Does Paul’s rebuke of Peter in the Book of Acts prove that St. Peter could not have been the head of the entire Church? Jimmy Akin sets the record straight.
Transcription:
Host: Tim is in Washington, D.C., on the mighty 1160 a.m. Hello, Tim in Washington!
Caller: Hi, Patrick and Jimmy. Thanks for taking my call.
So I’m trying to reconcile what happened between St. Paul and St. Peter. Specifically regarding Galatians 2:11, and then prior to that in Acts 11 and Acts 15.
It appears that St. Peter is the first one to baptize the Gentiles, and then at the Council of Jerusalem he basically says “Hey, let’s not burden them with these laws.”
And yet in Galatians, St. Paul’s writing is pretty aggressive, where he apparently gets in Saint Peter’s face and tells him he’s off the track, and you know, basically, uh, he’s off the beaten tracks.
I’m trying to reconcile that, and it’s kind of sensitive to me because I’m married to a wonderful woman who’s a Protestant. And I get the impression Protestants tend to champion St. Paul at the expense of St. Peter, and so she often loves to mention the fact how St. Paul had to straighten St. Peter out.
Host: Resisted him to the face!
Jimmy: Okay, well there is any number of things that can be said. Here, first of all, let’s start with the book of Acts.
In Acts chapter 10, God so arranges it that Peter ends up preaching to the household of Cornelius, who is a Gentile. And when the Holy Spirit descends on Cornelius’s household—based on their response to the gospel—Peter says “Okay, we need to baptize these people. We can’t refuse them Christian initiation.”
And so they baptize them, but he knows he’s going to get some criticism of this when he gets back to Jerusalem. And indeed, he does.
And so in the first part of Acts chapter 11, Peter explains why he undertook this action. And the people in Jerusalem seem to acquiesce to that. Later on, though, some people from Jerusalem come down to Antioch in Syria where Paul is ministering, and they are saying that without circumcision you can’t be saved.
And so they’re arguing that everybody needs to be circumcised and become a Jew if you’re going to be a Christian. This is at the beginning of Acts chapter 15.
This causes—as Luke says—no little argument with St. Paul and Barnabas. And so they end up going to Jerusalem to consult with the Apostles and elders there. And you’re correct, when they get there Peter defends the idea that the Gentiles don’t need to be circumcised, and they don’t need to keep the Mosaic law in order to be saved and be Christians.
So he explicitly invokes the memory of Acts chapters 10 and 11, pointing out that God arranged for him to do that, to baptize the first Gentiles in this way.
So that’s the situation in Acts. Now, how does that relate to Galatians?
Well, in Galatians Paul is concerned to show that he didn’t get his gospel from any man, and it seems that the reason he’s concerned to show that is that there were apparently people at the time who were saying, “Well, Paul isn’t really preaching the true gospel. He’s watered it down so that it’s no longer God’s gospel. It’s now only a human gospel because he’s not preaching requirements like you need to be circumcised.” He’s watered that down in order to please Gentiles. And so this is just a human gospel rather than a divine gospel.
And so to prove that it’s not simply a human gospel, Paul tells a series of anecdotes all of which startlingly involved Peter, precisely as a way of showing how his gospel transcends any human.
And the way he does that is by noting the way it transcends even the most authoritative human in the Church: Peter himself.
So there’s actually a recognition in the text of Peter’s authority. It’s precisely because Peter is so prominent in the Church that Paul is using him as an example to show how the gospel transcends any human being in its origin.
In the course of doing that, he mentions an incident that occurred in Jerusalem where the authorities agreed with him that Gentiles didn’t need to be circumcised. And scholars have debated whether the incident he mentions in Galatians is the same one as Acts 15 or not.
Some scholars think that it may refer to a previous incident before Acts 15. Personally, I don’t buy that. I think it’s just Paul’s recounting of Acts 15 from his perspective. But you know, scholars have looked at it either way.
Then after he records that incident, he says in Galatians chapter 2, he says “But when Peter came to Antioch I opposed him to his face because he was clearly in the wrong.” And so apparently after Acts 15, Peter came down to Antioch in Syria where Paul was ministering. And at first, things were fine. At first, everybody was getting along. But then some people came from the Jerusalem Church who were within the orbit of James the Just and who favored the idea of separation between Jews and Gentiles.
And when they arrived, in order to keep the peace, Peter stopped having table fellowship. He stopped eating with Gentile Christians and only ate with Jewish Christians because of the difference in sensibilities regarding the need to keep the Jewish kosher laws.
And other Jews who were there, present at the time, thought that was a reasonable thing to do. Barnabas, Paul’s companion, thought that was a reasonable thing to do as well.
And so he also only ate with the with the Jewish Christians while they were there in order to avoid giving them offense. Paul thought this sent the wrong message to Gentiles, and so that’s why he rebuked Peter.
It’s interesting that he doesn’t record afterward the fact that, “Oh, and everybody agreed with me.”
Many scholars have proposed that he actually lost this battle, otherwise he would report his victory like he did when recounting the council in Jerusalem. He says, “They all agreed with me.” Well, here he doesn’t say that.
And so it may be that he lost this argument but he still thought he was in the right. That by pulling back and choosing not to eat with Gentiles while the Jewish individuals were there, Peter was sending the wrong message. And so that was his opinion. It wasn’t everybody’s opinion, and when it comes to the theological question though, (Do you need to be a Jew in order to be a Christian?), we already know the answer to that from Acts.
We know Peter was on the “No, you don’t need to be a Jew to be a Christian” side. You don’t need to be circumcised. And that seems to be reflected even in Paul’s comment to Peter in Galatians 2:16, where he’s addressing Peter and he says “You know we who are Jews know that this is the case.” And so he seems to be acknowledging that Peter himself agrees with the fundamental theological point.
He just thinks that Peter is not drawing the correct inference for who you have lunch with.