Excursus 14B: The missionary agreement and the Jerusalem Council
It is frequently claimed that Galatians 2:1-10 and Acts 15:6-21 are Paul’s
and Luke’s separate accounts of the one event, the meeting of the Jerusalem
Council. Two meetings in Jerusalem to resolve the issue of the circumcision of
Gentile believers is surely unlikely, it is claimed.
Against this view and in favor of two meetings, the following
considerations are raised.
1. This hypothesis requires that Galatians 2:1-10, Paul’s second visit
to Jerusalem, be equated with the third visit mentioned by the Acts of the
Apostles. This is very unlikely. In Galatians for strong apologetic reasons,
Paul is very precise in his review of his visits to Jerusalem: “Then after
fourteen years I went up again to Jerusalem” (Gal 2:1). Failure to mention an
interim visit to Jerusalem would have been a fatal omission by Paul.
2. The meeting recorded in Galatians 2:1-10 was a private meeting
between James, Cephas and John, “pillars” of the Jerusalem church, and Barnabas
and Paul, delegates from the church at Antioch. Acts 15:6-21, however, describes
an assembly of some size, consisting of “apostles and elders” presided over by James,
which Barnabas and Paul attended and at which they spoke.
3. According to Galatians 2:7-9 James, Cephas and John, having
recognized the validity of Paul’s circumcision-free gospel, agreed that
Barnabas and Paul should go to the Gentiles. However, Acts 15:6-21 makes sense
only on the basis that Barnabas and Paul had already preached to the Gentile.
There is a more plausible reconstruction of the events. Paul made his
second visit to Jerusalem, in company with Barnabas, with famine relief for the
church, prompted by the visit to Antioch by Agabus the prophet, as in Acts
11:27-30. The “revelation” of Galatians 2;2 that brought Paul to Jerusalem was
received during Agabus’s ministry in Antioch. In the course of their visit to
Jerusalem, the delegates from Antioch met privately with James, Cephas and
John. Their decision that Barnabas and Paul “go to the Gentiles” was contingent
upon them remembering the poor (believers in Jerusalem). Paul’s assertion of
Galatians 2:10, “which very thing I had been eager to do,” accommodates the
famine relief visit of Acts 11:27-30 and anticipates the collection from the
churches of the Gentiles taken in the midfifties. Paul’s vigorous approach to
evangelizing the Gentiles of the Roman cities, including to no less a person
than the proconsul of Cyprus. Sergius Paulus, raised problems that may not have
been anticipated at the private meeting in c. 47 in Jerusalem. Greater
precision regarding the scale of Gentile inclusion was urgently needed. This
was arrived at in a more representative setting, prompting the meeting in Jerusalem
in c. 49. (Paul Barnett, Jesus and the Rise of Early Christianity: A History
of New Testament Times [Downers Grove, Ill.: IVP Academic, 1999], 294-95)
