Acts 21:21, commentary and pictures

Paul had been gladly received by the brethren on reaching Jerusalem, yet the real test of his reception would come the next day when he went with his companions to James with all the elders present. Some hearts were open to the news he brought and loved him for Christ and the truth, but prejudice, envy, and jealousy surrounding himself and his work left him anxious about the attitude toward himself and his work.

That meeting was the occasion when he formally presented the contributions forwarded by the Gentile churches for the support of the poor among the Jewish brethren. Gathering them had cost him and his fellow workers much time, anxious thought, and wearisome labor, and the sum far exceeded the expectations of the elders and represented many sacrifices and even severe privations on the part of the Gentile believers. Those freewill offerings showed the loyalty of the Gentile converts to the organized work throughout the world and should have been received with grateful acknowledgment, yet even among the leaders before whom he stood some were unable to appreciate the spirit of brotherly love that had prompted the gifts.

The charge laid against him was that he taught all the Jews living among the Gentiles to forsake Moses, to stop circumcising their children, and to give up walking after the customs. Many thousands of believing Jews who were zealous of the law had been informed of this by his enemies, and the multitude would gather when they heard he had come. The report fueled prejudice, envy, and jealousy against him and his work, for Jewish Christians who still held the ceremonial law binding regarded him as lax about its obligations and blamed him as Christianity departed from Jewish ceremonies and traditions.

Instead of defending him and showing the disaffected where they were wrong, the leading brethren repeated the charge to him, treated him as largely responsible for the existing prejudice as though he had given cause for it, and laid wholly on him the burden of removing the misapprehension by compromise. They counseled him to join four men under a vow, purify himself with them, and pay their charges for shaving their heads, so all might know the things informed concerning him were nothing and that he himself walked orderly and kept the law. At the same time the former decision still held for the believing Gentiles that they observe no such thing except to abstain from things offered to idols, blood, things strangled, and fornication. That distinction showed the Jerusalem council's decision concerned Gentile converts, not a command for Jewish believers to forsake their customs.

That counsel was not prompted by the Spirit but was the fruit of cowardice and was inconsistent with that decision. It was driven by knowing that nonconformity to the ceremonial law would bring Jewish hatred and persecution, that the Sanhedrin was following Paul to hinder the gospel, and that believers condemned as breakers of the law would suffer swift and severe punishment as apostates from the Jewish faith.