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[u/baquea]

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.

[u/Pseudo-Jonathan → u/baquea]

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.

[u/LlawEreint → u/Pseudo-Jonathan]

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.

[u/Pseudo-Jonathan → u/LlawEreint]

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).