“And some men came down from Judea and began teaching the brethren, ‘Unless you are circumcised according to the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved’ ”.
These words in Acts 15:1 introduce an issue that challenged
the Christian church soon after its inception and would continue to be debated
among the believers for years to come.
But where did this controversy originate?
The Cause
In order to trace this issue back to its roots, one must go
back to the Old Testament and consider what it has to say about the relationship
between Jew and Gentile.
Once the distinction appeared, however, God made it clear that He wished the distinction between His people and the pagan nations to be readily apparent at all times.
First, all Jewish men were to undergo circumcision as an indelible
mark of their relationship to God.
Of course, Israel was not the only mid-eastern nation to practice circumcision,
but for the Jews the ritual had special significance.
In addition to this distinguishing mark, God gave the
Israelites a detailed and complex set of dietary, religious and social laws
designed to remind them of their call to holiness and to prevent them from
associating too closely with their Canaanite neighbors.
Although Jewishness was largely a matter of ancestry —
descent from Jacob, or as God renamed him, Israel — it was nevertheless possible for a
non-Jew to become part of the nation.
If, however, a Gentile wished to leave his pagan gods for
the worship of Yahweh and enter in to God’s covenant with Israel, he must first
be circumcised and then accept the Mosaic Law as binding on himself. One could not claim to be
a worshipper of Yahweh and yet refuse to revere and keep the Law. There was no
other means of approach to God save through the Mosaic ritual and
regulations.
For centuries — even millennia — this pattern persisted.
Then the Lord Jesus Christ came, bringing with Him a new covenant in His blood. At first His exclusively Jewish disciples understood the
message of the gospel as belonging to the nation of Israel alone, but the Holy
Spirit soon directed otherwise, and the message spread through Philip to the
half-Jewish Samaritans and the non-Jewish proselytes to Judaism,
through Peter to the uncircumcised “God-fearers” like the Roman centurion
Cornelius,
and finally through Cypriot and Cyrenian disciples to the pagan and idolatrous
Gentiles.
With the advent of the apostle Paul’s ministry, great numbers of Gentiles began
coming to the Lord.
The issue of how these non-Jewish believers were to be
incorporated into the church body, therefore, became crucial.
The earliest converts to Christianity had been the Jerusalem Jews who heard Peter’s stirring sermon on the day of Pentecost. They had been “pierced to the heart” by his call for repentance, and some 3,000 of them had been baptized on that first day alone.
The earliest converts to Christianity had been the Jerusalem Jews who heard Peter’s stirring sermon on the day of Pentecost. They had been “pierced to the heart” by his call for repentance, and some 3,000 of them had been baptized on that first day alone.
It was only natural, therefore, that these Jewish believers
would feel anxious about seeing so many Gentiles entering the fellowship
without undergoing the traditional conversion process. After all, in the past
no Gentile could be counted among God’s people unless he was circumcised and
submitted to the Law: why should it be any different now?
So it was that while Paul was ministering in the Gentile
territories of Asia, he encountered a number of Jewish Christians who had
traveled up from the Jerusalem area to make sure that the Gentiles understood
their legal obligations.
Next: Why the debate was crucial
RJA
Published by permission of the author
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