40—41.
and Cilicia, xv. 41, doubtless because they were already aware of the enactments prescribed). It may well be that St. Paul regarded himself as the missionary- Apostle of the Church at Antioch, sent forth from that Church for a special work, and that he would recognise that if the Antiochian Christians were to be loyal to the compact of Jerusalem, he as their representative and emissary must enforce the requirements of that com- pact in revisiting those regions in which the converts had been so instrumental in causing the Decree to be enacted.
But the work upon which he had been specially sent forth from Antioch had been fulfilled, xiv. 27 ; the Conference at Jerusalem had assigned a wider and a separate sphere to his labours; henceforth his Apostleship to the Gentiles eis ra ἔθνη was more definitely recognised, and more abundantly fulfilled; and in what may be called strictly Gentile Churches, in Churches not only further removed from Palestine, but in which his own Apostleship was adequate authority, he may well have felt that he was relieved from enforcing the Decree. In these Churches the stress laid upon such secondary matters as ‘‘things strangled and blood” would simply have been a cause of perplexity, a burden too heavy to bear, the source of a Christianity maimed by Jewish particularism, see Lightfoot, Galatians, pp. 127, 305; Hort, Ecclesia, pp. 88, 89; Fudaistic Christi- anity, p. 74; Speaker’s Commentary, Acts, p. 325; Zéckler, Apostelgeschichte, Ρ. 254; ‘‘Apostelkonvent,” K. Schmidt in Real-Encyclopadie fir protest. Theol. (Hauck), pp. 710, 711 (1896); Wendt, p. 269 (1899) ; and for the after-history ofthe Decree, K. Schmidt, u. s., Lightfoot, u .s., Plumptre, Felten, and cf. also Hooker’s remarks, Eccles. Pol., iv., 11, 5 ff.
On the attempt to place the Apostolic Conference at Jerusalem before chaps. xiii, and xiv., see Apostelgeschichte, Wendt (1899), pp- 254, 255, and McGiffert, Afos- tolic Age, p. 181. Weizsacker adopts this view because no mention is made in Gal. i. 21 of the missionary journey in Acts xili., xiv., and he therefore maintains that it could only have taken place after the Conference, but the Epistle does not require that Paul should give a complete account of all his missionary experiences outside Judea; he is only concerned to show how far he was or was not likely to have received his Gospel from the older Apostles.
Moreover, it is very difficult to find a place for the close companionship of