in toto, it could not but appear to many Jewish Christians time
to reconsider the situation, and boldly deny the reality of any
Gentile’s portion in Messianic salvation apart from circumcision
(as binding to observance of the Law). So argued the stricter
section, those with Pharisaic antecedents, who boldly invaded
the headquarters of the liberal mission at Antioch, and began
to teach the Gentile converts that circumcision and the Law
were matters of life and death to them. Paul and Barnabas
took up the gage; and as the judaizers no doubt claimed that
they had the Judaean Church at their back, the local church
felt that the issue would have to be decided in Jerusalem itself.
So they sent up Paul and Barnabas “and certain others of their
number” (Acts xv. 2; contrast Gal. ii. 1 seq.) to confer with “the
apostles and elders” there. The fact that Paul consented to go
at all, to the seeming prejudice of his direct divine commission,
is best explained by his prior understanding with “the Pillars”
of the Judaean Church itself (Gal. ii. 1–10). His object was
twofold: to secure in the centre of Judaeo-Christianity that
public vindication of Gentile freedom from “the yoke of the
Law” on which he felt he could count, and at the same time to
save the Church of Christ from outward schism.
On the main issue there could be no compromise. It was conceded, largely through the influence of Peter and James, that the good pleasure of the Holy Spirit (xv. 28a), in possessing Gentile hearts, settled the question. But as to the need of considering age-long Jewish sentiment on points where divergent practice would tend to prevent Jewish Christians from recognizing Gentile believers as brethren, as well as place a needless stumbling-block between Jews and a Messianic society in which unlimited “uncleanness” was tolerated—on this compromise was possible. The compromise was proposed by James (xv. 20 seq.) and accepted by Paul. Indeed he had less to sacrifice than the other side in the concordat. For his Gentile converts had only to limit their freedom a little, in the cause of considerate love; but their Jewish brethren had to surrender a long-standing superiority conferred by divinely instituted national law. For while the law of Moses was still observed by Jewish Christians, in the case of Gentile proselytes to Messianic Judaism it was to be waived, and a minimum of proselyte rules, indispensable (xv. 28) to a type of piety[1] essentially common to all “in Christ,” taken as sufficient. Of the “abstinences” in question only that touching blood (in its two forms) was really a ritual matter, and it was one on which there was a good deal of scruple outside Judaism. The other two were obvious deductions from fundamental Christian ideas, as well as elements of proselyte piety. On the other hand, security against Gentile liberty undermining Jewish-Christian observance of the Law was felt to exist in the firmly rooted tradition of the synagogues of the Diaspora (xv. 21).
The above is only one reading of the case, though the simplest. Not a few scholars dispute that Paul could have been a party to such a concordat at all, and suppose that the letter embodying it is a fiction, probably composed by the author of Acts. Others hold that, if any such letter were ever sent, it was by James and the Jerusalem Church at a later date, without consulting Paul. In fact it was their solution of the deadlock to which interference with Peter’s table-fellowship with Gentiles led in Antioch after the Jerusalem conference; but the author of Acts unhistorically fused it with the decision of that conference. Finally Harnack (Die Apostelgeschichte, 1908, pp. 188 sqq.) maintains that the reference to “things strangled” is an interpolation, not shared by early Western authorities for the text, and that “blood” meant originally homicide. Hence the rules had no reference to food apart from constructive idolatry. This theory—which does not remove the contradiction with Gal. ii. 10, on the assumption that Acts. xv.＝Gal. ii. 1–10—seems at once textually improbable (feeling in the East being too anti-Jewish in the sub-apostolic age to allow of such an interpolation) and historically needless.
At no point in his career does Paul’s greatness appear more strikingly than now in his relations with Judaeo-Christianity. Equally above the doctrinaire temper which cannot see its favourite principle practically limited by others, and a mere opportunism which snatches at any compromise as the line of least resistance, he acted as a true missionary statesman, Paul’s Conciliatory Spirit. with his eye both on the larger future and on the limiting present. As he himself obeyed the principle of loving concern for others’ good by conforming to certain Jewish forms of piety (1 Cor. ix. 19 seq., 22), as being a Jew by training; so he was ready to enjoin on Gentiles, short of the point of compulsion, abstinence from blood simply as a thing abhorrent to Jewish sentiment. His was the spirit of a strong man, who can afford and loves to be generous for the greater good of all. This is the key to his conduct all along, leading him to interrupt his work on two later occasions simply to keep in touch with Jerusalem by conciliatory visits, as prejudice against him recurred owing to rumours of his free conduct on his Gentile missions.
On the other hand, it was the opposite side of his character, viz. inflexible courage in defence of vital principle, that was called into action soon after, owing to Peter’s visit to Antioch (the abrupt reference to which in Gal. ii. 11 probably means that the judaizers were making capital of it in Galatia). There for a time Peter fell in Peter’s Visit to Antioch. readily with the local custom whereby Jewish and Gentile Christians ate together. But this was more than was understood even by James to be involved in alliance of the two missions. It was one thing not to force Judaism on Gentile Christians; it was another to sanction table-fellowship between Gentile and Jewish Christians, in consideration for the former as brethren. Let Peter, said James through his friends, remember Judaean feelings as well. Such a step was in advance of their convictions; and in any case it seemed wrong to break with the sentiment of the Mother Church in Judaea for the comfort of Gentile brethren on the spot, whom they had but recently regarded as by nature “unclean.”
One man, however, saw further into both the logic and the expediency of the case. Paul saw that by their very reliance on Christ rather than the Law for justification, Jewish Christians had in principle set aside the Law as the divinely appointed means of righteousness: that thereby they had virtually come down from their prerogative Paul’s Protest. standing on the Law and classed themselves with “sinners of the Gentiles”; and finally that they had been led into this by Jesus the Messiah Himself. If that attitude were sinful “then was Christ the minister of sin.” If righteousness depend after all on the Law, then why did Christ die? This penetrating analysis (Gal. ii. 14–21) of the implications of Christian faith was unanswerable as regards any legal observance as condition of justification. But was it not possible that the degree of sanctification to be hoped for depended, for Jews at least, upon adhering as closely as possible to the old law of holiness? This was probably the position of Peter and Barnabas and the rest, as it was certainly the theory with which the judaizers “bewitched” the Galatian converts for whose benefit Paul recounts the story (iii. 1–3). But for it too he had an answer, in his doctrine of an evangelical sanctification, homogeneous in nature and motives with the justification out of which it grows, as fruit from root (iii. 5, v. 16–26). But at Antioch he confined his protest to the vital matter of principle, the true relation of Christ and the Law, and the deadly danger of confusing their values and functions if both were to be treated as essential to Christian faith. Thus a higher expediency, for Jews in particular, told against the expediency alleged on the other side; while as for expediency in relation to the Gentiles, it was a matter not only of Antioch and the Jews and Gentiles there involved, but also of the Roman world and the relative numbers of potential converts from either class in it. This point is not made explicit in Gal. ii. 14 sqq.; but it was probably present to Paul’s mind and added to the intensity of his feeling touching the gravity of the issue.
The standpoint of the Epistle to the Galatians is of great moment in judging of its historical retrospect. What Paul had to establish
in the first instance was his independence up to the date of his- ↑ For this as the spirit of these rules, whatever their exact origin, see Hort, Judaistic Christianity, pp. 68 sqq. They thus correspond to the “remembrance of the poor” in the earlier agreement between “the Pillars” and Paul in Gal. ii. 10.
