CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 15
Conference in Jerusalem
1. Leaders in Antioch
The christian community in syrian antioch quickly became a metropolitan church rivalling in size the church of Jerusalem. If the church of Jerusalem was the mother-church of Christians in general, the church of Antioch was the mother-church of Gentile Christians in particular.
The little we know about the leaders of the church of Antioch suggests that they were men of interesting antecedents and relationships and makes us wish we knew more about them. As it is, we can at best make intelligent guesses. In addition to Barnabas and Paul, Luke names three leaders at Antioch, and associates all five together as “prophets and teachers” (Acts 13:1). The three were Symeon surnamed Niger, Lucius of Cyrene and Manaen, sometime companion of Herod the tetrarch.
As for Symeon, his Latin sobriquet Niger (“black”) could imply an African origin for him as well as for his colleague Lucius. The New Testament record knows of an African of this name—Simon (the hellenized form of Symeon) of Cyrene, whose services were commandeered to carry the cross of Jesus to the place of execution. When Mark the evangelist relates this incident, he identifies Simon of Cyrene for his readers of the next generation, primarily in Rome, as “the father of Alexander and Rufus” (Mark 15:21). We know of one Rufus in the Christian community of Rome about A.D. 57—that “Rufus, eminent in the Lord”, to whom Paul sends greetings by name in Romans 16:13. This presupposes indeed that the greetings of Romans 16 are intended for Rome and not (as many hold) for Ephesus;1 but if Paul’s friend Rufus did live in Rome the coincidence of his name with that of one of the sons of Simon of Cyrene may be more than a mere coincidence. Then what significance lies in the fact that Paul sends greetings not only to Rufus but also to “his mother and mine”? The implication is that there was a time when the mother of Rufus had proved herself a mother to Paul. A writer of historical fiction might picture Paul as lodging, during his years in Antioch, in the home of Simon of Cyrene alias Symeon surnamed Niger and as being mothered by his host’s wife.2 But one who is not setting out to write fiction must be content with noting possibilities and beware of going beyond the evidence, tantalizingly scanty as it is.
Whatever may have been the provenance of Symeon surnamed Niger, Lucius of Cyrene has his clearly indicated, and it is not outrunning the evidence to think of him as one of the men of Cyprus and Cyrene who started Gentile evangelization in Antioch. The name Lucius appears in one other place in the New Testament—in Romans 16:21, where Paul sends greetings to his readers from one Lucius, whom he includes among his “kinsmen”, which may mean fellow-Christians of Jewish birth. This Lucius may be identical with our Lucius of Cyrene; there is no means of being sure. He is probably not identical with Paul’s companion Luke (Lucas), “the beloved disciple”, as he is called in Colossians 4:14, and the traditional author of the Third Gospel and Acts. Luke probably belonged to Antioch, and his name could well be a by-form of Lucius,3 but the context in which he is mentioned in Colossians 4:14 suggests that he was a Gentile Christian, not a Jewish Christian.4 Nevertheless, the identification of Lucius of Cyrene with Luke the evangelist is found at quite an early date5 and has been defended by scholars in more recent times.6
It is thought-provoking to find that one of the leaders of the Antiochene church had been a companion of Herod Antipas, tetrarch of Galilee and Peraea from 4 B.C. to his deposition in A.D. 39. The word that Luke uses for Manaen’s relationship to Herod Antipas (syntrophos) is attested in the sense of “intimate friend” or “courtier”,7 but the version of 1611 may well be right in saying that he “had been brought up with Herod the tetrarch”. Antipas was the youngest son of Herod the Great, and Manaen could have been the son of a family known to the king who was chosen to come to the palace and be brought up with the prince, as his playmate and schoolmate, and occasionally, it may be, as whipping-boy. If we try to identify the family to which Manaen belonged, conjecture must come in (as with Symeon surnamed Niger) to take the place of evidence. Manaen is a Greek spelling of the Hebrew name Menahem. One conjecture which has been ventilated is that he was the grandson of an Essene named Menahem, who was honoured by Herod the Great for having predicted his rise to royal estate.8 However that may be, if the author of Luke-Acts was a member of the church of Antioch at that time, the fact that a former associate of Herod Antipas now occupied a position of influence in that church may point to one possible source from which he could have derived some of his special information about the Herods and their entourage.
2. Famine in Judaea
For all the differences between the church of Jerusalem and the church of Antioch, they recognized their common bond and there was considerable coming and going between the two. On one occasion a deputation of prophets from the Jerusalem church visited Antioch. One of them, Agabus by name, possessed by the spirit of prophecy, foretold that there would be great scarcity throughout the Roman world. “This took place”, Luke adds, “in the days of Claudius” (Acts 11:28), and in fact we have the testimony of Suetonius that the principate of Claudius (A.D. 41–54) was marked by a succession of droughts and poor harvests.9 One of the resultant famines was specially severe in Judaea; it was on this occasion—in the procuratorships of Cuspius Fadus and his successor Tiberius Julius Alexander (c. A.D. 46)—that Helena, queen-mother of Adiabene and a proselyte to Judaism, bought grain in Egypt and figs in Cyprus for the relief of her co-religionists in Judaea, while her son, King Izates, sent money to the Jewish authorities in Jerusalem for distribution among the poor.10 It was probably about the same time that the church of Antioch sent to the leaders of the Jerusalem church a sum of money which they had been collecting ever since they heard the prophecy of Agabus. Their brethren in Jerusalem, they knew, would not be able to afford the high cost of food in famine conditions without such Christian aid. The conveying of the money was entrusted to Barnabas and Paul.11
In later years the organizing of financial relief from Gentile Christians to the Jerusalem church was a major concern of Paul’s;12 it may well be that he had played a leading part in organizing this gift in Antioch. This may be the point of a remark he makes when he reports a special request made to Barnabas and himself by the leaders of the Jerusalem church.
3. Interview with the Jerusalem leaders
This report comes at the end of an account which Paul gives in Galatians 2:1–10 of an occasion when he and Barnabas went up to Jerusalem from Antioch. The occasion may be the same as the famine-relief visit mentioned by Luke; we cannot be sure. The implication of Paul’s account is that this was the second visit which he paid to Jerusalem after his conversion. The first was that which he paid “after three years” to spend a fortnight with Peter (Galatians 1:18); this one took place “after fourteen years” (Galatians 2:1). Fourteen years from the earlier visit or fourteen years from his conversion? Once more we cannot be sure; the construction of the phrase “after fourteen years” is different from that of the phrase “after three years”, but it is not clear what significance, if any, lies in the difference of construction.13 One thing emerges clearly from Paul’s narrative: he is leaving out no material phase of his relations with the Jerusalem leaders, and it is unlikely that he had paid another visit to Jerusalem between the two expressly described and dated in the letter to the Galatians. He was concerned to argue that at no point between his conversion and the writing of the letter had the Jerusalem leaders conferred on him any authority which he did not possess already by direct commission of the risen Christ. Had he omitted from his retrospect an intervening visit, somebody would have been sure to spot the omission and draw unfavourable conclusions from it. After the fourteen years, he says (Galatians 2:1 f.):
I went up again to Jerusalem with Barnabas, taking Titus along with me. I went up by revelation; and I laid before them (but privately before the men of repute) the gospel which I preach among the Gentiles, lest somehow I should be running or had run in vain.
When Paul speaks of going up to Jerusalem “by revelation” it is improbable that he has the prophecy of Agabus in mind. The Paul of Acts was not over-responsive to other people’s revelations which affected himself,14 and the Paul of the epistles—not least the Paul of this epistle—is so constantly aware of his unmediated authorization by Christ that it is natural to conclude that, when he did anything by revelation, the revelation was personally received. Whether this visit had any other purpose than to meet the leaders of the Jerusalem church he does not say; he does say that he and Barnabas had a private conference with those leaders—the “men of repute”,15 as he calls them, who turn out to have been James the Lord’s brother with Peter and John. At this conference he set before them the gospel as he was accustomed to preach it to Gentiles, and the reason which he gives for doing so gives us pause: it was, he says, “lest somehow I should be running or had run in vain”. There is nothing surprising in the athletic metaphor: this is not the only place where Paul describes his apostolic service as a race to be run.16 But there is certainly cause for surprise in the implication of his statement that, failing the recognition by the Jerusalem authorities that the gospel he preached was the authentic gospel, his apostolic service would have been, and would continue to be, fruitless. It is certainly not implied that, if this recognition had been withheld, Paul would have changed his mind about the gospel he preached or changed his method of presenting it. A gospel received by direct revelation is not to be modified out of deference to any human authority. What Paul was concerned about was not the validity of his gospel but its practicability. His commission was not derived from Jerusalem, but it could not be effectively discharged except in fellowship with Jerusalem. A cleavage between his Gentile mission and the mother-church in Jerusalem would be disastrous for the progress of the gospel: the cause of Christ would be divided, and all the devotion with which Paul had thus far prosecuted his apostolate to the Gentiles, and hoped to go on prosecuting it, would be frustrated.
4. Demarcation of mission fields
As it was, however, everything seemed to turn out well at the conference. The Jerusalem leaders recognized not only that Paul’s gospel was the authentic gospel, but also that his vocation, unlike theirs, was to preach it to the Gentiles. The men of repute, he says (Galatians 2:6–9):
added nothing to me. On the contrary, they saw that I had been entrusted with the gospel to the uncircumcised, just as Peter had been entrusted with the gospel to the circumcised (for he who worked through Peter for the mission to the circumcised worked through me also for the Gentiles). So, when they perceived the grace that was given to me, James and Cephas and John, the men of repute as pillars, gave to me and Barnabas the right hand of fellowship, that we should go to the Gentiles and they to the circumcised.
The Jerusalem leaders were reputed to be “pillars”—pillars, perhaps, in the new temple of living stones which Jesus spoke of founding, a distinction which was not confined to their status in the church of Jerusalem, but betokened a claim to special recognition wherever the name of Christ was confessed.17 The order in which Paul names them suggests that James had now attained a position of primacy, in Jerusalem at least, in which he was beginning to overshadow the Twelve themselves. No longer is he mentioned almost incidentally alongside Peter, as in Paul’s account of his earlier visit to Jerusalem.18
Paul does not commit himself to acceptance of their status as “pillars”. He affirms, however, that they “added nothing” to him—neither to the subject-matter of his gospel nor to his authority to preach it. What was settled at the conference, he says, was an amicable demarcation of the two mission-fields. But there is one exceptional feature of usage in his account of this agreement. Whereas he regularly refers to the prince of the apostles by his Aramaic name Cephas, its Greek equivalent Peter (Petros) appears twice in this account, and then “Cephas” takes over again. The most probable explanation (though by no means the certain explanation) of this feature is that the passage containing the form “Peter” is an extract from a more or less official record of the conference, the reference to Paul being changed to the first personal pronoun singular so as to integrate the quotation into the construction of its context.19 If this explanation be accepted, we have first Paul’s adapted quotation:
they saw that I had been entrusted with the gospel to the uncircumcised, just as Peter had been entrusted with the gospel to the circumcised (for he who worked through Peter for the mission to the circumcised worked through me also for the Gentiles)—
and then his repetition and continuation of the same situation in his own words:
when they perceived the grace that was given to me, James and Cephas and John, the men of repute as pillars, gave to me and Barnabas the right hand of fellowship, that we should go to the Gentiles and they to the circumcised.
The difference in Peter’s name is not the only difference between the two passages. In the former Paul and Peter are set over against each other; in the latter it is not Paul only, but Paul and Barnabas, whose call to evangelize the Gentiles is acknowledged, and it is not Peter only, but James, Cephas and John, who are to discharge an apostleship to Jews. One suggestion in this regard is that the extract represents the situation at the time of the conference, while Paul’s re-wording which follows, and indeed his general language about the “men of repute”, reflects the situation as it had developed in the interval between the conference and the writing of the letter.20 In the event not Peter in particular, but the triumvirate as a whole, undertook the responsibility for directing and executing the mission to Jews, with James becoming more and more primus inter pares and issuing directives which even Peter felt bound to obey.21
It is possible that the agreement about the demarcation of the two mission-fields concealed one or two unobserved ambiguities which did not come to light until a later date, when they caused some tension between Paul and Jerusalem.
First, were the terms of the demarcation sufficiently clear? Was it to be interpreted geographically or communally? Either way, it must have been difficult to define the boundaries of the two mission-fields. Jews and Gentiles were to be found in practically every city in the eastern Mediterranean world. It was almost certainly not envisaged that the Jerusalem leaders should be debarred from evangelizing the Jews of (say) Ephesus or Corinth or Rome. But since the churches planted in due course in those cities comprised both Jewish and Gentile converts, some dovetailing or overlapping of the two spheres of missionary action was inevitable. Again, it was probably not envisaged that Paul should be debarred from visiting synagogues in Gentile cities. According to the narrative of Acts, it was in synagogues that he regularly found the nucleus of his churches—mainly among the God-fearing Gentiles who habitually attended the services of worship there. But this could constitute a fruitful source of misunderstanding, unless entire mutual confidence was maintained between the two parties to the agreement.
Next, misunderstanding could arise from Paul’s own account of the conference. Some, on hearing it, might well say to him, “So you did receive the recognition of the Jerusalem leaders!” To this his reply would probably have been: “I did not receive their recognition as though my commission was previously defective without it; they recognized that I had already been called to this ministry, but they did not in any sense confer on me the right to exercise it.” Paul and Barnabas had been energetically engaged for several years in Gentile evangelization, but whereas Barnabas undertook this work in Antioch as commissioner of the Jerusalem church, Paul had been engaged in it long before Barnabas brought him to Antioch as his colleague in the work there. The nature of the recognition which Paul received at this conference in Jerusalem could easily have been misunderstood or misrepresented by any one who was unable or disinclined to distinguish between various forms of recognition. Perhaps the Jerusalem leaders would not have given precisely the same account of the matter as Paul does. In our more sophisticated days we are familiar with the device of calculated ambiguity in ecclesiastical as in other agreements; but such ambiguity as inhered in the Jerusalem agreement was probably not deliberate but inadvertent. Even so, we may see as our narrative progresses the kind of misunderstanding to which it could lead.
It has just been suggested that Paul would have seen a distinction between Barnabas’s commission and his own. Nevertheless, he nowhere says anything that could imply a depreciation of Barnabas’s commission alongside his. His concern was to assert the authentic and unmediated character of his own apostleship; for the rest, he uses the designation “apostles” in a fairly wide sense—a wider sense, certainly, than Luke gives it.22 He does not explicitly call Barnabas an apostle, but he does so by implication in a passage where he is stoutly defending his own apostleship and sets Barnabas and himself on one side over against “the other apostles and the brethren of the Lord and Cephas” on the other (1 Corinthians 9:5 f.). Luke, for his part, reserves the designation “apostle” almost exclusively for the Twelve: the one occasion on which he uses it of Paul is the exception that proves the rule, for there he speaks of “the apostles Barnabas and Paul” (Acts 14:14) in a context which suggests that he viewed them as apostles in the sense of commissioners from the church of Antioch—which indeed they were on the occasion referred to (cf. Acts 13:3). To be sure, when Paul in his letters argues for the validity of his apostleship by an appeal to his achievements, the record of Acts provides abundant independent confirmation of his argument;23 nevertheless, Luke nowhere gives him the title “apostle” in the sense in which Paul claims it for himself—which reminds us that the choice of a word is less important than the meaning attached to it.
5. “Remember the poor”
We return to the Jerusalem conference. Paul ends his account of it by mentioning one condition which the three “men of repute” pressed on Barnabas and himself (Galatians 2:10):
only they would have us remember the poor, which very thing I was eager to do.
There are two verbs in this sentence. The former, “remember”, is present subjunctive in Greek and may suggest continued action; the latter, “was eager”, is aorist indicative, which in appropriate contexts (of which this is perhaps one) can be rendered by the pluperfect in English.24
“Only”, said they, “please continue to remember the poor”; and in fact I had made a special point of attending to this very matter.
If this rendering gives the right emphasis, then the leaders’ request that Paul and Barnabas should continue to remember “the poor” is illuminated by Luke’s account of the carrying by these two of the famine relief which the Antiochene church provided for their brethren in Jerusalem in time of famine. The phrase “the poor” may denote the poorer members of the Jerusalem church; it might, on the other hand, be a designation for that church as a whole.25 In later times there was a body of Jewish Christians, claiming to represent the church of Jerusalem in dispersion, which was called the Ebionites; this is derived from Hebrew hāʾebyōnîm, “the poor”, which could well underlie the Greek phrase used in Galatians 2:10, especially if, as seems probable, Paul is echoing the language of the Jerusalem leaders.26 How seriously Paul continued to “remember the poor” will be shown in the sequel. But even here there was a possibility of misunderstanding: what Paul regarded as a voluntary gesture of Christian charity and fellowship was perhaps viewed by the mother-church as a tribute due from her daughter-churches among the Gentiles.27
6. The circumcision issue
One issue which might have been expected to arise at the conference has not been mentioned yet. That is the issue of the circumcision of Gentile converts, which soon became the subject of an animated debate. Did it arise on this occasion? The answer to this question is not clear. Paul does make a reference to it, but while his Galatian readers, who knew something of the background of his reference, no doubt grasped his meaning, his modern readers find it more difficult to do so. This is partly because we know less of the background than his first readers did, partly because his construction is fractured and partly because there is a variant reading which changes the sense by omitting a material “not”.28
Immediately after telling how he laid his gospel before the Jerusalem leaders, lest he “should be running or had run in vain”, Paul goes on (Galatians 2:3–5):
But even Titus, who was with me, was not compelled to be circumcised, though he was a Greek. But because of false brethren secretly brought in, who slipped in to spy out our freedom which we have in Christ Jesus, that they might bring us into bondage—to them we did not yield submission even for a moment, that the truth of the gospel might be preserved for you.
Then he goes back to the “men of repute” and affirms that they “added nothing” to him.
Titus, a Greek Christian, who accompanied him from Antioch to Jerusalem on this occasion, was “not compelled to be circumcised”. To us, though probably not to Paul’s first readers (who knew whether Titus had been circumcised or not), this statement is ambiguous. It may mean (i) that Titus was not circumcised or (ii) that Titus was circumcised, not by compulsion, but voluntarily, or perhaps by a temporary concession on Paul’s part—on the principle, presumably, of reculer pour mieux sauter. The editors of the Western text of the Pauline corpus appear to have understood it the latter way, for they make Paul say, “to them [to the false brethren] we yielded submission for a moment, that the truth of the gospel might be preserved for you”. How the circumcision of a Gentile convert could have been imagined by any one, especially by Paul, to help towards preserving the gospel of free grace for other Gentile converts, is something which passes all understanding. F. C. Burkitt might ask, “who can doubt that it was the knife which really did circumcise Titus that has cut the syntax of Galatians 2:3–5 to pieces?”29—but to this question, as to many others beginning with the rhetorical “who can doubt …?” an effective answer is “I can”; and so, it is evident, can many exegetes who have dealt with the passage. “If he was circumcised”, T. W. Manson comments on Burkitt’s argument, “the fact would be well advertised in Galatia by Paul’s opponents, and the involved and stumbling verbiage of these verses would be worse than useless as camouflage for that nasty fact.”30
The last-named scholar has pointed the way to a more satisfactory understanding of the abrupt reference to the false brethren: it is a parenthesis, referring to a later development, and introduced here because Paul is reminded of this subsequent occasion by his reference to Titus.31 At the time of the Jerusalem conference, he says, so far was the circumcision question from presenting any difficulty that although Titus, a Greek, was in Jerusalem with Barnabas and himself, no pressure was brought to bear to have him circumcised. The circumcision issue, he adds in a parenthesis which lacks a principal clause, became acute at a later date on account of “false brethren” who infiltrated the Gentile churches and tried to impose a yoke of legal bondage in place of the Christian freedom which they enjoyed. This later development may be linked with Luke’s statement in Acts 15:1, that “some men came down from Judaea [to Antioch], and were teaching the brethren, ‘Unless you are circumcised according to the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved’.”32 It was to those infiltrators that Paul refused to concede an inch, so as not to prejudice his converts’ gospel liberty. Having concluded his parenthesis on this note, he returns to the point where he had left off and continues to tell what happened at the Jerusalem conference.
That the question of circumcising Titus or any other Gentile convert was not raised during this visit is quite consistent with the evidence of Acts. The Gentile mission in Antioch had been proceeding for some years before visitors from Judaea tried to insist on the circumcision of the converts. Similarly, when Cornelius, the Roman centurion of Caesarea, and his household believed the gospel and received the Spirit, they were baptized, but no one seems to have suggested that they should be circumcised. Although Peter, on returning to Jerusalem, had to defend his visit to them, his fellow-apostles, when they accepted his defence, did not say, “Well, it is all right provided they accept circumcision.”33 In Acts as in Galatians the question of circumcising Gentile converts did not arise until later. When it did arise, those who raised it were steadfastly resisted by Paul and others who, with him, could not allow the truth of the gospel to be compromised by an infusion of legalism. But if it did not arise at the conference described in Galatians 2:1–10, that conference cannot be identified with the Council of Jerusalem described in Acts 15:6–29, for on the latter occasion circumcision was the main issue under debate. The conference of Galatians 2:1–10 may well have coincided in that case with the famine-relief visit of Acts 11:30, although this cannot be positively affirmed. Before circumcision became a burning issue, the Gentile mission had a further advance to record.