CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 17
The Gentile Problem
1. Repercussions in Jerusalem
News of the expansion of gentile christianity naturally brought pleasure to the church of Antioch, but it was received with mixed feelings in Jerusalem. It was good, certainly, that so many Gentiles had come to acknowledge Jesus as Lord. But when the Jerusalem leaders had shaken hands with Barnabas and Paul, they had scarcely envisaged such a rapid influx of Gentile believers. Hitherto they had tried to maintain some measure of control over the extending Christian mission, but this was henceforth going to prove more and more difficult. It does not appear that they were specifically consulted about Barnabas and Paul’s recent mission to Cyprus and South Galatia.1 Any concern which they felt about this should not be put down merely to a desire to keep the reins of power in their own hands. There was an important question of principle at stake, as they saw it: with such an increase in the number of Gentile Christians, to a point where they must soon outnumber Jewish Christians (if they had not done so already), how were the church’s ethical standards to be safeguarded? Jews in general had no great opinion of Gentile morality,2 and the church’s ethical standards were based on the peculiarly demanding requirements of Jesus. Jesus may have relaxed various non-ethical prescriptions of Jewish tradition, such as those relating to food restrictions and sabbath observance, but he sharpened the ethical prescriptions, carrying them back beyond overt speech and action to the hidden motives and emotions of the heart,3 and insisting on “the weightier matters of the law, justice and mercy and faith” (Matthew 23:23). His disciples were taught to practise a righteousness exceeding “that of the scribes and Pharisees” (Matthew 5:20)—no easy matter. But it was evident that Gentiles would have a hard task to bring their practice, especially in relations between the sexes, up to the ordinary Jewish level, let alone that of the scribes and Pharisees. What could be done to protect Christian standards?
It was all very well for Barnabas and Paul to forge ahead with Gentile evangelization, but meanwhile the Jerusalem leaders had to discharge their own responsibility to commend the gospel to their fellow-Jews. The discharge of this responsibility would not be rendered any easier by reports that large numbers of Gentiles were entering the new fellowship on what must have seemed to be very easy terms. The whole issue of the approach to Gentiles was a delicate one in the Jerusalem situation. During the brief reign of Herod Agrippa as king of the Jews there had been a short but sharp campaign against at least one section of the Jerusalem church, in which the apostles, far from being unmolested as they had been in the earlier persecution which followed Stephen’s death, were now the principal targets of attack. James the son of Zebedee had been executed and Peter would have shared his fate had he not escaped from prison and gone into hiding.4 This attack on the apostles was not unconnected with the recent first steps in Gentile evangelization, such as Peter’s visit to Cornelius in Caesarea5—first steps which, cautious though they were, apparently lost the apostles much of the public goodwill which they had formerly enjoyed in Jerusalem.
Herod Agrippa’s attack came to an end with his sudden death in A.D. 44, but fresh trouble for the church sprang up from another quarter. Judaea reverted to the control of Roman procurators, under whom during the next eight years there was a succession of militant actions led by men who might be generally described as Zealots, even if they did not all adopt this designation. Josephus, less politely, calls them brigands or impostors.6 Most important of these insurgent leaders were two sons of Judas the Galilaean, James and Simon by name, who were caught and crucified by Tiberius Julius Alexander (procurator c. 46–48).7 Such insurgents were not only fiercely anti-Roman; they showed hostility also to those Jews whom they suspected of collaborating with the Romans.8 Those principally guilty in this last respect were members of the chief-priestly establishment, but even a pious body of humble Jews, like the Jerusalem church, would incur their disfavour if they, or their associates elsewhere, were thought to be building bridges to the Gentile world.
On religious and political grounds alike, then, the Gentile mission was bound to pose problems for the Jerusalem church and its leaders. Some members of the church suggested a simple solution: Gentile converts to Christianity should comply with the same requirements as Gentile converts to Judaism—they should be circumcised (if they were men) and undertake to keep the law of Moses. This would not only limit the intake of Gentiles into the church; it would ensure that those who did enter it would have to observe an acceptable ethical standard. Even the Zealots could have no valid argument against the admission of Gentiles on these terms. If this suggestion were adopted, however, it would have a disconcerting effect on the large number of Gentiles who had already been admitted to Christian fellowship without any such requirements—in Caesarea, Antioch, and places farther afield. Nevertheless, the suggestion commended itself to many, and some were disposed to insist on it, especially those who had links with the Pharisees. How far they could count on the support of the leadership of the Jerusalem church is uncertain: the apostles had already compromised themselves in the eyes of such rigorists, but they may have hoped for the approval of James the Just, who was respected by all the people for his piety and self-denial.9
2. Confrontation at Antioch
Some of these people visited Antioch and tried to impose their line on the Gentile Christians there: “Unless you are circumcised according to the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved” (Acts 15:1). This may well be the situation to which Paul refers when he speaks about the “false brethren” who infiltrated the Gentile-Christian fellowship “to spy out our freedom which we have in Christ Jesus, that they might bring us into bondage” (Galatians 2:4). This, too, provides a setting in which we can place the incident which Paul recounts in Galatians 2:11–14:
When Cephas came to Antioch I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned. For before certain men came from James, he ate with the Gentiles; but when they came he drew back and separated himself, through fear of the circumcision party. The rest of the Jews who were there joined in this play-acting; matters went so far that even Barnabas was carried away into joining their play-acting. But when I saw that they were deviating from the straight path of gospel truth, I said to Cephas in front of them all, “If you, Jew as you are, live in the Gentile and not the Jewish way, how is that you try to compel the Gentiles to live tike Jews?”
The picture that Paul here gives of Peter’s habitual practice agrees with the picture that Luke gives in Acts. From his vision on the flat roof of Simon the tanner’s house in Joppa and from his experience with Cornelius and his household at Caesarea Peter had learned that he “should not call any one common or unclean” (Acts 10:28). Having broken decisively with his former practice and eaten with Gentiles at Caesarea, he continued to eat with Gentiles thereafter as opportunity offered. So, when he visited Syrian Antioch some time, probably, after Barnabas and Paul’s return from Asia Minor, he had no difficulty in enjoying table fellowship with Gentile Christians there. This was as true of ordinary social meals as of the special meal of bread and wine which Christians took as the memorial of their Lord and as a sign of their joint participation in him; in fact, no practical distinction could be made between the two, since the memorial bread and wine were normally taken in the context of a social meal. It is Peter’s habitual practice that gives point to Paul’s charge of “play-acting” (hypokrisis) against him when he withdrew from table fellowship with Gentile Christians and ate with Jewish Christians only. Had Paul been confronted with a convinced Judaizer, an advocate of the circumcision of Gentile converts, he would have rebuked him too, but in different terms: he would not have charged him with “play-acting”, for such a man, even if his conduct amounted to “perverting the gospel of Christ” (Galatians 1:7), would be acting in accordance with his true convictions. But Peter was no judaizer; in the company of Gentile Christians he was quite happy to live like a Gentile himself. Why, then, did he suddenly charge his course?
This question could be answered more adequately if Peter’s own account of the incident had been preserved alongside Paul’s, and more particularly if we knew exactly the part played by “certain men” who “came from James”. These are not identified by Paul with the “false brethren” whose infiltration he deplores; they appear rather to have been commissioned by James to deliver a personal message to Peter. One variant reading, indeed, refers in the singular to “a certain person” who “came from James”.10 The message conveyed to Peter could have been to the effect that news of his free and easy intercourse with Gentiles at Antioch had come to Jerusalem and was causing scandal to many good brethren there, besides hampering the mission in which James and others were engaged among their Jewish neighbours.11 The reported conduct of the prince of the apostles was being exploited by unsympathetic scribes and Pharisees to the detriment of the Christian cause in Judaea, and might even provoke violent reprisals from those militants who condemned fraternization with non-Jews as treasonable.12
It is not difficult to appreciate Peter’s dilemma, or to see how he could have defended his change of course. Though he could not emulate Paul’s versatility, he too was endeavouring to be “all things to all men” for the gospel’s sake.13 For him, as for Paul, the interests of the gospel were paramount, and if the interests of the gospel in Judaea were being prejudiced by his way of life in Antioch, he was prepared to alter that way of life. In his eyes, as in Paul’s, there was nothing in the non–ethical realm, such as food, which should be regarded as inherently “unclean”, but he might have decided, as Paul was to put it at a later date, “not to eat meat or drink wine or do anything that makes your brother stumble” (Romans 14:13–21). A major Jewish objection to eating with Gentiles was that, in doing so, one would almost certainly infringe the Jewish food-laws.14 If, then, Peter’s practice in Antioch was a stumbling-block to members of the Jerusalem church whose consciences were scrupulous and unemancipated, he might well think it right to discontinue it for their sakes.
Paul, for his part, was equally concerned on this occasion to safeguard the interests of the gospel and to avoid putting a stumbling-block in the path of his fellow-Christians. The aspect of the gospel that meant most to him was the Gentile mission, and the fellow-Christians whose interests he had most at heart were Gentile Christians. Whatever Peter’s motives were, Paul would have regarded them as negligible in comparison with the progress of the Gentile mission and the wellbeing of Gentile Christians. Even worse, if possible, than Peter’s action in itself was the effect of his example on other Jewish Christians, and when even Barnabas—the last man of whom it might have been expected—was persuaded to join in withdrawing from table-fellowship with Gentiles, what must the Gentile Christians have thought? They could draw only one conclusion: so long as they remained uncircumcised, they were at best second-class citizens in the new community. In that case they might either repudiate the message which (despite what Paul said) consigned them to second-class status in comparison with their fellow-believers of Jewish birth, or they might decide that (despite what Paul said) their best policy was to go the whole way of the proselyte and accept circumcision, since only so could they become first-class citizens. If they took the latter course, this would be what Paul meant when he said that Peter was trying “to compel the Gentiles to live like Jews”. Either way, the good which had apparently been achieved at the Jerusalem conference would be undone; the truth of the gospel would be hopelessly compromised. In Christ, Paul believed and affirmed, there was “neither Jew nor Greek” (Galatians 3:28), whatever distinctions might persist in the world at large. The middle wall of partition between them had been demolished by the work of Christ; Paul would not stand idly by and see it rebuilt, whether as a religious or as a social barrier. The only logical reason for preserving it as a social barrier would be its continuing validity as a religious barrier, and to recognize such a continuing validity, even if it were only in outward behaviour, would be to nullify the grace of God. If God’s redeeming grace was to be received by faith, and not by conformity with the law of Moses, then it was available on equal terms to Jew and Gentile, and to make a distinction in practice between Jewish and Gentile believers, as Peter and the others were doing, was in practice to deny the gospel.
What the immediate outcome of this confrontation between Paul and Peter was cannot be known with certainty. Perhaps the Galatian Christians, to whom Paul relates the incident, were aware of the sequel; perhaps the situation was still fluid when Paul wrote. Such information as we can glean about Peter after this does not suggest that he persisted for long in this charade of “separate tables”. Peter was more conservative than Paul, no doubt, but since at heart he was in basic agreement with Paul he probably resumed his more liberal course when the awkward situation at Antioch was a thing of the past. At any rate, Paul here does not say how Peter responded to his rebuke, for his account of the rebuke merges into a more general comment on the principles involved, for the benefit of his Galatian readers.
3. The letter to the Galatians
Since there is no document in the New Testament more indisputably Paul’s than the letter to the Galatians, it is strange that there is no unanimity on its date, or even on the identity of “the churches of Galatia” to which it is addressed. If there is no unanimity, the reason must be that the evidence is not unambiguous. It was evidently written by Paul to warn his Galatian converts against certain “trouble-makers”15 who were urging upon them a line of teaching and course of action which, as he saw the situation, threatened to undermine the gospel which he had brought to them and which they had accepted. But even on the character and policy of these “trouble-makers” there is disagreement.
The view adopted here—provisionally, not dogmatically—is that the letter was written shortly after the confrontation at Antioch, to the churches recently planted by Barnabas and Paul in cities of South Galatia, and that the “trouble-makers” were visitors to those churches who were insisting, as others of the same outlook did at Antioch, that it was necessary for Gentile converts to be circumcised. That circumcision was a major plank in their religious platform is plain even on a superficial reading of the letter. Along with circumcision, the Galatian Christians were beginning to adopt other Jewish customs, such as the observance of holy days. It is a natural conclusion, then, that the “trouble-makers” were judaizers, and this indeed has been the general opinion. In more recent times the opinion has been expressed by some scholars that the “trouble-makers” were inculcating a form of gnosticism.16 This is a term which is capable of a wide range of meaning. Strictly it denotes a lop-sided and over-intellectualized development of Christian teaching which is well attested in the second century, but in so far as first-century anticipations of it can be traced, they may be described as incipient gnosticism. Such incipient gnosticism is presupposed (and deprecated) in 1 Corinthians17 and Colossians.18 It may be that the “trouble-makers” in Galatia told their hearers that they were imparting to them the true knowledge (gnōsis) of God; this might be the point of Paul’s remark in Galatians 4:9, “now that you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God”. But the incipient gnosticism which has been discerned in this letter is much more likely to have arisen in the minds of modern interpreters from a misunderstanding of some of Paul’s arguments in it than to be part of the propaganda of the “trouble-makers.”19
If the “trouble-makers” were judaizers—or even if they were gnostics—the first response to their teaching would have been, “But this is not what we were taught!” Such a response would have provoked the question: “Who taught you?” If they replied, “Barnabas and Paul”, then they would be told that the authority of Jerusalem was superior to Barnabas and Paul’s—in fact, that Barnabas and Paul had no authority apart from that conferred on them by the leaders of the Jerusalem church.
Paul, says Luke, was recognized as “the chief speaker” by the men of Lystra (Acts 14:12), and they probably shared this recognition with the men and women in other South Galatian cities. It is probable that the “trouble-makers” saw that it was Paul’s authority in particular that had to be diminished in the eyes of the Galatian Christians. If so, they showed wisdom, even if they did not know of Barnabas’s recent action in Syrian Antioch. In any case, it is Paul’s own authority that he defends in his letter because, whatever might be said of the source of Barnabas’s authority, Paul claimed to have received his, without human mediation, from the risen Christ.
Paul devotes a good part of the letter to an autobiographical outline, in which his main point seems to be to prove that at no time between his conversion and the date of writing the letter had the Jerusalem leaders an opportunity of conferring any authority on him: rather, they recognized the authority which he already possessed and by virtue of which he had been energetically discharging an apostolic ministry for several years. This presupposes that the “trouble-makers” maintained that his authority was derived from Jerusalem and therefore dependent on Jerusalem. But, if they were judaizers, could they maintain that Paul had derived his gospel from Jerusalem and yet find fault with a gospel so derived? Does not their criticism of the gospel which, as they insisted, Paul received from the Jerusalem leaders, imply that they rejected the authority of the Jerusalem leaders—that, consequently, they were not judaizers but more probably gnostics?
Not necessarily. Their argument may well have run along these lines: “Paul has no authority of his own, no gospel of his own, apart from what he has received from Jerusalem. But he has not given you the whole Jerusalem gospel. The Jerusalem believers, with their leaders, revere the law of Moses; every man among them has been circumcised. Of course they did not receive circumcision when they accepted Jesus as the Messiah, because they were circumcised already. But you were uncircumcised when you believed the gospel; if you are to be on the same footing as the Jerusalem Christians and to be acknowledged by them as fellow-heirs of salvation, fellow-members of the people of God, you must be circumcised too. If Paul told you otherwise, he had no authority to do so. His gospel is all right so far as it goes, but it Is defective: be ruled by us, and have the deficiencies made good at once”.
Paul’s position on the circumcision question was clearcut because he had thought it through; the Jerusalem leaders had not as yet had any occasion to think it through, and so their position was not so clearcut. The conversion of Cornelius, and even the ingathering of Gentile believers at Antioch, had been treated by them, on an ad hoc basis. When, as a result of the current agitation, they were compelled to think it through, they reached the same conclusion as Paul, in so far as they came to agree that circumcision was not to be imposed oh Gentile Christians. As Paul saw the new situation introduced by the coming of Christ, circumcision was no longer of any account. A man might be circumcised or uncircumcised: it made no difference in his relation to God.20 What Paul did oppose was the idea that, by submitting to circumcision as a religious obligation, a man could acquire merit in God’s sight. Similarly, the observance of certain days or of various food restrictions was neither here nor there, unless it was thought that such observance was necessary to win divine approval. These were features of the old order of law, which had been superseded by the new order of grace. Once Paul had relied on these and other forms of legal obedience for his justification before God: now he had found a more excellent way. But if, as those people maintained, “justification were through the law, then Christ died to no purpose” (Galatians 2:21); in fact, if the law were still in force, as the way of justification, then the age of the Messiah had not yet dawned, and so Jesus could not be the Messiah.21 No wonder that Paul pronounced an anathema on the bearer of a message which led to this conclusion. Such a message was no gospel, whatever it might be called; it was a travesty of the true gospel.
Moreover, if justification came through the law, then it must be through the whole law. Let no one imagine that the requirements of the law could be satisfied by such a token performance as circumcision. If a man had himself circumcised as a religious obligation, the obligation which he undertook thereby involved the keeping of the law in its entirety. Paul knew from his own experience what that meant: the Galatian Christians had not begun to appreciate it, and even the visitors who were pressing circumcision on them were far from keeping the whole law in any serious sense. One could not pick and choose among the ordinances of the law; it was all or nothing. The law pronounced an explicit curse on all who failed to keep it in its entirety.22 The gospel showed how men and women could be redeemed from that curse by faith in Christ, who by the manner of his death absorbed the curse in his own person.23
Again, no one should be misled by the idea that the law, by virtue of its antiquity, had a greater claim to veneration than a message so recent as the gospel. The gospel was the fulfilment of God’s promise to Abraham, which antedated the law by centuries. Abraham, whose faith in God was counted to him for righteousness, was the prototype of all who were justified by faith.24 The law was a parenthetical dispensation, introduced to serve a temporary purpose, but now rendered obsolete by the coming of Christ, the true offspring of Abraham, in whom the promises and their fulfilment were embodied.
The Galatians did not realize what a retrograde step they were being encouraged to take: a step back from freedom to bondage, from maturity to infancy, from the status of sons to the status of servants. They had come of age in Christ: why should they want to revert to the apron-string stage? The beginning of their Christian life had been attended by manifestations of the presence and power of the Spirit: were they now to seek the perfection of Christian life in ordinances of an outmoded regime, related not to the Spirit but to the flesh?
But the majority of the Galatian Christians were converts from paganism, who had never lived under the Jewish law; how could their submission to the yoke of the law be described as a reversion to their former state? The answer to this question reveals perhaps more sharply than anything else how radical was Paul’s reorientation to the law which had once been the centre of his devotion. By putting themselves under the law the Galatians would be subjecting themselves to the same stoicheia or “elements” under which they had formerly lived as pagans. So Paul, counting himself in along with his converts from paganism, says, “when we were infants” (that is, before we had attained the age of spiritual majority through faith in Christ), “we were slaves to the stoicheia of the universe”; but how, he asks (now that they have attained the age of spiritual majority), “how can you turn back again to the weak and beggarly stoicheia, whose slaves you want to be once more?” (Galatians 4:3, 9). Then he immediately gives an example of what he means: “you observe days, and months, and seasons, and years” (Galatians 4:10). If the observance of such special occasions by way of religious obligation was a form of servitude to the stoicheia, then the stoicheia are best identified with the planetary bodies by which the calendar was regulated. According to the creation narrative, the heavenly luminaries were ordained not only to give light on earth but also to be “for signs and for seasons and for days and years” (Genesis 1:14). Pagan religion to a large extent deified the heavenly luminaries; Judaism regarded them as instruments serving their Creator’s will. But those who felt themselves compelled to pay special veneration to a calendar regulated by those luminaries were in effect giving them the same status as the pagans did—treating them as elemental powers. Elemental powers indeed they were so long as they dominated men’s minds, together with other forces which had the same effect, like the weight of outworn tradition or the pressure of current opinion, but those whose minds were emancipated by the gospel from their domination knew all such influences to be in themselves “weak and beggarly”, unable to exercise control where their control was not admitted. But why should people who had experienced the emancipating grace of the gospel submit to those elemental powers all over again? To consent to such bondage afresh was to fall from grace, to cut oneself off from Christ and his liberating gospel. “For freedom Christ has set us free; stand fast therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery” (Galatians 5:1).
As regularly in the Gentile mission-field, it was necessary to deal with some converts from, paganism who misinterpreted gospel freedom to mean licence to do whatever they chose, to indulge their old propensities unchecked. There is an occasional word of admonition for them too in this letter, but it has the nature of an aside: “you were called to freedom, brethren; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh” (Galatians 5:13). The burden of the letter, however, is the warning against exchanging Christian freedom for legal bondage: that was the main danger at this time in the churches of Galatia. Paul pours out his urgent and affectionate concern for his new-born children in the faith, his hot indignation against those who were upsetting them and leading them astray, and at times his bewilderment at the ease with which they allowed themselves to be hoodwinked. He was one of those men of powerful intelligence who find it difficult to understand how others cannot see a logical argument as clearly as they can themselves, especially when they can be presumed to share the same premises—premises which, in this case, the Galatians had learned from Paul himself. “Who has cast a spell on you?” he asks in his perplexity (Galatians 3:1).25
4. The apostolic decree
We do not know what immediate effect the letter had in the churches of Galatia. But the agitation caused in the church of Syrian Antioch by the insistence of the circumcision party led that church to send a deputation to Jerusalem to have the issue settled, if possible, once for all. The apostles who were present in the city together with James and his fellow-elders of the Jerusalem church held a meeting—commonly referred to as the Council of Jerusalem—to consider the question and reach a decision. The Council of Jerusalem, as described by Luke in Acts 15:6–29, was not an inter-church meeting, despite the presence of the delegates from Antioch; it was a meeting of the leaders of the Jerusalem church. No one could have foretold with confidence the outcome of the meeting. The circumcision of Gentile converts was vigorously advocated by some members of the church. But thanks to Peter’s advocacy of the line he had defended when he was questioned about his visit to Cornelius and to James’s judicious summing-up, the Jerusalem leaders confirmed their previous practice and gave that confirmation official expression in a written document addressed to the church of Antioch and her daughter-churches in Syria and Cilicia, often called the apostolic decree: circumcision was not to be required of Gentile converts.
It has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay upon you no greater burden than these necessary things: that you abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols and from blood and from what is strangled and from fornication. If you keep yourselves from these, you will do well. Farewell.26
The decision against imposing circumcision on Gentile Christians must have given great satisfaction to the church of Antioch, and not least to Paul. He was not likely to change his practice or policy whichever way the verdict went, but his work would have been rendered immeasurably more difficult if Jerusalem had gone on record as insisting on circumcision. No longer would it be possible for “trouble-makers” to visit his churches and claim that the circumcision of Gentile believers was the official policy in the church of Jerusalem.27 That question was now closed. In fact, an argument for the early dating of Paul’s letter to the Galatians, which has been followed here, is that if the Council of Jerusalem, as reported by Luke, had already taken place, Paul could hardly have refrained from mentioning its decision on the main issue with which the letter is concerned. True, he was not disposed to invoke the authority of the Jerusalem church, but a bare statement of historical fact would have been an effective argument for the cause which he was defending.
Although the apostolic decree did not impose circumcision, it did lay down certain requirements for Gentile converts to observe. These requirements may have been intended to facilitate social intercourse between Jewish and Gentile Christians. Some Gentile practices were specially offensive to Jews, and if these practices were given up, Jewish Christians would feel that an obstacle in the way of table-fellowship and the like with their Gentile brethren had been removed. Three of the requirements have the nature of food-restrictions:28 the fourth—abstention from fornication—is apparently ethical. While the collocation of ethical and non-ethical requirements may seem strange to us, it would not necessarily have seemed so to Jewish Christians; they were familiar with the juxtaposition of such (to us) disparate requirements in the law.
Perhaps, however, fornication in the decree does not mean general sexual laxity but has a more technical sense. The most elementary teaching given to converts from paganism almost certainly made it dear that fornication and similar practices were incompatible with the Christian way. Even so, the Jerusalem leaders may have felt that no harm would be done by underlining this in the decree. But fornication could bear a more technical sense of marital union within the prohibited degrees of consanguinity or affinity laid down in the Hebrew “law of holiness” (Leviticus 18:6–18).29 There are one or two other places in the New Testament where fornication may have this technical sense—e.g. the concession “except on the ground of fornication” added in the Matthaean version of Jesus’ prohibition of divorce for his followers (Matthew 5:32; 19:9). There may have been some unions which did not flout Gentile convention but would have been scandalous in Jewish eyes.
As for the food-restrictions, these resolve themselves into two: Gentile Christians were to abstain from eating the flesh of animals which had been sacrificed to pagan divinities and flesh from which the blood had not been completely drained (the phrase “and from what is strangled”, which is missing in some authorities for the text, simply denotes one form of flesh with the blood still in it). Eating with blood was absolutely tabu for Jews: it is expressly forbidden in Leviticus 17:10–14 and even earlier, in the commandments enjoined on Noah and his family (Genesis 9:4).30 People who had been brought up in the Jewish way of life could not be expected to accept such food at Gentile tables. To eat the flesh of animals which had been sacrificed in pagan temples was regarded as participation (however remotely) in idolatry: this also must be avoided. If a Jewish Christian suspected that the meat set before him in a Gentile house, or the meat shared with a Gentile Christian at a fellowship meal or love-feast, had come from such a tainted source, it would be impossible to sit with him at a common table. Many Gentile Christians were perfectly willing to make practical concessions of this kind: indeed, over wide areas of the Christian world the terms of the apostolic decree were observed for many centuries as essential to the Christian way of life.31
What of Paul? Where the principles of the gospel were not at stake he was the most conciliatory of men. He repeatedly urged Christians with robust consciences to be specially considerate of their fellow-Christians whose consciences were less emancipated than their own, even, to the point of curbing their personal freedom in the interests of Christian charity, and he was careful to show them a good example in this regard.
He was familiar with an argument, voiced at times by his own Gentile converts, that since sexual activity belonged entirely to the sphere of the body, it was as morally and religiously neutral as food to truly “spiritual” men.32 But he disagreed completely. Anything which involved personal relations, especially at such a deep level as sexual union, was of the utmost moral and religious importance, and of quite a different order from food. Where fornication was concerned, Paul’s own teaching was at one with that of the apostolic decree. People who persisted in this kind of practice must not be tolerated in the church, whether fornication was understood as ordinary commerce with harlots or in the more technical sense, as with the man in the church of Corinth some years later who was openly cohabiting with his father’s wife—a breach of the permitted limits of affinity which flouted even pagan convention (1 Corinthians 5:1).
Where food laws were concerned, Paul’s conscience was completely emancipated. He knew from the teaching of Jesus that no species of food was religiously impure or contaminated in itself;33 any such impurity or contamination attaching to it had its origin not in the food but in the human mind. But he was anxious not to upset those who were more scrupulous in this respect than he himself was. He would happily accept the food restrictions specified in the apostolic decree if this would facilitate fellowship between Christians, and recommend their acceptance to others on the same ground. But such acceptance must be voluntary, not compulsory, and it must be intelligent, based on the dictates of Christian charity and not on the idea that there was something wrong and impermissible per se about certain kinds of food. It is noteworthy that when, in later years, he was asked to give a ruling on this matter, he appealed to first principles and never to the apostolic decree.
The dictates of Christian charity, on which Paul bases his ruling, are summed up by him as “the law of Christ”, in fulfilment of which his people should, among other things, “bear one another’s burdens” (Galatians 6:2). When he warns some members of the Galatian churches not to exploit their Christian freedom “as an opportunity for the flesh”, this is the corrective which he applies to such licence: “but through love be servants of one another” (Galatians 5:13). The “law of Christ” is a repromulgation of the injunction of Leviticus 19:18, “You shall love your neighbour as yourself” (Galatians 5:14).34 But when “law” is used in this way, it cannot be understood “legally”: the law of love is incapable of being imposed or enforced by external authority. Rather, it is the spontaneous principle of thought and action in a life controlled by the Spirit of Christ; it is willingly accepted and practised. Paul was persuaded that the freedom of the Spirit was a more powerful incentive to the good life than all the ordinances or decrees in the world.