I’ve known for quite a while now that there was a major problem with mainstream Christianity’s interpretation of Paul’s words about being without offense and not causing your weaker brother to stumble. I could tell that the universalized morality message was not the intent of Paul’s letters, but was unable to fully clarify the situation. Now, having done the necessary critical-historical study, I am able.
Much of what Paul says in Corinthians, Galatians, and Romans comes directly from what was passed on to him by the Jewish community headed by James and the other apostles in Jerusalem. Paul along with other Jewish believers like Barnabas and Silas, took these things to the Jews and Jewish Gentiles of the Diaspora. In the zeal of his letters, Paul elaborated on and added to the things entrusted to him. Therefore, the interpretation of much of his messages is controlled by knowledge of the actual things handed down to him. One of these is called the apostolic decree
. It occurs in Acts 15. But before we get there, let me briefly explain the historical circumstances.
In the early days of the Christian community, believers and followers of Yeshua were strictly Jewish. They were either full-blooded Jews or they were converts who were circumsized and followed Torah. It was their common cultural belief that the gentiles would be saved not because the gospel would go out to the gentiles as they were, but because the gentiles would BECOME JEWS. It was such a strange concept for them to think that a gentile could be part of the followers of Yeshua apart from Torah, that it took a direct revelation of Yahweh to several influential people like Peter himself (Acts 10-11) in order to change their minds. And even then, it was still a great point of contention. When Yahweh began working to save gentiles through Peter and through Jews from Cyprus and Cyrene in Antioch, this caused a big commotion among the Jewish believers. Many of them wanted the gentiles to become Jewish by following Torah and being circumsized before they could be considered followers of Yeshua. Paul wrote several times of going to Jerusalem and defending the truth of gentiles’ conversion despite lack of Torah observance (such as Galatians 2:1, 3)—events which are also found in Acts. The problem was two-fold. 1. The Jews were judging the gentiles as being outside of Yahweh’s will because they didn’t submit themselves to Torah observance and 2. because the Jews still believed in and followed Torah, for them to do some things that Christ himself asked them to do would force them to break Torah and therefore cause them to offend the Law/stumble in observance. (One of the practices of Yeshua which his followers mimicked was table fellowship and communion…a potentially disastrous situation for a Jew as it will be explained momentarily).
In Acts 15, the apostolic council decided in favor of both parties so that both Jew and Gentile might be honored and peace would be established among them. They decided for the benefit of the gentiles that the Jews should no longer judge them as inadequate, inferior, or outside the faith because they didn’t follow Torah—neither would they coerce them to follow their own regulations. And they decided for the benefit of the Jews that the gentiles should chose to refrain from certain activities or practices—not because of any limitation on themselves, but because of the limitation that Jews had on themselves according to their observance of Torah. These are the words of that agreement:
For it seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us (the Jewish believers in Jerusalem) to put not one greater burden on you (the gentiles who believed in Yeshua) than these necessary things: To hold back from idol sacrifices, and blood, and that strangled, and from fornication.
Acts 15:27b-28a
The reason these things were chosen to ask of the gentiles was because in the Levitical code, Yahweh told the Jews that in order to follow Torah, they could not have fellowship with or unite themselves with gentiles who ate sacrifices to idols, committed various acts of sexual misconduct, or drank blood (see Leviticus 17:10; 18:26; 20:2). If gentiles came into their midst who did these things, it would force a Jew to commit an offense before Torah and stumble in their observance of its commands. Therefore, since the Apostles asked the Jews not to judge gentiles as being unclean (because of lack of Torah observance), they therefore also asked the gentiles to not purposely put their Jewish brothers in a position which would make them unclean (by eating idol sacrifices with a Jewish brother who could not be pure in such a situation).
And so we find in Paul’s letters to the Corinthians, Galatians, and Romans the exact same things he was personally told to tell the Jews and Gentiles among the nations in Acts 15. The following are examples drawn from the decree about eating food sacrificed to idols.
Paul tells the Jewish believers in 1 Corinthians 10:27 that if they go to eat at a gentile’s table, not to ask if the food was sacrificed to idols, but if they are told that it was, not to eat it (otherwise they would condemn themselves under Torah). This mimics exactly the message Paul received from the apostles and Jewish brothers in Jerusalem—both that the Jew should be upheld in his observance and that the gentile should not be made to feel or believe that his table is unclean.
In Romans 14:15, Paul speaks to the gentile believers, asking them not to eat sacrifices to idols among Jewish believers, otherwise the gentiles would destroy their Jewish brother’s purity before Torah. Why would you make your Jewish brother believe he has soiled himself before God? Uphold him, do not strike him down! And yet in Romans 14, Paul also upholds the faith of the gentile believers, telling them not to think that they are less than their Jewish brothers or that they are defiling themselves if they eat what they have always eaten. Because they do not follow Torah, it is nothing for them to eat food from idol sacrifices.
And again, in Galatians 2:11-16, Paul writes about confronting Peter. When Peter and Barnabas had gone with Paul to Antioch, they had eaten freely with the gentiles—fulfilling this very decree that they (as Jews) should not consider the table of the gentile believers to be unclean. But when certain Jews from Jerusalem joined them, Peter, Barnabas, and the other Jewish believers separated themselves. Paul rebukes Peter for separating from the gentile believers. Had the grace of God to gentiles changed between the absence and appearance of the other Torah obedient Jews? Are the gentiles sinners because they don’t keep Torah? It is faith in Yeshua—whether you also follow Torah or not—which has changed you from one whom God has rejected to one whom God has accepted. Therefore why do you suddenly not accept those whom God has accepted? Paul goes on in Galatians 3 to ask the same question to the Jews in Galatia—why then if the gentiles have been accepted apart from Torah do you now reject them like Peter did when I confronted him?
Jewish and gentile relations going back to Acts 15:27b-28a is what offense and stumbling-block and weakness is all about. It has nothing to do with a gentile Christian ceasing some activity because some other gentile Christian has a problem with it. That would be akin to elevating someone’s personal feelings or thoughts to the status of a command from the lips of a prophet speaking in Yahweh’s own name—making a Christian’s personal beliefs into Torah. It would be deifying personal thoughts or words of men instead of recognizing what was and has been for thousands of years the word of God as witnessed and accompanied by signs and wonders to validate it. Even the appeal to avoid an “appearance of evil” is not a sudden universalized morality that could sidestep this situation–it is fundamentally tied to Jewish/Gentile relations and directly concerns the one thing which Paul himself says made sin or evil appear or be known–the Law (or Torah).
Lazlo Says:
This is a very good post.
Two points. One: regarding avoiding “the appearance of evil.” That’s a mistranslation in the King James Version. Look at 1 Thess 5:22 in virtually any other translation (including the NKJV) and you’ll see it more appropriately translated as something like “avoid every form of evil.” Another reason not to use the KJV!
Two: I agree that these verses are often misused, and your description of the context is in keeping with contemporary scholarship. But Paul’s message is still applicable outside the immediate context. Paul was very concerned with keeping the church unified in Christ, and encouraged his readers to do so at the sacrifice of not only personal comfort, but also inessential beliefs. Clearly there’s a world of separation between the theology of 1st-century Jewish Christians and 1st-century Gentile Christians, but Paul insisted that the two could somehow form a family.
The loss of this message, I believe, is the true casualty of the overly-personalized message that mainstream evangelical Christianity reads into Paul’s words.