XIV. 1. ΤΟΝ δὲ ἀσθενοῦντα τῇ πίστει "προσλαιβάνεσθε, μὴ εἰς . Ὃς μὲν πιστεύει φαγεῖν πάντα, ὁ δὲ
to speak of those who by an inadequate appreciation of Christian liberty were prac- tising an ‘‘over-scrupulous asceticism ”’, There has been much discussion as to who ‘“‘the weak” and “the strong” re- spectively were. The weakness is weak- ness in respect of faith; the weak man is one who does not fully appreciate what his Christianity means; in particular, he does not see that the soul which has committed itself to Christ for salvation is emancipated from all law but that which is involved in its responsibility to Him. Hence his conscience is fettered by scruples in regard to customs dating from pre-Christian days. The scruples in question here were connected with the use of flesh and wine, and with the religious observance of certain days (whether as fasts or feasts is open to question). Possibly the persons indulg- ing such scruples were Jewish Christians, but they need not have been. They were certainly not legalists in principle, making the observance of the Jewish law or any part of it an essential condition of the Christian salvation; otherwise Paul, as the Epistle to the Galatians shows, would have addressed them in a different tone. Further, the Jewish law does not pre- scribe abstinence from wine or from animal food; and there is no suggestion here, as in 1 Cor. 8, that the difficulty was about food that had been offered in sacrifice to false gods. Hence the in- fluence at work in the Roman Church in producing this scrupulosity of conscience was probably of Essene origin, and akin to that which Paul subsequently treats with greater severity at Colossae (Col. ii. 16). At Rome the scruples were only scruples, and though there was danger in them because they rested on a defec- tive apprehension of Christianity, they could be tenderly dealt with ; at Colossae they had grown into or adapted them- selves to a philosophy of religion which was fatal to Christianity; hence the change oftone. But though “the weak” need not have been Jews, the scruples in which their weakness was expressed, had so far Jewish connections and Jewish affinities; and it is probable, from the way in which (chap, xv. 7-13) the dis- cussion of the relations of the weak and the strong passes over into an exhortation to unity between Jew and Gentile in the Church, that the two classifications had a