The Apostolic Decree

The Apostolic Decree is the encyclical that issued from the Council of Jerusalem (Acts 15:19–29, repeated at Acts 21:25): on the motion of St. James, the council freed Gentile converts from circumcision and the Law while asking them to abstain from four things — meat offered to idols, fornication, things strangled, and blood. This file examines the four clauses and their Greek, the letter sent to Antioch, Syria, and Cilicia, the famous textual variant in the “Western” tradition, and the decree’s abiding force in the Orthodox East, where the prohibition of blood is still formally maintained in canon law.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostle)

The Four Terms

When James gave his judgment that the Gentiles should not be troubled, he attached to that freedom a short list of abstentions: “that they abstain from pollutions of idols, and from fornication, and from things strangled, and from blood” (Acts 15:20). The list is restated in the council’s letter — “that ye abstain from meats offered to idols, and from blood, and from things strangled, and from fornication” (Acts 15:29) — and recalled a final time when James reminds Paul of it years later: “that they observe no such thing, save only that they keep themselves from things offered to idols, and from blood, and from strangled, and from fornication” (Acts 21:25).

The four terms, in their Greek, are precise. (a) Eidōlothuta — things sacrificed to idols, the meat that came from pagan temple sacrifice and was sold in the markets or served at table; James’s first formulation calls these the “pollutions of idols” (alisgēmata tōn eidōlōn, Acts 15:20). (b) Porneia — fornication, sexual immorality, here most likely embracing the forbidden unions of Leviticus 18 as well as illicit intercourse generally. (c) Pnikton — that which is strangled, i.e. the flesh of animals killed without draining the blood. (d) Haima — blood, whether consumed directly or in meat from which it had not been drained. Three of the four (idol-meat, things strangled, blood) concern food; one (porneia) is moral. This mixture is itself significant for the interpretation of the decree.

The Encyclical Letter

The decision was not merely announced but published in a formal letter, the Church’s first conciliar encyclical. “Then pleased it the apostles and elders, with the whole church, to send chosen men of their own company to Antioch with Paul and Barnabas” (Acts 15:22) — namely Judas Barsabas and Silas. The letter is addressed “unto the brethren which are of the Gentiles in Antioch and Syria and Cilicia” (Acts 15:23), repudiates the troublers who had gone out “to whom we gave no such commandment” (Acts 15:24), and frames the decree in the formula that became the Church’s conciliar signature: “For it seemed good to the Holy Ghost, and to us, to lay upon you no greater burden than these necessary things” (Acts 15:28). That the decree was carried by delegates and circulated by letter to a named region — Antioch, Syria, Cilicia — shows it functioning as binding conciliar legislation, the very form the Church’s canons would later take (on the conciliar act itself, see The Council of Jerusalem).

The Western Text and the Disputed Reading

The shape and intent of the decree turn in part on a textual problem. The “Western” text of Acts, represented above all by Codex Bezae (D), transmits the list differently: it omits “things strangled” (pnikton) and appends a negative form of the Golden Rule (“and whatsoever ye would not should be done to you, do not ye to another”). With pnikton removed, the three remaining items — idols, blood, fornication — can be read morally rather than ritually: idolatry, murder (blood as bloodshed), and fornication, the three classic mortal sins. The four-clause Alexandrian reading, by contrast, keeps pnikton and reads “blood” alongside it as a food rule, yielding a largely dietary-and-cultic list.

[Disputed: the four-clause "ritual" reading (idol-meat, fornication, things strangled, blood) of the Alexandrian and Byzantine text vs. the Western three-clause "ethical" reading of Codex Bezae, which omits *pnikton* and adds a negative Golden Rule, recasting the decree as a list of cardinal sins (idolatry, murder, fornication); Metzger, *A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament*, 2nd ed. (1994), on Acts 15:20 and 15:29, judges the longer reading with *pnikton* original and the Western form a secondary "ethical" recasting, and notes the difficulty either way of accounting for the omission]. The Orthodox tradition has received and transmitted the four-clause text, and reads the decree accordingly — as including, and not merely metaphorical about, the abstention from blood and from what is strangled.

The Abiding Eastern Observance

It is on this last point that Eastern practice has remained distinctive. Whereas Western Christianity came largely to regard the food clauses of the decree as a temporary first-century accommodation that lapsed once the Jewish-Gentile tension passed, the Orthodox Church has continued to treat the prohibition of blood as a standing canon. The blood-and-strangled rule is carried forward in the canonical tradition: Apostolic Canon 63 directs that any clergyman who eats “flesh with the blood of its life, or that which is killed by wild beasts, or that which dies of itself” be deposed, and a layman who does so be excommunicated (The Rudder [Pedalion], trans. Cummings, Apostolic Canon 63). The Quinisext Council in Trullo of 692 confirms the same: its Canon 67 forbids the eating of “the blood of any animal whatsoever,” prescribing deposition for clergy and excommunication for laity who transgress, and explicitly grounds the rule in Acts 15 (Quinisext / Trullo 692, Canon 67; The Rudder [Pedalion], trans. Cummings). (The collection consulted here is The Rudder; St. Nikodemos’ accompanying commentary is not itself the canon text.)

The Orthodox observance thus draws a real line between Eastern and typical Western practice: in the East the apostolic prohibition of blood is not held to have expired but to remain in force as canon law. This is not legalism but the synergy of law and grace that the decree itself embodies — the Gentiles are saved by grace apart from the Law (Acts 15:11), yet they receive from the council a discipline that honors God and guards the communion of the Church (on grace and the saving work of Christ, see Soteriology).

A Pastoral Accommodation

Read in its setting, the decree is best understood as a pastoral provision preserving table-fellowship between Jewish and Gentile believers in one Church. Three of its four terms touch precisely the things that would have made shared meals impossible for Jewish Christians: meat from idol-temples, the flesh of strangled animals, and blood were all abhorrent to Jewish sensibility, and porneia named the moral compromise associated with the pagan world. By asking Gentile converts to forgo these, the council did not re-impose the yoke of the Law it had just lifted (Acts 15:10, 28); it asked a charitable restraint that allowed Jew and Gentile to sit at the one table and share the one cup. The decree is therefore the council’s solution to the deepest practical problem of a Church becoming catholic: how the freedom of the Gentiles and the conscience of the Jewish believers could be held together in a single body (on that catholicity, see Ecclesiology; on the mother church from which the decree went out, The Mother Church). The same hand that wrote the Epistle of James, with its insistence that faith without works is dead, here frames a faith that issues in concrete love (see The Epistle of James; Faith and Works).

References

The Holy Bible. Acts 15:19–29; 21:25. (Greek consulted for eidōlothuta, porneia, pnikton, haima, alisgēmata; quotations follow the Authorized Version.)
Metzger, Bruce M. A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament. 2nd ed. Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft / United Bible Societies, 1994. (On Acts 15:20 and 15:29: the Codex Bezae omission of pnikton, the added negative Golden Rule, and the ritual-vs.-ethical reading.)
The Rudder (Pedalion). Trans. D. Cummings. Chicago: Orthodox Christian Educational Society, 1957. (Apostolic Canon 63; Quinisext / Trullo Canon 67, on the eating of blood and things strangled.)
Bruce, F. F. The Book of the Acts. Rev. ed. New International Commentary on the New Testament. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1988. (On the four clauses and the decree as a provision for table-fellowship.)