You missed my point entirely. Those who prepared the meals Peter shared with Gentiles are not likely to have provided kosher service. At Cornelius' household, scripture explicitly describes Peter eating non-kosher food at the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and direction of an angel.
So then, it is your claim that Paul was a hypocrite, pretending to be observant only around Jews but hanging out with the prostitutes when he hung out with the Gentiles. Because really, that's what you're accusing him of.
It is you who accuse Paul. I do not see anything wrong with him reasserting his status as Pharisee or going to the Temple. The Apostles did not immediately cut themselves off from all Mosaic law. They did deemphasize the law, and not only for Gentiles.
What makes you think that the corrupt successors of the Apostles would keep their offices in God's eyes for one minute more?
Bishops that pass along what they receive were not corrupt. Bishops that adopt novelty and heresy are condemned.
Not until the Messiah came--Eternal. This promise is reiterated in Jer. 33:18-22. When was the last time you honored a Cohen? Indeed, you have claimed that there is no eternal Levitial priesthood and called heretics those that trust the Word of God.
How would the imperfect animal sacrifices continue to please God after the perfect sacrifice has been made?
Heb 10:1 "For the Law, since it has only a shadow of the good things to come and not the very form of things, can never, by the same sacrifices which they offer continually year by year, make perfect those who draw near. 4 For it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins. 11 Every priest stands daily ministering and offering time after time the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins; 12 but He, having offered one sacrifice for sins for all time, SAT DOWN AT THE RIGHT HAND OF GOD, 14 For by one offering He has perfected for all time those who are sanctified."
Why? Because all too well you annul the Word of God for your (relatively young and novel) tradition.
You are accusing either me, Christian Tradition, or the Apostles. The Holy Spirit inspired the Apostles to establish the Church according to God's will. Mosaic law was not permanent but provisional until the coming of Christ:
Galatians 3:19 "Why then was the law? It was set because of transgressions, until the seed should come, to whom he made the promise"
And Gentilizing Jews is the exact same sin played the other way. Out of your own mouth you condemn yourself.
The Church is infallibly guided in her legislation by the Paraclete. The refugees from Goshen adopted laws given to them by God. Converts who accept the laws of the Church bow not to Gentiles, but to God.
And that is why so few Jews believe in Yeshua--because you have misrepresented Him. It wasn't enough for you to say, "I don't think that X, Y, and Z apply to me as a Gentile." That might be acceptable. I can make the case, for example, from the Torah that kosher is not incumbent on Gentiles. But the moment that you claimed the authority to interpret the Apostles in such a way as to draw aside Jews out of the way that the Eternal God commanded us to walk, you sinned against the Word and against the Jews. If there is a heretic here, it is the one who claims that Yeshua is not enough for the salvation of the Jews, but that it takes Yeshua plus ceasing to be a Jew and becoming a Gentile. That is another "gospel," and let any who preach it, even an angel from Heaven, be anathema.
Again, I do not make the rules. You are putting the cart before the horse. If the Church is false, then you should cut all ties and be done with her. If the Church is true, then you must submit to her despite ties you have with anything else.
Why not? I wasn't aware that there was a Gentile disease that requires eating pork three times a day, or mandates mixing meat and dairy together. Just as I'm capable of providing dairy-free meals for my lactose-intolerant friends or vegetarian meals for vegetarians, the early Gentile believers would have been fully capable of learning the basics of making kosher meals for communal purposes. Especially in the Diaspora, where the rules of kosher were generally more relaxed than in Judea.
So again: It is your assertion that the Mosaic Law, i.e., the Torah itself, makes it impossible for Jews and Gentiles to eat together without violating kosher. Cite chapter and verse.
At Cornelius' household, scripture explicitly describes Peter eating non-kosher food at the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and direction of an angel.
Chapter and verse, please. As I recall, Peter had a vision of being offered unkosher food, which he turned down three times only to be chastened from Heaven, "Do not call what God has made clean common." Peter himself interprets the vision for us in v. 28: "And he said to them, “You yourselves know how unlawful (note: the Greek word means 'against custom,' not 'against Torah') it is for a man who is a Jew to associate with a foreigner or to visit him; and yet God has shown me that I should not call any man unholy or unclean."
The issue was not kosher. Unless the Gentile is just bent on being offensive, that can be handled. The issue was eighteen measures that had been passed about a generation before that pretty much declared even God-fearing, Torah-observant Gentiles to be completely unclean and unholy. These eighteen measures, it should be noted, were passed under dubious circumstances and were revoked by the rabbis in the second century, but at the time of Acts, they were a very big deal--and the zealots were willing to enforce them by assasinating those who got too close to the Gentiles.
Now, I don't blame you for not knowing about the Eighteen Measures. Most Jews don't even know about them and I only learned about them a year or so ago. However, I do hold you responsible for not actually reading the Torah for yourself and factoring it into your understanding of the New Testament.
If you had done so, you would have noticed that the Torah forbids despising the alien, but rather to love him (Deu. 10:19) and that the foreigner who wished to offer a sacrifice to Hashem was to be allowed to do so under the same laws as an Israelite (Num. 15:14-16). That means that declaring all Gentiles to be intrinsically unclean and creating a "middle wall of partition" (per Eph. 2) to separate a court for the Gentiles from the court of the Israelites was illegal according to the Torah. These were man-made traditions that opposed the true Torah, and just as He did in His earthly ministry, Yeshua now did in a vision to Peter: He removed the errant tradition so that the true Torah could be seen. Gentile believers in the God of Israel who had renounced idolatry were no longer to be considered unclean or unholy.
It is you who accuse Paul. I do not see anything wrong with him reasserting his status as Pharisee or going to the Temple.
But do you agree that Paul was a Pharisee--which is the equivalent today of an Orthodox Jew--and that he continued in the practices of the Pharisees? If he did, then that means that the Apostle not only kept kosher, but kept the stricter kashrut, the stricter standards of ritual purity, and other aspects of Jewish law? If he did, then on what basis can you claim the authority to tell Jews today not to do the same? If you think he didn't, then you accuse him of being a hypocrates, a pretender to the title of Pharisee. You know, the very thing Yeshua condemned in Matthew 23.
I accuse Paul of nothing because I don't assume that he changed his practices based on convenience or audience. I think he was a Pharisee through-and-through. I think he changed his terminology and his teaching methods to best reach the maximum number of people.
They did deemphasize the law, and not only for Gentiles.
If so, you have yet to produce a valid example. If you want to take another stab at it, save us both some time and go look up the actual commandment and the actual example of the supposed violation.
Bishops that pass along what they receive were not corrupt.
No matter how much simony and immorality surrounds them.
How would the imperfect animal sacrifices continue to please God after the perfect sacrifice has been made?
If Abraham was saved by faith (Rom. 4), why did he offer up sacrifices? Why did the Apostles?
You are accusing either me, Christian Tradition, or the Apostles.
I'm accusing you and your tradition of not following the Apostles and of persecuting those who have.
Mosaic law was not permanent but provisional until the coming of Christ . . . Galatians 3:19
The Torah itself declares that no one, not even a miracle-working prophet, can change its commandments (Deu. 12:32-13:5). So either Paul is a false prophet and you are a heretic for following him, or you have misunderstood Paul. I'm betting on the latter.
So what is Paul's point, taken in context? Simply this: The promise to Abraham and his seed (which Paul midrashically renders as singular instead of the collective to point to Yeshua, but explaining that gets into the Hebrew) came 430 years before Moses was given the Torah on Mt. Sinai. Ergo, the unilateral promise that Abraham's seed would inherit the physical land of Israel and be a blessing to the whole world is not and has never been contingent on Israel's obedience. There is literally nothing Israel can ever do to to annul that Covenant. Our disobedience may put the blessings on hold and result in punishment, but God has assured us over and over again through the prophets that He will bring us to that place of blessing in the end.
And that is what makes replacement theology a heresy: You claim that because Israel disobeyed, the promises were taken from the natural seed and given to another. You annul not only the Torah, but the very Apostle that you depend on to attack the Torah!
Paul then answers the question: "So why have a Law at all, if it isn't relevant to the promise and only incites the will of man to sin the more?" The answer, more literally rendered: "It was gathered together because of transgressions, ordained by messengers by the means of a mediator"--referring to Moses--"until the Seed would come to whom the promise had been made"--referring to Messiah.
Now here, and in many other places in Paul's writings, I'm not convinced that "Law" means the written Torah only. The Torah of Moses, in the Jewish mind, was never "gathered together," but was given to Moses on Mt. Sinai. Rather, being a Pharisee, Paul was used to thinking of Law as meaning not only the written Torah, but the corpus of Jewish law that had grown out of it. Here, the "gathering together" of what became known as the Mishnah may be in view, especially since the verbs are in the aorist, rather than the past, tense.
But even if it isn't, since the Greek word translated "until" does not necessarily connotate a stopping point, but is rather a conjunction indicating purpose or direction; e.g., "Brethren, I may confidently say to you regarding the patriarch David that he both died and was buried, and his tomb is [fn] with us unto this day." That doesn't mean the tomb of David suddenly vanished that morning. I know, because I've been there.
So what does it mean? Here is my paraphrase for you to judge: "Israel's transgressions of the Law could not annul an unconditional promise given 430 years before the Law was ever given on Mt. Sinai. So why have the Law at all? It has been, is being, and will be gathered together and added to because of our transgressions (trying to legislate morality, as it were), having been ordained by messengers--the prophets, the men of the Great Assembly, and the rabbis--who received it by the hand of our mediator, Moses, even unto the present time when the Seed has appeared to whom the promises were ultimately made and through whom they will be fulfilled."
So basically, we have two possible ways to read this verse. Your way takes it out of context and pits it against the rest of Scripture, not to mention the life of the person who penned it. My way takes into account the context, the life of the author, and the meaning of the original Greek and reconciles the verse to the rest of the Scriptures.
The Church is infallibly guided in her legislation by the Paraclete.
Baloney. But your belief that this is the case is why this discussion is ultimately a waste of time: We simply don't have a mutually-accepted source of authority. You accept that everything the Roman Catholic Church does and teaches is to be received uncritically. I believe that we are to test what we are taught even by an Apostle to see if what he says is true (Acts 17:11).
If the Church is false, then you should cut all ties and be done with her.
I think the Roman Catholic Church is false, but I don't think the true Ekklesia, the true Kingdom of Heaven, made up of both Jews and Gentiles by the work of the Spirit is. That Kingdom has many Catholics in it, but it is not to be confused with the Magisterium.
And no, the Bible does not teach unconditional, unthinking submission. It does teach us to honor the duly appointed authorities and to obey them in every way that does not directly contradict God's commandments. That is why I honor and obey the rabbis, the duly appointed authorities of my people. There are of course areas in which I must follow Yeshua instead of our traditions, but one of the nice things about Judaism is that no one is expected to blindly submit and there is always room for debate and variations in practice between different rabbis.
Shalom and an early Merry Christmas to you and yours.
The Judaizers are not likely to read the passages that way. They will insist that you are putting a gentile spin on the text. That good Jews see the dietary laws in inviolate, even in this age. So go so far as to insist that to be truly right with God gentiles should submit to the law of Moses in all things.