Dive deep into the pivotal events of Acts 15 as we explore how Paul and Barnabas initiated a turning point in the early church. Discover the transformative decision at the Jerusalem conference, where apostles faced the pressing question of Gentile inclusion. This episode unpacks the transition of a Jewish-centric faith into a belief system embraced by Gentiles across regions.
The CEM Network is pleased to present Ronald L. Dart and Born to Win.
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If you’re reading your Bible, you should know that the events recorded in Acts 15 are of singular importance in the history of the early church. What had happened is that Paul and Barnabas had returned to Antioch from their first journey into Gentile lands. Up until this time, the church was Jewish. This time, things were different. In fact, everywhere Paul and Barnabas went, they went to synagogue first and made no progress at all. But the Gentiles who had been attending synagogue said, Oh, we want to know more about this. And they had accepted the faith in large numbers, and everyone was delighted with the results. Well, almost every one. Certain men came down to Antioch from Judea, and they taught the brethren and said, Except you be circumcised after the manner of Moses, you cannot be saved. Now, this did not go down well at all with Paul and Barnabas. They were quite certain that that was not correct. And so they had no small amount of dissension and disputation with these people. Finally, The Antioch church determined that Paul and Barnabas and certain other of them would have to go up to Jerusalem to the apostles and elders about this question. Now there follows the great Jerusalem conference where the home church and the original apostles were forced at last to face up to the question of the Gentiles who were now accepting the gospel in larger numbers than the Jews. We are almost 20 years into the history of the church at this time. and only 20 years before the destruction of Jerusalem and the church’s flight to Pella, and probably shortly thereafter the death of the last of the apostles. Until this conference in 49 AD, the church was a Jewish institution, and the apostles, well, they stayed firmly in Jerusalem. They had no particular need that they felt to go anywhere else. Paul’s success may have led some of them to feel they finally had to step out, and we do know that in subsequent years, they did. Since the apostles could not be everywhere to tell their stories, the question of writing it down had to begin growing in their minds. At the same time, the world was changing around them. There were prophets in the church in those days, and they cannot possibly have left these men in the dark about the impending destruction of Jerusalem. They knew it was coming. They knew it could not possibly have been long. It would be some ten years after that Jerusalem conference before the first gospel was written down, as best we can determine. Conventional wisdom has concluded it was Mark who wrote first, but really this depends heavily on the assumption that Matthew and Luke borrowed heavily from Mark, which I don’t think is the case. It’s just as possible that they borrowed heavily from what is called Q, which I think is the oral gospel that existed in the church in those days. There’s really nothing to learn from the order of the books as they’re presented in our Bibles that we have today. There is no evidence that there is anything like an inspired order. The order that we have in our scriptures is the order we got from the Greek church in the East. The Western order coming back from Rome is a little different. But nevertheless, there is nothing particularly to be gained from that. And there’s also little understanding to be gained from a chronological order, even if we could be certain of it. Why? Well, there are two reasons in particular. The four Gospels are intended each to stand alone as independent witnesses. They do not depend on one another to tell their story. Therefore, while their dates may be of importance to scholars, the dates offer us nothing as regards meaning. And when folks like us sit down to read the Bible, what we’re particularly concerned about is what does it mean? The rest of the books of the Bible after the Gospels, mainly epistles, are incidental. That is to say, they rose out of local and temporal necessity. They were provoked by events. If, for example, the Corinthian church had not been such a pain in the neck, or if Paul had been present in Corinth when the problems arose, the letters to Corinth would never have been written. Think about that. And we would be all the poorer. Each of the books of the New Testament has its own story to tell, its own testimony to offer. And there really is no particular reason to concern ourselves with how they relate to other books, except perhaps on the basis of their content. Now, after this comes the question we’ve talked about before, commonly called the synoptic problem. The term synoptic is borrowed from the Greek, and it means seeing with one eye. Matthew, Mark, and Luke show a great deal of similarity with one another to such a great extent that some scholars postulate that they borrowed from one another. This is especially true and underlined since John is so very different from the others. Perhaps they think with Matthew and Luke taking Mark as an outline and then improving on his rather abbreviated account. But in my opinion, the scholars underrate the power of the memorized gospel to influence any final written account. But of course they did borrow from one another in this sense. They knew one another. They swapped stories for a generation before they ever got around to writing down their accounts. If you can imagine it, sitting around a campfire, sitting at dinner in someone’s house, standing before the church teaching, going back and forth over and over and over again with the story, the good message, as it might be called, of Jesus Christ. So they, I suppose, in that sense borrowed from one another, and it fully accounts for the similarities in the Synoptic Gospels. Another scholar offered a two-document hypothesis. That is, that Matthew and Luke borrowed from Mark and an unknown source called Q. Now, if there is a source which we can call Q, it is the memorized gospel which was developed in the first 10 years of teaching and questioning and clarifying the gospel. It probably should have been called O to represent the oral gospel. Now, there’s an incident recorded by Luke in the book of Acts that reveals the existence of an oral gospel. If you’ve read the Bible very much or even gone to Sunday school a lot, you probably know this story. It’s found in the eighth chapter of the book of Acts. The angel of the Lord spoke to Philip, Philip being one of the seven that were ordained first as deacons in the church. Philip had gone up to Samaria, preached the gospel there, and baptized a whole lot of Samaritans. But now the angel said, get up from here and go down toward the south from the road that runs from Jerusalem to Gaza. So he got on down there, and he ran into a man of Ethiopia. He was a eunuch of great authority under Candace, the queen of the Ethiopians, who had charge of all her treasure. He had come to Jerusalem to worship. So apparently this Ethiopian was what they call in those terms a God-fearer. That is, one who is not a Jew, but who had come to fear and to believe in God. He was on his way home, and he was sitting in his chariot reading Isaiah the prophet. Now, it’s hard for us in this generation to understand how unusual this picture is, because scrolls of the prophets or of the Old Testament scriptures were of tremendous value and of cost. because every book, every scroll, had to be copied painstakingly by hand, and they had to be carefully checked to be sure there were no errors in them. It was not unheard of that because of errors that were in a document as a result of copying, that the document was burned, which made those scrolls even more rare and more special. Now the Spirit said to Philip, Go over there and join yourself to this chariot. So he ran over, and as he got there, he heard him reading, presumably he was reading aloud, from the prophet Isaiah. And Philip said, Do you understand what you’re reading? He said, Well, how can I, except somebody should guide me through this? And he desired, Philip, that he would come up and sit with him. The place of the scripture he read was this. He was led as a sheep to the slaughterer. And like a lamb dumb before his sharer, so he opened not his mouth. In his humiliation, his judgment was taken away. And who shall declare his generation, for his life is taken from the earth? Now, it’s highly unlikely that the Ethiopian was reading a Hebrew scroll here. More likely, it was a copy of the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament. Those had been done some 200 years previously and were in fairly common use throughout that part of the world that believed in the God of the Old Testament. The reading here follows the Septuagint, although not precisely, but that shouldn’t be surprising. You have to bear in mind that Philip, then Luke, cited all this from memory pretty accurately because these men memorized the Scriptures. But it’s almost impossible for us to be certain what they were citing in this circumstance. Well, the eunuch answered Philip and said, I pray you, of whom is the prophet saying this? Is it of himself or some other man? Well, Philip opened his mouth and began at the same scripture and preached to him Jesus. Now today, we would open up the New Testament and preach to him Jesus. Problem is, the first gospel had not been written at this time. There was no Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John, nor, for that matter, any of Paul’s epistles. Not one word that’s in our New Testament had been written down by this time. What Philip had was the oral gospel, which had been carefully taught, nurtured, and memorized from endless tellings of the story. If you can visualize… Matthew is speaking to the local church congregation. John was sitting over in a corner. Philip and two or three of the other fellows were over here in the center. And they listened to Matthew tell the story as they had heard him tell it again and again and again. And no doubt John might have spoken up, or maybe Mark, and said, you know, I heard that a little differently. This is what I heard Jesus say. And in the years that followed, they were systematically firming up the gospel as they would preach it. What Philip had was the memorized oral gospel that he had gotten from the apostles themselves. Well, as they went on their way, they came to a certain water, and the eunuch said, Here’s water, what hinders me to be baptized? And indeed, Philip said, If you believe with all your heart, you may. And he was. baptized on this occasion. This is a classic example that shows clearly enough the existence of an oral gospel that enabled Philip to preach the gospel to the eunuch, even though not a word of it had been written yet. Now, there’s a question lurking in the background here that troubles some people. And as soon as I come back after this short message, I’ll clarify that. But for now, grab a pencil and a piece of paper. I want to give you an address and a phone number.
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As I said, there’s a question that tends to trouble some people that lurks in the background of much of what I’m talking about. The theory of biblical inerrancy, that is, the inerrancy of the text of the Bible, has been a football kicked around among theologians for generations. And it tends to be misleading, I think. First of all, let me make this clear. We believe that the Bible is inspired of God front to back, Old Testament, New Testament, the whole thing. But does that inspiration suggest divine dictation? In other words, the control of every word that the Holy Spirit says, sit down, John, and take this down. Now, that idea, which I think seems to be taken for granted by some people, will not stand up under examination. And people who kind of hold on to that may, if they keep reading one of these days, stumble on something that’s going to cause them to fall down. Any reader, even reading the English versions, will know that the writer of John has a very different style from the author of Matthew. It’s inescapable, even in English. It is perhaps even more dramatic if you go back and read John’s letters. You can tell I’m reading a letter by the guy who wrote the gospel according to John and who didn’t write Matthew. Now, Paul offers what I think is an interesting insight to the inspiration of Scripture. He’s talking about something else, but he says this. It’s in Romans 8, 16. The Spirit itself bears witness with our spirit that we are the children of God. Now, what this suggests is that there is the Spirit of God that works with us, but our spirit is also involved, and it is the witness of both of those that is involved in, say, the testimony of Luke as the story of the gospel. But most important from an unbeliever’s point of view is the fact that these are four independent witnesses of the life and ministry of Jesus. Now, did you get the importance of what I said there? There are two things you do. One is a Christian, you go, you believe God, you believe the Bible’s inspired, you read it, no questions like this ever cross your mind. But to merely go to an unbeliever and say, well, now these scriptures were inspired by God, doesn’t hack it. He will want to know, how do you know that? And that, sometimes, you may be tempted to say, well, I just have to accept that on faith, which is not very helpful to people who don’t have any faith. Now, what’s interesting, as you make your way through these four independent witnesses, the agreements and the variances of the gospel accounts attest to the independence of the witnesses and to the truth of their story. In other words, in the end, you realize that these four independent witnesses have all told you essentially the same story, It agrees in the important parts. But it’s also clear that they are independent because of the ways in which their stories vary. Now, before I go on, I should tell you that you should know this about scholars. Scholars have to publish or perish, and they cannot approach the work of the New Testament, studying the New Testament, assuming the supernatural quality. They are bound by academic standards to maintain an independent viewpoint, to approach the Scriptures not as believers but as unbelievers. Now, scholars have done yeoman work with the text and the study of the documents, but when they depart from facts into theory, you can safely assume there will be another scholar along soon with a totally different viewpoint. As lay readers of the Bible, we can be safe in assuming that we have a valid witness in our hands when we pick up the New Testament. And the truthfulness of the witnesses of Jesus shines through in spite of all the work that occupies scholarship. Now, I’ve asked why Jesus did not write his own gospel. The answer is obvious. He wanted independent witnesses to testify of all he had done. Everett Harrison, in his introduction to the New Testament, asks a different question. Why, he wonders, was the church not content to create and endorse a single account that would be definitive and used throughout the Christian community? Logical question. He concluded that this might have been the case if the church had set out to create a record of the life and works of Jesus right at the beginning of their work. Obviously, they didn’t. And in fact, there was hardly a need for the written gospel in the early years when the church was essentially Judean. The apostles were fully occupied with teaching, training, explaining, and again telling their story. The early Christians, frankly, I think were probably stunned by all that had happened to them. I know that if I had been through all that Matthew had been through in the last days of Jesus and then his reappearance and his ascension, I would have been struggling to understand it all years later. It takes a while for the mind to absorb such incredible events and to make sense of them. It’s plain when you read through the Gospels that the disciples did not understand what Jesus was doing, and in many cases didn’t even get it when he told them. It’s a striking thing of the Gospels. Those guys do not make themselves look well at all in their telling of the story. You sometimes would almost get the impression, how stupid can you be when they didn’t get these things? That’s easy for us to say. Because we have the distillation of all their work of coming to understand this. Because in many cases, they were able to think about what Jesus said. Then they would be sitting in synagogue hearing the Scriptures read, and all of a sudden the light would go on as they connected what Jesus said to the Scripture they just heard read in synagogue. That’s how much of this stuff began to be developed. By the time they wrote their gospel accounts, they had sorted most of this stuff out. And as a result, they tell the truth about what they saw and how they thought about it. And they give us the facts about what Jesus said and their conclusions. Later. One can only imagine their campfire conversations, you know, Matthew giving a sermon, Mark listening over on one side, their sessions of helping the brethren to understand and to learn how to repeat the story. Perhaps they even got Philip up in front of the group and says, Okay, now it’s your turn. You tell the story. He began to tell it, and they could take turns correcting different items in the story as he went. In short, while the disciples had the events and words of Jesus in mind on the day of Pentecost, they still had not absorbed all the implications of the events which would finally comprise the gospel, the story of Jesus. Meanwhile, while they were thoroughly employed with this task, the gospel was breaking out of their world into the world of the Gentiles.
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Stay with me through this short break, and we’ll talk about that. For a free CD of this radio program that you can share with friends and others, write or call this week only. And request the program titled, Introduction to the New Testament, No.
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7.
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Write to Born to Win, Post Office Box 560, White House, Texas 75791. Or call toll free 1-888-BIBLE44. That’s 1-888-242-5344.
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In case you missed the first part of this program or the programs that led up to this one, you can actually listen to them on your computer. If you’re plugged into the Internet, you can go to our website, borntowin.net, go to our audio services and play today’s program all over again. But you can look in radio archives and find two weeks of daily programs, download them, listen to them at your leisure. Also, we’re in the process of developing a new email newsletter in which we’ll actually send those links to you every time we put them up. We don’t want to create more spam on the Internet, but we do want to make things easier for you to find our work online. So check our website, borntowin.net, and we’ll try to provide even better service. Now, the first development of what I call the breakout of the gospel breaking out of Judaism came from persecution, when the disciples were forced to flee from Jerusalem after the stoning of Stephen. There was a great persecution came up against the church at that time, much of which was coming from one Saul of Tarsus. They were all scattered abroad throughout all the region of Judea and Samaria, except for the apostles. It was time to move out. You know, before his ascension, Jesus had told the 11 apostles what they had to do. He said, you’ll find it in Matthew 28, all power is given unto me in heaven and earth. Go you therefore and teach all nations. The word nations is the same thing everywhere else in the New Testament is translated Gentiles. Go ye therefore and teach all Gentiles, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things I have commanded you. And lo, I am with you all the way, even to the end of the world. Now, up until Acts 8, they had been limited to the home country and to Jews. All that was about to change. And it tells us in Acts 8, verse 4, Therefore they that were scattered abroad from this persecution went everywhere preaching the word. Meanwhile, one Saul of Tarsus is struck down on the road to Damascus, and he is commissioned to take the gospel to the Gentiles, to kings, to the children of Israel. And the Holy Spirit said, I will show him how great things he must suffer for my name’s sake. Now, other developments are going on at the same time. It’s as though the Holy Spirit is working everywhere to begin to break out from the constraints of Judean Christianity. In the 11th chapter of Acts, those that were scattered on that persecution about Stephen went as far as Phoenix and Cyprus and Antioch, preaching the word to no one except to the Jews. They still hadn’t got into their heads, except that there were a handful of them who were men of Cyprus and Cyrene, whose language was Greek, who, when they came to Antioch, spoke to the Grecians preaching the Lord Jesus. This is the first major evangelistic work to Gentiles came about in Antioch. The hand of the Lord was with them. A great number believed and turned to the Lord. The result of all this was that the Jerusalem church, having heard of it, sent Barnabas up there. Barnabas came and found what was going on, went to Tarsus and brought back Saul. And the stage was set in Antioch. It’s a fateful development because it creates a second center for the early church outside of Jerusalem, outside the narrow focus of the believing Jews. And even here, it took an overt act of the Holy Spirit to get Paul and Barnabas out on the road. Now, why is this important? Well, apart from the fact that it involved a breakout of the gospel, it explains in some measure the later writing of the gospels. Harrison observes that the increasing spread of Christianity, not a local phenomenon confined to Judea, cried out for the emergence of written gospel accounts. Tradition tells us that these four gospels appeared in different geographical areas of the church. The logic is inescapable. By 60 AD, the apostles were no longer sitting around Jerusalem copying each other’s Gospels. Chances are, none of them knew the other accounts were being written at all. And once these Gospels were written and had become known by a number of people, any attempt at the suppression of any one of them would have failed. As Harrison puts it, the church did not find it expedient to attempt to eliminate all but one. And I feel personally they had a sense that since these men were witnesses, any such attempt would fly against the leading of the Holy Spirit. Actually, there was an attempt toward that end at the end of the second century by one Tatian who wrote something called the Diatessaron. It was an attempt to create uniformity, but it was seen as biased. And besides, the four Gospels were, in Harrison’s words, too firmly entrenched to be dislodged. There’s a powerful logic underlying all this, which speaks to me of the work of the Holy Spirit in maintaining the independent testimonies of Jesus’ life, words, and work. According to Harrison, it’s a perversion to regard the gospel materials as shaped by the church rather than the influence of Jesus. And somehow the word perversion seems appropriate.
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Until next time.
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