and if any one
will read Galatians ii. alongside of Acts xv., not in order to see how
much they agree or differ, but rather to note how far they might be
different accounts of the same series of events, he will see that
Paul's chief contention is that he only saw the leaders of the
community at Jerusalem in private, and that they at no time succeeded
in imposing any regulations on him. The vigour of his protestations
seems to indicate that his opponents had maintained that the meeting
was an official one, and that it had imposed regulations, namely,
should the theory which is being suggested be correct, the Apostolic
Decrees.

The two traditions are naturally quite contradictory; but human nature
is so constituted that it is not impossible for two sets of people,
especially after {66} some lapse of time, to give entirely different
accounts of the same events and to do so in perfectly good faith. The
editor of Acts, however, did not realise that the two traditions
referred to the same event, and made a mistake in thinking that the
meeting which he found described in the Jerusalem source came after and
not before the first missionary journey. Ed. Schwartz goes further.
He points out that the first missionary journey follows the account of
the meeting in Jerusalem given in Acts xi., and that the second journey
follows the account given in Acts xv. If there was really only one
meeting, was there not really only one journey, which the editor of
Acts, or his sources, converted into two?

However this may be, and no agreement among critics is ever likely to
be reached, it is at least certain that there was considerable friction
between Jerusalem and Antioch, and that Antioch wholly refused to
accept the dictation of Jerusalem. On the contrary, it undertook
wide-reaching missions, of one of which Paul became the leader,
founding churches in Galatia, Asia, and Achaea. Of his career we have
an obviously good account, so far as the sequence of events is
concerned, in the second part of Acts, and some interesting sidelights
on its difficulties and trials in the Pauline epistles.

What were the main characteristics of the preaching to the Gentiles
which thus found a centre in Antioch? Its basis was the intellectual
heritage from Jerusalem which made the Christians teach that {67} the
God of the Jews was the only true God, and that Jesus had been
appointed by him as the Man who would judge the world at the end of the
age.