By JIM CAMPBELL

PART 1 – This article was taken from Jim Campbell’s opening statement in his debate with Troy Goldsmith on April 27th, 2024. (This is Part 1)

“For it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay upon you no greater burden than these necessary things.” (Acts 15:28) These are words spoken by the apostles and elders gathered in council in Jerusalem in about 50 A.D., recorded and handed down for us in Acts chapter 15. They can be found in a letter, described in the same chapter (v. 23), which the Council wrote to the Gentile Christians in the wider area of Antioch, explaining their judgment as to what amount of the ceremonial law of Moses those Gentiles were bound to keep as Christians.

‘Judgment’ is the precise word to describe what the Jerusalem Council was doing here. It is the very word used by St. James himself: “Therefore my judgment is[1] that we should not trouble those of the Gentiles who turn to God” (Acts 15:19), etc.

On what was this very specific judgment to dispense the Gentile Christians based? Very little scripture, in fact. Rather, it was apparently based in some non-negligible part on firsthand observations from the missionary experiences of Saints Peter, Paul, and Barnabas. While St. James does after the fact make reference to Amos 9:11-12, this is only to show that the House of David will be restored and will incorporate the Gentiles. There is nothing in those verses at all giving explicit license to lift the practice of circumcision – let alone almost the whole rest of the law – for anyone seeking to enter into Covenant with the Living God. The absence of a prophet or a Psalm is especially conspicuous in the authoritative testimony of St Peter, whose preaching and reasoning is almost always rooted in one or the other throughout the rest of Acts.[2]

How could the apostles be so bold as to render a judgment so consequential to the understanding of the burgeoning Church without first establishing and communicating a much more robust basis within the authority of scripture? Moreover, how could the apostles here claim to be speaking on behalf of the Holy Spirit when the New Testament had yet been written? The answer is that the apostles themselves had a divinely instituted and even infallible authority on which to stand – not a competing one, but one drawn from the same source and preaching the same Gospel.

 

The New Covenant Economy: The Fulfillment of the Old

Speaking to these same apostles on the night he was betrayed, Our Lord Jesus Christ said to them, “And I confer on you a kingdom, just as my Father conferred one on me, so that you may eat and drink at my table in my kingdom and sit on thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel” (Lk 22:30).

Jesus did not make this statement in a vacuum. His commission to the apostles was delivered against a very specific backdrop in the Old Covenant. In both Exodus 18 and Deuteronomy 1, we see Holy Moses himself, by divine institution but also seemingly on the advice of his father-in-law Jethro, establishing a network of greater and lesser judges over the Twelve Tribes of Israel: “So I took the heads of your tribes, wise and experienced men, and set them as heads over you, commanders of thousands, commanders of hundreds, commanders of fifties, commanders of tens, and officers, throughout your tribes” (Deut. 1:15). These commanders and officers would hear cases from the tribes – specifically people come to “inquire of God” (Ex 18:15) – and answer and resolve them through authoritative judgment.

The exercise of this authority came to be called “binding and loosing.” The Jewish encyclopedia[3] defines this power to bind and loose as to “forbid and permit.” Elsewhere more completely, it says that those with this power “possessed and exercised the power of tying or untying a thing by […] their divine authority, just as they could, by the power vested in them, pronounce and revoke an anathema upon a person.” Note that the encyclopedia understands this as a divine authority. This echoes the words of Moses himself to these judges when he says “You shall not be afraid of the face of man, for the judgment is God’s” (Deut 1:17). Nevertheless, though these judges were established so that the cases of the “small and great alike” could be heard, Moses reserved the highest and final judgment in the most difficult cases for himself, which he would hear sitting in his own seat of judgment.

It’s fascinating that even in the time of Jesus’ earthly ministry, the heirs of this burden of authority, the Sanhedrin, are held in a certain qualified reverence. The apostle John even seems to suggest that the chief priest, Caiaphas, receives supernatural support so that in exercise of his office, he may speak rightly on divine things even in spite of himself in his wrong-heartedness. We see this in John 11 when, speaking of the need to have Jesus killed to avoid a political insurrection, Caiaphas says, “it is expedient for you that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation should not perish.” Commenting aside on this, John narrates, “He did not say this of his own accord, but being high priest that year he prophesied that Jesus should die for the nation,” (Jn 11:50-52) etc.

Though Caiaphas did not perceive the providence in his own words, it was nonetheless there, and John attributes this very explicitly to the unique office he held. Putting an even finer point on it, the Lord Jesus himself, even in the midst of rebuking the hypocrisy of the scribes and pharisees, nonetheless acknowledges that they “sit on Moses’ seat, so practice and observe whatever they tell you, but not what they do; for they preach, but do not practice” (Mt. 23:3). Jesus’ grievance with the Sanhedrin is therefore not that they bind and loose without authority, but rather “They bind heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on men’s shoulders; but they themselves will not move them with their finger” (Mt 23:4).

Is it a coincidence that the Sanhedrin are said to “lay” heavy burdens on the shoulders of men, and that the later Council of Jerusalem judges it good to “lay no greater burden than these necessities” upon the Gentile Christians? It is no coincidence. The apostles and elders are conscious of their authority within the New Covenant system. They are conscious that it is a divine authority, saying that the laying of the burden at Jerusalem “has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us.”

The apostles are set up within the New Covenant system as a kind of new Sanhedrin. This is made even more clear by the fact that Jesus says to them generally in Matthew 18 that “whatever you bind on earth shall have been bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall have been loosed in heaven” (Mt 18:18). Earlier (Mt. 16:17-19), he had made an almost identical statement to St. Peter in the singular, endowing him with a particular and still-greater office even within this brotherhood of the apostles. That Peter’s particular endowment is different and superior can be demonstrated by a simple contrast of Jesus’ statements in the respective verses:

  1. Where Jesus promises all of the apostles in Mt 18 that whatever they bind on earth shall have been bound ‘in Heaven’ (ἐν οὐρανῷ en ourano, singular), he promises to St. Peter alone in Mt 16 that whatever he binds shall have been bound ‘in the Heavens’ (ἐν τοῖς οὐρανοῖς en tois ouranois, plural).
  2. This promise of binding and loosing is joined only in Peter’s individual case with the further endowment of the “keys of the kingdom of Heaven.” This is an obvious allusion to the Book of the Prophet Isaiah, in which God promises to endow upon Eliakim the “keys of the house of David” (Isaiah 22:22). The allusion continues into the next statement in Isaiah, in which God promises that Eliakim “shall open, and none shall shut; he shall shut, and none shall open.”
  3. Only Peter as an individual is called the rock (Greek Πέτρος Pétros; Aramaic כֵּיפָא képá). This is a very significant identification with Christ himself, who is the rock of the Old Testament that nourished the Israelites in the desert (Exodus 17:6; 1 Cor. 10:4). That Christ intends to identify Peter with himself can be further evidenced by countless other parallels, the most simple being that only these two are depicted walking on water (Mt 14:22-33).

These simple verse comparisons leave aside that the Sanhedrin of the Old Testament was headed by a chief priest, as we have seen already when discussing the prophetic intervention of the priest Caiaphas. If the apostles really are intended by Jesus to serve as the Sanhedrin of the New Covenant, then symmetry would demand that someone take up this ‘high priestly’ office from among the apostles. Let us remember that there is already a new and eternal high priest of the New Covenant in Jesus Christ; but just as Moses offered priestly sacrifices for the assembly and nonetheless instituted Aaron as a high priest alongside him from among the twelve tribes, so too does Jesus the high priest elevate a priestly prince to serve at his side from among his twelve closest disciples. Who would be more fitting for this office than the one who has already been identified so closely with Jesus: the one who joined him on the water, who received from his divine hands the keys to the kingdom of heaven, and who is, like Jesus, called for all time by Holy Writ the Rock? Who else but Cephas?[4] For Semitic-speaking Christians of the early centuries, this connection of Peter to the chief priest role within the New Covenant was made all the more obvious by the likeness of the Aramaic form of his new name, Cephas, to the name of the previous office holder – Caiaphas! Ancient Fathers of the Church and contemporary scholars alike – even Protestants – have accepted both the equivalence of the men’s names in Aramaic as well as the correspondence of their respective offices.[5]

In sum, from top to bottom, Jesus’ constitution of the New Covenant economy of authority may be anticipated by so many forerunners in the Old Covenant. Where seventy elders were elevated to assist Moses in the governance of the Israelites, even receiving the Spirit by the laying on of hands (Numbers 11:16-30), Jesus appointed seventy disciples to go out in pairs and minister to the towns and cities.[6] Among Jesus’ disciples there are twelve which take special precedence; among the sojourning Israelites, there were twelve tribes. From among the twelve, Jesus elevates one as chief, prince, or head; from among the twelve staffs of the leaders of the Old Covenant twelve tribes, the Lord chooses Aaron’s staff to bloom, thus confirming his special election as high priest among them (Num 17).

If you’d like to see how the rest of the debate turned out, tune in here.

If you’d like to reach Jim to discuss a speaking or teaching event, contact him at cedruslibani17@gmail.com

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END NOTES:

[1] Greek ἐγὼ κρίνω ego kríno, ‘I judge’.

[2] Compare Acts 1:20; Acts 2:16-21, 25-28, 34-35; Acts 3:22; etc.

[3] https://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/3307-binding-and-loosing

[4] Κηφᾶς Cephas, the Greek transliteration of the Aramaic כֵּיפָא képá. St. Paul chooses in Galatians (1:18 and 2:9) to refer to St Peter by the Semitic form of his new name, perhaps in recognition of their shared Semitic origins.

[5] For an illuminating presentation on this parallel, See Dr. Daniel J. Vecchio’s Caiaphas Theory at the following link: Cephas-Caiaphas: A New Argument for the Papacy – Daniel Vecchio (Christian Theology Series)Accompanying notes may be found here.

[6] Yet another astonishing fact solidifies this connection. A well known variant exists among manuscripts of the Gospel on the exact number of disciples sent out by Jesus in Lk 10. Some say seventy, others seventy-two. Between Hebrew and Greek (LXX) renderings of Exodus 24, there is similar variation in the numbering of elders between the same two numbers – seventy, or seventy-two, hinging on whether Moses’ two assistants are counted alongside the seventy elders or not. That these two bodies of seventy/seventy-two not only parallel numerically, but are subject also to the same exact ambiguity of numbering, must point at some intentional identification between them on someone’s part.