See original post.

It appears that although the clean/unclean distinction is clearly removed for Christians, the prohibition on eating strangled animals and animals with their blood (life) may have ongoing effect. I want to come to some conclusions on this issue and Arthur was interested. So i’ll blog it and invite you to join in.

This first post will talk history. I have no issue with being up-front and saying that history is not my strong suit so let me know if you find any more sources that might shed some light, or have better insights!

I am going to try to answer the first question I posed

When did this practice [of not eating blood with meat] stop?

What I am assuming in asking this of course is that Christians at one point were united in their commitment to what the so-called ‘Jesusalem Council’ ordered:

¹⁹“It is my judgment, therefore, that we should not make it difficult for the Gentiles who are turning to God. ²⁰Instead we should write to them, telling them to abstain from food polluted by idols, from sexual immorality, from the meat of strangled animals and from blood. ²¹For Moses has been preached in every city from the earliest times and is read in the synagogues on every Sabbath.” (Acts 15:19-21)

And then at some later point this was disregarded wholesale. More than likely this is not a valid assumption.

It is generally accepted that Christianity was basically a  ‘Jewish’ sect in its infancy and that even after the destruction of the temple in AD70 there was no clean parting of ways where Christianity ‘threw out’ its Jewish roots. The issue that kept recurring was ‘how Jewish would Christianity be?’.

The council’s letter then is probably representative of ongoing tensions between Jewish and gentile Christians. It seems to be a compromise of sorts – the Jewish law remains of great importance but gentile converts would not be required to follow the whole law (and be circumcised) to belong. We will return to consider how to take the letter in Acts 15 in another post.

There was likely to have been ongoing discussion about how the OT law was to be applied to life in the new Christian community. There at least appears to be varied practice in the Biblical record – for example Paul allows eating of food sacrificed to idols amongst the Corinthians (1 cor 10:14-22, 27-30)

So if it wasn’t so clean and simple as my question may have implied, do we find any later Christians adhering to the blood eating prohibition? Did acts 15 stick? or is the consensus that Jerusalem in acts 15 ‘got it wrong’ or needed to be even more compromising in its application of the Mosaic law?

I could only find a few references – one by Tertullian (mid 2nd – early 3rd century) and the other by Eusebius (writing early 4th c?). Tertullian tells us that persecuted Christians on trial would be offered blood sausages which they could not eat (Apology 9.13, 14). He says they act on the basis that the prohibitions of Gen 9 and Acts 15 bind them. Eusebius in his Church History (5.1.26) makes a brief but approving reference to those who

do not think it lawful to taste the blood even of irrational animals…

So we have a few instances in which later Christians kept on avoiding eating blood. Although the references are scarce, we have some reason to believe that the issue of eating blood had ongoing theological significance for some later Christians.

Therefore I think we need to look at what that theological significance might be.Were they right or wrong (or neither)?

Part 2 we’ll go OT.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 14th, 2009 at 1:14 pm and is filed under Reuben & Jodie's Blog, Theology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.