Acts 15:28-29: a closer look
28 For it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay upon you no greater burden than these necessary things: 29 that you abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols and from blood and from what is strangled and from unchastity. If you keep yourselves from these, you will do well. Farewell.”
In considering how Gentiles should be brought into communion with Jewish Christians (the concern was especially about sharing meals together) the Jerusalem Council agreed that they need not keep the full Jewish Law. They would only had to abstain from four items:
- Food sacrificed to idols
- Food that has not been drained of blood
- Animals that were strangled (not ritually butchered)
- Porneia, variously translated as unchastity, fornication, sexual immorality, unlawful marriage.
But why these four? Most likely this goes back to the few basic rules in Leviticus 17-18 which applied both to Jews and to “any stranger who sojourns among you.” The Old Testament is especially concerned to preserve the holiness of the community, and this means following the Lord’s way and not the ways of the surrounding world. As Lev 18 says:
And the Lord said to Moses, “Say to the people of Israel, I am the Lord your God. You shall not do as they do in the land of Egypt, where you dwelt, and you shall not do as they do in the land of Canaan, to which I am bringing you. You shall not walk in their statutes. 4 You shall do my ordinances and keep my statutes and walk in them. I am the Lord your God. 5 You shall therefore keep my statutes and my ordinances, by doing which a man shall live: I am the Lord. (Lev 18:1-4)
With this understanding, allowing “the stranger who sojourns among you” to follow abhorrent practices would have a polluting effect on the community of faith.
That being said, it is significant that the later Church modified the first three of these rules.
- Paul in 1 Corinthians (written around 50 AD) addresses the question of whether Christians should eat food that had been offered to idols, which was Gentile standard practice both in the market and at social occasions. He felt it wasn’t a big deal, but left the decision up to the conscience of the Christian believer, which should above all be guided by love of the brethren. “If food is a cause of my brother’s falling, I will never eat meat [offered to idols], lest I cause my brother to fall” (1 Cor 8:13.)
- The Gospel of Mark (written around 70 AD) allows that all foods are clean. With the contemporary controversy about food in mind, Mark hears Jesus calling for a much higher standard of moral life that depends on a transformed inward being and not food laws. And [Jesus] called the people to Him again, and said to them, “Hear Me, all of you, and understand: 15 there is nothing outside a man which by going into him can defile him; but the things which come out of a man are what defile him.” 17 And when He had entered the house, and left the people, His disciples asked Him about the parable. 18 And He said to them, “Then are you also without understanding? Do you not see that whatever goes into a man from outside cannot defile him, 19 since it enters, not his heart but his stomach, and so passes on?” (Thus He declared all foods clean.) 20 And He said, “What comes out of a man is what defiles a man. 21 For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, fornication, theft, murder, adultery, 22 coveting, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, foolishness. 23 All these evil things come from within, and they defile a man.” (Mark 7:14-23).
- A later manuscript of the Greek New Testament (Codex Bezae, 5th c.) further interprets/modifies Acts 15:29 by recording that the instruction is to “abstain from idolatry, from fornication, and from bloodshed and from doing to others what they would not like done to themselves.” By then, all the food-related rules had dropped out.
- What remained, however, was the rule about porneia. If Paul could relax the food laws in 1 Cor 8, he allowed no relaxation of the rules on sexual purity and severely rebuked the community (1 Cor 5) for tolerating “a man living with his father’s wife.”
And you are arrogant! Ought you not rather to mourn? Let him who has done this be removed from among you.” (1 Cor 5:2)
Judaism and early Christianity were particularly distinguished from the surrounding Greco-Roman world by insisting on purity in matters of sexual relations.