentence: "God, who knows the heart, testified about them, giving them the Holy Spirit, just like he did to us. He made no distinction between us and them, cleansing their hearts by faith" (Acts 15.8-Acts 15.9). The Law, he then says, is a "yoke... which neither our fathers nor we were able to bear," and he ends with the sentence that Chrysostom hears as Paul's own doctrine on Peter's lips: "we believe that we are saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus, just as they are" (Acts 15.10-Acts 15.11).
Chrysostom, preaching on the speech, hears a double purpose. Peter speaks in defense of the Gentiles, but he also, Chrysostom says, means to teach the Jewish believers who are listening: "faith only is needed, not works nor circumcision." He notes the care with which Peter handles the matter, aiming his charge at the Law and sparing the Jewish believers who are listening, and he observes that "the same that Paul says at large in the Epistle to the Romans, the same says Peter here."[^chrys-32] The Jewish Annotated New Testament notes the same likeness from outside the Orthodox tradition: Peter argues that the Gentiles received the Spirit, that God makes no distinction, that the law is an unreasonable burden, and that salvation is by grace, all arguments the note calls "familiar from Paul."[^jant-15]
Then "all the multitude kept silence, and they listened to Barnabas and Paul reporting what signs and wonders God had done among the nations through them" (Acts 15.12). Chrysostom thinks the order significant. After Peter, Paul speaks and no one silences him, and James waits patiently; "no word speaks John here, no word the other Apostles, but held their peace, for James was invested with the chief rule, and think it no hardship."[^chrys-33] James, the Lord's brother and leader of the Jerusalem church (St. James the Just), then builds his case. Chrysostom's comment is that "This (James) was bishop, as they say, and therefore he speaks last," and that his argument was drawn from the prophets, "both new and old," because he had no deeds of his own among the Gentiles to report as Peter and Paul had.[^chrys-33]
James begins with Peter, whom he calls by his Semitic name, Simeon, as the Jewish Annotated New Testament notes.[^jant-15] In the World English Bible he says: "Simeon has reported how God first visited the nations to take out of them a people for his name" (Acts 15.14). He then lays down a prophecy. In the World English Bible, Acts 15.16-17 reads: "After these things I will return. I will again build the tabernacle of David, which has fallen. I will again build its ruins. I will set it up that the rest of men may seek after the Lord: all the Gentiles who are called by my name, says the Lord, who does all these things." The prophet is Amos, and the reading is that of the Greek Old Testament. Brenton's Septuagint of Amos 9.11-12 reads: "In that day I will raise up the tabernacle of David that is fallen, and will rebuild the ruins of it, and will set up the parts thereof that have been broken down, and will build it up as in the ancient days: that the remnant of men, and all the Gentiles upon whom my name is called, may earnestly seek me, saith the Lord who does all these things."[^amos] Acts has compressed the opening, putting "After these things I will return" for "In that day," dropping the clause about the ancient days, and writing "seek after the Lord" where Brenton has "seek me," but the part on which James builds his case stands in both: the remnant of men, and all the Gentiles on whom the Lord's name is called, will seek him.
The two forms of the verse say different things. The Jewish Annotated New Testament's note on Acts 15.16-18 says that the Hebrew version speaks of Israel's possessing other nations, whereas the Septuagint, which James quotes in Luke's account, refers to God's restoration of all peoples, Jews and Gentiles; and Leonard Greenspoon's essay on the Septuagint in the same volume says that where the Hebrew text reads that they "may possess the remnant of Edom," the wording of Acts agrees with the Greek.[^jant-lxx] Brenton's Septuagint preserves the Greek form of the prophecy that Luke has James use. Chrysostom reads the "tabernacle of David" in terms of Christ's kingdom now standing in all the world, and he draws from Amos that the rebuilding existed for the sake of the nations: "of the building of the city the cause is, the calling of the Gentiles."[^chrys-33]
The decree
James' sentence follows directly: "my judgment is that we don't trouble those from among the Gentiles who turn to God, but that we write to them that they abstain from the pollution of idols, from sexual immorality, from what is strangled, and from blood. For Moses from generations of old has in every city those who preach him, being read in the synagogues every Sabbath" (Acts 15.19-Acts 15.21). The assembly then chose Judas called Barsabbas and Silas to carry the letter to Antioch with Paul and Barnabas. The letter says that those who had troubled the Gentiles with the demand for circumcision had gone out "to whom we gave no commandment," and that "it seemed good to the Holy Spirit, and to us, to lay no greater burden on you than these necessary things: that you abstain from things sacrificed to idols, from blood, from things strangled, and from sexual immorality, from which if you keep yourselves, it will be well with you. Farewell" (Acts 15.24; Acts 15.28-Acts 15.29).[^acts15]
The requirements came out of the Law, but James does not say that they were required by the Law, and the reason, in Chrysostom's account, is that the council wants to honor Moses without binding the nations to him. James appears to set Moses up as the authority for his own people, and "by this very thing he leads away the Gentiles from him." The whole device is gathered into one line: "while he seems to preserve the Law by adopting these rules from it, he unbinds it by taking only these." Two of the four were no novelty to the Gentiles, since the apostles had often pressed idolatry and fornication on them already, and Chrysostom adds that the observances, "although relating to the body, were necessary to be observed, because (these things) caused great evils."[^chrys-33]
What the four prohibitions are
The Jewish Annotated New Testament's note on Acts 15.20 proposes, while admitting it is not certain, that the four relate to participation in pagan worship: things polluted by idols are presumably food sacrificed to idols, which Paul discusses in 1 Corinthians 8 and 10; fornication is improper sexual activity; "strangled" is possibly a requirement that meat come only from animals slaughtered so that the blood is drained, which the note ties to Leviticus 7.24, 17.15, and Deuteronomy 14.21; and blood points to Leviticus 7 and 17 and Deuteronomy 12, though the note allows that it may mean murder.[^jant-decree] David Freidenreich, in the commentary's essay on food, adds that Jews of the Second Temple period regarded eating food offered to idols as tantamount to idolatrous worship, which fits the connection with pagan worship for the first item. Blood is different in his account, since the passages he cites (Genesis 9.3-6, Leviticus 17.10-12, Ezekiel 33.25-26) compare consumption of blood to murder and declare that all people, or all in the covenant community, must abstain. The decree thus exempts Gentile believers from most Jewish dietary laws but keeps two basic taboos. He also writes that early Christian authorities "uniformly interpret the decree literally," a remark that follows his mention of writers such as the Letter of Barnabas who treated the Torah's food laws as allegory; the next paragraph shows that the Fathers were not uniform about what "blood" meant, so his remark is best taken to say that they treated the decree as a real rule and not as an allegory.[^freid] The Torah itself gives a ground for the blood prohibition that reaches beyond Israel. In Brenton's Genesis the prohibition comes after the flood, "But flesh with blood of life ye shall not eat," and in Leviticus the same prohibition covers "the stranger that abides among you" (Genesis 9.4; Leviticus 17.12). The entries on Book of Leviticus and Blood treat the blood laws themselves.
The Fathers divide on what "blood" means, and the division is the qualification that Freidenreich's remark needs. Chrysostom, after quoting the final form of the decree, says of the pair "from things strangled, and from blood": "Here it prohibits murder."[^chrys-33] Tertullian, arguing in his work on modesty that the apostles' letter ranks adultery and fornication between idolatry and murder, quotes the decree with three items, sacrifices, fornications, and blood, and concludes: "for the interdict upon blood we shall understand to be (an interdict) much more upon human blood."[^tert-mod] Augustine, answering the Manichaean Faustus, knows both readings: it is "thought by many" that the apostles meant flesh from which the blood has not been poured out, a rule that goes back to Noah after the deluge, while others take abstaining from blood to mean not being polluted with the crime of murder, and he judges that the question need not be settled.[^aug-faust] The simplest literal reading is also in the record: Cyril of Jerusalem, instructing those preparing for baptism, appeals to the letter of the apostles and elders and to "James the bishop of this Church," and warns against men who, like dogs, "lap up blood... and greedily devour things strangled."[^cyril4]
Is the decree the Noachide laws?
It is natural to ask whether the four prohibitions are the Noachide laws, the minimal obligations that rabbinic tradition places on non-Jews. The Jewish Annotated New Testament speaks of those laws in at least three places, and each says something different.
In the essay "The Law," Jonathan Klawans says the rabbis developed a list of seven Noachide laws, the minimal legal obligations on Gentiles, building on Genesis 9.1-17 and possibly on Jubilees 7.20; he gives the Talmudic version in b. Sanhedrin 56a (cursing God, idolatry, sexual immorality, bloodshed, robbery, eating a limb off a living animal, and the duty to establish courts), and he relates the idea to Paul's remark in Romans 2.14 about Gentiles who "do instinctively what the law requires." The essay does not mention the apostolic decree.[^klawans] Gary Gilbert, in his notes on Acts 15.20, does set the two side by side. After explaining the four terms, he says that Jewish texts set forth similar requirements for righteous Gentiles and cites Jubilees 7.20; he then lists the Noachide laws as he finds them in the Tosefta, the Talmud, and Genesis Rabbah (idolatry, blasphemy, murder, incest, stealing, eating flesh from a living creature, and justice in an orderly legal system), and cross-refers to Klawans' essay.[^jant-decree] And Michael Fagenblat, in an essay on the concept of the neighbor, mentions the Noahide laws as binding on all people in the rabbis' view and sets them beside Acts 15.29 with a bare "cf."[^fagenblat] Gilbert calls the requirements "similar," which is less than identical. The overlap is real: idolatry, sexual immorality, and bloodshed appear both in the decree and in Klawans' Talmudic list, and that overlap is what makes the comparison attractive. The lists also differ, since the decree has "strangled" while the Noachide list has theft, courts, and blasphemy. Gilbert's own proposal about the four, which he calls not certain, is that they relate to pagan worship, a connection Freidenreich also draws for food offered to idols, though he ties blood to murder and to the Torah's prohibitions. None of the three says that James or the council adopted the Noachide laws, and none says that the apostles knew the rabbinic list in the form given.
Two Christian writers reach for another connection, one that runs back before Moses without the rabbinic scheme. The Apostolic Constitutions, a church-order compilation and not the work of a single Father, in a long retelling of the council that puts the account in the apostles' own mouths, have James propose the abstentions, "which laws were given to the ancients who lived before the law, under the law of nature, Enos, Enoch, Noah, Melchizedek, Job, and if there be any other of the same sort."[^ac-vi12] Augustine, in the passage already seen, ties the blood rule to what was "enjoined in ancient times upon Noah himself after the deluge," and finds in the ark a picture of the Church of all nations.[^aug-faust] Both see in the decree a line that runs back before the Law of Moses: Augustine names Noah, and the Constitutions list Noah among several who lived under the law of nature. Neither passage mentions the rabbinic list.
"It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us"
The letter's central sentence is "it seemed good to the Holy Spirit, and to us." Chrysostom's comment on Acts 15.28 is a small lesson on how apostles speak: they name the Spirit first and themselves second, "not making themselves equal (to Him)—they are not so mad." The Spirit is named so that the Gentiles will not take the decree for a merely human arrangement, and "and to us" is added to show the Gentiles that the Jewish apostles themselves admit them, though circumcised. The assembly has also been careful about the manner of the decree, Chrysostom adds: they choose men of their own to carry it, they praise Paul and Barnabas in the letter, and they act, he says, "to show that they do not act despotically."[^chrys-33]
The Second Council of Constantinople, writing in its sentence about its own manner of proceeding, points to the apostles: although the grace of the Spirit abounded in each one so that none needed another's counsel, "yet they were not willing to define on the question then raised touching the circumcision of the Gentiles, until being gathered together they had confirmed their own several sayings by the testimony of the divine Scriptures"; the fathers of the four earlier councils, it says, have followed "the example of the ancients" in settling heresies by common discussion.[^const2] The Orthodox Church in America calls the council "the prototype of all subsequent Church councils," and the Orthodox Study Bible heads the letter "The Decree: Early Canon Law."[^oca-proto][^osb] OrthodoxWiki says the gathering was "exceptional," a meeting of leaders of the whole Church with no parallel until the First Ecumenical Council at Nicaea in 325.[^ow] The entries on Ecumenical Councils, Nicaea I, and Sacred Tradition follow how that method grew; the entry on Apostolic Succession deals with those who inherit the apostles' authority; and the entry on The Church takes up the nature of the assembly that decided.
The question came to Jerusalem from the church at Antioch; witnesses were heard; a text of the prophets was produced; the decision was written in a letter to the churches affected; and the letter went out with representatives who could repeat the message by word of mouth (Acts 15.27). Luke is careful to say that the decision "seemed good to the apostles and the elders, with the whole assembly" (Acts 15.22). Chrysostom adds a remark on James' manner: Peter "spoke more strongly, but James here more mildly: for thus it behooves one in high authority, to leave what is unpleasant for others to say."[^chrys-33]
What the council did not decide
The decree answers a question about Gentiles. It is silent on a second question, which is whether Jewish Christians were still to keep the Law. The book of Acts shows that they did, for some time. When Paul came to Jerusalem near the end of his ministry, James and the elders said to him: "You see, brother, how many thousands there are among the Jews of those who have believed, and they are all zealous for the law." They had heard that he taught Jews among the Gentiles "to forsake Moses," and they asked him to share the expense of four men under a vow, so that "all will know that there is no truth in the things that they have been informed about you, but that you yourself also walk keeping the law." Then they restated the decree: "concerning the Gentiles who believe, we have written our decision that they should observe no such thing, except that they should keep themselves from food offered to idols, from blood, from strangled things, and from sexual immorality" (Acts 21.20-25), and Paul "took the men, and the next day purified himself and went with them into the temple" (Acts 21.26).
Chrysostom comments that the elders advise and do not command, and that the repetition of the decree is a kind of remonstrance: "As we, say they, commanded them, although we are preachers to the Jews, so do thou, although a preacher to the Gentiles, cooperate with us."[^chrys-46] Augustine takes the scene as a proof that the early church's concern was to avoid two opposite errors. Jewish believers might keep the old rites "as a way of declaring the divine authority of these rites, and their holy use in the prophetic dispensation, and not as a means of obtaining salvation," whereas the false teachers insisted that without them the gospel could not save. In Jerusalem, he writes, the apostles had decreed that no one should compel the Gentiles to adopt Jewish ceremonies, "but had not decreed that no one should then prevent the Jews from living according to their customs."[^aug-82] The Jewish Annotated New Testament reads the scene as one of several in Acts (compare the circumcision of Timothy in Acts 16.3) that defend Paul against the charge of urging Jews to abandon Torah observance.[^jant-decree] Chrysostom is struck by the circumcision of Timothy, "now that the decree is made sure," and sees in it the same wisdom: Paul "circumcised, that he might take away circumcision."[^chrys-34]
Keeping the old rites did not become the Church's rule, as two later writers show. Basil writes, in a letter that is otherwise about marriage law, "whatever the law says, it says to those who are under the law; otherwise we shall be subject to circumcision, the sabbath, abstinence from meats."[^basil] Augustine says of the blood rule itself that "no Christian feels bound to abstain from thrushes or small birds because their blood has not been poured out," because the church had become wholly Gentile and the wall between circumcision and uncircumcision was gone.[^aug-faust] The entries on The Torah and Fulfillment of The Law give the longer account of how the Church holds the Law.
After Jerusalem
Paul and Timothy, as they went through the cities, "delivered the decrees to them to keep which had been ordained by the apostles and elders who were at Jerusalem," and "the assemblies were strengthened in the faith, and increased in number daily" (Acts 16.4-Acts 16.5). Chrysostom marvels at the way it was done: "Do you mark fighting, and by fighting, edification?"[^chrys-34]
In Paul's own letters the matter of food offered to idols appears in a form that does not mention the decree. In 1 Corinthians 8 he says that "we know that no idol is anything in the world" and warns that "this liberty of yours" must not "become a stumbling block to the weak" (1 Corinthians 8.4; 1 Corinthians 8.9); in 1 Corinthians 10 he says that what the Gentiles sacrifice they sacrifice "to demons and not to God," that "you can't both drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons," and also that "whatever is sold in the butcher shop" may be eaten "asking no question for the sake of conscience" (1 Corinthians 10.20-21; 1 Corinthians 10.25). Clement of Alexandria joins the two. Commenting on the permission to buy in the shambles, he says Paul means "all other things buy out of the shambles, asking no questions, with the exception of the things mentioned in the Catholic epistle of all the apostles, with the consent of the Holy Ghost, which is written in the Acts of the Apostles."[^clem] Augustine gives the reason from 1 Corinthians 10 itself: the issue in the food is not its nature but "not to seem to have fellowship with demons."[^aug-faust]
The Revelation to John levels the same pair of charges at the churches of Pergamum and Thyatira. The risen Lord says there are some who "hold the teaching of Balaam, who taught Balak to throw a stumbling block before the children of Israel, to eat things sacrificed to idols, and to commit sexual immorality," and that at Thyatira the church tolerates "your woman Jezebel," who "teaches and seduces my servants to commit sexual immorality and to eat things sacrificed to idols" (Revelation 2.14; Revelation 2.20). The Jewish Annotated New Testament reads "Balaam" and "Jezebel" as pseudonyms for rival prophets who allowed the eating of food offered to idols and loosened sexual restraint, takes the charges to be likely caricatures of the Pauline mission, and cross-refers to Acts 15.29 and 1 Corinthians 7-8; this is a modern critical reading of the Apocalypse.[^rev]
Minucius Felix, answering the charge that Christians drank the blood of infants, says: "so much do we shrink from human blood, that we do not use the blood even of eatable animals in our food."[^minucius] Among the canons attributed to the apostles, the sixty-third reads: "If any bishop, or presbyter, or deacon, or indeed any one of the sacerdotal catalogue, eats flesh with the blood of its life, or that which is torn by beasts, or which died of itself, let him be deprived; for this the law itself has forbidden," with suspension for the laity.[^apcan] The Synod of Gangra, in its second canon, anathematizes anyone who condemns a faithful and devout man for eating meat "which is without blood and has not been offered to idols nor strangled."[^gangra] The historian Socrates uses the decree to answer people who quarrel over holy days while treating fornication as a matter of indifference, and he says that they thereby make "of none effect the decree of the apostles."[^socrates] The Council in Trullo, in its sixty-seventh canon, says that "The divine Scripture commands us to abstain from blood, from things strangled, and from fornication," and deposes a cleric and cuts off a layman who eats the blood of an animal.[^trullo] Augustine's remark that no Christian feels bound by the rule stands beside these canons, and the two sit uneasily together.
How the Orthodox Church reads it
Peter's confession that "we are saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus, just as they are" is, in Chrysostom's hearing, the same doctrine Paul sets out in Romans, and Chrysostom finds in Peter's speech the "seeds" of Paul's saying that neither circumcision nor uncircumcision avails anything, which ties the council to Justification and to St. Paul.[^chrys-32] The Orthodox Study Bible, for its part, introduces Acts as a book of great importance for "its method of resolving controversies" and for the "role of apostles, bishops, priests (elders), and deacons."[^osb]
The Jewish Annotated New Testament observes that Luke presents the controversy as quickly and gently resolved, notes the differences from Galatians, and suggests that the decree's four items concern pagan worship. The Orthodox sources read the same text as the beginning of the Church's conciliar life. Whether the decree is taken as a courtesy for the years when Jew and Gentile still stood side by side, as Augustine takes it, or as a rule of discipline, as the canons take it, the council's lasting act was that the nations were received into the people of God without first becoming Jews, and that this was decided by Peter's witness, James' reading of Amos, and the assent of the whole assembly under the Spirit, the pattern to which the Second Council of Constantinople points back when it describes its own method, and which the Orthodox Church in America calls the prototype of all later councils.
Sources
[^acts15]: Acts 15.1-Acts 15.35 (WEB). [^gal2]: Galatians 2.1-Galatians 2.14 (WEB). [^acts1011]: Acts 10.15, Acts 10.44-Acts 10.47, Acts 11.2-Acts 11.4, Acts 11.15-Acts 11.18 (WEB). [^jant-15]: Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler, eds, The Jewish Annotated New Testament (Oxford: Oxford University Press), notes on Acts 15.1-35 (Gary Gilbert), 227-29. [^jant-gal]: The Jewish Annotated New Testament, note on Galatians 2.1-10 (Shaye J. D. Cohen), 335-36; notes on Acts 15.2 (Gilbert), 228, and on Acts 15.37-39 (Gilbert), 230. [^chrys-32]: John Chrysostom, Homilies on the Acts of the Apostles, Homily 32 (on Acts 15.1-11). [^chrys-33]: John Chrysostom, Homilies on the Acts of the Apostles, Homily 33 (on Acts 15.12-35). [^chrys-34]: John Chrysostom, Homilies on the Acts of the Apostles, Homily 34 (on Acts 16.1-5). [^chrys-46]: John Chrysostom, Homilies on the Acts of the Apostles, Homily 46 (on Acts 21.17-26). [^chrys-gal2]: John Chrysostom, Commentary on Galatians, chapter 2, on Galatians 2.1-14. [^aug-82]: Augustine, Letter 82 (to Jerome), §§8-11. [^aug-faust]: Augustine, Against Faustus 32.13. [^dates]: Orthodox Church in America, "History Answers and Reflections for Discussion"; OrthodoxWiki, "Apostolic Council of Jerusalem" and "Church of Jerusalem." [^oca-proto]: Orthodox Church in America, "The Church" and "History Answers and Reflections for Discussion"; see also Orthodox Church in America, "Acts of the Apostles." [^ow]: OrthodoxWiki, "Apostolic Council of Jerusalem." [^osb]: The Orthodox Study Bible, introduction to Acts and section headings at Acts 15. [^amos]: Acts 15.16-Acts 15.17 (WEB); Amos 9.11-Amos 9.12 (Brenton). [^jant-lxx]: The Jewish Annotated New Testament, note on Acts 15.16-18 (Gilbert), 229; "The Septuagint" (Leonard Greenspoon), 562-63. [^jant-decree]: The Jewish Annotated New Testament, note on Acts 15.20 (Gilbert), 229; note on Acts 15.23-29, 230; note on Acts 21.20-26 and 21.25 (Gilbert), 241; textual notes at Acts 15.17-18, 15.20, 15.24, 15.29, 15.34, 21.25. [^freid]: The Jewish Annotated New Testament, "Food and Table Fellowship" (David M. Freidenreich), 521-23. [^klawans]: The Jewish Annotated New Testament, "The Law" (Jonathan Klawans), 517-18. [^fagenblat]: The Jewish Annotated New Testament, "The Concept of Neighbor in Jewish and Christian Ethics" (Michael Fagenblat), 541-42. [^tert-mod]: Tertullian, On Modesty 12. [^cyril4]: Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lectures 4.28. [^ac-vi12]: Apostolic Constitutions 6.12. [^const2]: Second Council of Constantinople (553), Sentence of the Synod. [^basil]: Basil the Great, Letter 160, §3. [^clem]: Clement of Alexandria, Stromata 4.15. [^rev]: Revelation 2.14, Revelation 2.20 (WEB); The Jewish Annotated New Testament, notes on Revelation 2.14 and 2.20-21, 469-70. [^minucius]: Minucius Felix, Octavius 30. [^apcan]: Apostolic Constitutions 8.47 (Apostolic Canon 63). [^gangra]: Synod of Gangra, canon 2. [^socrates]: Socrates Scholasticus, Church History 5.22. [^trullo]: Council in Trullo (Quinisext Council), canon 67.