And certain men which came down from Judaea taught the brethren, and said, Except ye be circumcised after the manner of Moses, ye cannot be saved.
The brethren at Antioch being troubled about circumcision by Judaizing zealots from Jerusalem, Paul and Barnabas, with certain others, are sent up to Jerusalem on the subject-The brethren of Phenice and Samaria rejoice to hear from them of the conversion of the Gentiles (15:1-3)
And certain men which came down from Judea taught the brethren, and said, Except ye be circumcised, [peritemneesthe of the Received Text, and-tmeetheete, of Lachmann and Tischendorf, have about equal support]
After the manner of Moses, ye cannot be saved. It may seem strange, after Peter had satisfied the brethren at Jerusalem, that the admission of Cornelius and his Gentile friends, as uncircumcised believers, to the fellowship of the Church, was according to the will of God (Acts 11:18), that the question should be raised afresh. But inveterate prejudices, especially in religion, die hard; and "that the Gentiles should be fellow-heirs, and of the same body, and partakers of His promise in Christ by the Gospel," without passing through the gateway of circumcision, was a truth so novel at that time, that nothing could reconcile even sincere believers to it but the divine seal set upon it in the case of Cornelius, while to the mere adherents of an ancestral creed, with its traditional usages, it would seem revolutionary and destructive. If such zealots for exclusive Judaism might be expected to have their stronghold anywhere, it would be at Jerusalem, the metropolitan seat of the ancient Religion. And since at Antioch the uncircumcised believers had not only been recognized as a true Church of Christ, but become the parent of a Gentile Christianity which threatened to eclipse that of the mother church of Jerusalem and its little daughters, we can hardly wonder at those Jewish zealots making a stand now as for life or death. The question, indeed, was much larger and more fundamental than might seem. For though the immediate point in dispute was only whether 'circumcision after the manner of Moses was necessary to salvation,' it was 'to the whole law' that they wished to bind the Gentiles (as is evident from Acts 15:5); and, says the apostle to the Galatians (Acts 15:3), "I testify to every man that is circumcised, that he is a debtor to do the whole law." On the same principle (as Humphry observes) 'the baptism of John stands for his whole ministry (Acts 1:22; Luke 20:4).