COUNCIL OF JERUSALEM
As God had broken down the wall of separation between Gentiles and Jews, and as Gentiles had entered the church of God (Acts 11:1-18; cp. Eph. 2:11-22), the problem arose that many Of the Jews who had believed insisting that believers from the Gentiles must be circumcised and keep the entire law of Moses (Acts 15:1), this being vigorously opposed by Paul and Barnabas, this issue was finally raised before the church in Jerusalem. .
After lively discussions and Peter, Paul and Barnabas having witnessed everything that had happened, and insisting on the truth of salvation by grace, James gave the final and definitive decision on behalf of God, that the believers coming from the Gentiles were totally exempt from the law.
They only had to keep those precepts that were binding on all humanity, such as abstaining from idolatry and all communion with it, from eating blood (Gen. 9:4), a prohibition made to Noah, and in him to all nations, of drowning, for the same reason as above, and of fornication (cp. 1 Cor. 6:18, 20) Apart from these necessary things (Acts 15:28) the believers of the Gentiles were freed from all burdens in the freedom of Christ.
It should be noted here that in the face of the claims of the church of Rome in the only Council that we find in the Bible we see that it is not Peter, but James, who defines and gives the divine decision (Acts 15:19 cp. v. 28).
The heading that Herder’s Bible gives to this section is therefore not at all justified: “Roma locuta, causa finita”, (having heard Rome, the issue is resolved), but rather it openly confronts the content of the text.
The case was heard in Jerusalem, not in Rome, and the person used by God to give His advice and decide the question definitively was James, and not Peter, who took the place of a witness, and certainly not of president