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the Jerusalem Council: lessons for how your church greeters must not act.

honeybee on a thistle. Barajul Drăgan (the Dragan dam), near Cluj, Romania

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The Jerusalem Council is typically regarded as a significant step in adding Gentile Christians into the church. The Jewish Christian leaders, wary of the reports they were hearing, listened to the arguments and came to the decision that the Gentile believers were welcomed into the church without being required to observe the Mosaic law.

Like so many explanations of such things, it is the opposite of what happened. It was an unvarnished act of religious imperialism. The Jewish Christian leaders enhanced their position of power by granting themselves authority over Gentiles both within Israel and in Gentile areas, the Jews were ensured their peace would not be disturbed by the Gentile Christians—even outside Israel, and the Gentile Christians were told their place: at least one step lower than the real people of God.

Jesus asked Peter three times to take care of his sheep. Now Peter tells the sheep they are welcome to stay in the pasture, since apparently Christ let them in, but they must keep their place, other there, and must not do anything to upset the real sheep.

This is what love looks like?

Rabbinic Judaism distinguished three categories of Gentile converts and sympathizers:

• Full proselytes: Gentiles who became Jews by conviction and kept the whole law. Full-fledged proselytes underwent circumcision, worshiped in the Jewish temple or synagogue, and observed the rituals and regulations concerning the sabbath, clean and unclean foods, and all other matters of Jewish custom. For the most part, the Jews accepted them as equals, but many rabbis regarded the proselytes’ sinful beginnings as a bent toward sin that could never totally be overcome.

• God-fearers: Gentiles who belonged to the wider missionary community in the Diaspora and were favorably viewed as righteous people who had a share in the world to come. Sometimes dubbed half-proselytes, these converts studied and worshiped in the synagogue but were restricted to the Gentile area of the Temple, did not submit to circumcision, and did not necessarily observe the other Jewish religious requirements regarding diet, sacrifice, the Sabbath, and so on.

• Resident aliens: Gentiles who lived and worked in Israel, and were thus required to keep the Noachic law. The Talmud finds seven laws for all peoples in the Noachian Covenant, which the Jews applied to all Gentiles and required of those living in Israel. Fornication, murder and idolatry were the three chief transgressions, to which blasphemy, judging, and theft were often added. Amorean scholars also demanded a renunciation of paganism. Usually the list was shortened to three: the command to multiply and fill the earth, the prohibition against eating blood, and the sanction against tak­ing human life.

In spite of these categories, the rabbis were generally not content to leave uncircumcised Gentiles as loose adherents, the point being that they cannot learn the law if they are not circumcised. They were thus regarded as fully Gentile if they did not take the step of full conversion within a year of accepting the Noachic law.

In view of this, the decision of the Jerusalem Council to require the Gentile converts to observe Noachic laws was not designed to bind them to the basics of Judaism but rather had the purpose of extending resident alien status to Gentiles living outside the borders of Israel, making these Gentiles resident aliens even though they were not residing in Israel. The Jews always considered the Gentiles duty-bound to obey the Noachic laws, but previously they considered themselves as having authority over the Gentiles only when within the borders of Israel.

In the world of the Diaspora, things were necessarily different. Jews lived in clean Jewish enclaves within the unclean Gentile world. Gentiles could be granted entrance, assuming they bound them­selves to the proselyte/God-fearing/resident alien obligations. Thus the Diaspora essentially became a dynamic expansion of Israeli territory into the Gentile world. Wherever the Jews settled there was a requirement for a separation from uncleanness, and so pockets of clean Jewish settlements appeared within these Gentile areas, and a Gentile coming within the Jewish-occupied area was bound by Jewish-defined standards of religious, cultural and societal conduct.

The Jerusalem Council changed that, to the enrichment of the Jew. Gentiles who had no proximity to the Jewish community were now told they were subject to Jewish leaders. Their relationship to Christ connected them to the Jewish faith, and the Jews insisted that Gentiles who called themselves Christians now came under Jewish authority. It really was quite remarkable. The Gentiles, not necessarily wishing to have anything to do with the Jewish religion, are told they must submit to circumcision. Resisting this, they are informed that the Jewish leaders have come to the decision that they need not do this, but are told that the Jews have authority over the Gentiles nevertheless.

One has to wonder to what extent the apostles saw the placing of the Noachic laws upon Gentile converts living outside Israel not as an acceptance of the Gentiles but rather an enlargement of Jewish authority. The fact that they granted themselves authority over these new converts speaks volumes about their implicit assumption that they were in control: that the church in Jerusalem was the final arbiter of all expansions of the church in all areas (note that this included a view of Paul as their representative and subject to their oversight, not just in Acts 15 but as late as Acts 21 as well).

The Jerusalem Council’s decision effectively labeled the new believers “resident aliens” and extended the spiritual boundaries of Israel to encompass whatever territory these resident aliens occupied, for how could they be “resident” aliens if they were outside Israel? When James makes the observation in Acts 15.21 that there are synagogues in all these areas he is not saying that the Gentiles must observe these rules so as to not offend the Jews with their licentious conduct. His point was that Israel’s borders had already been spiritually extended throughout the world, for wherever there was a synagogue there was an Israeli outpost, and so the borders of Israel were extended to encompass the Gentile converts living in close proximity. The Gentiles are thus required to observe the Noachic laws because “resident alien” applies to any Gentile having contact with any Jew anywhere in the world. If there is a synagogue and Gentiles are within proximity, then they must observe Jewish rules.

It is astonishing that the Gentiles accepted this, but Christianity was a Jewish religion so possibly they considered themselves as having nothing to say about it. Regardless, it was a decision doomed to failure, first because it assigned the converts a primitive pre-Jew religious status that was only one notch above natural law, and second because it gave the apostles far-reaching control not only over the Jerusalem church and all Jewish converts in Gentile areas, but over all Gentiles everywhere, something the Jew had never have done previously. They were granting themselves universal power and privilege and at the same time relegating the Gentiles to a juvenile distinctly substandard role.

The practical outworking of this is seen in the way the people from Jerusalem unashamedly interfered in the churches, insisting that they fall into line behind Jerusalem. The problem, of course, was that the believers at Jerusalem continued to observe the law in most of its important aspects: Temple worship, circumcision, diet, and Sabbath observance. The insistence that Gentiles be circumcised is evidence that they had no intention of abandoning their Jewish religious prac­tices: circumcision, Sabbath observance and Temple worship, dietary laws (except for Peter on occasion), and probably not even their sacrificial system, given the forcefulness of the argument of the Letter to the Hebrews.

When Paul returned from his missionary journey to deliver the offering to the leaders at Jerusalem (Acts 21), they declared there were thousands of Jewish believers who were zealous for the law—the inference being that Paul wasn’t—and that therefore he was a problem. There is no doubt that James and the other apostles included themselves in those who were zealous for the law. For Paul to make the statement that in Christ there is no longer Jew or Gentile is a distance that none of the other apostles were willing to go. They were Jews. They were going to remain Jews. The Gentiles could be included as resident aliens, but the Jews maintained control, were not going to stop observing their Jewish religion, and were outraged when Paul wrote that in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision means anything, that Christ is the end of the law, that the law brings wrath, that everyone under the law is under a curse, and that he counts all his Pharisaic righteousness rubbish. None of the apostles would have ever agreed to such outrageous statements. Paul was alone in teaching that both Jew and Gentile needed to come to Christ, stripped of everything old (both Judaism and paganism) to form one body that was new, separate, and unlike anything the world had seen before.

(This is still a lingering problem for us today: we like the part about being saved by faith with nothing added by us but aren’t so keen on the other half of that formula: leaving behind everything that is inconsistent with following Christ. Heb 12: Let us lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith. Leaving the sin is fairly easy. Shedding the weight is a lot tougher. Both sin and weight keep us out of the race, but since laying aside the sin is easier people tend to emphasize that, even though it doesn’t necessarily mean they get into the race. My argument: if you don’t get into the race, you might as well keep on sinning because your sinlessness isn’t doing God any good.)

And so the apostles, at least at this point, were still anchored to their Jewishness and considered being a Jew an understandable and necessary reason to exert control over the Gentiles who come within their sphere, no matter how remotely. Their decision was not a statement of acceptance or toleration, but of imperialism. The Gentiles were not equals and were not elevated to the level of even proselyte or God-fearer, for they refused to take on the Jewish obligations of lifestyle and worship. The Council’s ingenious solution is to grant the Gentiles the status of resident alien by virtue of the fact that there are synagogues located in these areas, which now redefine the boundaries of these Israeli outposts to include the surrounding Gentile areas where new believers reside.

Ingenious, but wrong. Really, really wrong. The fact that James proposed the idea should tell us all we need to know: It was political, parochial, divisive, derisive, and wholly Jewish.

The question must be asked: How did the Christian Jewish leaders devise such a clever solution to this problem? Were they aware of the implications of this new imperialism when they created the plan to expand their influence and control to wherever Gentiles were coming to Christ? The simple answer is that no, it wasn’t necessarily a clever plan. It was mostly just business as usual, sent in a slightly different direction by the command of Christ for them to make disciples of all nations. That they did not do this immediately, energetically, or correctly does not mitigate the fact that they had the command of Christ to go into the nations and so they had to regard these new converts as somehow being part of God’s plan. That they did not leave their Jewishness behind is what led to problems, and so the decision of the council is completely in line with everything they believed, and possibly almost inevitable rather than clever:

• Christ told them to go into every nation (and so there was this new contingent of believers who had to somehow be fitted in)

• but Jesus did not say they had to abandon their Jewishness (which would not have occurred to them to do)

• neither had Christ given them instructions on how the Gentiles were to be regarded (and so their inclination would be to treat them the way they had always treated Gentiles)

• which led to the Jerusalem solution: create a new category of Gentile believers who could believe in Christ without being brought into the Jewish religion under the previously defined categories, but would nevertheless remain under the authority of the Jewish Christian leaders.

We don't know how long this heavy hand remained on the Gentiles, but Paul was still battling it in his letter to the Galatians, so we know it continued for a while (and we can see that the decision only continued the problem of the Jews confusing and oppressing the Gentile believers). We would guess that the destruction of the Temple in AD 70 severely limited the Jews’ ability to retain control over anyone, and so possibly that was the end of this Christian-Jewish imperialism. Regardless, what is certain is that if the Gentiles had remained under the control of the Jewish leaders it would have made for a very different church, and possibly even the end of the church as it was intended. The speculation that the Temple was destroyed by God to put an end to Temple worship (and I intend that as it is written: Temple worship, not worship in the Temple) becomes more interesting if we add to that the other problem that needed to be addressed: the continuing negative influence of the Jewish leaders over the Gentile believers. Possibly the destruction of Israel was to bring a final solution to both problems.