Post 233 has my question:
Do you think Paul lied to the Holy Spirit, the Apostles, all Israel, and sinned in the temple here ?
And when we were come to Jerusalem, the brethren received us gladly. And the day following Paul went in with us unto James; and all the elders were present. And when he had saluted them, he declared particularly what things God had wrought among the Gentiles by his ministry. And when they heard it, they glorified the Lord, and said unto him, Thou seest, brother, how many thousands of Jews there are which believe; and they are all zealous of the law: And they are informed of thee, that thou teachest all the Jews which are among the Gentiles to forsake Moses, saying that they ought not to circumcise their children, neither to walk after the customs. What is it therefore? the multitude must needs come together: for they will hear that thou art come. Do therefore this that we say to thee: We have four men which have a vow on them; Them take, and purify thyself with them, and be at charges with them, that they may shave their heads: and all may know that those things, whereof they were informed concerning thee, are nothing; but that thou thyself also walkest orderly, and keepest the law. As touching the Gentiles which believe, we have written and concluded that they observe no such thing, save only that they keep themselves from things offered to idols, and from blood, and from strangled, and from fornication. Then Paul took the men, and the next day purifying himself with them entered into the temple, to signify the accomplishment of the days of purification, until that an offering should be offered for every one of them.
Acts, Catholic chapter twenty one, Protestant verses seventeen to twenty six,
as authorized, but not authored, by King James Do you think Paul lied to the Holy Spirit, the Apostles, all Israel. and sinned in the temple here ?
Thanks for finding the question. Of course I think Paul was truthful. That's a bit like asking a theist if he believes in God. Well, yeah. That doesn't necessarily turn a specific historical action into a paradigm for Christian behavior. It is still just a description of what happened while the Temple still stood.
The paradigm for Christian belief and behavior is in the teaching of the whole message of Scripture. There are acts described in both Old and New Testaments that cannot and/or should not be imitated because the full revelation of Scripture teaches otherwise. The Holy Spirit is not going to present an inconsistent message. If the book of Hebrews is to be taken as divine revelation, one has to take its teachings as the guide for understanding descriptions of historical events and what lessons we should draw from them.
For example, Paul's compliance with some Jewish customs was part of hs overall plan of evangelism by blending in. He states this explicitly here:
For though I be free from all men, yet have I made myself servant unto all, that I might gain the more. And unto the Jews I became as a Jew, that I might gain the Jews; to them that are under the law, as under the law, that I might gain them that are under the law; To them that are without law, as without law, (being not without law to God, but under the law to Christ,) that I might gain them that are without law.
(1 Corinthians 9:19-21)
The mission is the thing with Paul. He was perfectly happy to accomodate expectations of Jewish believers, just as he did here:
Then came he to Derbe and Lystra: and, behold, a certain disciple was there, named Timotheus, the son of a certain woman, which was a Jewess, and believed; but his father was a Greek: Which was well reported of by the brethren that were at Lystra and Iconium. Him would Paul have to go forth with him; and took and circumcised him because of the Jews which were in those quarters: for they knew all that his father was a Greek.
(Acts 16:1-3)
So he had Timothy circumcised, not for his personal justification, but in deference to the Jewish community to which he was to minister. But whether in principle or in practice, Paul was adamant in his revelatory teaching that these customs were not to be understood as the substance of obedience to the Gospel. They were mere accommodations to those whose consciences would otherwise be offended, inhibiting the progress of the Gospel. Missionaries today do the same sort of thing. Becoming as identified with your audience as possible is still a good way to get access to share the Gospel. But it doesn't mean the adopted cultural practices become a requirement of the faith.
And so when Paul is presented in Acts 21 with the prospect of reassuring his countrymen that he was not advocating that Jews apostatize wholesale from Moses, which he was not in fact advocating, he was happy to accommodate their sensibilities by following through on the recommended ritual. And why not? A good Jew can comply with Moses and still be fully aware that his justification is not coming from that compliance but from his faith in Messiah, of which all the ceremonial law was a forecast and a shadow. So Paul was indeed not recommending apostasy from Moses, but he now had a Messianic understanding of Moses, and could just as easily get by without Moses to blend in with Gentiles for the same purpose, in both cases gaining access for the Gospel.
But with the fall of the Temple system, what the writer of Hebrews spoke of here came to fruition, at least with respect to the levitical temple service and the sacrifices associated with it:
In that he saith, A new covenant, he hath made the first old. Now that which decayeth and waxeth old is ready to vanish away.
(Hebrews 8:13)
Notice he doesn't describe it as a sudden break, or that it had ceased completely, but was in a process of decline. This suggests that Hebrews was probably written before the fall of the temple, within the timeframe of Paul and the other apostles.
And the writer of Hebrews is not alone in this attitude toward Moses as a system that was ramping down, because the same view appears elsewhere, in a book I hope we can both agree was authored by Paul:
Not that we are sufficient of ourselves to think any thing as of ourselves; but our sufficiency is of God; Who also hath made us able ministers of the new testament; not of the letter, but of the spirit: for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life. But if the ministration of death, written and engraven in stones, was glorious, so that the children of Israel could not stedfastly behold the face of Moses for the glory of his countenance; which glory was to be done away: How shall not the ministration of the spirit be rather glorious?
(2 Corinthians 3:5-8)
The ministration of death, the law, was indeed glorious, but such glory was to be done away, overcome by an even greater glory, the glory of the Gospel, the ministration of the spirit.
So no, Paul was definitely not lying to either the apostles or the Holy Spirit, nor do I think he was sinning in his action. Purification rituals under Moses did not necessarily entail personal atonement for sin. A woman giving birth to a child was in need of ceremonial purification, despite childbirth being an innocent act. Likewise, Paul, having been with the Gentiles, would be expected to purify himself, but not in connection with an actual sin for which he must offer a sacrifice, but to accommodate a Jewish culture that would be harder to reach for the Gospel if the purification rituals were ignored. Paul did this for peace, not for justification.
Some have gone further and argued this was a mistake. This does not mean there was a deliberate sin by either Paul or the apostles. But it is interesting to observe that if the purpose was peace, the action did not succeed in the short term, because a riot broke out over the false belief that Paul had polluted the Temple with a Gentile associate of his. Can apostles make mistakes? Certainly. No one is perfect but God. Was this a mistake? Perhaps. I can see the argument. I can also report this is exactly what my own father believed. It is interesting to be reviewing it again after so many years.
But getting back to how this relates to Hebrews 10, there is no reasonable way to see this as Paul and the apostles sanctioning the false idea that the Mosaic system of sacrifice would continue indefinitely in parallel to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, or that these shadow sacrifices were at all necessary to justification before God, even for a Jew. One Holy Spirit, one Scripture, one message. So no, I don't see the conflict. Hebrews 10 connects very well with Paul's view of the covenants, and with the overall theme of Hebrews, the contrast between the Old and the New Covenants, the one being our teacher that leads us to Messiah, the other being the full revelation of Messiah, whose once for all sacrifice rendered all others obsolete.
Peace,
SR