Apostle Paul Never Touch Meat Again
A Polite Bribe shows Paul angrily standing up and shouting, and Peter shoved flat against the table, suggesting a very physical confrontation. Paul believes, rightly or wrongly, that Peter has gone back on his agreement. (This isn't precisely what we find in Galatians two:11–14, only the general depiction is fair plenty.)
What was this dispute virtually? In A Polite Bribe, scholars are befuddled by this issue. The just suggestion they make is that Peter suddenly decided that everyone had to keep kosher. Really? Was someone showing up at their community dinners with pork, or what? Moreover, Paul never mentions kosher issues in his letters. What's going on here?
There's a ameliorate explanation, based on the Jewish Christian agreement, which gives us a totally new perspective to this whole dispute. This dispute was non nearly keeping kosher at all; information technology was about vegetarianism and meat sacrificed to idols. The Jewish Christian agreement becomes articulate when we look at the Recognitions and Homilies, two documents either written by Jewish Christians or written with strong Jewish Christian influence.
For the Jewish Christians, "eating with the gentiles" has cipher to do with failure to proceed kosher. Information technology means eating at the tabular array of demons. And for the Jewish Christian Ebionites, eating meat was eating at the table of demons. Eating meat allowed demons to have possession of you. Christians, therefore, should not be eating at the table of demons; they should not eat meat or things sacrificed to idols.
Merely before the confrontation between Peter and Paul at Antioch, "certain men from James" conveyed to Peter an even more radical course of this requirement. For Jewish Christianity, not simply does this mean non eating meat, information technology also means not eating with someone who is themselves possessed by a demon — that is, non eating with unbaptized and unrepentant pagans. The demon is always nowadays in the unrepentant pagan, and therefore eating with them ways eating with demons. Why should Christians endanger their own souls past sitting downwardly with pagan meat-eaters possessed by demons?
This dispute was about vegetarianism and meat sacrificed to idols. It is either violence, or sharing a table with unrepentant violent people, which allows the demons to have possession in the first place. "Eating at the table of demons" means an unacceptable level of complicity with violence or with violent people. It was not about "Jewish customs" every bit nosotros empathise them today.
This is the existent issue, and on this signal, the letters of Paul and the Jewish Christian sources agree. Paul nowhere in his letters talks well-nigh kosher requirements as we understand them, only he talks a cracking bargain about eating at the table of demons, eating meat, and eating meat sacrificed to idols (Romans 14, I Corinthians 8–10). Even Acts supports this view, putting a prohibition on "blood" and a prohibition against meat sacrificed to idols in the apostolic decree (Acts 15:29).
In the Recognitions and Homilies, Peter repeatedly pleads that he is unable to swallow with Clement, with other pagans, or manifestly other Jews, until they have been baptized. Why? Considering they are possessed past demons. And what leads to demon possession? It's bloodshed, including the killing of animals, and eating meat sacrificed to demons. If you swallow at a table where demons are present — and demons are present in all meat-eaters and idol-worshipers — you are risking your own soul. We may regard this concern well-nigh demon possession every bit beingness superstitious, but whatever information technology was, it had nothing to do with the standard kosher requirements.
What is at outcome hither in "not eating with the gentiles" is not a question of Jewish identity, but of Christian identity. Once you are baptized, everything is fine; baptism drives out the demons. Peter says, "it lies with you, when yous wish it, to come to our tabular array; and non with united states, who are not permitted to accept nutrient with any i who has not been baptized" (Recognitions 2.72). Peter says that "the things which are well-pleasing to God are these . . . to abjure from the table of devils, non to sense of taste expressionless flesh, not to touch claret" (Homilies vii.4). God never wanted animals to be killed in the first place, and therefore does non enquire for or desire animal sacrifices (Homilies 3.45).
Paul's letters actually support the estimation given past Peter in the Recognitions and Homilies. In all of his messages, Paul never discusses kosher regulations equally we now understand them (non eating pork, not mixing milk with meat, and so along). What Paul does talk over is the very aforementioned problems that the Jewish Christian sources mention: vegetarianism (Romans 14:1–3, 20–21), not eating at the table of demons (I Corinthians 10:twenty), and not eating meat sacrificed to idols (I Corinthians x:25). Paul disagrees with Peter's views (every bit expressed in the Recognitions and Homilies). Just Paul frames the issue in almost exactly the same way — it is about what constitutes eating at the tabular array of demons, about eating meat, and specially about eating meat sacrificed to idols.
In fact, even Acts supports this interpretation. The apostolic decree (Acts xv:29) forbids "blood," things strangled, things offered to idols, and unchastity. For the Jewish Christians, forbidding "claret" meant a prohibition on eating meat. Forbidding "things strangled" implies, nearly likely, a prohibition on eating fish, which are typically killed by asphyxiation.
Peter may take concerns about "kosher," but it is a very dissimilar and more than radical concept of kosher. For the Jewish Christian leadership, eating meat and drinking wine was non kosher (Romans 14:twenty–21). This is non the traditional Jewish view of kosher, but a new, more radical, Jewish Christian view of what foods are proper for believers to eat.
Source: https://compassionatespirit.com/wpblog/2014/05/27/%E2%80%9Ceating-at-the-table-of-gentiles%E2%80%9D/
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