THE APOSTOLIC DECREE AND OUR MEAT MENU: READING ACTS 15 IN REDEMPTIVE- HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

The decision of the Jerusalem Council concerning Gentile believers - that they had to abstain, among other things, from meat with blood still in it and from sexual immorality - was officially recorded in order to be obeyed in the early Christian communities (Acts 15). It is echoed in Paul's letters, because this apostolic instruction was intended for non-Jewish believers like us. The prescription from Jerusalem was by no means incidental, it is rooted in basic principles of created life, and it was generally observed during the first centuries. Yet, most Christians today no longer feelbound bythis biblical rule and have no problem with eating blood pudding or rare steak. The purpose of this article is to explain why, in the course of time, the Apostolic Decree was considered to have become obsolete. In a church with an increasing number of Gentile Christians, the redemptive-historical necessity of the decree had ceased to exist.

The Christians Who Became Jews

When considering Jewish identity in Acts of the Apostles, scholars have often emphasized Jewish and Christian religious difference, an emphasis that masks the intersections of civic, ethnic, and religious identifications in antiquity. This book explores the depiction of Jewish and Christian identity by analyzing ethnicity within a broader material and epigraphic context. Examining Acts through a new lens, the book shows that the text presents Jews and Jewish identity in multiple, complex ways, in order to legitimate the Jewishness of Christians. The book begins with an overview of the importance of ethnicity and ethnic rhetoric to the formation of ancient Christian identity. It then situates Acts of the Apostles historically and examines previous scholarship on Jewish identity and Acts before moving on to focus on the production of Jewish identity and difference in Acts 2:5–13. The book assesses how Acts of the Apostles uses the image of Jewishness constructed in Acts 2:5–13 to depict the Jewishness of Christian non-Jews in the Jerusalem council (15:1–21), and explores how Acts of the Apostles and the Salutaris Foundation inscription each uses ethnic reasoning together with civic and imperial space to produce unified identities. The book concludes that Acts of the Apostles' rhetoric of Jewish and Christian identity should be situated within the context of Roman-era cities, in which ethnic, civic, and religious identities were inseparable. Placing Acts within this broader ethnic discourse emphasizes the Jewishness of Christians, even in Acts.

The Jerusalem Council and the Foundation of Salutaris

This chapter assesses how Acts of the Apostles uses the image of Jewishness constructed in Acts 2:5–13 to depict the Jewishness of Christian non-Jews in the Jerusalem council (15:1–21). Comparing the ethnic rhetoric of Acts 15 with ethnic rhetoric of the Salutaris Foundation inscription, it calls attention to wider negotiations of civic identity and within the context of formal public documents like this inscription. The Salutaris Foundation inscription, which contains the stipulations for a donation given by a wealthy citizen of Ephesus, provides a useful comparison with the Jerusalem council narrative in two primary ways. First, the inscription was composed within a decade or two of the likely publication of Acts and therefore offers a glimpse of a contemporaneous use of ethnic rhetoric. Second, a majority of the narrative of Acts takes place in an urban context, including in Ephesus. The Salutaris Foundation thus provides a securely dated and located example of the negotiation of identity within the city, demonstrating who had the power to influence identity claims and how such negotiations took place. Both Acts and the Salutaris Foundation leverage religious ideology in their respective forms of ethnic rhetoric in order to legitimate ethnic change, employing ancestral religious rhetoric, a shared sense of the flexibility of ethnic identity, and the authority of councils in ways that delimit the identity of contested populations and their religious activities.