‘And certain men came down from Judaea and taught the brethren, saying, “Except you be circumcised after the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved.”
As with the prophets who had arrived earlier and had been of great assistance (Acts 11:27), some men ‘from Judaea' now arrived in Syrian Antioch, but this time their message to the Christians there was, “Except you be circumcised after the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved.” They no doubt saw themselves as going with a salutary and godly message in which they believed profoundly. They may have acclaimed themselves to be prophets, but if so Luke refuses to recognise them as such. We note further that he does not say that they came ‘from Jerusalem'. He saw that that would have conferred on them an authority that they did not have, so he says that they were vaguely ‘from Judaea'. Their attitude was not that of ‘the church of Jerusalem' but of Judaeans. His stress was on the fact that they did not have the authority of the church of Jerusalem behind them (as what followed would prove).
The message of these men would come like a bombshell to many Gentile Christians. To them these messengers were brethren, and appeared to have come from the very home of Christendom. Did this really mean that they had to become full Jewish proselytes, being circumcised and bound to keep the whole ritual and ceremonial Law of the Jews if they wanted to follow Christ? This was not what they had been taught up to this point. But many of them were ready for it if it was necessary. (This was something that Paul resisted so vehemently - Galatians 3:1-5; Galatians 4:9-11; Galatians 5:2-4).
It was no doubt ‘of God' that this had not occurred until the arrival back of Paul and Barnabas. Had it done so it might have caused even greater confusion. But God was in control of affairs and had timed it accordingly.
The question can only be seen as almost irrelevant today. For we would rightly ask, ‘If Christ through His death has fulfilled all offerings and sacrifices, as the New Testament makes clear that He has in a number of places (e.g. John 1:29; 1 Corinthians 5:7), and if, as the letter to the Hebrews emphasises in detail, all such offerings are now redundant and all necessary rituals are now fulfilled in heaven by our heavenly High Priest, what further need is there for earthly ritual? Indeed, as Paul makes clear concerning circumcision, it is precisely on this basis that in Christ all who are His have been circumcised with a circumcision made without hands in the circumcision of the One Who was circumcised for us (Colossians 2:11). We are already circumcised in Christ. We have therefore been made alive, and have been forgiven, without the need for further circumcision (Colossians 2:13).
But it was certainly a question that still needed settling then, for it went to the root of what salvation is all about.