For Patrons: Fitting Acts 15 (Jerusalem Council) and Galatians 2 Together

My podcast/video for patrons this week is now available. Patrons are those who donate at least $5 a month to my Patreon.com page, supporting my daily podcast commentaries on Acts, along with the daily videos on the Greek of these same passages. The patron post this week is on the question of how Acts 15 and Galatians 2 fit together.

Jerusalem versus Paul (Acts 15), Part 2

continued from yesterday
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I wanted to give a possible historical reconstruction of the circumcision controversy in the early church.  I'm trying to read between the lines, taking into account the way Acts seems to present things and relying heavily on Paul.

Gentile "God-fearers," men who believed in the God of Israel but did not fully convert, were already a part of the synagogues of the Roman Empire. [1] It is not clear how many Diaspora Jews were expecting some apocalyptic event to take place in the near future, probably not a lot.  Some many have expected God to restore Israel at some point as a nation.

When the message of Christ's second coming and the coming judgment of the world started to spread, it is only natural that such Gentiles would want to be saved from God's wrath. The church at Antioch seems naturally to have started to open the door for this to happen. Why wouldn't they allow a Gentile to be baptized like anyone else? They could be in good standing in the coming kingdom just like they were now, like the "strangers in the land" of old.

And assuming early Christian teaching on the Holy Spirit, what if Gentiles manifested the same signs of having the Spirit as anyone else? This is exactly what the story of Cornelius in Acts 10 indicates. Over the course of Paul's first missionary journey, he finds non-Jews more receptive to his message than Jews. He becomes more and more convinced that this is not only a possibility but in fact his fundamental calling.

But this situation is alarming to conservatives among the early believers.  The lines between Jew and Gentile become seriously blurred if the key entry marks are baptism and the Spirit!  What about the most important boundary marks of Judaism--circumcision and law-keeping?  Jesus himself is remembered as being rather lax when it comes to such issues and we can imagine that Peter and the disciples were not strong on such issues either--many of them were fishermen, after all.

On the other hand, many of their early converts in Jerusalem were surely "apocalyptic conservatives," people like the Essenes who were especially looking for a Messiah to restore Israel and who had a strong sense of angels and demons in spiritual warfare. These are the types that were looking for a purified and restored temple. It creates an inner tension in the earliest Jerusalem community--those who are more in continuity with Jesus' ethic and inclusiveness and those who are attracted to his apocalyptic ideology.

So we see the phenomenon of "Judaizing missionaries." These are individuals who begin to try to pull Christian Jews into line on their law-keeping, especially on purity issues. Eventually they will make their way into Galatia and begin to undermine Paul's teaching there. Their message to Gentile converts was probably something along these lines. "It's nice that you have correctly decided to follow the God of Israel. But you need to go all the way.  If you're really serious about following God, you need to become circumcised and fully convert to Judaism, because salvation is of the Jews."

Paul realizes the situation and the Lord tells him that he should go to Jerusalem to secure the support of the Jerusalem leadership.  He and Barnabas take uncircumcised Titus as an object lesson. Although James, Peter, and John still think it is optimal for Titus to be circumcised, they do not force him (Gal. 2:3). They adopt a "separate and unequal" policy of sorts.  They agree that Titus will not fry on the Day of Judgment, even though he is not circumcised. He is like a stranger in the land of Israel.

The danger of this intermediate position is obvious to James and the Jerusalem church. It may start a slippery slope where Jews start to cut corners on their law-keeping too. Peter visits Antioch to see the church that has sprung up organically. Perhaps Jerusalem is feeling a little out of control. They are the disciples, after all, the ones who actually knew and witnessed Jesus. They are the leaders. What's this megachurch to the north outside of HQ's control?

Peter seems to do just fine.  He is fellowshipping with the Gentile converts, eating with them.  All is good. Presumably, as a Galilean fisherman, this purity stuff wasn't naturally a big deal to him. But then the messengers come from HQ, from James, Jesus' brother. [2] "Peter, you are the apostle, the one to whom Jesus first appeared.  You have to set the tone.  You have to hold the line on purity rules or all the Jewish believers will throw them out the window."

So Peter caves, and Barnabas obediently follows HQ's wishes, whether he agrees with them or not.  Jewish believers stop eating with Gentile believers so that they do not become unclean. Perhaps Barnabas is thinking that this is the best compromise for now, that they'll work it out. Two steps forward, one step back, to get ready for the next two steps forward.

Paul completely disagrees.  He has kept the Law better than any of these pretenders.  He was a Pharisee's Pharisee, after all. It was a joke to see these light weights pretending to be law-observant. "You keep the Law, Peter.  I kept the Law.  You don't keep the Law."

Paul had previously tried to be in good standing on the basis of law-keeping.  He had been perfect at it (Phil. 3:6).  It just wasn't what God was looking for.  God is justifying, establishing a right relationship with him, through faith, not through these sorts of works of Law.  It is the faithful death of Jesus that God counts, appropriated through baptism and the Spirit. The rest is now a distraction, especially for non-Jews.

Eventually, the Jerusalem church would come up with a compromise.  If Gentiles will stay away from sexual immorality, if they will not have any blood in the food, if they will not serve meat that has come from a nearby temple or that was strangled so that the blood stayed in it, then Jewish and Gentile believers can eat together.

But Paul was long gone.  He completely disagreed because, like Jesus, he believed that clean was a matter of the heart, not a matter of what you eat. When the issue of meat sacrificed to idols comes up at Corinth, he completely ignores the position of the Jerusalem church.

[1] It is less clear to me by what clear ritual a women might have converted.

[2] We remember that Jesus' brothers didn't support his ministry when he was on earth. Are we seeing some of the tensions between James and Jesus in the tensions between James and Paul?

Showdown in Jerusalem (Acts 15)

1. Acts 15 presents what is sometimes called the Jerusalem Council.  The issue is whether non-Jewish believers have to get circumcised in order to escape God's wrath and be "saved."

Acts 15 presents a very orderly and peaceful series of events. There is a disagreement at Antioch over the issue. Antioch sends Paul and Barnabas to HQ for advice. The Jerusalem church welcomes them.

Then some believers who are Pharisees argue that the Gentile believers must fully convert. The apostles and elders consider the issue. Then Peter shares about his experience with Cornelius, and Paul and Barnabas share their missionary experiences.

James, the brother of Jesus, seems to render the final verdict. He quotes Scripture. He wants to make it easy for Gentiles to get in (After all, they already have Moses and aren't going to flock in with the same requirements as before). He gives four requirements: 1) stay away from meat sacrificed to idols, 2) stay away from sexual immorality, 3) stay away from meat from an animal killed by strangling, and 4) don't ingest blood.

A letter is composed to this effect and sent in the hands of two men to Antioch, a man named Judas and a man named Silas. The church at Antioch receives it with joy.

2. Galatians 2 presents a somewhat similar event but from Paul's perspective. There were some telling the Gentiles at Antioch that they needed to be circumcised in order to be saved from God's coming wrath.  Paul and Barnabas (and an uncircumcised young man named Titus) go down privately to Jerusalem to ask the pillars of James, Peter, and John. These leaders recognize that God has called Paul to go to the Gentiles (just as Peter is called to Jews) and receive them in peace.

Then there is a second event. Peter comes up to Antioch and fellowships freely with Gentile converts. Then some people come from HQ, from James, and convince him he shouldn't eat with them to stay ceremonially clean. Barnabas even joins Peter.

Paul will have none of that. He openly calls Peter a hypocrite. Peter is no scrupulous law-keeper. He's pushing a standard on the Gentiles that he himself doesn't keep.

3. What are we to do with these two accounts? There have been some brilliant attempts at harmonization. F. F. Bruce suggested the following scenario: 1) the Galatians 2 visit was during the "gift trip" of Acts 11, before the first missionary journey, 2) then the incident with Peter happened at Antioch after the first missionary journey, 3) then the issue erupted in Galatia, causing Paul to write Galatians, the first of his letters that he wrote, 4) then the Jerusalem Council settled the whole issue.

As brilliant as this scenario by Bruce is, we have to wonder whether it tries too hard. Harmonization of this sort usually creates an alternative scenario that twists all the existing accounts in deference to an ideal the text itself may or may not care about.

a) The timing of the private meeting does not coincide well with the gift trip of Acts 11. To argue for it, Bruce reinterprets what "after 14 years" means in Galatians 2:1.  He takes it to mean 14 years from Paul's conversion, when its most natural sense is 14 years from the last time he visited Jerusalem. Also, the revelation that leads Paul to Jerusalem in Galatians 2 is not revelation about a famine, as in Acts 11, but revelation that he should go and consult with HQ.

b) Galatians may fit better a little later in Paul's missionary journeys than at the very beginning. Theologically and rhetorically, it reads well as a slightly earlier version of Romans, an argument that Paul has been developing for sometime, perhaps while meeting at the Hall of Tyrannus in Ephesus. Paul uses a word in 4:13 to refer to his first visit to Galatia that would normally imply it was the first of more than one--but Paul would have only been there once if he wrote Galatians when Bruce suggested.

c) Acts is not just giving a videotape of what happened. As was fully acceptable at the time, Luke seems at least to have edited the sermons (because in Acts 2, it seems to have Peter quoting the Greek version of the OT in Jerusalem, as well as the fact that the sermons mostly follow the same outline). Acts arguably shifts blame to Paul's Jewish opponents and omits perhaps some key opponents, such as when we know secular authorities were after him at Damascus and it shifts the blame entirely to Jewish opponents. Peter's visit to Cornelius is highlighted in a way it may not have been at the time. Luke 24 similarly compresses 40 days between the resurrection and ascension into what seems like a single day.

These tendencies lead us to ask whether Acts 15 is an efficient, orderly, and ideal way of presenting what historically was a little messier and perhaps took a little more time. Again, it was perfectly acceptable to do such things in history telling at the time (i.e., it would not be an error). For example, the four prohibitions sound more like a response to how Jewish and Gentile Christians might eat together than a complete list of what Gentiles need to be saved. Presuming that Paul knew of such a letter, he never mentions it when the issue of meat sacrificed to idols came up at Corinth, suggesting that he didn't agree with it.

A possible analysis of the event tomorrow...