Father Stephen De Young: Okay, we’ll go ahead and get started. When we get started here in just a moment, we’ll be picking up in Acts chapter 15. As always, by the time anyone is hearing this recording, the recording of the first Bible study on the Acts of the Apostles will be also available to listen to. So, you can go back and listen to the introduction to the book.

To get us caught up to sort of where we are now. Last time at the end of Chapter 14, Sts. Paul and Barnabas concluded their sort of first missionary journey. They had been sent out from Antioch and they went through portions of Asia Minor and then returned. They also went through the other Antioch, because, as we mentioned, there’s more than one, there’s Antioch in Pisidia, which was another place that they visited in addition to Antioch in Syria. And they had returned at the end of the chapter to Antioch.

We’ve seen already both in Antioch and in this missionary journey, that there’s already coming to be some strife between the early Christian communities and the local Jewish communities. This was not, of course, St. Paul’s intent. His intent was not to create another separate group. His intent and his hope was that he would go into the synagogues and proclaim that Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah and all of the people in the synagogues would come to accept Jesus as the Messiah. But as we saw, some did and some did not.

And in addition, a number of the God-fearers who were Gentiles who are sort of at the periphery, at the edges of these Jewish communities, they signed on with Jesus as the Messiah and became believing Christians and were baptized and received the Holy Spirit. And so now these believing Jews and these believing Gentiles are sort of forming into these Christian communities who St. Luke here in Acts refers to as “the brethren” most commonly.

And these are separate from an unbelieving Jewish group that both has rejected St. Paul’s message and is quite upset about the fact that these Gentiles, many of whom were endowing and supporting these synagogues, are now not. Are now part of this separate movement.

And they’ve begun to specifically, in addition to just sort of following him from town to town and stirring up trouble with the local authorities to get him run out of town, they’ve sort of hit upon as one of their primary arguments when they are addressing their fellow Jews and the Jewish communities in these other cities, one of their primary arguments has been that by St. Paul and St. Barnabas receiving these Gentiles without making them go through the whole proselytism process, which is, of course, why they remained at the fringes of the Jewish community, they weren’t going to go the whole way and be circumcised and follow Sabbath regulations and the food regulations and actually become members of the Jewish community and give up their status as Greek or Roman people, because St. Paul is accepting them without making them go through that process, he is in some way rejecting or negating or setting aside the Torah, setting aside the law of Moses, setting aside the customs and traditions of the Jewish people.

And so as we begin here in chapter 15, that particular argument, that particular issue, is going to reach sort of a crisis point and need to be addressed. And so that’s really where we’re picking up here in Acts Chapter 15.

And also, as I mentioned before we started recording, Acts 15 has unfortunately become a very important passage, not just in the Book of Acts, but in the whole New Testament to discuss, because it’s a passage that has, I think we’ll see as we work through it, been radically misread and misquoted in a lot of recent debates. It’s been used by a lot of different groups addressing a lot of different issues to basically try to negate the moral teaching of the Old Testament, to say that somehow the moral teaching of the Old Testament doesn’t apply to Christians.

This passage in particular is read that way, it is cited that way to a greater or lesser extent, this was already being done at the time of the Protestant Reformation. This is really the way that Martin Luther and John Calvin and the other reformers read Acts 15.

Interlocutor: So that’s why they felt they could strip away lots of liturgical…

Fr. Stephen: Right. This is a key passage in the origin of Martin Luther’s idea that there is the Scriptures, the Law and the Gospel, and these are these two separate things. That if you try to mix them together, that’s where you end up with, for Luther, that’s where you end up with Roman Catholics, so… keeping those two distinct.

Now, to be fair to Luther, since I brought it up, that was not the same as Old Testament, New Testament. He believed there was Law and Gospel in both, but that you had to keep those two things radically separate. And so this gets into how the Reformation read St Paul, the idea that Judaism is this quote unquote “legalistic” religion and that Christianity is in some way a rejection of that.

Interlocutor: That’s what I learned in Presbyterian Sunday school.

Fr. Stephen: Right. [Laughter] I think, as we’ve already seen in many other books of the New Testament, the Judaism of the first century was very much not that, but we’ll continue to see that here.

Interlocutor: Well, it’s not really an argument, but a lot of Protestants, I hear they say, “I hate religion, but I like my relationship with God.”

Fr. Stephen: Well, yeah, because there’s, of course, religious regulation in the Torah as well. Again, to be fair to the Reformers, Calvin or Luther were not exactly immoralists. Right? Calvin in particular was quite the moralist. But even Martin Luther, you read Luther’s Catechisms and there’s a huge focus on the Ten Commandments and on Christian living.

So I don’t want to make a caricature of them, but that line of thought has now progressed into this yawning gap where people are using Acts 15 to justify all kinds of sexual behavior, because none of that from the Old Testament applies anymore. And basically anything else. Economic regulations, I mean, anything that we want to ignore in the Old Testament, Acts 15 now becomes the means to do that. But as we’ll see as we work through it, Acts 15 is actually teaching almost the exact opposite of that.

That said, unless anyone has any questions or comments or innuendos or anything else they want to say, we’ll go ahead and get started in chapter 15, verse one:

And certain men came down from Judea and taught the brethren, “Unless you are circumcised according to the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved.”

So, they’re still an Antioch. We’re talking about the church in Antioch.

Interlocutor: Which one?

Fr. Stephen: Antioch in Syria. [Laughter] The big Antioch, the third largest city of the Roman Empire at this time. So we’ve got again, the brethren is referring to the Christian community, which are now being called Christians there in Antioch. And this group includes both Jewish people who have accepted Jesus as the Messiah and Gentiles, the vast majority of whom at this point are from that group of God-fearers or proselytes who are sort of at the fringes of the Jewish community. There aren’t a lot of just outright pagans who have converted to Christianity yet, although we’ll see some more of that as we move on through Acts. But most of these are people who, like the Ethiopian eunuch, we’re sort of at the edge of the Jewish community.

So it’s this mixed group. And this group comes from Judea up into Syria and says, we can assume is saying to the Gentiles who have been baptized and received the Holy Spirit, become Christians, “You also need to be circumcised. You’re not part of the covenant, you’re not part of Christ unless you are circumcised.” And presumably circumcision here it’s not just circumcision, but circumcision is sort of the emblematic for all of the customs and practices of the Jewish people. Essentially saying to the Gentiles, in order to become Christians, you have to become Jews.

Therefore, when Paul and Barnabas had no small dissension and dispute with them, they determined that Paul and Barnabas and certain others of them should go up to Jerusalem, to the apostles and elders, about this question.

So Saints Paul and Barnabas say, “No, They do not.” They’ve received the Holy Spirit. That means they are part of Christ already without having done these other things. And so, rather than just having this continue to be a debate, rather than having this potentially split the community, we’re going to see when we get into St. Paul’s epistles, especially Galatians and Romans, one of his big concerns is that we don’t end up having a Jewish church and a Gentile church as these two separate entities that aren’t united in Christ. So rather than just allowing this debate to continue, they decide, “Okay, we’ll go to Jerusalem, we’ll talk to the apostles, we’ll talk to St. James”, who’s serving as the overseer, effectively the Bishop of the Church of Jerusalem at this point, “We’ll inquire of them Paul, Barnabas and certain others, we’ll inquire of them, and we’ll settle this”

Interlocutor: Now who’s going? Paul, Barnabas, and…?

Fr. Stephen: Paul, Barnabas, and “certain others”.

And “certain others”... this is the new King James, basically the Orthodox Study Bible, “certain” is the King James way of saying “some people”. We don’t know who the others were. Presumably there are probably some from the other parties as well.

They said, “Well, go, we’ll talk about this and we’ll resolve this.” And then presumably everyone had agreed that, “Well, okay, if the apostles in Jerusalem say, this is the way it is”.

So, being sent on their way by the church, they passed through Phoenicia and Samaria, describing the conversion of the Gentiles; and they caused great joy to all the brethren.

So as they travel, they’re stopping a bit. Remember St. Philip had gone and evangelized in Samaria. So, there are these Christian communities… again, “the brethren”, there’s Christian communities all sort of along the way as they’re traveling to Jerusalem, and they’re stopping and visiting these communities on the way, telling them about the things they saw on this missionary journey, and that not only these Jewish communities, but these Gentiles also are embracing Christ and becoming part of their Christian community. And this is something that makes everyone happy, everyone rejoices in this.

One more note before we continue. Note here that the early Church here is not Congregationalist. They didn’t say, “Well, okay, who’s in charge of the church at Antioch?” Or, “Let’s gather and resolve this for Antioch, and we’ll do it this way in Antioch, and they could do it their way in Jerusalem, and they can do it however they want in Galatia”, right? They all recognize the authority of the apostles, the apostles who knew Christ best. And have known Him for the longest time. These are the ones who will know what it is we should do. So an appeal is made.

So this goes against many of our Protestant friends, their view of the early Church, that there was just sort of all these little groups of people who all sort of did things their own way. That’s clearly not the case. That’s not how they saw themselves. Right? That’s not how they saw themselves. This is in the 40s A.D., so they already see themselves as being this one body of Christ and all brethren, right? The people of these churches in Samaria, whom St. Paul has never met, are still his brethren.

And when they had come to Jerusalem, they were received by the church and the apostles and the elders; and they reported all things that God had done with them.

The word “elders” here, remember again, is presbyters. And that’s the same word that’s used back in the Torah, in the Pentateuch, in Greek, for the elders of the people of Israel, Moses appoints the 70 elders. So that’s who it’s talking about when it talks about elders, it’s talking about people who held this rank of presbyter, who were helping govern the community, in Jerusalem, the Christian community. 

Interlocutor: And so these are presumably not the same people as were elders in the synagogues.

Fr. Stephen: Right. This isn’t the Sanhedrin, but this is a different group.

Interlocutor: Clearly not, but are these people elected, chosen by the apostles?

Fr. Stephen: By the apostles. By the apostles. So by the time you get back to Jerusalem here, we’ve already seen that in Jerusalem they have deacons assisting the apostles. There’s also a group of presbyters. So, we’ve got the apostles, and presbyters and deacons. And we’re going to see later and some of St. Paul’s later epistles, we’re going to see that as the apostles begin to die, they don’t make new apostles. Because you can’t really. You don’t have a time machine for them to go back and walk with Christ. So, they appoint overseers to take their place, to govern the Church in their stead. And those overseers, that’s what episkopos, the Greek word for bishop literally means, is an overseer.

It actually goes back to… it’s a Greek translation of a Hebrew word, raim, which refers to someone who watches over flocks, to a shepherd or a herdsman. And that’s important because overseer to us sounds like manager.

Interlocutor: It sounds like in a plantation.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, that or taskmaster. Literally epi means “over” and scopos like telescopes, “watch”, literally, that word had a particular usage to refer to shepherding and herding. And that’s why it gets translated into Latin as “pastor”, which is Latin for shepherd.

But we already see here these structures, again, we’re in the 40s AD, and these structures are already in place. And remember, we saw last time that one of the things that St. Paul and Barnabas did on their way back through the cities, they came through and evangelized, remember, and then they passed through again teaching on the way back. And one of the things they did was to appoint presbyters in each of the cities over the communities there.

So they were received and welcomed. They report to them everything that they saw, everything that happened on their journey.

But some of the sect of the Pharisees who believed rose up, saying, “It is necessary to circumcise them, and to command them to keep the law of Moses.”

Interlocutor: Well, so there are Pharisees who have accepted Christ and are part of the brethren.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, it’s not just St. Paul. There are people who are from the Pharisees who have done this. It may be surprising to us because of course, the Pharisees are sort of the quote-unquote “bad guys” in the Gospels a lot, and they’re going to kind of be the bad guys here too, after a fashion or at least the antagonists. But the Pharisees, like St Paul, we quickly forget that they were mostly right. I mean, Jesus even says to his disciples, remember at one point, “Do whatever the Pharisees tell you, because they sit in the seat of Moses, but do not do as they do because they are hypocrites.” And the repeated criticism that Christ gives of the Pharisees is not that they’re wrong or they’re heretics or they have wrong beliefs. He keeps calling them hypocrites over and over again because they aren’t practicing what they know. Right? They’re experts in the Torah and could quote it to you all the time, but they don’t do it. Right? They don’t do it.

They believed in the resurrection of the dead. They believed that there was a Messiah coming. They believed in keeping the commandments of God. Right. They were a little too extreme and judgmental about it.

Interlocutor: They believed that the Messiah would come when everyone obeyed the rules?

Fr. Stephen: Right. So there was a problem there. They weren’t right about everything. But compared to, say, the Sadducees, yeah, the Pharisees were close. They were close. For example, when St Paul converts, he doesn’t start believing a radically different set of doctrines. It’s just he shifts his timetable of where he is in history, right? Oh, it’s not that we’re waiting for the Messiah to come. The Messiah has come and this is who he is and this is what he’s done. But he doesn’t sort of radically, like, “I didn’t used to believe in the resurrection, but now I do,” that kind of thing. So it shifts his understanding of where he is, sort of in the quote unquote “prophetic timeline” for his reading of what we call the Old Testament Scriptures, the Hebrew Bible. But it’s not a radical overturning.

So it makes sense that there would be more Pharisees who would have accepted Jesus as the Messiah than, say, Sadducees right. Or Essenes, who are living out the desert in these quasi-monastic communities. The Pharisees are a little bit closer. Now, the problem is, as we’re going to see, these Pharisees, at least these ones who are making this protest, are very attached to their old understanding and don’t really understand the fullness of what it means now that the Messiah has come and that there’s now been a shift.

The understanding that the early Church had. And this is from the Scriptures, is that there are ages in history and that there was the age before Adam fell into sin. And sometimes world is used instead of age, right? There was a world before the fall. There was an age before the fall. There’s the age between the fall and when the Messiah comes. There’s the age between when the Messiah comes and the end of the age. That’s what’s referred to as the end of the age. And then there is the age to come.

And that needs to kind of be understood because especially once we get into St. Paul’s epistles, he has this in his head as he communicates that there’s this age and the age to come. And he very much writes in that paradigm now, there are past ages too, but he’s going to talk about them less than this age of the age to come.

But that means that there’s been this transition when the Messiah comes from the age before to now, this age. And that means some things are transformed. We understand that as fulfillment as Christians, right? So it’s not that the Sabbath thing is done away with, but the Sabbath day finds its fulfillment in the Lord’s day because Christ rested in the tomb on the 7th day and then rose again on the first day of the week. It finds its fulfillment there. It’s not replaced, it’s filled, right? It’s filled up. And there are any number of other examples.

But this debate is really going to come down to, and we’re going to see this a lot in Galatians and in Romans, for St. Paul it’s going to come down to understanding that fulfillment. And if this in this age, if the new is the fulfillment, then going back, trying to go back to these things that belong to the previous age is for him going to represent rejecting Christ. Because effectively you’re saying then that the Messiah hasn’t come, and we need to go back to this.

Interlocutor: It didn’t make any difference.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Whereas if we’re living in the Messianic age, these things are all fulfilled and we should celebrate them in their fulfilled state. The same understanding is all through the Fathers. So when you read St. John Chrysostom, sometimes the title is translated provocatively as “Sermons Against the Jews”. It really is more like, “Sermons Against the Judaizers”, and even that doesn’t really get at what it’s about. He was preaching an Antioch in Syria about 350 years later than this. And there were a number of people because the Jewish community there was so much older and so much more well established. Christianity hadn’t been legal for all that long at that point, about 70 years.

And so the Christian Holy Week and all these things were still being formed, especially in a city like Antioch. And so there was this great temptation for a lot of the people who were ostensibly now part of the church, who had been baptized, who are now part of the church, would go and celebrate the Passover and the other feast days with the Jewish community, okay? Because they were sort of these bigger and more established sort of community festivals. And so St. John Chrysostom had to come to say, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, time out.” Christ fulfilled what happened at the Exodus in his resurrection from the dead. So the Christian Pascha is a fulfillment of that.

If you go back to that, you’re essentially rejecting what Christ did. You’re saying it wasn’t fulfilled. It wasn’t elevated in this way. So this is going to be a sort of central issue, not just for St. Paul in his life in ministry, but well into the 5th and 6th century in terms of how this relates.

So, these Pharisees, they hear what St. Paul says, they say, “Well, hold on a minute”, now they don’t say it’s a bad thing. You notice, okay, “Look, we’re all for these Gentiles coming to worship the true God, right? That part is good, but you can’t just sort of bypass the Torah to get them in. The reason that they didn’t become Jewish before is they didn’t want to do these things and you’re basically letting them out of doing them.”

Interlocutor: Now, Paul has actually seen these people receive the Holy Spirit. What the circumstances were.

Fr. Stephen: Well, these are in various cities. Remember, we’re going to hear from St. Peter here a little later in the chapter with St. Peter, with Cornelius, that was what… Remember, it happened in the abnormal order for him. They received the Holy Spirit and then he said, well, I guess we should baptize them. I guess we should baptize them because God’s already accepted them, right? So this is a sign. If God’s given them his spirit, clearly, they’ve been cleansed, they’ve been purified, they’re part of God’s covenant, they’re God’s people, so why would we need to do these other things?

Interlocutor: That makes Cornelius more important than we usually think of?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, Cornelius is critically important.

Okay, so they raised this objection, right? And it’s basically the same objection that the people had raised at Antioch. It’s sort of the reason why we’re here is to settle this issue, so we shouldn’t be too hard on these converted Pharisees.

Now the apostles and elders came together to consider this matter. And when there had been much dispute, Peter rose up and said to them:

Now notice, there’s dispute, right? This isn’t just sort of a no brainer. This isn’t a no brainer.

Interlocutor: Let me interrupt a bit. The chapter heading there, the Council in Jerusalem?

Fr. Stephen: It’s not actually part of the text, but yeah. [Laughter]

Interlocutor: I’ve heard this referred to that way many times, do we count this as one of the Church Councils? Is this the first Church Council?

Fr. Stephen: No. Well, it’s sometimes referred to… this is not the first Ecumenical Council. First Ecumenical Council is Nicea in 325. But this is often referred to as the Council at Jerusalem because the later councils, both the local councils that came up before the Ecumenical Councils and then the Ecumenical Councils follow this pattern, right? The Church looked to this and let me rephrase. I shouldn’t say “the Church looked to this” because that implies that at some point in the third century, they’re like, “Oh, we got this problem, what do we do? I don’t know. Let’s look in the Bible”, which of course isn’t how it worked [Laughter]. But this set the pattern for how the Christian Church was going to resolve issues. And so the councils sort of got bigger as they were able to, to the point that they could include the whole Roman world and beyond, once Christianity became a legal religion. But they still follow this pattern of everyone gathering to discuss these issues.

But yeah, as I mentioned, there’s dispute here. This isn’t a no brainer, and as we’re going to see, the actual solution to this problem is not to take one side or the other. If we take the extremes as the two sides. The two extremes would be on one hand, “Oh, just chuck the Torah because now we have Christ and the Holy Spirit, so we don’t need it anymore and get rid of it.” The other extreme would be, “No, to be a part of the Christian community, you have to follow the letter of this,” as understood by the Pharisees, that would be the other…

Interlocutor: And I’ve heard it advocated that it was a mistake for Christianity to keep the Hebrew Bible. We should have just only had the New Testmament.

Father Stephen: Yeah, Marcion in the beginning of the 2nd century started that one. And now we have Andy Stanley making the same argument, so that’s a perennial one.

But neither of those extreme positions is going to be taken. So the questions that are involved here are much more subtle because it’s clear to everyone involved we’re not throwing out the Torah. These are people who follow… and Christ is very clear, especially in St. Matthew’s Gospel, it says over and over again that he did not come to abolish the law, but to fulfill it. Anyone who teaches anyone to disobey the least of these commandments will be least in the kingdom of heaven. Right. He goes on and on saying no, not one jot or tittle will pass away from the law. Those being these two little tiny marks in Hebrew.  So Christ was very clear, he was not getting rid of the law. For the apostles who were there who heard him say that, they’re like, okay, we’re not doing that. The law is still here.

At the same time, we’ve witnessed that these Gentiles are receiving the Holy Spirit without being circumcised and going through all these ritual purifications and all of this. So God’s already accepted them. So it doesn’t seem rational that we should go back and have them do these things, because the purification of baptism and receiving the Holy Spirit is a greater purification than these rites were. So going back to them doesn’t make any sense. So how do we understand this and how do we balance these things? How do we interpret the Torah? How do we understand are there things that still apply and things that don’t? That’s one possible compromise. In fact, that’s how most people, unfortunately, today interpret Acts 15, what we’re going to read, is that some things apply and some things don’t anymore, right.

Interlocutor: Pretty much the way we look at everything.

Father Stephen: Right. That’s not actually the path they are going to take. But so there’s a room for a range of positions here, right? In terms of how we understand this and how we keep this, another possible position is, well, maybe Jewish Christians still need to follow all these things and just Gentiles don’t. That’s another possible one. Or another possible one is these things are now, these are good and holy and pure, and if someone wants to do them, it’s good, but they don’t have to. I mean, there’s all kinds of potential positions here.

So, when we read that there’s a dispute, we shouldn’t read it as they can’t get their act together and everyone’s arguing different things, except there’s a wide range of positions here and things to discuss and try to come to an understanding. Notice also, though, that they don’t vote, right?

You will hear this all the time about even the Ecumenical Councils. People talk as if they voted, and they didn’t. Right? They came to an agreement. They came to a mutual understanding, not a compromise, a shared understanding. That’s what we see here, too. It’s not a vote, right? “It’s like, okay, there’s 115 people here and 73 voted for this, and the other 42 voted the other well, sorry, you 42 guys who voted in favor of mandatory circumcision majority rules!” That’s not how it works. This dispute is this discussion to try to come to this shared understanding.

So after this has been going on for a while:

Peter rose up and said to them: “Men and brethren, you know that a good while ago God chose among us, that by my mouth the Gentiles should hear the word of the gospel and believe.”

Referring to Cornelius, right? He’s like, “You all know that I went and preached to Cornelius.”

So God, who knows the heart, acknowledged them by giving them the Holy Spirit, just as He did to us, and made no distinction between us and them, purifying their hearts by faith.

So he says, I told you about this, right? We here, we’re Jewish, we’ve done all these things, right? We’re circumcised, we’ve kept these customs and we received the Holy Spirit, but these Gentiles received the same Holy Spirit just as we did, and they did not do all these things. So this obviously is something we need to take into account in this discussion.

“Now therefore, why do you test God by putting a yoke on the neck of the disciples which neither our fathers nor we were able to bear?”

So he says, “God clearly didn’t require this of them in order to give them the Holy Spirit and to purify them. If God didn’t require this of them, why are you going to go and put these requirements on them, which, by the way, I haven’t kept the law perfectly. You haven’t kept the law perfectly. None of our forefathers kept the law perfectly.” And we need to be a little careful here, When we read these statements, he’s not making primarily a theological statement there. He’s making a historical statement. Meaning he’s not arguing for total depravity, he’s just saying, “Okay, read the Old Testament, right? The whole exile thing. Our forefathers did not… we received the Torah and we did not keep it, okay? And now you’re going to take this and you’re going to put this requirement on them, even though God didn’t put it on them.”

“But we believe that through the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ we shall be saved in the same manner as they.”

So even though we haven’t kept it, even though we’ve received the law and heard it and not kept it, we believe that we will be saved through the grace of Jesus Christ, the forgiveness that comes to Jesus Christ, the same way they will.

Interlocutor: Because we and they are equal in that we’ve all not kept the Torah.

Fr. Stephen: Right. It’s not as if, “Well, we are very pure because we have the law and we have kept all these customs, and so that’s why we received the Holy Spirit, and these dirty, no-good Gentiles didn’t”, right? He’s saying we’re just as impure as they are. We have the law, but we haven’t kept it. And they didn’t have the law, so they haven’t kept it. But both of us are saved by the grace of Christ.

Interlocutor: This is maybe the first time in Acts that we’ve encountered the word grace. Does it have any… what’s the meaning of grace in this context?

Fr. Stephen: Grace is, to put it really simply, grace is the action of God. Christ is doing it to us. Meaning it’s not something we’re doing. Right? It’s not that we have the law and we’ve kept it perfectly. And so we’re all good. These no-good Gentiles haven’t. Neither of us have. But through Christ saving action of forgiveness of our sins and the purification of us he uses that purifying of our hearts and their hearts, that’s something God does, He purifies your heart. Through God’s action, we are going to be saved.

And this is where the concept of the divine energies in later Orthodox theology, erga means work, right? And energeia means in-working, working in. And so, God’s grace is his working in creation, his working in us. The word “energies” in English makes you think of “wom, wom, wom” [Laughter]. It’s not a new age, the force, right? It’s not like that kind of energy. It’s God working, God acting in his creation and in us. And so that’s what St. Peter is talking about. He’s talking about specifically this purifying of the heart through God’s doing, that we hope to be saved the same as they do. Now, notice the next verse does not say “And since St. Peter was the Pope, the discussion was at an end.”

You will notice, that for the next couple of pages, this discussion continues, in your Bible. St. Peter does not have the last word. And you notice he did not stand up and say, “Brothers, you remember that Christ made me the leader of you all, and therefore I am going to settle this and end this dispute.” Right? What he says is, “God chose me to go and bring the gospel to the Gentiles, which he did.”

He specifically chose Peter to go to Cornelius’s house. So there’s not a whiff of that here. St. Peter did not preside at this council. We’re going to see someone else presiding at this council, and it wasn’t St. Peter. I’m sorry to our Roman Catholic friends…

Interlocutor: The first of the councils, the alleged first Pope is there.

Fr. Stephen: But he’s not presiding, and he’s not the one who renders the decision.

Then all the multitude kept silent and listened to Barnabas and Paul declaring how many miracles and wonders God had worked through them among the Gentiles.

St. Peter speaks, now Sts. Paul and Barnabas speak and talk about what they’ve seen in terms of how the Gentiles are receiving the Holy Spirit.

And after they had become silent, James answered, saying,

This is James, the brother of the Lord, who we’ve already read, has sort of become in charge of the church in Jerusalem:

†“Men and brethren, listen to me: Simon has declared how God at the first visited the Gentiles to take out of them a people for His name.  And with this the words of the prophets agree, just as it is written:

  ‘After this I will return

  And will rebuild the tabernacle of David, which has fallen down;

  I will rebuild its ruins, And I will set it up;

  So that the rest of mankind may seek the Lord,

  Even all the Gentiles who are called by My name,

  Says the Lord who does all these things.’

So he refers to St. Peter as Simeon, his Aramaic given name. Now, I mentioned that St. James has come to have this role of precedence in the Jerusalem Church. If you’re listening very carefully, in vespers, you may have heard him referred to as the first bishop. St. James is the first bishop. He’s mentioned in tandem with St. Peter, but he’s mentioned as the first bishop. This is because we have a very early tradition of the Church, it goes back as far as we could tell. So we’re talking essentially one of the interesting things in church history, and one of the things that drives people nuts who are Scripture scholars, is that when you get to 125 AD, between 125 AD, back into the first century, there’s just this complete historical fog where we don’t have copies of texts. We have all kinds of manuscript going back to about 125. And then just…

And so, when you’re trying to figure out when something originated earlier than that, it’s almost impossible.

Interlocutor: Unless it’s here.

Fr. Stephen: Well, we only have copies of the New Testament text from after 125. An example of this that’s relevant to what we’re reading I mentioned this way back when we started the Book of Acts is that there are two different versions of Luke-Acts, of the two books of St. Luke’s Gospel and of Acts. The Book of Acts, the two versions are much more different than the Gospel of Luke. Though there are some differences. And they’re in Western manuscripts and Eastern manuscripts.

But the Book of Acts in the Western manuscripts is about a third longer. It’s significantly longer. And it’s not added stories. It’s sort of fleshing out of stories, more adjectives, more dramatic tellings of stories. And there are all kinds of theories as to what the relationship between these two is. The one I’m probably most persuaded by is that both of them come from St. Luke and that one is sort of an earlier draft and then a later draft. But in terms of determining which one was first or how exactly they originated, we have copies of both going back to about 125. They just sort of both disappeared into the fog.

So there’s sort of no way to know for sure which one was earlier.

Interlocutor: This is the shorter version, I take it?

Fr. Stephen: No, this is actually the longer version, in the New King James. But yeah, it’s not longer because there’s like a whole bunch of stories. It’s just words added all throughout, descriptive words. All that is to say, when I say that this tradition about St. James goes all the way back, I mean to 125, goes back as far as we could tell, that one of Christ’s appearances after his resurrection was to James. Now that we actually know we actually read this epistle on Sunday where in First Corinthians, St. Paul lists all the people who Christ appeared to before his ascension, and he mentions James’s brother. But that story is nowhere in the New Testament of what happened when he appeared to his brother.

But the tradition goes all the way back as far as we can. And we have various written forms of this, we have various references to this going all the way back to the beginning of the second century that in that appearance, Christ put James, his stepbrother, in charge as overseer of the Church in Jerusalem, of the community in Jerusalem. We see the result of that all through the New Testament, including here, where he’s presiding at this gathering. He was mentioned before in that respect, we’re going to see in St. Paul’s epistles, like in Galatians, he’s going to talk about “When I went to Jerusalem and saw James, the Lord’s brother”, and Cephas listed second. So we see the results of that. I think that makes it a very… and we know that he appeared to him. So between that evidence that we have in the New Testament, it seems to be a very grounded tradition in terms of it makes sense of what we have in the New Testament.

Interlocutor: I asked this question before, but I don’t remember the answer. Where is this St. James buried? This is not the one in Spain?

Fr. Stephen: No, this St. James is in Palestine. There’s a cathedral. I think it’s ours, there’s an Armenian cathedral of St. James there, too. But I think it’s our Cathedral of St. James that has his relics. As an aside on that, one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen on the History Channel was whenever there’s that James ossuary a few years ago, ossuary being the bone box, they discovered this bone box that had an inscription on the side that turned out to have been altered. It turned out to be fake, but the inscription on the side said it’s Aramaic, “James, son of Joseph”. I think maybe even “brother of Jesus”. Or it might have just been “James, son of Joseph”. It turned out a bunch of that was added. I think maybe the James was legit. But of course, that’s Yakov, so there’s a thousand. I mean, there’s five or six James’s in just in the New Testament,

So, it turned out to be fake. But they did a History Channel documentary about it almost immediately, of course, before it had been checked out. But the really funny part of it to me was they went to this cathedral, and I swear to you, they’re interviewing this Orthodox priest at the cathedral and asking him, “Do you have the relics of St. James?” “Yes, we do.” “Did they come out of a box that looked like this?” So this was funny to me on multiple levels.

Number one, they would have come out of that box like 2000 years ago. So how would he know? Yeah, but number two, if they have his actual bones, who cares about the box?

Interlocutor: So anyway, do you still have the Christmas wrapping?

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah, that just seemed really bizarre to me. They’re taking for granted that, yes, these are authentically the relics of St. James. But we’re really worried about authenticating this stone box.

Interlocutor: Because that becomes the authentic, right?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. But his relics are still there. St. James is the overseer of the church in Jerusalem. He is presiding, as we’ll continue to see at this council. And it is very solid that Christ appeared to him and put him in that position. There’s also the issue of the fact that we were told before Christ’s death that his brothers didn’t believe that he was the Messiah, and now he’s a leader. So something happened to make him the leader over the eleven. So we see that reflected here. Okay, so he says, “Listen, men, brethren, listen to me. Simeon here has recounted to you what happened with Cornelius, how God has visited the Gentiles to take out of them of people for his name.”

Why is this language important? This is the language that’s used about Israel in the Old Testament. That God… they were not a people, God made them a people for his name. Abraham was a Gentile, he was a Chaldean, he lived in Ur of the Chaldees. He was a Mesopotamian. He wasn’t ethnically different than the other Mesopotamians. But God chooses him and creates this nation from him to be his, to be his possession. So what St. James is saying here is the Christian community, God is doing this again. God is doing this again. So, St. James here is arguing that again, the Christian community now, the brethren, the Christian community, is not a replacement for Israel and the Jewish people. But like we’re saying is the fulfillment of what God was doing by creating and calling the Jewish people.

Interlocutor: Why isn’t it both that and a replacement? I don’t understand.

Fr. Stephen De Young: Well, replacement would imply that he’s rejected Israel and St. James himself is Jewish, right? There’s continuity and discontinuity, right? When God creates Israel from Abraham, that comes right after the Tower of Babel. We’ve talked about the Tower of Babel several times already here in the Book of Acts, Tower Babel, God rejects the nations, scatters them, disowns them, and then goes and creates this nation for himself.

He didn’t do that with the Jewish people, right? He doesn’t reject them all. He doesn’t say, “Forget all of you, I’m starting over and pick some person in a Gentile world”, Right? So that’s why I’m saying it’s not a replacement, it’s a fulfillment.

Interlocutor: I suppose you have to watch how people land the charge of “replacement theology”, the nature of replacement theology what do you mean by that? Because in this context are we replacing the Jewish people, or do you just not subscribe to my Dispensationalist views? It’s a family and that’s two separate issues. Dispensationalist views on end times, it’s a separate issue. It may be related, right, but you can hear sometimes politically being used in two different ways. Like you can hear people use, “this is replacement theology”, like, well, what do you mean by that?

Fr. Stephen De Young: Right. But it is important to note, right, that for St. James here, the Jewish person who doesn’t accept Christ is no longer one of God’s people, right? The fulfillment language means…

Interlocutor: That’s not something God has done. That’s something they chose?

Fr. Stephen De Young: Right. And St. Paul’s going to talk about that much more in Romans, that they’ve been cut off because of their unbelief, basically, they have left, they have rejected Christ, right? Because the purpose it’s being argued here, the purpose here is that the purpose of God creating Israel, making this people right, was first and foremost the incarnation of Christ.

We heard some of that language tonight, too, regarding the Theotokos. As being sort of the completion of David’s line in Israel so that Christ could be born, right? So that’s first and foremost. But then what Christ does for this people, right, is he now creates this people from every tribe and tongue and nation in the world, including the Jewish people, not excluding them, including them, but including everyone else, too. Right. Forms this, purifies this people for himself.

Interlocutor: Would it be correct for him to say that the Jewish people have to exist for Christ to have a context into which to come where he’ll be comprehensible?

Fr. Stephen De Young: Right. The history of Israel was leading up to the incarnation of Christ. It’s a story that’s heading somewhere and leading to something.

Interlocutor: But Christ couldn’t have been born to a Roman family and be Christ.

Fr. Stephen De Young: Well, right, because Christ means Messiah. Yeah. Right. I mean, God could do things however he wants, but it would have been very different, right? The whole history of the world would have been very different for that to happen. So this is a fulfillment in the sense that this is the purpose. This was the aim.

And St. James is getting this language from the prophets of the Old Testament. We’re going to talk about his quote here in a second. But the language of the new covenant, particularly in like Jeremiah, chapter 31, and in Ezekiel, that language is always that God called Israel. He told them to be good, he told them to be holy. He told them to be righteous, and they failed. But the time is coming when he is going to make them righteous and make them holy and make them this is that grace again, God acting and God doing it because they haven’t and didn’t so say. James is drawing on that language, right. So he doesn’t just see this as a one-off, “Okay, now some Gentiles are getting saved.” Notice though, he also doesn’t see it as now these details are becoming Jewish. God is forming this people for Himself out of every nation.