This
commentary might be helpful as reference although it is very old. It is part of
the biblehub comments about Acts 15,29 as well. http://biblehub.com/commentaries/acts/15-29.htm
Charles
John Ellicott, compiler of and contributor to this renowned Bible Commentary,
was one of the most outstanding conservative scholars of the 18th century. He
was born at Whitwell near Stamford, England, on April 25, 1819. https://www.studylight.org/commentaries/ebc.html
„… not even the most devout
believer in the inspiration of the Apostles, or in the authority of primitive
antiquity would venture to urge that the two last precepts of the four here
enjoined were in any degree binding“, Charles John Ellicott
https://archive.org/details/biblecommentaryf01elliuoft
Commentary
to Acts 15 (29)
From meats offered to idols.—The
specific term takes the place of the more general word which St. James had
used. The change, if the two words were not used, as is possible, as altogether
equivalent, may be thought of as favouring the Gentiles by narrowing the
prohibition to a single point.
Fare ye well.—The
closing salutation was, like the opening, a Greek and not a Hebrew one. It
meets us again in Acts 23:30. Both were naturally used in a letter
addressed to Greeks, and intended to be read by them and by Hellenistic Jews.
It does not occur, however, in any of the Epistles of the New Testament.
It
is natural to ask, at the close of the great encyclical letter, in what
relation it really stood to the life of the Apostolic Church. As a concordat
between the contending parties it was framed, as has been said, with a sagacity
that may well be looked on as inspired. But obviously it was not, and from the nature
of the case could not be, more than that. The time had not come for proclaiming
to the Church of Jerusalem the full width of St. Paul’s teaching (Galatians 2:2), and accordingly, though
something may be read between the lines, the decree seems to treat the precepts
of Noah as perpetually binding, places moral and positive obligations on the
same footing, and leaves the ground on which they are “necessary” an open
question.
St.
Paul, who had accepted it as a satisfactory settlement of the matter in debate,
never refers to it, even when he is discussing the chief point with which the
decree dealt (1 Corinthians 8-10). In his narrative of what passed on this occasion
(Galatians 2:1-10) there is no mention of it.
The
private conference with the three great “pillars” of the Church was for him
more than the decree of the synod, and he felt himself able to discuss the
whole question again on different grounds, and with a more distinct reference
to spiritual and ethical principles.
It
was wrong to eat things sacrificed to idols, not because the act of so eating
in itself brought defilement, but because it might involve a participation in
the sin of idolatry in the consciousness of the eater, or wound the conscience
of the weaker brother who saw him eat.
It
was natural that those who lacked his largeness of view should become slaves to
the letter of the rules long after the grounds on which they rested had ceased
to exist, and so we find that the prohibition of blood was re-enforced in the
so-called Apostolic Canons (c. 62), and in the fourth century by the Council of
Gangra (c. 2), and in the seventh by that at Constantinople, known as in Trullo
(c. 67), and continues to be the binding rule of the Greek Church still.
In
Africa and in Europe, however, truer views prevailed (August, cont. Faust.
xxxii. 13), and not even the most devout believer in the inspiration of the
Apostles, or in the authority of primitive antiquity would venture to urge that
the two last precepts of the four here enjoined were in any degree binding.
Hooker
(Eccl. Pol. iv., xi., § 5) rightly refers to this decree as a crucial instance
proving that commands might be divine and yet given only for a season, binding
as long as the conditions to which they applied continued, but no longer.
It
would almost seem, indeed, as if St. Paul felt that the terms of the decree had
the effect of placing the sin of impurity on the same level with that of eating
things sacrificed to idols, and things strangled, and blood, and so tended to
keep men from seeing it in its true hatefulness. Those who claimed a right, which
in the abstract St. Paul could not deny, to eat of things strangled or offered
to idols, thought themselves free to fall back into the old license of the
heathen world, and he needed far stronger motives than the canons of the
council to restrain them (1 Corinthians 5:9-10; 1 Corinthians 6:15-20, and found those motives in
the truths that they had been bought with a price, that the will of God was
their sanctification, and that their bodies were His temple.
Look at Page 100 of the original extensive bible commentary Volume VII (Acts
to Galatians) to read the original text
https://archive.org/stream/biblecommentaryf07elliuoft#page/100/mode/2up
