Archbishop Mark’s podcast series “The Birth of the Church: Why the loser won” continues with Episode 5 focusing on a critical early gathering that helped to set the direction of the early Church. Listen to the details of a fascinating moment in the Church’s history.
Episode 5 – The disagreement at Antioch:
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- Episode 5: The disagreement at Antioch - Transcript
Episode 5: The disagreement at Antioch - Transcript
Author: Archdiocese of Brisbane
Last time we saw the intense controversy that surrounded the proclamation of the gospel to the Gentiles, the pagan world. And how Paul and Barnabas, when they returned from their first mission, that they say God has opened a door of faith to the Gentiles.Now, you would like to think that that settled the whole issue, but it did not, believe me. The controversy continued with such intensity that the mother church in Jerusalem decided that they needed to convene, to use slightly anachronistic language, the first ever ecumenical council. The story of which is told to us in Acts Chapter 15.
Now, it is a council of the church in order to discern the mind of God. To listen to the voice of the Holy Spirit. A bit like the Plenary Council that we are looking to hear in Australia at this time. So, this was a council in Jerusalem, the seat of the Mother Church, to try and resolve what was clearly a moment of crisis in the infant church.
Now, Paul and Barnabas obviously go to the council. And we’re told they had no small discussion and debate with the Jewish Christians who are saying, unless you are circumcised according to the law of Moses, you cannot be saved. In other words, you can’t become a Christian unless you become a Jew. Here again is that central question.
So, Paul and Barnabas obviously disagree with them. So, there’s quite a lot of debate and discussion, we’re told. And Paul and Barnabas tell their story of God opening a door of faith. But this doesn’t solve the matter magically. And we are told after there’d been much debate. Peter, here is, Cephas, Simon Peter rose with his unique authority and said to them, brothers and sisters, you know, that in the early days and so on.
So, Peter, as it were, speaks an authoritative word. And that seems to settle the matter, seems. Because Peter, in fact, agrees with Paul and Barnabas. So, Peter says, yes, the mission to the Gentiles is of God. So, we can’t force them to bear the burden of becoming Jewish in order to become Christian. We can invite them to walk through the door of faith.
Now, in the Acts of the Apostles, Chapter 15, the impression you have is that there was one gathering. But in fact, I think if you read the text more closely and attentively, it seems that there were two gatherings because this first gathering where Peter speaks the authoritative word did not in fact, resolve the issue. So, the first meeting in Jerusalem, hoping to have resolved the issue disbands. Peter and Paul and Barnabas go their various ways.
However, the controversy keeps raging. And therefore, it seems to me that there was a second gathering to try again to resolve the issue. And this time we’re told in verse 15, that James replied. Now, James was, I’ve said already, the residential leader of the church in Jerusalem. So, he had a particular kind of authority, which was not the same as Peter’s, but was still real authority.
So, James speaks at the second gathering, as does Simeon, he’s called. Now, it’s often assumed that this is Simon Peter. But again, the name’s not Simon, Shimon, it’s Shimeon, it’s a different name in Hebrew. And it’s a name we have struck earlier in the Acts of the Apostles, the leadership team in Antioch, Simeon, who was called Niger.
So, it seems to me that the key voices in this second attempt to resolve the issue were not Peter, Paul and Barnabas, because they had scattered. They were elsewhere. It’s James and Simeon who are still in Jerusalem. And James decides on behalf of the whole gathering, to on a compromise. In the attempt to bring peace.
And they send a letter to the Gentile Christians, and it reads like this, we have sent Judas and Silas who will tell you these things by word of mouth. So, they’re sending delegates to the Gentile Christians who can speak with them. And the letter then reads, for it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us, good combination there, the Holy Spirit and us. To lay upon you no greater burden than these necessary things that you abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols and from blood and from what is strangled and from unchastity.
Now, these are requirements of the Jewish law, but by no means is it the whole burden of the law. That’s what I mean by compromise. Certain elements of the Jewish law in order to respect the sensibilities of Jewish Christians who have been troubled by all of this controversy. So, if you keep yourselves from these, you will do well, the letter says. Farewell.
Now, the letter is sent. But Paul is informed of it later. Why was he informed of the letter later? Because he wasn’t at the second gathering. He didn’t know about the letter until he was told. So that’s why I say it seems to me that in Acts 15, reading between the lines, there are two meetings that Luke, the writer, conflates into a single meeting. They were two parts of a single meeting, I suppose you could argue. But both of them attempts to resolve this great controversy that was troubling the early church.
So, with that sense of compromise, Paul finds his way back with Barnabas to Antioch. And eventually Peter comes to Antioch as well. And again, there’s a long tradition of Peter spending some time at Antioch. Now, what they find at Antioch. Or what they do at Antioch, really, is that they have one church at one table. In other words, Jew and Gentile sitting down at the table together to do two things that were related. The first is to celebrate the Eucharist, and the second is to share the agape meal afterwards.
Now, the problem with this was that eating together for Jews had an almost sacred character. It obviously does in the Eucharistic moment. But for a Jew to eat with a Gentile was unthinkable. And for people like Barnabas and Paul and Peter to actually do this, to sit down and eat, whether it be the Eucharistic meal or the agape meal afterwards with Gentiles, must have initially at least have been extremely difficult. Gone deeply against the grain of their religious sensibility. But they are doing it because this is what Jesus has done. This is what God is doing in Jesus. Knocking down the walls, Paul says, between Jew and Gentile. Making one people of two peoples.
So therefore, because of what God has done and is doing, knocking down the walls and the barriers, they sit down together. However, the story, the plot thickens. Some of the Jewish Christians come down from Jerusalem to Antioch and they see Jews and Gentiles sitting down together at one table. They see one church, one table. And they forget whatever about the compromise that the two-part meeting in Jerusalem. They say, wrong way, go back, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop. One church, yes. But two tables. Now, you can see the fundamental contradiction at this point. One church, two tables.
Peter listens to them. These were good people coming down from Jerusalem. They weren’t troublemakers or ideological warriors of some kind. They just had a particular understanding of what God was doing in Jesus and of the nature of the church and the church’s mission. So, Peter listens to the voice of these new arrivals from Jerusalem. And again, he seems to have decided on a kind of compromise for the sake of peace. Which always seems reasonable and often is, but not always.
So, at this point you have what I would call the brawl at Antioch. And this is another key moment. Because Paul absolutely rejects what the Jewish Christians from Jerusalem are saying. They’re called the James party. James, again, being the residential leader of the church in Jerusalem. So, the James party, Paul rejects their critique, their claim. But he tells us in Galatians that Paul and Barnabas opt for compromise. But Paul at this point rejects any sense of compromise.
So, you have a moment of crisis where Paul is beginning to look a bit of an extremist and look rather isolated. And Paul says in his own words in the letter to the Galatians, Chapter 2. When Cephas, Peter came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face. Here we get the brawl. Because he stood condemned. For before certain men came from James he ate with the Gentiles. There we are, one church, one table. But when they came, he drew back and separated himself, fearing the circumcision party. In other words, the James party.
And with him the rest of the Jews, this is the Jewish Christians, acted insincerely, that’s not a great translation. So that even Barnabas was carried away by their insincerity. A better translation of the Greek word that’s given here as insincerity is inconsistently. By which I mean, what they were doing was inconsistent with the gospel. They didn’t see it, but Paul saw it. There’s a contradiction. What God is doing in Christ is knocking down the walls and the barriers. And what you are doing, Paul says, is you’re building up the walls and barriers again. You’re, in that sense, inconsistent with the gospel. You’re undoing the work of God in Jesus. Which is to create precisely one table around which anyone can sit who has walked through the door of faith.
So, at this stage, you’ve got a standoff. You’ve got on one side, you’ve got James, as it were. You’ve got Peter with his unique authority, and you’ve got Barnabas, this crucial figure in the story of the early church. Lining up on one side and on the other side at this stage, you’ve got Paul. Now, at this stage, Paul would have looked extremist, unreasonable, a very isolated figure, very little support in the community.
So, it’s a critical moment for Paul. What does he do? He has three options. One is he could just well say this is a bad joke, I’m going back to Tarsus. He could just pack up his bags and go home. It was all a bad joke. Or he could simply cave in and say, look, I’m so sorry for creating all this trouble. You’re right and I’m wrong. So, let’s just settle for compromise for the time being and opt for peace and get on with the show. It doesn’t sound like Paul, does it? Certainly doesn’t to me. So, the third option that he has, and the most extraordinary of the three. Is to set up his own mission. And that’s what he does. So, this moment of the brawl in Antioch really is the birth of the independent Pauline mission.
Now, once he opts for that path, you can imagine what the voices in the background, and not too far in the background were saying. You’re a sore loser. You’re just a lone outrider. You’re an empire builder. You won’t play as part of a team. And those were the kinds of criticisms to which Paul was subject to from now until the end of his life. Within the church that he was a dangerous outrider, an empire builder, false apostle, and so on.
So, Paul decides to start his own mission, and he needs people with him. And the first person that he recruits, really the only leading member of the Jerusalem church that seems to have agreed with him and may well have been in Antioch is the man known as Silas. He was mentioned in Acts 15 as one who would speak to the Gentile Christians and carry the letter with him.
Now, Silas was a crucial recruit for Paul. Because he was a trusted and leading figure in the mother church. So, Silas obviously thinks Paul is right. So, he joins Paul as part of Paul’s missionary team. And he will become a key figure in the Pauline missionary operation. And he will be known in the letters by his Roman name that he used rather than Silas, which is a Semitic name. But out in the Hellenistic world, he would have used his Roman name, Silvanus. And he’s frequently mentioned in the letters. So, he was obviously a key coworker with Paul for a long time on this mission.
The third key member of Paul’s missionary team will be Timothy. We’ll come to him in just a moment. So, Paul and Silas, Silvanus, set out across Asia Minor, what we call Turkey. So, they head west. And from now on, Paul will say that I go to territory where others have not been or won’t go. Paul doesn’t want to be sharing territory with anyone. And that, again, would have fed that sense of he’s just an empire builder, he’s a dangerous lone ranger and so on.
So, they head across Asia Minor visiting some of those communities that Paul had established in that first ever Christian mission with Barnabas. So, he goes back, as it were, across familiar territory at first. But then he heads out into unknown territory. And it’s at that point that he meets Timothy, whom I’ve mentioned already. Now, Timothy is a fascinating figure. Because he was a native of Lystra, it seems, again in modern day Turkey. The fact is he has a Greek name. Timothy is not a Semitic name, it’s a Greek name. And he is, we are told, in Acts 16, the son of a Jewish woman who was also a believer. So, his mother was a Jewish Christian, but his father was Greek, hence the Greek name. But for Jews, if your mother is Jewish, then so too are you.
And although she’d become Christian. But Timothy was a problem, as it were, because Paul, we’re told, wanted Timothy to accompany him and took him and circumcised him because of the Jews that were in those places. For they all knew that his father was a Greek. Now, this can seem strange, given that Paul is saying that you don’t have to become a Jew to become a Christian.
But nor was he. Paul wasn’t wanting to create scandal among Jewish Christians or Jews generally by saying that the Jewish law is to be rejected completely. Paul never says that. It’s like, did Paul abandon his Jewish identity when he became Christian? No, no, no, no, no. So, he has Timothy circumcised in order not to scandalise.
The Jewish Christians and the Jews whom he would encounter on the road of mission. Because again, Timothy’s mother was Jewish and therefore the Jews would have regarded him as a Jew who had become a Christian, but still a Jew. So, Paul again, although he was accused of being an extremist, is far from extreme in many critical circumstances of his apostolic mission. He is prepared to compromise when he has to. But he is not prepared to compromise, as we’ve seen in Antioch, on things that are of fundamental importance, like the nature of Christianity and therefore the nature of Christian mission. So, Timothy then becomes the third member of the leadership team. So, Paul, Silvanus and Timothy are the three names that occur again and again in the letters from Paul, Silvanus and Timothy.
Now, they were the core group of leaders of a large and complex missionary operation that will emerge over time, not immediately. Sometimes people think of Paul as this heroic lone figure thundering out into the Mediterranean world. He wasn’t. He was the head of a large and complex missionary operation. And I might say a costly operation, too. And it always fascinates me the question of who bankrolled Paul. Because with all of his travels that cost plenty of money and he was a tent maker by trade. Just by the way, very often Pharisaic Jews had a trade to pay the bills. But their real work was study of the Torah, the Scripture. And the you still see this today in certain rabbinic communities.
So, Paul was a tent maker, but you can’t make enough tents to pay for a large, complex and costly missionary operation such as he’s. So, he was obviously dependent upon some wealthy support from his communities. And again, we see evidence of that in the letters where he talks about the collection for the Poor Saints in Jerusalem at one point.
So, they go where others do not go. Up into northern Turkey, Galatia, it seems is up in that part of the world. That was a crucial community, as we see in the letter to the Galatians, one of the more important of his texts. So, he’s founding communities all the time and Paul’s whole mission, and its fate, depended upon the success, as it were, of these communities. His whole mission was about founding communities, which were the body of Christ, and in which therefore the door of faith was available to people, and they could encounter the risen Christ here and now, not as once upon a time, but as here and now, just as Paul had on that road to Damascus.
So, communities in which the encounter with the risen Christ was made available to all people. So, his mission stands or falls on whether he founds a community and whether that community survives and thrives and becomes missionary itself.
Now, these communities were very fragile in many ways and also troubled in many ways. But Paul dedicates all his energies, certainly his letters to ensuring that these communities don’t collapse. Because if the communities collapsed, Paul ends up with egg all over his face. And gives substance to his critics who are saying that this is not the work of God. But if Paul can say, but look at the fruit of my mission. That is the work of God. Then his mission justifies itself.
So, he comes again, going west all the time, founding communities. He comes to what we call Troy, Troias as it’s called, it’s a Greek name, in Acts 16. Now, Troy is on the very west coast of what we call Turkey. And it looks across the water, across the Dardanelles, as we know, from Gallipoli, across the Dardanelles to Europe. So, on one side of the Dardanelles you’ve got Asia, at least in Roman terms, and on the other side of the Dardanelles you have the different world of Europe. The Western Empire as it will become.
And in Acts 16 we come to another one of these critical moments. And again, it’s the spirit of Jesus, we’re told. And this through the spirit of Jesus, Paul has a vision. A man of Macedonia, in other words, Europe, the other side of the water. Standing, beseeching him saying, come over to Macedonia and help us. And when he had seen the vision, immediately we sought to go into Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to preach the gospel to them. This is a fateful moment. But you can see how Luke presents it not as Paul’s decision, you know, this empire build or I’m going to carve out territory for myself. This is the work of God. This is the work of the Spirit of Jesus. The decision then that Paul takes is to cross that narrow strip of water, the Dardanelles, setting sail from Troias and so on, he says, across into Greek territory, into Europe.
And once Paul crosses again, that very narrow stretch of water, the whole future of Europe is caught up in that decision. Because Paul will begin to found communities on European soil. And in some ways you can say that Paul is the father of European Christianity. He didn’t found the Roman church, with all its influence. But Paul begins to found these communities in Europe. And the impact that that will have eventually on not just the church throughout the world, but upon world history is inestimable.
So again, we reach a real threshold moment when Paul crosses that thin stretch of water and ends up in Philippi. Where he will found his first European community and a community for which Paul will always have a special affection. You can see it in the letter to the Philippians, which we’ll look at next time. But it’s a community that he regarded with great affection and understandably, given that it was his first community in Europe. And one of those communities, therefore, that upon which his mission depended utterly. So finally, we’ve got Paul into Europe, and we’ll leave it there for this time. But we’ll take up the story next time in Philippi and see how this first European community of the Pauline mission was brought to birth.