What Does Acts 15:1 Mean?

XV. (1) **And certain men which came down from Judæa.**—We enter on the history of the first great controversy in the records of the Christian Church. It might have seemed as if the conversion of Cornelius had been accepted as deciding the question which we now find raised again (Acts 11:18). It would seem, however, that those who had raised objections to Peter’s conduct in that case were not content to accept the conclusion which he drew from it, and it is not difficult to represent to ourselves the train of thought which led them to take a different view. To them it may have seemed the exception that proved the rule. Where signs and wonders came in, they may have been content to accept an uncircumcised convert as a member of the Church, simply on the ground that God had dispensed in such cases with His own law; or they may have urged that though, in such cases, they did not require circumcision as a condition of admission, the continuance in the uncircumcised state after baptism was a wilful transgression, which shut men out from the “salvation” which they were seeking. Circumcision, they may have said, had been given as an “everlasting covenant” (Genesis 17:13), and had never been formally abrogated. Who were the new teachers, that they should change what God had thus established? It is clear that they came, claiming to speak in the name of James, the Bishop of Jerusalem, and though he distinctly repudiates having authorised them (Acts 15:24), yet if we suppose, as is probable, that his Epistle was written shortly before the Council, we can easily understand that they might rest their case on the words which he had used in it, that “whosoever shall keep the whole Law, and yet offend in one point, is guilty of all” (James 2:10). Here, they might say, is a point confessedly in the Law, and even prior to it; and they were not prepared to draw the distinctions which we have learned to draw between the positive and the moral, the transient and the permanent, obligations of that Law. And it is to be noted that they did not merely make circumcision a condition of church communion; they carried their principles to their logical conclusion—as mediaeval dogmatism did in the case of baptism—and excluded the uncircumcised from all hope of salvation. (Comp. the account of Ananias and Izates given in the Note on Acts 9:10.)