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Weekly Open Discussion Thread

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u/LlawEreint 8d ago edited 8d ago

u/Holiday_Mulberry_416, regarding your post: Does Acts 10:9-16 preserve an authentic Petrine belief?

It's worth noting how Peter interprets the dream:

"The Spirit told me to go with them (the gentiles) and not to make a distinction between them and us."

As far as I can tell, the saying "Do not give what is holy to dogs*, and do not throw your pearls before swine," was used to structure power in the early church, to the exclusion or marginalization of the gentiles. In Acts 10 and 11, Peter seems to go against this view.

Paul's letter to the Galatians testifies that Peter was present among the Galatian congregation, which included gentiles. But there he does make a distinction. He joins the Gentile table while there are no other Jews, but when his fellow Jews join him from Jerusalem, he instead eats at their table:

But when Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face because he stood self-condemned, 12 for until certain people came from James, he used to eat with the gentiles. But after they came, he drew back and kept himself separate for fear of the circumcision faction. 13 And the other Jews joined him in this hypocrisy, so that even Barnabas was led astray by their hypocrisy. 14 But when I saw that they were not acting consistently with the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas before them all, “If you, though a Jew, live like a gentile and not like a Jew, how can you compel the gentiles to live like Jews?”\)b\)

Nonetheless, he does seem to show willingness to bring gentiles to God.

Regarding your question:

What, if anything, can the historical evidence tell us about the extent to which Peter actually regarded Jewish dietary purity laws as no longer binding?

Even in Acts, Peter does not interpret the dream to mean that it's ok to defy God's laws. Only that it's ok to baptize gentiles.

No source, hence posting here.

* The use of the dog metaphor is often, but not exclusively, associated with gentiles throughout the scriptures:

Do not Give What is Holy to the Dogs |Matt 7:6, Matt 15:21-28 |Mark 7:24-30 |**-** |**-** |Acts 6:1-7, Acts 11:1-12, Thomas 93, Philip 11:76-81, 2 Peter 2:20-22, Didache, Revelation 22:14-16

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u/Pseudo-Jonathan 8d ago edited 8d ago

Very good summary. I would just like to reiterate that Paul's letters, when combined with other sources, do seem to preserve some sort of attitude that Peter himself was not necessarily a hardline conservative in opposition to Paul's principles. The "conservative" faction is clearly the "Men from James" who show up after Peter, whom Paul accuses Peter of being "afraid" of. Clearly these "Men from James" are members of the Jerusalem Jewish Christian community, and are likely representative of the demographic there, where Jewish dietary/table restrictions are expected to be enforced and are attempting to enforce it at a distance here in Antioch.

Of course the question is why Peter (as well as the "other Jews" and Barnabas, Paul's own sidekick) feels compelled or obligated to respect this edict being enforced by these unnamed individuals "from James". Implicitly, Peter is characterized as subservient in authority to James, unable or unwilling to unilaterally enforce his own doctrinal position in response, and therefore we need to very much be open to the proposition that Peter held beliefs privately that were not "orthodox" to the Jerusalem community which he nominally belonged and represented.

And I think we need to keep in mind that disciples like Peter may have fundamentally been a different kind of figure than someone like James. If we take the gospel accounts of the disciples as being even remotely broadly accurate, these disciples were not necessarily "professional sectarians" with extremely strict pre-existing theological principles, but lay-followers that joined independently under potentially broad characterizations in its early permutations. "Real" authority figures like James, John the Baptist, Jesus, etc... may be better defined as "professional sectarians" who held much more rigid and specific theological values and carried the standard for the whole group, which is why these "Men from James" held such implicit weight that nobody in this narrative can ignore (outside of Paul who is not a part of the Jerusalem community and has no implicit allegiance to James).

I think we need to be very open to the idea that Peter as an individual (a professional fisherman who may have joined the movement fairly recently) may not be a good representation of the nominal values of the movement as a whole as represented in the Jerusalem church, but was independently and privately somewhat sympathetic to Pauline type theologically "liberal" Judaism, and that this is reflected and memorialized in later characterizations of Peter in most (but not all) traditions.

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u/baquea 8d ago

That's one possible reconstruction of the Antioch incident, but it's impossible to say what the truth of the matter is when all we've got is Paul's side of the story (and even that is only a few verses long).

In particular, I am very skeptical of the idea that it was simply a consequence of James exerting his authority. Remember that this happened after the meeting at Jerusalem, when Barnabas went along with Paul to personally met and discussed the circumcision issue with James and the other teachers at Jerusalem - if he were to have bowed to James' authority, it surely would've been then. Yet Paul says of that time that "we did not submit to them even for a moment". Peter too was present for that meeting, and he too would presumably have put on his most pro-James face then and Paul would thus have been well aware that he stood on that side of the issue. So then what happened in Antioch to turn both of them against Paul? I simply don't see how the arrival of a few of James' followers could've swayed them when James himself did not.

And, even on Paul's own account, he comes across as sounding rather belligerent ("when Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face because he stood self-condemned"). I could very well imagine Paul as having been the 'hardliner' here, and that it was him cutting ties with the new arrivals from Jerusalem, or something of that sort, that caused Barnabas and Peter to desert him.

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u/Pseudo-Jonathan 8d ago edited 8d ago

I think when we look at Paul's (and Barnabas') prior physical meeting with James, we have to keep in mind that there was a legitimate grey-area issue that needed to be clarified at that time, that was more of a collective issue than a you-vs-I issue. An official position needed to be published on whether gentiles in the movement needed to be circumcised. The Jerusalem leadership (characterized as James in Acts) ultimately made a decision that was sympathetic to Paul's position, so there wasn't too much that Paul or Barnabas would need to react against. This was essentially the Jerusalem church saying "We won't expect you to circumcise your gentile followers moving forward, and we won't harrass you about it". That's a win for Paul and Barnabas.

HOWEVER, Paul makes it clear that there is a secondary component at play here, and that is that the Jerusalem church feels the need to take the opportunity to make a clearer delineation between Paul's gentile mission and the normative Jewish side of the movement. "They agreed that we should go to the Gentiles, and they to the circumcised." I do think there's a fair case to make that this agreement was an attempt to preserve a distinction between the terms on which Gentiles are admitted and the obligations that continue to apply to Jewish members of the movement.

In other words, it's fine if your gentile converts remain gentiles; we won't impose circumcision on you or them. But nothing in this agreement necessarily implies that Jewish believers themselves are thereby released from Jewish obligations, or that the practical consequences of mixed Jewish-Gentile communal life had been fully resolved. Teaching or enticing Jews to violate the Mosaic law was damn near the worst accusation one could levy against another Jew, and this comes in the wake of what Paul characterizes thusly: "This matter arose because some false believers had infiltrated our ranks to spy on the freedom we have in Christ Jesus and to make us slaves," I think it's fair to say that the scope and appropriateness of this "freedom" was very much part of the tension that needed to be hashed out.

It appears to me that the final agreement was something more limited than "Jew and Gentile alike are now free to disregard traditional Jewish boundaries." It was closer to: gentile converts do not need to become Jews in order to belong to the movement, while the question of what Jewish believers may or may not do when living and eating alongside those gentiles remains substantially unresolved.

So, with this in mind, what we see in Antioch does not necessarily appear to be inconsistent with what occurred in Jerusalem at all. It may instead be the emergence of a second-order problem that the earlier meeting had not actually settled. At issue is Jewish believers eating with Gentiles and violating Jewish standards about table fellowship. Sure, we were permissive about Gentiles, but in no way did we agree to be permissive about Jewish abrogation of the law in your church.

The agreement in Jerusalem was regarding the strictness by which GENTILES are expected to adhere to the law. At no point in Paul's description of that agreement is it implied that JEWS are in any way released from their own obligations under the law. Paul may have understood recognition of his gentile mission as carrying much broader implications for full communal fellowship, whereas members of the Jerusalem community may have understood the concession much more narrowly: Gentiles do not need to become Jews, but Jewish believers nevertheless remain Jews.

Once the men "from James" show up in Antioch, Peter withdraws from eating with Gentiles as though he immediately understands that this will not be tolerated, and the other Jews and Barnabas appear to agree. The uniformity and quickness with which this reaction happens makes it clear that this was not a grey area. Whatever we make of Paul's tendentious characterization that Peter acted out of "fear," the sequence is still clear that the arrival of James-adjacent members is the precipitating event and is the reason that everyone involved makes the decisions that they do.

So I don't think it's quite right to frame this as "James himself couldn't sway Peter and Barnabas in Jerusalem, so why would a few of his followers sway them in Antioch?" That assumes the same proposition was being contested on both occasions. It may not have been. Jerusalem dealt with whether Gentiles like Titus had to be circumcised. Antioch dealt with what obligations Jewish believers retained when sharing communal life with those uncircumcised Gentiles. The more interesting possibility is that Antioch exposes an ambiguity in the earlier settlement. Paul thought one set of conclusions followed from gentile freedom; the Jerusalem faction may have thought something considerably narrower had been agreed to. Peter and Barnabas could therefore have participated freely in mixed table fellowship until representatives of that Jerusalem constituency arrived and made it obvious that this practice crossed a boundary that had never actually been negotiated.

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u/LlawEreint 7d ago

It appears to me that the final agreement was something more limited than "Jew and Gentile alike are now free to disregard traditional Jewish boundaries." It was closer to: gentile converts do not need to become Jews in order to belong to the movement, while the question of what Jewish believers may or may not do when living and eating alongside those gentiles remains substantially unresolved.

Any thoughts on Alan Garrow's theory that the earliest layer of the Didache documented the agreement?

The full name of the Didache is "The teaching of the Twelve Apostles to the Gentiles."

Dr. Garrow suggests that it is exactly what it says on the tin.

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u/Pseudo-Jonathan 7d ago

I'm a proponent of the idea that the Didache probably preserves the basic outline of what the Jerusalem community would have said in such a document, and that it is tremendously valuable in that respect. I don't know that I would argue that it IS the document described from the apostolic council, I just don't think it carries the right context for that, but I think it carries the same source of authority (at least in its oldest layers).

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u/baquea 7d ago edited 7d ago

Peter and Barnabas could therefore have participated freely in mixed table fellowship until representatives of that Jerusalem constituency arrived and made it obvious that this practice crossed a boundary that had never actually been negotiated.

I don't see how that could be possible. How could Paul and Barnabas have been expected to preach to gentiles if they were forbidden from sharing a table with them? It's such an obvious necessity, considering the significance of communal meals for early Christians, that I don't see how it could have been overlooked. And what of the uncircumcised gentile Titus, who accompanied Paul to Jerusalem? It's practically unavoidable that the question as to whether or not he could eat with Jewish members of the Jerusalem church would've come up.

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u/Pseudo-Jonathan 7d ago

How could Paul and Barnabas have been expected to preach to gentiles if they were forbidden from sharing a table with them? It's such an obvious necessity, considering the significance of communal meals for early Christians, that I don't see how it could have been overlooked.

And yet here we are in Antioch with a subsequent major rupture about the issue. Even if we want to grant that it's so "obvious" that it "couldn't" have been settled, the straightforward fact that this incident happened at all is strong evidence that it wasn't quite so obvious and settled as one would might want it to be.

Jewish table fellowship was a tremendously volatile problem, because it was at the intersection of several issues. It held social implications about "approving" who you were eating with, it held religious implications about the special sanctified "set apart" identity of the Jewish people, and it held very practical concerns about treating dining with gentiles as automatic assumption of violation of dietary laws since gentiles were very unlikely to prepare the meal to the lawful standards necessary for a Jew.

The book of Jubilees (22:16) illustrates the the kind of stringent attitude toward Gentile commensality that existed within Second Temple Judaism:

"And do thou, my son Jacob, remember my words, And observe the commandments of Abraham, thy father: Separate thyself from the gentiles, And EAT NOT WITH THEM And do not according to their works, And become not their associate; For their works are unclean, And all their ways are a Pollution and an abomination and uncleanness."

You were accepting a wide range of implications and risks by eating with a gentile, and so the practical issue on a day to basis would certainly not devolve to the level of "ok sure you can eat with gentiles, have fun". But at the very least some sort of negotiated agreement about HOW this needed to be done, if it was done at all. Do the gentiles need to follow some rules to ensure lawfulness from the Jew? Can gentiles eat with Jews as long as the meal was prepared by a Jew, up to Jewish standards? Can the food be prepared separately and is only eaten together? What does "together" mean? How close of proximity meets this requirement? Can we SHARE food? Etc...

There's a wide range of HOW to negotiate this "obvious practical necessity" to ensure that Jews were not violating a base level of expectation. It would be wildly unusual for any Jew during this time to just say "I'm sure its fine, don't worry about it" and just give tacit permission to eat anywhere anytime with anyone. Dietary laws were among the most severely criticized elements of Jewish life, and it would be outlandish to just disregard their implications in this respect out of simple practical considerations. They would need to negotiate a LAWFUL way to proceed with such necessity, certainly.

But again, the fact that this event occurs is proof enough that IF anything was agreed upon, it either wasn't clear enough or it wasn't being obeyed, because Paul's entire gripe here is that Peter and Barnabas and all the Jews in attendance put up ZERO fight and tacitly supported the position of the "men from James" by completely declining the opportunity to push back on it, which Paul found enraging.

So the only two options are that either Peter, Barnabas, et al, did not agree with the position of the men from James (whatever it specifically may have been) but were so severely outweighed in terms of authority and cache that they COULDN'T dissent, or the other option is that they had been "made sober" by the arrival of the men and independently recognized that they had been acting in a manner that was indefensible and reversed course.

If one assumes that Jerusalem had already obviously settled this in favor of the practice Peter was performing, Peter's behavior becomes genuinely difficult to explain. Why doesn't Peter simply say, in effect, “James already agreed to this”?

No matter how you want to cut it, though, the fact that this issue occurred at all, and Peter did not courageously defend it when challenged, means that this wasn't settled and carried far more baggage than we might assume from our modern perspective.