The Message of the Jerusalem Council in the Acts of the Apostles: A Linguistic Stylistic Analysis

Abstract

This study investigates how the book of Acts addresses certain local problems in Luke's community through a linguistic stylistic analysis that utilizes models of verbal art and intertextuality within a systemic-functional linguistic framework. This methodology is suited to demonstrate how Luke symbolically articulates a message to his audience through his stylistic patternings of language of the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15 and the texts with which it shares thematic content. The scheme of the study begins with the analysis of the Cornelius episode in Acts 10:1-11:18, continues with the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15:1- 29, and concludes with Paul's return to Jerusalem where he stands accused of forsaking the Law of Moses in Acts 21:17-26. Each of these episodes, sharing patterns of repetition, plays a role in the symbolic articulation of a message in the book of Acts. First, the Cornelius story establishes the legitimacy of table fellowship among Jewish and Gentile believers against opposing Jewish value positions regarding moral purity. Next, the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15 recapitulates the Cornelius episode but then further develops value orientations concerning social relations among Jewish and Gentile believers in the church, principally by means of the Apostolic Decree. Then, the repetition of the Apostolic Decree in Acts 21 clarifies its meaning according to different situational variables. The thesis of this study is that these patterns reveal contextual elements of a particular conflict the early church faced over the communal integration of Jewish and Gentile believers - namely, that Jews were susceptible to splitting off from multi-ethnic churches due to the pressures of a Jewish separationist ideology. The book of Acts subverts this ideology by means of the foregrounded patternings identified in this study. These patternings, which serve to identify foregrounded thematic formations, orient the reader to the proper heterglossic backdrop and reveal that Luke engages a particular Noahic tradition associated with the discursive practice of rewriting sacred scripture in Second Temple Jewish literature, not to align with its value orientations but to subvert it and thereby convince Jewish believers not to withdraw from the community of God.