But neither St. Paul nor Acts gives the particulars of the process which issued in this result. For an answer to this problem we must rely upon inference, supplemented by later tradition. Eusebius (HE II. i. 3) states, on the authority of Clement of Alexandria, that Peter, James (the brother of John), and John, not coveting honour for themselves, chose James to be bishop of Jerusalem soon after Jesus' ascension ; but so formal an appointment at this early date is hardly probable. It is far more likely that a gradual development of circumstances pro- duced the later situation in which James supplanted Peter. Peter's work as an ev.angelist and the op- position which his public prcailiing aroused among the Jews probably resulted in his leaving the city for longer and longer periods, so that the task of local leadership devolved increasingly upon James. The Jewish opposition which broke out afresh under Herod Agrippa I., and from which Peter barely escaped with his life, was the occasion of his I going to ' another place ' after he had sent James
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PETER
a message re^ardinf; the situation (Ac 12''). It lias been conjectured with some degree of plausi- hility that James became actual head of the .lerusalem Church aliout this time. Clement of Alexandria {Strom. VI. v. 43) reports a tradition to the eli'ect that Jesus had instructed tlie apostles to preach to Israel for twelve years before going forth to the world — which may signify that tlie original apostles' departure from Jerusalem, thus leaving James in charge, was virtually coincident with Herod's persecution. But aside from the question of the historicity of Clement's tradition, James lirobably supplanted Peter in Jerusalem about this time. This seems to be the most satisfactory explanation of the NT data. James's blood rela- tionship to Jesus would give him a unique position among Christians, and his vision of the Kisen Lord would add to his prestige, while his conservative attitude towai'd Judaism would be a valuable asset to the community in those days of persecution (cf. Eusebius, HE II. xxiii. I H'. ). The impetuous Peter sought other fields of activity. Yet we must not assume that there was any rivalry between these two individuals, notwithstanding the contrasts in their personalities. Between the extremes of Pauline liberalism and Jacobtean conservatism Peter (and Barnabas) sometimes vacillated, but on the whole they seem to have inclined toward the position of James.
A second problem left unsolved by our NT in- formation is the question of Peter's real attitude toward the Gentile missionary enterprise. Accord- ing to Ac 10 f., he had been instructed by God in a vision not to call any man common or unclean, and as a result he went to the house of Cornelius, where he ate with Gentiles and established a Gen- tile church. On returning to Jerusalem he was arraigned for his conduct, but presented so strong a defence that the mother Church gloritied God for the conversion of the Gentiles accomplished through Peter's action. St. Paul, on the other hand, in writing to the Galatians, represents that this prob- lem had been fought out — manifestly for the first time, as St. Paul describes it — over the missionary activities of himself and Barnabas. Even then it was merely the question of admission, and not the question of table-fellowship, that had been dis- cussed at Jerusalem. Not until later, when Peter came to Antioch, did the latter question become acute, and then Peter took the conservative posi- tion in line with the wishes of the Jerusalem Church (Gal 2""^-). If St. Paul's representation is correct, it becomes difficult to believe, as the narrative of Acts would seem to demand, that Peter and the Church at Jerusalem had taken exactly the opposite stand a few years earlier.
Different attempts have been made to obviate the difficulty. Appeal is sometimes made to the pro- verbial fickleness of Peter, but in order to meet the situation we should have to predicate a similar characteristic for the leaders in Jerusalem. Or, again, it is urged that Cornelius was already a ' God-fearer,' that he prayed to Jahweh, gave alms, and wrought ' righteousness' in good Jewish fashion (Ac 10'"-^), and so his case was e^uite differ- ent from that of ordinary Gentiles. \ et it must be remembered that the specific thing for which Peter was called to account was ' eating with the uncircumcised' (Ac IP). He affirmed that the Spirit had instructed him to make no distinction in respect to table-companionship between circumcised and uncircumcised believers, and this was the very point in debate at Antioch. We are quite ignorant of any extenuating circumstances which made the Antiochian situation ditierent in principle from that of Csesarea, and so the difficulty of squaring the narrative of Acts with the representa- tion of St. Paul remains unsolved.
Still another metliod proposed for relieving the difficulty IS to appeal to the alleged apologetic ))urpose of the author of Acts, who, it is said, clesned to bridge the chasm separating Peter from St. Paul, and tried to accomplish this result by ' Paulinizing' Peter in the early part of the book and by ' Petrinizing ' St. Paul in the latter part. Thus Peter is credited with inaugurating the Gentile mission, and the Jerusalem Clmrch is made to put the stamp of its approval upon his under- taking. In Acts' account of St. Paul, on the other hand, the Antiochian incident is absolutely ignored. St. Paul voluntarily circumcises Timothy (Ac 16'), he also accepts and imposes upon his churches the decrees issued from Jerusalem (Ac 16''), and in still other respects his loyalty to Judaism is made evi- dent (e.g. Ac 21""^). Thus 'Theophilus' has been assured — and this is assumed to be the author's chief aim— that the new religion is firmly established through a line of unbroken descent from antiquity, Gentiles having been designed from the first to be its legitimate heirs. Gentile Christianity is not an offshoot from the main movement — the ingraft- ing of a wild olive branch, as St. Paul says — but an integral part of the whole, having full ecclesi- astical supervision and approval from the first. In favour of this interpretation it is possible to cite the manifest interest of Acts in the formal organiza- tion of the early community and in Jerusalem as the official centre from which the new religion expands. The appearances of Jesus, both in Luke and Acts, are located in or near Jerusalem ; the disciples are instructed to wait in Jerusalem until Pentecost, when the adherents of thenew movement are to be formally equipped with the Spirit ; in the meantime, the waiting company fills the vacancy in the apostolate, so that the new church may be properly and fully officered from the start ; and throughout the entire history of the early period the matter of official apostolic supervision is con- stantly in evidence. It certainly was not the in- tention of the writer of Acts to dwell upon differ- ences of opinion among early Christians ; and, further, it was quite natural that he should .so select or interpret his source materials as to indicate that the certainty and stability attaching to his thought of this movement in his own day were but a continuation of an earlier state of affairs. Con- sequently it is not improbable that there was a disposition on his part to believe that the proper officers of the church had formally approved the Gentile mission from its very inception, and this feeling quite probably influenced his account of the Cornelius incident. But this fact does not warrant us in concluding that Peter did not come into con- tact with Gentiles at an early date, although he is not likely to have settled formally the ultimate problem of the whole dispute before it was pushed into the foreground by the work of the Judaizers in Pauline territory.