The
apostles followed Jesus in moving beyond Jewish law toward active ministry.
Peter warned that it was necessary to support faith with goodness, good
behavior and good works; John proclaimed the new commandment, to love one
another. James said that truly pure religion meant doing something – caring for
the poor, the widows and orphans, and leading a good life. “Faith by itself, if
it has no works, is dead…A person is justified by works and not by faith
alone”.
As we recall, the first Jewish priests wanted to seal off the Israelites from all other cultures and religions, even to the point of murder. But after several centuries of interaction with neighboring cultures – war, trade, everything – that aim seemed silly and impractical. Jesus reached out not only to foreigners but to all sorts of undesirables: helping and curing Romans, Samaritans, Canaanites, lepers, prostitutes, tax collectors. In Matthew he said that some gentiles would go to heaven while some Jews were left behind.
Fatefully, two key followers of Jesus, Peter and Paul, had to settle the notion of expanding the reach of the ministry, but luckily they got along well enough. Peter called Paul his brother and warned him that others were misinterpreting his words. This relationship symbolized the course of the early church: Peter planned to preach to the Jews while Paul went out to the gentiles; in fact Peter had to persuade the other disciples about the propriety of preaching to the gentiles. The sentiment of both men was that we are all God’s children, that gentiles are “fellow heirs” who will get the same mercy from God that Jewish converts do, and that Jesus had removed the wall dividing Jew and gentile so the two groups could be reconciled. This big-tent attitude applied also to preaching: although they were wary of false prophets, they also embraced outsiders who were purveying the message of Jesus honestly – whoever is not against us is for us.
But the first important thing they did, when they got together to discuss what Christianity meant, was to declare that they would not require followers to go back to the old Jewish Bible and follow those rules, even though they were Jews by birth. They realized that Mosaic law could no longer be interpreted literally as the will of God which must be obeyed without exception: those rules were the laws of man, and other men could decide for themselves whether they were valid, which is exactly what Peter and Paul did. Likewise they were not tramping all across the Mediterranean basin demanding that their new converts, Greeks and Romans, must circumcise themselves, give up ham and shrimp, and grow side curls. In part this was because they knew the locals would beat the hell out of them. They left Mosaic doctrine behind in Jerusalem and preached Jesus instead. Particularly, they did not want their flocks across the ancient world divided into circumcised and uncircumcised, pork and not pork. And they didn’t want earthly “referees” standing between the devout and the Almighty.
As we recall, the first Jewish priests wanted to seal off the Israelites from all other cultures and religions, even to the point of murder. But after several centuries of interaction with neighboring cultures – war, trade, everything – that aim seemed silly and impractical. Jesus reached out not only to foreigners but to all sorts of undesirables: helping and curing Romans, Samaritans, Canaanites, lepers, prostitutes, tax collectors. In Matthew he said that some gentiles would go to heaven while some Jews were left behind.
Fatefully, two key followers of Jesus, Peter and Paul, had to settle the notion of expanding the reach of the ministry, but luckily they got along well enough. Peter called Paul his brother and warned him that others were misinterpreting his words. This relationship symbolized the course of the early church: Peter planned to preach to the Jews while Paul went out to the gentiles; in fact Peter had to persuade the other disciples about the propriety of preaching to the gentiles. The sentiment of both men was that we are all God’s children, that gentiles are “fellow heirs” who will get the same mercy from God that Jewish converts do, and that Jesus had removed the wall dividing Jew and gentile so the two groups could be reconciled. This big-tent attitude applied also to preaching: although they were wary of false prophets, they also embraced outsiders who were purveying the message of Jesus honestly – whoever is not against us is for us.
But the first important thing they did, when they got together to discuss what Christianity meant, was to declare that they would not require followers to go back to the old Jewish Bible and follow those rules, even though they were Jews by birth. They realized that Mosaic law could no longer be interpreted literally as the will of God which must be obeyed without exception: those rules were the laws of man, and other men could decide for themselves whether they were valid, which is exactly what Peter and Paul did. Likewise they were not tramping all across the Mediterranean basin demanding that their new converts, Greeks and Romans, must circumcise themselves, give up ham and shrimp, and grow side curls. In part this was because they knew the locals would beat the hell out of them. They left Mosaic doctrine behind in Jerusalem and preached Jesus instead. Particularly, they did not want their flocks across the ancient world divided into circumcised and uncircumcised, pork and not pork. And they didn’t want earthly “referees” standing between the devout and the Almighty.
When
the founders weren’t preaching, they were writing letters to their churches
across the Roman Empire. Again, they knew that the church leaders in Greece and
Asia Minor would laugh at the notion of being asked to follow dozens and dozens
of Jewish rules unfamiliar to anyone outside the Holy Land. So instead the
Christian founders wrote to the churches that Christians should stick to the
very basic precepts such as avoiding sexual immorality, which they didn’t even
bother to define.
Paul
stressed these themes in his address to the Romans, and in other epistles. He
said that just as the patriarchs before Moses were independent of the law
(which hadn’t been written yet, at that time), after Jesus we are all
discharged and set free from the law: it is pointless to judge people by what
they eat, he argued, and Jews who keep the old law while ignoring Jesus won’t
be saved. He made the same point to the Galatians: just as God’s covenant with
Abraham predated the laws of Moses, after Jesus we could move beyond the law –
Jews don’t even obey Jewish law, and clinging to the law cuts you off from
Jesus. In fact many of Paul’s letters return to the same point: ignore Jewish
laws on circumcision and food and sacrifice, since they are of human origin and
cannot remove sin; the new covenant of Jesus cancelled the old covenant which
was doomed to disappear.
Paul even criticized Peter when he wavered on this point. Peter, under the influence of the old hardliners, refused at one point to eat with uncircumcised Gentiles because it would anger Jews, but Paul argued that Peter shouldn’t reject people for ignoring a Biblical code which was, by their lights, no longer valid. Paul accepted that some people would follow Mosaic law and even followed it himself sometimes, but did not want anyone coerced into it, or punished for violating it.
Paul even criticized Peter when he wavered on this point. Peter, under the influence of the old hardliners, refused at one point to eat with uncircumcised Gentiles because it would anger Jews, but Paul argued that Peter shouldn’t reject people for ignoring a Biblical code which was, by their lights, no longer valid. Paul accepted that some people would follow Mosaic law and even followed it himself sometimes, but did not want anyone coerced into it, or punished for violating it.
The
founders of Christianity let people use their own judgment and follow a lot of
local customs, just as the Romans very wisely did when they conquered
territory. The Jewish priests of the day should have been thanking their lucky
stars that the ruling Romans weren’t as rigid about religion as their own
priests were, because if the Romans had been that rigid, they would have killed
the priests and eradicated Judaism forever. Actually the Romans did wipe out
Jerusalem and the Second Temple a decade after Paul left the city for the last
time, in response to a local rebellion rooted partly in religious pigheadedness
by Jewish zealots. Paul would have been among the first to warn Jewish
religious leaders not to go down that dangerous path: adhering rigidly to any
doctrine without any thought or reflection is the short road to disaster.
