The Jerusalem Council is probably fabricated

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]The Jerusalem Council never happened.

[00:00:02]When you read Acts 15, there's a story about Paul going up to Jerusalem to meet with the leaders there. And the outcome of this story is that Paul essentially gets a blessing blessed by James and Peter and this so-called Jerusalem church. Paul gets a blessing to go and continue his mission to the Gentiles.

[00:00:20]And essentially, this blessing comes with a piece of paper that guarantees him his right to do this. Now, I think that we need to be really honest with ourselves about what is happening here because the evidence from Paul suggests that this Jerusalem council is at the very least an exaggeration and at the very most a fabrication. And in many ways, I think the evidence suggests more that the council itself is a complete fabrication. And if it were true, if the council had actually happened the way that it says in Acts 15, Paul's letters make zero sense. I want to show you what the serious problems in this story are.

[00:00:55]I want to show you how I think the author of Acts invented the Jerusalem Council. And I even want to suggest to you that when we think about the history of Christianity, we need to completely get rid of this idea that there was this body in Jerusalem that could pronounce declarations. Before we start, my name is Chris. I have a PhD in religious studies with a specialty in Christian origins. This is kind of a companion to some videos I've done on the historicity of Acts. I actually believe Acts was a second century forgery. You can see videos I've done on that. I'll link to them below. But let's talk about the Jerusalem Council.

[00:01:33]So the story opens in Acts 15. Paul and Barnabas are going up to Jerusalem and they are going up for a very serious reason because Paul's ministry is going to be sort of questioned. And what happens is Paul goes and ends up meeting with a very formal looking body of this church in Jerusalem. It's presided over by James, the brother of Jesus. The apostle Peter is involved with it. And essentially this council meets and it gives a formal declaration and a letter that Paul can take everywhere with him that essentially says Paul is okay. What he's doing is fine. This letter goes out to gentile churches. It's apparently applicable everywhere. And it commands that Gentiles should abstain from food sacrifice to idols, abstain from blood, abstain from things that have been strangled, and abstain from sexual immorality. It's clean. It's authoritative. It's unified. It sounds really good. And from it, we have a picture of this Jerusalem church that blessed Paul's ministry. But there are some serious problems with this. And the main problem comes when we read Paul's account of how this actually happened.

[00:02:45]So, if we go to Galatians 1 and 2, we actually get Paul's own account of his dealings with Jerusalem, and they're very different. It's actually almost wild that they could be so different because I do think that Acts used Paul as a source, but let's talk about that later. The stories are incredibly different. In Acts, Paul has this like base in Jerusalem, and he goes back to Jerusalem right after his conversion.

[00:03:07]And in Galatians, he almost seems to be protesting like, "I didn't go to Jerusalem that much. I didn't go for a long time." And he says, "When I went to Jerusalem, I only met with Peter." This sounds almost like he's talking about the same visit, but there's very subtle differences. For one, Paul's visits are apparently secret. He talks about like almost a secret visit to Jerusalem. He says he met with them privately. He didn't meet with anybody else. And it's weird that in Galatians, Paul actually swears an oath. He swears an oath to say, "I'm not lying." It's almost like somebody accused him of having more connection to Jerusalem. Now, Paul doesn't want connections to Jerusalem.

[00:03:40]He wants to say that his gospel came from Jesus. And of course, to us modern readers, that sounds weaker. It sounds better if he has a connection to Jerusalem. And I think that's true for the author of Acts 2. But in Paul's own mind, that connection is a weakness. In Paul's own mind, he wants to be unconnected from Jerusalem and he wants to be doing his thing basically because Jesus gave him visions. And finally he says, "Okay, I finally did go up to Jerusalem only because I had a vision and it sounds like a very different story than the Jerusalem council we get in Acts, which is like a formalized body." Now, I mean, I think there are probably ecclesia in Judea. I think that's a very reasonable assumption. I think there are Jesus followers in Judea and in the Galilee. That's a reasonable assumption. So, like, I don't have any conceptual problems with there being a church in Jerusalem. And I don't have any conceptual problems with Paul having connections to it. In fact, I think he kind of says that he does. The conceptual problem I have is that acts has anything to do with reality here because it really just doesn't make a lot of sense.

[00:04:45]Not only does Paul in Galatians have this story in which he denies a lot of extensive connections to Jerusalem, he denies public meetings, he denies having meetings with multiple apostles. and they gave him this like right hand of fellowship, whatever that means. But there's actually something even more telling in 1 Corinthians. Because the wild thing is in 1 Corinthians chapters 8 to10, Paul's dealing with the subject of meat sacrificed to idols. Situation is there's people in the community. Some who he calls the strong obviously think it's no big deal to eat meat sacrificed to idols. Some who he calls the weak think that it is a big deal and you shouldn't eat meat sacrificed to idols.

[00:05:23]The irony of Paul's situation in First Corinthians is that Paul himself doesn't have a lot of authority in the community. Paul spends these chapters trying to urge his readers why they should abstain from meat sacrifice to idols because you don't want to cause somebody to stumble. So, he's pleading with them. He's begging with them. He's using these kind of rhetorical tricks to try to convince people to stop eating meat sacrificed to idols for the purpose of communal harmony. You know what would be really nice to pull out at this point? a letter from Jerusalem in which this Jerusalem council gives you the authority to tell everybody to stop eating meat sacrificed to idols, which is what Acts 15 gives us. And remarkably, that's completely absent in 1 Corinthians 8:10. Now, the silence of this letter, the silence of this apparent body of the Jerusalem Council that apparently has this kind of authority over Paul's churches is really telling because obviously we could say that, you know, Paul could have pulled out this letter if he had. I think that's pretty obvious. is I think it's pretty obvious he doesn't have it. But what's even more telling about it is that I think that the formal structure that the author of Acts writing long long time after all this the formal structure that the author of Acts imagines in which there's this body that has sort of one unifying like voice and power over all of the gentile churches and it flows out of Jerusalem. This doesn't make any sense of the evidence we have. What's more, I think it makes a lot more sense as a later fabrication.

[00:06:52]It makes a lot more sense for somebody who's trying to show that Paul had more authority than just his own authority.

[00:06:59]Even though in the, you know, the letters of Paul, Paul doesn't have more authority than his own authority. He's in a really weak position. Acts basically makes Paul stronger than he ever was in his life. And that's a problem.

[00:07:16]There's something that really stood out to me though when I read the Jerusalem Council Declaration in Acts 15 and it helps that I've studied some Greek inscriptions of different kind of ancient Greek associations and groups because what happens when you actually read this in Greek is there's a very formulaic way that this council um creates resolutions. So the author of Acts is imagining this council as essentially functioning like some sort of a civic body. We see examples of this in like Asia Minor in Greece. Like there's different different ones from kind of all over. But what would happen in these civic bodies is they would get together. It's like a little bit democratic. They would get together and they would pass a resolution. And these resolutions would have certain ways of formalizing language. And usually it would be a bit like it would say like since X has happened, we therefore declare that Y is going to happen. And we see this like all over the place. We see it from cities. We see it in private associations, this way of writing a resolution. And the author of Acts knows about this. The author of Acts makes the Jerusalem Council sound like one of these civic or voluntary associations.

[00:08:22]The author of Acts makes the Jerusalem Council sound like this because they use this language. They use this kind of civic boilerplate language. So here are the words in Acts that jump out at me.

[00:08:32]min means something like it seemed good to us or like we have resolved is kind of like the formal power of it because that's what happens when you look at this in inscriptions as you can see here for example this is a way that a body formally kind of announces its resolution now the thing that boggles my brain the thing that really makes me stop and think about this is the geography of this because I'm not saying that Jerusalem didn't have assemblies like this councils like this that gave resolutions it's certainly possible but The structure of this resolution matches better from evidence that we see all over Greece and Asia Minor in civic inscriptions. Now, it's interesting because I've talked about this in other videos, too, that the author of Acts actually really knows quite well the geography of Greece and Asia Minor. The author of Acts knows about sailing on the Aian. The author of Acts doesn't know all that much about Jerusalem or the geography of Judea or the Galilee.

[00:09:26]This is where the author of Acts kind of falls down. And if we assume that Acts and Luke were written by the same author, we see these kind of stumbles throughout. The author knows a certain portion of the world really well, the Aian and the cities around the Aian. And it's ironic that when the author goes to tell this story about the Jerusalem Council and how they gave a decree, the decree of the Jerusalem Council looks identical to the civic decrees that you get around the Aian. Now, I have to step back here and be cautious because I will say you see these in like Josephus, which I actually do think the author of Acts know is Josephus as well. You see these kind of letters from rulers in Josephus. You see these in some like the books of the Mcabes. But I really do think there's a real irony here that when the author of acts seems to know about the civic structures of the Aian and seems in other places in acts will mention certain civic um functions for example in one place the author of acts mentions a polyark which is like a civic function in Thessalani or in a which is a role in the coinon of Asia which is sort of the conglomeration of cities and that the emperor basically organizes the emperor called for them. You see, the author of Acts knows about a lot of this stuff. So when the author of Acts all of a sudden is making decrees that show up a lot in the exact cities the author of Acts seems to know a lot about, especially like Ephesus, places like this, I have to wonder, is the author of Acts inventing a Jerusalem council that matches exactly what the author of Acts knows, which is not Jerusalem. It's actually civic structures in Ephesus.

[00:10:55]That's lining places like this, civic structures around the Aian. And that's where we actually get these kinds of organizations. There's actually even if you look specifically in Asia Minor, there are these coinaut. The word coinon means like common. Um, but what happens in Asia Minor is occasionally you'll get groups of like citystates or ethnic groups. Like you'll get different groups joining together and they call it a coinon. So for example, the famous Ionian League is one of these I mentioned a minute ago the coinon of Asia which is not exactly identical but it's a group of cities that are dedicated to um organizing the emperor cult. So what happens I think is the author of acts is using these coina this gives us a way for how a group of cities or how a group of e like ethnic groups or whatever could work together with one body overarching their activities. I think this is sort of what the author of acts is imagining with Jerusalem. I think the author of Acts is taking one of these coinon type structures and popping it onto the Jerusalem church in a way that doesn't actually make a whole lot of sense geographically. It's probably anacronistic. But who's going to argue? The Jerusalem church is probably gone at this point. It looks really likely that Acts was written in the second century. So it's not that surprising that the author of Acts in creating Jerusalem has to create what he actually knows which is Asia Minor. a coin on of Asia Minor and this type of civic structure, civic assembly and the proclamation that it gives. So, not only does this not match the evidence we get in Paul's own letters, not only does it actually contradict the evidence we get in Paul's own letters, but it actually looks like something somewhere else. It actually looks like this is something that has been transplanted onto Jerusalem.

[00:12:39]What does it mean for the way we actually study Christian origins?

[00:12:41]Because this book of Acts has been one of the key ways that we tell the story about how Christianity spread. Now, I have a whole video on why I think Acts is completely fiction despite having some accuracies in it. I'll leave it here and I will link to it at the end as well. But stop and think about this. If that Jerusalem Council is an invention, there's obviously like if we look at Paul as a primary source, Paul apparently went to Jerusalem to meet with Peter, James, and John. So like there's something there. There's some corner makes sense. Jesus, you know, if he's crucified in Jerusalem, it makes sense. The movement has some sort of connection out of there. But the movement out of Jerusalem, the role that Jerusalem had in the first century does not instantly have to be as a community that made decrees to all of these groups outside. It's certainly possible. I'm not I'm not even saying it's impossible.

[00:13:30]I'm just saying I don't think the author of Acts knows. I'm saying I think the author of Acts makes this up. I don't think Paul had this experience. I certainly don't think Paul had letters that were signifying his position was right or he certainly would have used them. Acts is written in a world where Paul already has authority. Not everybody thinks that, but some people do. And Acts becomes the story that justifies the authority Paul actually has. It works backwards using some of the fragments that we get in Paul, some of the information we get in Paul, and takes Paul's like best case scenario. If there was a world where Paul was fighting these battles in his churches and he had the Jerusalem church in his corner, that's what we get in Acts.

[00:14:09]That's exactly what we get. It's ahistoric. It contradicts, but it's basically like Paul's best imagination of what this could look like. And when you're writing a story in the second century to justify the main church father that doesn't actually know the founder and doesn't have connections to Jerusalem and you want to rope him in and connect him back into the movement, this is the type of story you tell. So I've done all these different videos on the book of Acts, but I wanted to do this one specifically on the Jerusalem Council alone because the Jerusalem Council is a fixture in the way that we imagine this movement spreading. And I actually think the evidence is pretty strong that it's a complete fabrication.

[00:14:46]It doesn't mean nothing in Acts is historically accurate. It doesn't even mean that there's not some kind of body or some kind of church home base in Jerusalem. It's possible, but the author of Acts doesn't know about it. Paul's not connected to it. These are things that were invented much later. And if we really want to understand how this movement spread and grew, we need to understand Acts for what it actually is.

[00:15:06]A second century myth about first century events. And the author probably didn't know very much about what actually happened in that first century.

[00:15:16]Let's tear that down and study this again and see what model of Christian origins we actually get to. Thanks for listening. I'll see you next time. Hey, if you're the kind of person who watches a video like this and wants to talk about it with someone, I built a community for that. We dig into the origins of Christianity, the ancient sources, the historical context, and the questions that scholars are actually debating. It's for people who want to study the Bible seriously without studying it alone. If that sounds like you, check the pin comment below.