The Jerusalem Council’s Letter

Here is the claim. The apostles met in Jerusalem in Acts 15 to settle what believers from the nations owed to the law of Moses. They sent a letter with four items in it, and only four. Whatever was not on the list was not required, and so the Gentile believer is free from the law of Moses.

It sounds reasonable. The council did meet, the letter was sent, and the list is short. We have already seen, in Chapter 14, the sentence James attached to it: Moses “is read in the synagogues every sabbaton σάββατον sab'-bat-on.” The four rules were a threshold and not a ceiling, because the rest would be heard week by week. That point stands, and it will return.

Three further questions remain. What exactly was the argument about? Where did those four rules come from? And what did the same leaders say about them years later?

The Question on the Table

We begin where Luke begins:

Acts 15:1 Some men came down from Judea and began teaching the brothers, "Unless you are circumcised according to the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved."

Read the last words slowly: “you cannot be saved.” The men from Judea were not saying that it would be good for these believers to learn the Torah. They were saying that without circumcision and the law of Moses, a Gentile could not be saved. In the council itself, some believers from among the Pharisees pressed the same demand:

Acts 15:5 But some of the sect of the Pharisees who had believed stood up, saying, "It is necessary to circumcise them and to direct them to observe the nomos νόμος nom'-os(law) of Moses."

This was their position, not the council’s decision. The decision comes later, in verses 19 to 21 and 28 to 29. First Peter stood up and named the problem:

Acts 15:10-11 Now therefore why do you put God to the test by placing upon the neck of the disciples a yoke which neither our fathers nor we have been able to bear? But we believe that we are saved through the charis χάρις khar'-ece(grace) of the Lord Yeshua, in the same way as they also are."

“A yoke which neither our fathers nor we have been able to bear.” What was that yoke? It was not the Torah as a way of life, for Peter himself still kept it (Acts 10:14). It was the Torah set up as the price of salvation, and no one has ever been saved by paying that price. “We believe that we are saved through the charis(grace) of the Lord Yeshua, in the same way as they also are.”

To that answer we say a full amen. Salvation is by grace, and circumcision and Torah-keeping are not the price of entry. That was the question in Acts 15, and the apostles answered it rightly.

But answering the question of how a person is saved is not the same as answering the question of how a saved person lives. The council answered the first question, and the letter shows what it said about the second.

Four Rules from an Old Book

This is James’s ruling:

Acts 15:19-20 Therefore I krino κρίνω kree'-no(judge, determine) that we do not trouble those who are turning to God from among the Gentiles, but that we write to them that they abstain from things contaminated by idols and from sexual immorality and from what is strangled and from blood.

At first glance the list looks almost random: idols, sexual immorality, strangled meat, and blood. Why these four, out of all the things one could name?

The answer is that none of them is new. Each one is a commandment already written in the Torah.

First, things offered to idols:

Exodus 34:15 Lest you cut a covenant (berit בְּרִית ber-eeth') with the inhabitant of the land, and they go whoring after their gods, and sacrifice to their gods, and one call you, and you eat of his sacrifice;

“And you eat of his sacrifice.” The verse names eating from an idol’s sacrifice as part of going after other gods.

Leviticus 17 makes the same point about sacrifices, and notice whom it names:

Leviticus 17:7-9 And they shall no longer sacrifice their sacrifices to the goat-demons after whom they go whoring. This shall be an everlasting statute (chuqqah חֻקָּה khook-kaw') for them throughout their generations. And to them you shall say: Any man (ish אִישׁ eesh), man (ish) from the house of Israel, or from the sojourner who sojourns in their midst, who offers up a burnt offering or a sacrifice, and to the opening of the tent (ohel אֹהֶל o'-hel) of appointed time (moed מוֹעֵד mo-ade') he does not bring it, to offer it to the LORD — that man (ish) shall be cut off from his people.

“Or from the sojourner who sojourns in their midst.” The foreigner who lived among Israel was bound by it as well.

Blood appears in the same chapter:

Leviticus 17:12 Therefore I said to the sons of Israel: No soul (nephesh נֶפֶשׁ neh'-fesh) among you shall eat blood, nor shall the sojourner who sojourns in your midst eat blood.

Once more the sojourner is named: “nor shall the sojourner who sojourns in your midst eat blood.” A few verses later the hunter is told to “pour out its blood and cover it with dust” (Leviticus 17:13). An animal that is strangled dies with its blood still inside it. That is why “what is strangled” stands next to “blood” in the letter, for both come from this one chapter.

Sexual immorality covers the whole of Leviticus 18, which lists the forbidden unions and closes in this way:

Leviticus 18:24-26 Do not defile yourselves in any of these; for in all these the nations were defiled, which I am casting out from before you. And the land was defiled, and I visited its iniquity upon it, and the land vomited out its inhabitants. But you shall keep, you yourselves, my statutes (chuqqot חֻקָּה khook-kaw') and my judgments (mishpat מִשׁפָּט mish-pawt'), and shall not do any of these abominations — neither the native nor the sojourner who sojourns in your midst.

“Neither the native nor the sojourner who sojourns in your midst.”

James, then, did not invent four new rules for Gentiles. He reached into Leviticus 17 and 18, chapters in which the Torah speaks directly to the foreigner living among God’s people, and drew out the commandments that a person fresh from a pagan temple needed most urgently. Idol feasts, sexual immorality, and the eating of blood were part of everyday life in that world, and these four would be the first to collide with a Jewish believer’s table.

Day One on the Site

Think of a new worker arriving at a busy construction site. The safety manual runs to five hundred pages, and no one hands it to him at the gate and tells him to finish it before lunch. Instead the foreman gives him four rules: wear your hard hat, clip on your harness, keep away from the live wires, and never walk under the crane.

Those four will keep him alive today and let him eat lunch with the crew. That does not mean the rest of the manual does not apply to him. It means he will learn the rest, one weekly safety meeting at a time.

That is the shape of Acts 15. There were four rules for the first day, and then, as James said in the very next breath, “Moses … is read in the synagogues every sabbaton.” That reason makes sense only if the new believers were going to go on learning the Torah.

The Same Four, Years Later

The strongest evidence comes from the same man, years afterward. We have already been in this scene, in Chapters 6 and 16, when Paul arrived in Jerusalem. Now listen to what James and the elders say about the Gentiles in that same conversation:

Acts 21:20-21 And when they heard it they began glorifying the Lord; and they 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 nomos(law); and they have been told about you, that you are teaching all the Jews who are among the Gentiles to forsake Moses, telling them not to circumcise their children nor to walk according to the customs.

Acts 21:24-25 take them and purify yourself along with them, and pay their expenses so that they may shave their heads; and all will know that there is nothing to the things which they have been told about you, but that you yourself also walk orderly, keeping the nomos(law). But concerning the Gentiles who have believed, we wrote, having krino(decided) that they should observe no such thing, except that they keep themselves from meat sacrificed to idols and from blood and from what is strangled and from sexual immorality."

Set the two halves side by side.

James tells Paul to show everyone that the rumor is empty, and that “you yourself also walk orderly, keeping the nomos(law).” The charge was that Paul taught Jews “to forsake Moses,” and James says there is “nothing to” it.

About the Gentiles, in the very next sentence, James repeats the decision of Acts 15 with the same four items: meat sacrificed to idols, blood, what is strangled, and sexual immorality.

Now suppose that Acts 15 had meant that the law of Moses was finished for believers. Then the report about Paul would not have been a rumor at all. It would have been the church’s official teaching. James could not have called it groundless, and Paul could not have gone into the temple to prove it false. The scene in Acts 21 makes sense only if the four rules were what the text says they were: a beginning.

“No Such Thing”

Look closely at the sentence about the Gentiles. The Byzantine Majority Text (Robinson–Pierpont 2018), the reference text of the YLV, says more here than many English Bibles print: “having krino(decided) that they should observe no such thing, except that they keep themselves from” the four. Read on its own, that sounds like the end of the argument, as if the Gentiles had nothing but four rules.

But “such thing” is a pointer, and it points back. James has just named what the whole quarrel is about, namely whether Jews living among the nations should still “circumcise their children” and “walk according to the customs.” He has answered it with a vow, a purification, and heads shaved in the temple. That is the “such thing”: circumcision, the vow, and the customs of a Jewish household.

The Torah itself makes this distinction. Some commands were given to Israel alone, to Abraham’s house. Circumcision is one of them, and we will see in Chapter 44 that the sign was given to “your house.” A believer from the nations was not being made a Jew, and no one was to lay those things on him. On that point Acts 15 and Acts 21 say the same thing.

The holy is another matter. Whoever comes near to the holy things, native or stranger, comes under one statute:

Numbers 15:14-15 And when a sojourner sojourns with you, or whoever is among you throughout your generations, and he makes a fire-offering, a soothing aroma to the LORD, as you do, so shall he do. For the assembly, one statute (chuqqah) for you and for the sojourner who sojourns, a statute (chuqqah) forever throughout your generations; as you are, so shall the sojourner be before the LORD.

“As you do, so shall he do.” “As you are, so shall the sojourner be before the LORD.” At the altar there is no Jewish rule and no Gentile rule. There is one standard for everyone who draws near, and the laws of clean and unclean, food included, belong to that standard. We saw in Chapters 22 and 23 how close an outsider could come, and what he had to be in order to come closer.

Pork and the holy place could never meet, and every Jew in that world knew why.

In 167 BC, Antiochus had sacrificed swine on God’s altar and forced the people to eat its flesh, and men and women died rather than swallow it (Chapter 21). The temple was cleansed and dedicated again, and every winter Israel remembered it with a feast. Yeshua Himself was there for it:

John 10:22-23 At that time the Feast of Dedication took place in Jerusalem; it was winter, and Yeshua was walking in the temple in the portico of Solomon.

This was the Feast of Dedication, Hanukkah. Yeshua was walking in the temple at the very feast that remembers the cleansing of God’s house after swine had been offered on its altar. Pork in the temple was never a matter of taste. It was the mark of the enemy who had defiled the sanctuary.

The prophets had already said how God sees it. Isaiah sets swine’s blood beside the grain offering as an abomination:

Isaiah 66:3 He who slaughters the ox strikes a man (ish); he who sacrifices the lamb breaks a dog's neck; he who offers up a grain offering offers swine's blood; he who burns frankincense as a memorial blesses iniquity. Indeed, they have chosen their own ways, and their soul (nephesh) delights in their abominations.

“He who offers up a grain offering offers swine’s blood.” And in the last chapter of his book, at the time when all flesh comes to worship “from Shabbat to Shabbat,” he names people who call themselves holy and still eat it. We read this verse in Chapter 24:

Isaiah 66:17 Those who sanctify themselves and purify themselves toward the gardens, behind one in the midst, who eat the flesh (basar בָּשָׂר baw-sawr') of swine and the detestable thing and the mouse, together they shall come to an end, declares the LORD.

“Who eat the flesh (basar) of swine … together they shall come to an end, declares the LORD.” Holiness and swine’s flesh do not meet, not in Isaiah’s day, not in the days of the Maccabees, and not at the end.

Every book of the Bible came to us through Israel, as Paul says plainly:

Romans 3:2 Great in every way — first, because they were entrusted with the logia λογία log-ee'-ah(oracle-word)s of God.

“They were entrusted with the logia(oracle-word)s of God.” The men who wrote those books lived in the world we have just seen, a world in which a faithful old scribe chose to be beaten to death rather than swallow swine’s flesh, and in which the whole nation kept a feast every winter to remember the cleansing of the temple after it had been defiled with swine.

Now suppose someone takes their words and makes them say that a believer may eat swine’s flesh and still come to the holy table. That would make them say the very thing their people had refused even under the sword of Antiochus.

So no one had to tell a Gentile believer that he could not bring pork into the holy assembly, stand at the table Paul compared to the altar, or touch the holy things. In the first century that was common sense, as we saw in Chapter 21, and the New Testament does not show a single person who ate pork and read the Torah in the synagogue, served in the temple, or led the ekklesia ἐκκλησία ek-klay-see'-ah. Nobody writes common sense into a letter, and the council did not write “do not murder” either.

That is why the apostles, writing to churches full of former pagans, did not need to list the unclean animals one by one. They spoke in whole sentences, and everyone knew what those sentences covered:

2 Corinthians 6:17 "Therefore, come out from their midst and be separate," says the Lord, "and do not touch what is akatharton(unclean); and I will welcome you."

2 Corinthians 7:1 Therefore, having these promises, beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from all defilement of sarx σάρξ sarx(flesh) and pneuma πνεῦμα pnyoo'-mah(spirit), perfecting holiness in the fear of God.

1 Thessalonians 4:7 For God has not called us for the purpose of akatharsia ἀκαθαρσία ak-ath-ar-see'-ah(impurity), but in sanctification.

1 Peter 1:15-16 but as He who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct, since it is written, "Be holy, for I am holy."

“Do not touch what is akatharton(unclean).” “Let us cleanse ourselves from all defilement of sarx(flesh) and pneuma(spirit).” “God has not called us for the purpose of akatharsia(impurity).” “Be holy, for I am holy.” That last line comes from Leviticus, from the chapter that closes the food laws. Not one of these verses stops to define “unclean,” because none of them had to. The Torah had already defined it, and the believers from the nations sat in the synagogue every sabbaton and heard Moses read aloud, Leviticus 11 with the rest (Acts 15:21).

Even before they ever entered a synagogue, they knew that much, for the Greek and Roman world knew that the Jews would not eat swine. The Roman historian Tacitus wrote it down, and Plutarch had his dinner guests argue about the reason. Augustus himself is remembered for a cruel joke about Herod: it was better to be Herod’s pig than his son, since a Jewish king would never kill a pig. The story behind it was not hidden either. The books of the Maccabees recorded Antiochus, the swine offered on the altar, and the martyrs who would not swallow it, and every winter Israel kept the Feast of Dedication to remember the cleansing of the temple. Josephus says that feast was known as Lights.

Swine’s flesh was unclean to eat, a carcass made unclean whoever touched it, and blood was not to be eaten at all. In that world this was no secret rule for scholars but common knowledge, among Jews and Gentiles alike. When an apostle wrote “do not touch what is akatharton(unclean),” no one in the room wondered whether he meant swine’s flesh.

So the four were not the whole Torah for the Gentiles. They were what a man fresh from a pagan temple most needed to stop doing on the first day, so that he could sit at the same table with Israel without defiling it. Everything else he would hear from Moses, read “in the synagogues every sabbaton.” The words “no such thing” do not tell him to set the Torah aside. They tell him that he is not being made a Jew.

A deeper objection remains. Some will say, “Even so, the Torah was given to Israel. It was never meant for the nations at all.” The Torah itself answers that objection.