It is Not "Satanic" to Agree with the Apostolic Decree

I made a video responding to some online folks who called me a "Judaizer" and "Satanic" for agreeing with the Apostolic Decree

A popular account on X (formerly Twitter) recently labeled me a “Judaizer” for agreeing with the Apostolic Decree in Acts 15:20. Other folks then piled on, calling me “Satanic,” a “heretic,” and all sorts of other names.

In this video, I’ll explain why it should not be controversial to believe that the four commandments of the Apostolic Decree are still relevant. As I’ll demonstrate, these four commandments are consistently affirmed throughout the New Testament and early Christian writings.

Video Transcript:

In Acts 15, the apostles address an important question: what is required of Gentile followers of the Messiah? Some believers from the Pharisees proposed that it was necessary to circumcise them and order them to keep the Law of Moses (Acts 15:5). However, in Acts 15:20, the apostles decided on a much more biblical approach: instead of circumcision, they required the Gentiles to keep four commandments—three food laws and a command to avoid sexual immorality (Acts 15:20). And as the next verse implies, the Gentile believers would gradually learn and apply more commandments as they attend synagogue services each Sabbath (Acts 15:21).

Why do I say that the apostles’ approach is more biblical? Because contrary to the Pharisees, the Torah does not require Gentiles who sojourn with Israel to get circumcised unless they wanted to be allowed to eat the sacrificial meat of the Passover lamb (Exod 12:48). The command regarding circumcision instructs Israelite parents to circumcise their sons on the eighth day (Lev 12:3; Gen 17:12). But there is no general command for adult Gentiles to get circumcised, and certainly not to be part of the community of Israel—in fact, the Torah itself assumes that Gentiles can be part of the community and worship the God of Israel while remaining uncircumcised (Deut 21:1, 10–14; Josh 8:30–35). They can’t eat the Passover sacrifice, but they can fellowship with Israel and worship God alongside them.

The Pharisees’ insistence that Gentile believers undergo circumcision went beyond what the Torah actually required of these Gentiles. In contrast, the apostles’ decision fully aligns with the Torah. As most modern scholars acknowledge, these four commandments were chosen because the Torah explicitly states that each of these four prohibitions applies not only to Israel but also to the stranger living among them (Lev 17:8, 10, 12-13; 18:26). In other words, the apostles selected commandments that the Torah applies to uncircumcised Gentiles who sojourn with Israel. The Torah does not require them to get circumcised, but it does require them to do those four things. As William Willimon writes:

Leviticus 17-18 applies these rules to both Jews and to aliens who reside within Israel. James seems to regard these gentiles as analogous to “strangers” in the Hebrew Scriptures…Nowhere does Luke suggest that Jesus abrogates the Torah. Even gentiles are to keep that part of the Torah which applies to them as non-Jews.¹

So, I take the apostles’ decree in Acts 15:20-21 as countering the Pharisees’ demands from Acts 15:5. The Pharisees demanded, “It is necessary [1] to circumcise them and [2] to order them to keep the law of Moses” (Acts 15:5). Acts 15:20 addresses the first demand of the Pharisees (that Gentiles must be circumcised) while Acts 15:21 addresses their second demand (that Gentiles be ordered to keep the Law of Moses). In verse 20, the apostles determined that, rather than circumcision, the Gentiles should observe the four prohibitions as the minimum level of Torah observance necessary to enjoy fellowship with the Jewish community. In verse 21, instead of requiring immediate adherence to all the laws of Moses that apply to Gentiles, the apostles expected that Gentile believers would gradually learn and grow in their obedience to the Torah by hearing it taught each Sabbath in the synagogues. I would note that the Torah includes the stranger—that is, the believing Gentile—in many other laws besides the four prohibitions (See, e.g., Exod 12:19; 20:10; 23:12; Lev 16:29; 22:18–25; 24:17–22; Num 15:14–16; 19:10; 35:15; Deut 5:14; 16:11, 14; 31:10–12). So, it seems that the apostles expected Gentile believers to pick up more commandments that applied to them over time. The four prohibitions were a starting point, an introduction to Torah. As Eyal Regev writes

The implications are that since the Torah is proclaimed and studied in the synagogue on a regular basis, the God-fearing Christians would gain further knowledge and adhere to Jewish law after being accepted into the (Jewish-) Christian community. The legal obligations of the Apostolic Decree may have been an invitation to observe Jewish law.²

Now, admittedly, my view that the apostles expected Gentile believers to gradually take on more commandments from the Torah beyond the four prohibitions is a minority interpretation. I think it is the most straightforward interpretation of Acts 15:21, but most scholars have not come to that conclusion. If you are interested in a scholarly defense of this view, I highly recommend Benjamin Frostad’s Master’s Thesis on Acts 15.³

Nevertheless, here, I just want to focus on the four prohibitions mentioned in Acts 15:20. While Christians can reasonably debate the extent to which Gentile believers are required to observe the Torah, I thought everyone agreed that they should observe at least these four commandments of the Apostolic Decree. However, to my surprise, it turns out that not everyone agrees with that.

I’ll get there in a moment. But first, as I mentioned earlier, what is remarkable about these four commandments that the apostles imposed upon Gentile believers is that they come straight from the Law of Moses. The command to avoid things polluted by idols refers to the Torah’s prohibition against eating food sacrificed to idols (Lev 17:3-9; cf. Exod 34:15). The command to abstain from “sexual immorality” refers to a general category that encompasses the many specific sexual prohibitions found in Leviticus 18 and 20. The command to avoid eating “blood” comes from the Torah’s commandments against eating blood (Lev 17:10-14). And finally, the command to avoid strangled things refers to meat that was improperly slaughtered and therefore still containing blood (m.Chullin 1.2; Philo, Special Laws 4.122). This prohibition comes from Leviticus 17:13, which requires pouring out the blood of animals that are killed for food.

So, in Acts 15, the apostles were not rejecting the Torah; they were applying it. This leads to my post on X (formerly Twitter). Here is what I said:

Antinomians will actually claim that the apostles were setting aside the Torah in Acts 15 despite the fact that the apostles’ decree literally imposes four commandments from the Torah on Gentile believers—three of which are food laws (Acts 15:20; cf. Lev 17–18).

This is a pretty obvious point, right? The apostles’ decree literally imposes four Torah commands on Gentiles, three of them food laws. If the apostles wanted to say that the Torah is entirely irrelevant, why do they explicitly apply it to Gentiles? That would be like saying, “The Torah does not matter anymore, so instead, keep these Torah commands.” The antinomian approach to Acts 15 just doesn’t work.

Well, this post surprisingly upset a lot of people. One Christian called me “Satanic” for this interpretation. And another large account labeled me a Judaizer, which led to several of his followers also calling me a Judaizer and a heretic. Keep in mind that all I did in this post was agree with the Apostolic Decree. I was not advocating for any of my other, admittedly, more controversial beliefs. I was only talking about the four commandments that the apostles explicitly told Gentile believers to keep.

It’s astonishing why anyone would have a problem with that straightforward reading of Acts 15:20. Well, it turns out that some modern Christian interpreters apparently do have a problem with it. Why? Well, here’s an argument from well-known YouTube apologist R. L. Solberg:

The unspoken assumption is that the four restrictions were biblical commands given to all Gentile Christians for all times. But I’m not convinced that is what this passage teaches. For one thing, the three food restrictions are not repeated anywhere elsewhere in the New Testament…The fourth restriction regarding sexual immorality is repeated elsewhere and obviously applies to all Christians.⁴

Solberg believes—rightly—that the prohibition against sexual immorality still applies to all Christians today. And indeed, the New Testament authors repeatedly condemn sexual immorality (see, e.g., Matt 15:19; Rom 1:26–27; 13:13; 1 Cor 6:9–10, 18; Gal 5:19–21; Eph 5:3; Col 3:5; Jude 1:7; Rev 21:8).

However, Solberg does not believe that the other three prohibitions apply today. Why? Because he says they “are not repeated anywhere elsewhere in the New Testament.” This is a bad argument for two reasons.

First, assuming that Solberg is right and that these laws are not repeated, why does something need to be repeated for it to be valid? The command against cross-dressing is nowhere explicitly repeated in the Old or New Testaments (Deut 22:5), but Christians generally agree that men and women shouldn’t cross-dress. Solberg’s standard for determining what applies today seems arbitrary.

The second problem with Solberg’s argument is that it is demonstrably false. These prohibitions are repeated two other times in Acts alone. For instance, later in Acts 15, the apostles send a letter to the believers in Antioch, insisting they observe all four prohibitions—including the three food laws that Solberg says aren’t repeated (Acts 15:29). The apostles even state explicitly that the Holy Spirit endorsed imposing these requirements upon the believers (Acts 15:28). Paul and Barnabas then carried the letter beyond Syria and Cilicia (Acts 16:4), proving that the application of the Apostolic Decree was not limited to one region. Additionally, when Paul meets with James in Jerusalem several years later to refute rumors that he taught against the Law of Moses, the four prohibitions are repeated yet again (Acts 21:25). James applies all four prohibitions to “the Gentiles who have believed,” indicating that he saw them as binding on every Gentile believer.

Beyond the book of Acts, in his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul explicitly forbids knowingly eating food that was offered to an idol (1 Cor 10:18-22). Similarly, in the book of Revelation, Jesus himself also condemns eating food offered to idols (Rev 2:14, 20). Solberg says that this prohibition is “not repeated anywhere elsewhere in the New Testament,” and yet we see it repeated twice in Acts as well as in 1 Corinthians and Revelation.

But wait! There’s more! Historical evidence shows that later generations of Christians still treated the Apostolic Decree—including its three food laws—as obligatory. For instance, the early-second-century Christian document known as the Didache instructs its readers to “Keep strictly away from meat sacrificed to idols, for it involves the worship of dead gods” (Didache 6:3). At the end of the second century, Tertullian wrote that Christians “have not even the blood of animals at their meals” and that they “abstain from things strangled” and that they consider transgressing these rules to be “unlawful” (Tertullian, Apology 9:13). The fourth-century Apostolic Constitutions likewise affirms all four prohibitions of the Decree (Apostolic Constitutions 6:12), a position also upheld by fifth-century Church historian Socrates Scholasticus (Church History 5:22). Fourth-century theologian Cyril of Jerusalem calls the decree “universal from the Holy Ghost” (Catechetical Lecture 17:29) and condemns those who “lap up blood” and “devour things strangled” (Catechetical Lecture 4:28).

Later church councils and canons similarly affirmed the Apostolic Decree as binding, and many Gentile believers continued following its prohibitions even as some later Church Fathers began to question them. As Karin Zetterholm observes:

The decree was confirmed by the Synod of Gangra in the fourth century, reconfirmed by the Second Council of Constantinople in the sixth century and the Council of Trullo at the end of the seventh century. Even from the writings of church fathers who try to de-emphasize parts of the decree, such as Chrysostom and Augustine, it is evident that many Gentile Jesus-followers in their time adhered to its rules.⁵

So, the Apostolic Decree is not only explicitly repeated in the New Testament despite Solberg’s claim that it isn’t, but also, it is consistently upheld by Christians throughout history. The evidence suggests that the four prohibitions, including the three food laws, were considered to be binding for all times. The apostles did not reject the Law of Moses in Acts 15. Acts 15:20 proves that the apostles required even Gentile believers to obey the Law of Moses; they imposed four Torah commandments upon the Gentile believers, three of them pertaining to food. You can call me a Judaizing heretic all you want for agreeing with the Apostolic Decree, but I’m in good company with the apostles and early Christians.

1. William H. Willimon, Acts, IBC (Atlanta, GA: John Knox Press, 1988), 130-131.

2. Eyal Regev, “The Gradual Conversion of Gentiles in Acts and Luke’s Paradox of the Gentile Mission,” in Law and Narrative in the Bible and in Neighbouring Ancient Cultures, ed. F. Avemarie and K. P. Adams (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012), 361.

3. Benjamin Frostad, “He Made No Distinction: Gentiles and the Role of Torah in Acts 15” (MA Thesis, Briercrest Seminary, 2021).

4. R. L. Solberg, Torahism: Are Christians Required to Keep the Law of Moses? 2nd ed. (Franklin, TN: Williamson College Press, 2022), 124.

5. Karin H. Zetterholm, “Jewishly-Behaving Gentiles and the Emergence of a Jewish Rabbinic Identity,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 25 (2018), 323n6.