The life and work of St. Paul

THB CONSULTATION AT JERUSALEM. 245
they regarded him, at the best, as the Ananias for futnre Eleazers. 1 Above
all, the burning question of social relations remained untouched. Titus had
been circumcised as the only condition on which the members of the Church
at Jerusalem would let him move on an equal footing among themselves. It
was all very well for them to decide with more or less indifference about
" clioois learets," " the outer world," " people elsewhere," " those afar," 3 as
though they could much more easily contemplate the toleration of uncircumcised
Christians, provided that they were out of eight and out of mind in
distant cities ; but a Jew was a Jew, even if he lived in the wilds of Isauria
or the burnt plains of Phrygia ; and how did this decision at Jerusalem help
him to face the practical question, " Am I, or am I not, to share a common
table with, to submit to the daily contact of people that eat freely of that
which no true Jew can think of without a thrill of horror 'the unclean
beast ?"
These were the questions which, after all, could only be left to the solution
of time. The prejudices of fifteen centuries could not be removed in a day.
Alike the more enlightened and the more bigoted of Jews and Gentiles con-
tinued to think very much as thoy had thought before, until the darkness of
prejudice was scattered by the broadening light of history and of reason.
The genuineness of this cyclical letter is evinced by its extreme naturalness.
A religious romancist could not possibly have invented anything which left so
much unsolved. And this genuineness also accounts for the startling appearance
of a grave moral crime among things so purely ceremonial as particular
kinds of food. There is probably no other period iu the history of the world
at which the Apostles would have found it needful to toll their Gentile con-
verts to abstain from fornication, as well as from things offered to idols, things
strangled, and blood. The first of these four prohibitions was perfectly intelligible,
because it must have boon often necessary for a Gentilo Christian to
prove to his Jewish brethren that he had no hankering after the " abominable
idolatries " which he had so recently abandoned. The two next prohibitions
were desirable as a concession to the indefinable horror with which the Jews
and many other Eastern races regarded the eating of the blood, which they
considered to bo " the very life." 3 But only at such a period as this could a
moral pollution have been placed on even apparently the sama footing as
matters of purely national prejudice. That the reading is correct,* and that
* See *
Plleiderer, ii. 13.
Acta ii. 39, oi jpa.< ; Col. iv. 5, oi .
8 Gen. ix. 4 ; Lev. xvii. 14. So too Koran, Sur. v. 4. See Biihr, SyttudZk, ii. 207.
On the other
"
hand, the blood" was a special delicacy to the heathen (Horn. Od, iii.
470; xviii. 44; Ov. Met. xii. 154); and hence "things strangled" were with them a
common article of food. Rutilius calls the Jew, "Huinauis animal dissocialecib is'' (It. i.
884). Even this 'restriction involved a most inconvenient necessity for nerer eating any meat
but kosher, t.f., meat prepared by Jewish butchers in special accordance with the laws of
slaughtering (moTTO). It would more or less necessitate what would be, to Gentile at
any rate, most repellent the " cophinus foenumque supellex" (Juy- &*< "i- 1^) which
were, for these reasons, the peculiarity of the Jew (Sidon. Up. vii. C).
4 There is not the faintest atom of probability In Bentley a conjecture of noontut. At
the same time, it must be noted as an extraordinary stretch of liberality on the part of
the Judaisers not to require the abstention from rmne's flesh by their Gentile brethren