I do have a question about number 1. Thank-you for your response. Did not the apostle Peter have a dream about a group of animals coming from a cloth with the command to “take, kill, eat?”
Did that mean to say that the Christian community not to take on the Jewish dietary laws as part of their observance?
Peter's vision occurs in Acts 10. Althought the larger purpose of the vision was to instruct Peter that God was offering salvation to the Gentiles and that Peter should not reject Cornelius's emmisary, it also seems to set aside the Jewish dietary laws. By the time of the First Jerusalem Council, in Acts 15 (i.e. several years later) even James, a strict Jew and the leader of the Jerusalem church, saw fit only to constain the Gentiles to a single dietary restriction, namely abstaining the eating of blood. This practice was considered so odius by Jews that it would have precluded fellowship between Jewish and Gentile believers had the Gentiles persisted in it, which is possibly the only reason James insisted on it.
So yes, to answer your question I believe that Peter's vision had as a secondary purpose the setting aside of the OT dietary laws. Put another way, I believe the church is bound to the behavioral codes published by the Jerusalm Council, i.e. abstaining from idol worship, meat with blood in it (activities that may cause other believers to stumble or break fellowship) and from all forms of fornication and sexual immorality.
Did not the apostle Peter have a dream about a group of animals coming from a cloth with the command to “take, kill, eat?”
Did that mean to say that the Christian community not to take on the Jewish dietary laws as part of their observance?
NO This was Peter, and his vision was NOT about food.. it was about Gentiles.. Peter and a group of Jewish believers ('of the circumcision faction' or those who believed you had to be circumsized to be saved) went and saw a guy named Cornelius who was a Gentile and while they were there the Holy Spirit came upon them. Cornelius was the first Gentile Christian.
Reading the scripture is far more instructive than reading someone else's opinions
Acts 10