The Council of Jerusalem, AD 49

**The decision on which everything after it depends.** The question was whether Gentile believers had to be circumcised and keep the Law of Moses, and Acts 15 records the debate, the ruling and the letter. Luke names the speakers: Peter, who argues from his own experience at Cornelius’s house that God made no difference; Barnabas and Paul, who report the signs among the Gentiles; and **James**, who gives the judgement — “my sentence is, that we trouble not them” — and whose four requirements the letter carries.

**The four abstentions** are worth stating exactly, because they are the whole of what was imposed: pollutions of idols, fornication, things strangled, and blood.

## Two accounts of the same meeting, and they do not read alike

**Acts 15** is procedural: an assembly, speeches, a ruling, a letter. **Galatians 2** is Paul’s own first-person account of a meeting at Jerusalem with James, Cephas and John, “who seemed to be pillars”, and it is far more personal — he went by revelation, he took Titus, false brethren came in privily, and he gave place “no, not for an hour”.

Whether Galatians 2 is this council or the earlier famine visit of Acts 11 **has been argued since antiquity and this archive does not settle it.** What it records is that both accounts have the same three men at the centre, the same question, and the same outcome for the Gentiles.

## The letter had carriers, and the archive holds them

The decree was not posted. It went to Antioch by hand, and Luke names the men: **Judas called Barsabbas** and **Silas**, “chief men among the brethren”, who confirmed it by word of mouth because a letter alone could be doubted. Silas then travels with Paul for the rest of Acts.

**And Titus is the test case.** Paul says he took him to Jerusalem, that he was a Greek, and that he **was not compelled to be circumcised** — which is the council’s decision embodied in one man before it was written down.