The Acts of the Apostles

THE APOSTOLIC DECREE 249
But the Apostolic Decree, if it contained a general
declaration against eating sacrifices offered to idols,
against partaking of blood or things strangled, and
against fornication, is inconsistent with the account
given by St. Paul in Gal. ii. 1-10,^ and with the
corresponding passages in the First Epistle to the
Corinthians. It is, accordingly, unhistorical. But
if the Decree is unhistorical, it follows that it is in
the highest degree improbable that a companion of
Silas and St. Paul either wrote or accepted from
others what we read in Acts xv. Both he and his
authority must have known the real result of the
deliberations of the Council. Neither could St. Luke
have been so audacious as to forge the result, nor so
simple as to forget it or to exchange it for another
tradition, seeing especially that he lays great stress
upon the fact that St. Paul and Silas on their
missionary journey delivered this very Decree to the
churches (xvi. 4), and seeing that he himself refers
with the Apostles, here falls into the background, we must neverthe-
less allow St. Luke, who was not present on this occasion, the
liberty so to picture the scene to himself, seeing especially that we
have here a conflict of two representations, and that the religious
and apostolic independence which St. Paul claimed for himself
by no means excludes that at that time the Church of Jerusalem
with its leaders was regarded as the court of ultimate appeal for
the whole of Christendom. (Even if the Decree is authentic, I have
always regarded the letter as a creation of St. Luke. He perhaps
imitated some other letter of the kind.) Besides, we must not
forget that even St. Paul has written in Gal. ii. 2 : dved^/xtju avroU
(the " pillars " of the Church of Jerusalem) t6 evayyiXiov 6 K-qpvaau
Iv Tois WvecLv . . . fjLT] TTws CIS Kcpov Tfiix^ ^ idpafJLov. This after all
is not so very different from the impression which is given by the
Acts.
1 And also with the narrative of Gal. ii. 11^.