Thus too had come the time when the believing Gentiles must be fully recognized as brethren, and received into the Church without circumcision.* Yet this does not in any sense imply that the mother church in Jerusalem and the rest of the Jewish Christians believed themselves to be exempt from the obligation of the Law. On the contrary, we are told in Acts that the many thousands of Jewish Christians continued to be 'zealous for the law' (21-°), and in a continuation
* A detailed explanation of this development is given in tiie art. Law.
MOSES
MOUNT, MOUNTAIN
45
of the piissnue we are shown that the rumour of St. Paul's having taught the Jewish Christians in his churches to forsake Moses was without founda- tion (vv.'-'--"), wliile we learn from St. Paul's own letters that within certain limits he desired the distinction made by iMoses between Jew and Gentile to be maintained in his churches (cf. 1 Co 7'», Gal 5^ ; see also art. Law, p. 690''). iMirther- more, even as regards a Gentile Christian com- munity, the Apostle could appeal to particular regulations of the Mosaic Law as expressions of the Divine will in contrast to the dictates of human reason (1 Co 9«'- ; cf. 1 Ti 5'«, where the same OT passage— Dt 25''— is placed side by side with a saying of Jesus) — just as elsewhere he frequently refers to special provisions of the Law, or to the Law as a whole. Yet this in no way detracts fronr the validity of the principle that all things are spiritually judged (1 Co S'"-), and that nothing is to be enforced according to the letter which killeth (2 Co 3"), the regulative canon being that the external statutes, ' the commandments in ordin- ances' (Eph 2'*), are merely the shadow of things to come, while the body is Christ's (Col 2") — whence it follows that the outward regulations of the Law are to be applied in a typological (or allegorical) way. A further result was a certain relaxation of the Mosaic ordinances relating to practical life, enabling the Jewish Christians to live in brotherly intercourse with the believing Gentiles.
In this connexion, however, certain difficulties arose which seemed actually to necessitate some limitation of Gentile Christian liberty, and it was this state of things that led the primitive Church to promulgate the ' Apostolic Decree.' According to Ac 15'-'-', St. James, the brother of the Lord, justified his proposal regarding the Decree by the circumstance that ' Moses from generations of old hath in every city them that preach him, being read in the synagogues every sabbath.' The point of this statement is much debated. Does St. James mean thereby that the apostles do not need to trouble regarding the dissemination of the Mosaic legislation, and that they should therefore lay upon the Gentile Christians nothing beyond the four pro- hibitions specified by him, since Moses had from of old been sufficiently represented throughout the Diaspora (so e.g. Zahn) ? If this be the true inter- pretation, the statement of St. James fails to ex- plain why these particular prohibitions were fixed upon. We must thus rather look for an interpre- tation according to which v.-' provides a reason why precisely these four injunctions were laid upon the Gentile churches. Such a reading ot the passage would be as follows : Since, not only in the Holy Land, but also in heathen lands, the doctrines of Moses are every Sabbath inculcated upon those who attend the Synagogue, it is necessary that the believing Gentiles— like the so-called ' God-fearing ' (ol (T€^6ixepoi rbv debv) — should give some consideration to the Mosaic Law, and should at least abstain from taking part in those heathen practices which were most revolting to the Jewish mind. The pro- hibitions of the Apostolic Decree, which resemble those imposed upon Jewish proselytes, were prob- ably framed in conformity with Lv 17. 18, which contain, inter alia, laws to be observed by aliens resident in the land of Israel. They seem at first sight to be a strange mingling of moral and purely ritual laws, the prohibition of sexual immorality being conjoined with three interdicts about food (cf. Ac 15^). But while this collocation has certainly an appearance of arbitrariness, a glance at Kev 2-""" (where we undoubtedly hear an echo of the Apostolic Decree), as also a comparison with 1 Co 10"-, shows us that abstinence from idolatrous sacrifices and abstinence from sexual immorality
are closely related, and that iropvela here refers not merely to the forbidden degrees of marriage but also to ceremonial prostitution ; the Gentile Christians must abstain both from taking part in the sacri- ficial meals of the heathen world and from the im- moralities connected therewith, i.e. from practices regarded among the heathen as a(/w/)/io;'rt (cf. 1 Co 6'-). As regards the other two restrictions, it is clear that they converge upon a single point — the supreme necessity of maintaining the sacredness of blood in every form, as already recojjnized in the so-called Noacliian dispensation : tlie believing Gentiles must no longer partake of blood either in the flesh or by itself {e.g. mixed with wine, as drunk by the heathen in their sacrificial feasts) ; in other words, only the flesh of ritually slaughtered animals may be eaten.
The essential equivalence of theae two prohibitions might also explain the uncertainty attaching to the reading irfiKTOv in the textual tradition. Here, however, another consideration arises. In the Western text, which omits (cai ttviktov (tti-cktwi'). w"e find an addition which points to an entirely different conception of the Apostolic Decree, viz. kou ocra fxij di^ovatv iavrot^ yti'eaSai tTc'pots iJ-v jToteii' (15-0 ; so D, Iren., Tert., Cypr., some Minus- cules, and the Sahidic). The ' golden rule ' being thus added to the prohibitions of idoKitrous sacrifices, fornication, and blood, the Decree is transformed into a short moral catechism, in which are forbidden the three cardinal vices— idolatry, forni- cation, and murder (ai^a= * shedding of blood '). But although the genuineness of this form of the text is defended by able scholars, such as Blass and Harnack, it should in all probability be rejected as of secondary origin. For not only is the golden rule introduced most inaptly in a formal respect, but the purely ethical character of the decree as thus transformed presupposes the conditions of a later time— a time when the Church was no longer concerned with the specific problem that had called for the attention of the Apostolic Council ; in the W'est, where the ' ethical ' form of the Decree took its rise, Jewish Christianity was a relatively insignificant force, and what was wanted there was a brief compendium of the anti-heathen morality ot Christi- anity. At the same time, however, the altered form of the Decree shows that the Church never regarded it as an inviolable law, but thought of it simply as a provisional arrangement which might be varied to suit local and temporary circum- stances.