4 THOU ART PETER
Council which had summoned him to give an account of what was held to be a new false teaching. His sermon in the Solomon Hall of the Temple, his activity in the house of the mother of Mark on Mount Zion (the place in which die primitive community met) all this is a picture of one who is the unshakeably loyal confessor of His Master. But he would never have brought about the separa- tion of the young Church from the old Synagogue. Neither would the venerable James, the other pillar of the faith in Jerusalem ever have done so. Must not the heathen become a Jew and submit to circumcision and to the old law before being admitted into the Church? This question had become acute in Antioch, metropolis of Gentile Christianity, and the centre of the Pauline mission. The manner in which Paul freed the new faith from the Jewish way of living had wounded the very souls of the law-abiding who had gone there to see for themselves. Their reports caused a flurry in Jerusalem. To this city Paul had to come in the year 49 or 50 to give an account of his ac- tions before an assembly of the first Apostles. His appearance there denoted recognition of the authority of Peter and James but he knew also how to value his own position. He who gave Peter the power to be an apostle among the Jews, he says, also gave me the power to work among the heathens. The fruit he had already garnered, the gifts and proofs of the Spirit in his person and work, had to be recognized by Peter, James and John as the judgment of God. They gave Paul and Barnabas their right hands in sign of union. In return Paul promised to keep the bond of love toward the primitive community alive by gather- ing moneys for the poor of Jerusalem. Thus union was found in a for- mula of separation Paul was to go to the Gentiles and Peter to the Jews.
But the sources of tension were not therewith removed. The strong Jewish colony in Antioch was the scene of a far-reaching con- troversy among the followers of Jesus. The Syrian metropolis, so rich in luxury and movement, boasting of a night life illuminated bright as day and affording endless scope to Hephaistos and Aphro- dite, exemplified the decadent energies that arc born of a chaotic in- termingling of ideas and peoples. Into this city of tender music and dance, of exciting novels, of spiritual poverty in the midst of Syrian prodigality, where the cypresses whispered more wisely than men
JEW
