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This Chapter Verse Commentaries:
20. ἀλλὰ ἐπιστεῖλαι αὐτοῖς, but that we write unto them. ἐπιστέλλω is used primarily of a charge sent by a messenger, but also, as in Heb 13:22, is often used of what is sent by letter (and hence comes the English word epistle), and there can be little doubt that this is the sense in the present case, for though messengers were sent, they carried with them the decision of the synod of Jerusalem in a formal manner committed to writing (Act 15:23).
τοῦ ἀπέχεσθαι τῶν ἀλισγημάτων τῶν εἰδώλων, that they abstain from pollutions of idols. This is explained in Act 15:29 by ‘meats offered (i.e. sacrificed) to idols.’ Of the necessity for such an injunction in the early Church, where congregations were to be now composed of both Jews and Gentiles, we can judge from St Paul’s argument to the Corinthians (1Co 8:1-10; 1Co 10:19), and we can also see how he would have the Gentile converts deal tenderly with the scruples of their Jewish fellow-worshippers, however needless they themselves might deem such scruples.
Here the genitival infinitive is used where in ordinary Greek a simple infinitive would have been written. Cf. above, Act 7:19 note.
The noun ἀλίσγημα is only found in N.T. and the verb ἀλισγέω in LXX. Dan 1:8; Mal 1:7; Mal 1:12, and in a passage somewhat illustrative of this verse, Sir 40:29 ἀλισγήσει τὴν ψυχὴν αὐτοῦ ἐν ἐδέσμασιν ἀλλοτρίοις, though the food there spoken of has not been offered to idols.
As the ordinance of the synod is for the settling of Jewish minds, we may understand the sort of offence which they were likely to feel. It was of the same nature as the feeling of Daniel when he refused to eat of the food supplied by King Nebuchadnezzar. Meat was often sold in the markets from beasts that had been offered in sacrifice to idols, and this food and those who ate it the Jew would abhor. The Gentile converts might not be careful, when they had once come to think of the idol as nothing, and might join still in banquets with their non-Christian friends, and St Paul (1Co 8:10) supposes an extreme case, that such men might even sit down to meat in an idol-temple. If Jew and Gentile were to become one in Christ, much respect must be paid to the feelings which had been sunk deep into the minds of Israel by long years of suffering for their own idolatry.
καὶ τῆς πορνείας, and from fornication. This injunction must not be understood as a simple repetition of a moral law binding upon all men at all times, but must be taken in connexion with the rest of the decree, and as forbidding a sin into which converts from heathenism were most prone to fall back, and which their previous lives had taught them to regard in a very different light from that in which a Jew would see it. The Levitical law against every form of unchastity was extremely strict (Leviticus 18, 20), and it is probably to the observance of these ordinances that we may ascribe the persistence of the Jewish type, and the purity of their race at this day. Whereas among the heathen unchastity was a portion of many of their temple rites, and persons who gave themselves up to such impurities were even called by the names of the heathen divinities. To men educated in the constant contemplation of such a system, sins of unchastity would have far less guilt than in the eyes of those to whom the Law of Moses was read every sabbath-day.
καὶ τοῦ πνικτοῦ κ.τ.λ., and from what is strangled and from blood. The prohibition of blood was made as soon as animal food was given to men (Gen 9:4), and it was frequently enforced in the Mosaic law (Lev 3:17; Lev 7:26; Lev 17:10; Lev 17:14; Lev 19:26). To eat blood was counted a sin against the Lord in the days of Saul (1Sa 14:33), and with strict Jews it is an abomination to this day. Things strangled are not specially mentioned in the law of Moses, but that they should not be eaten follows from the larger prohibition. Lev 7:26 does, however, make mention of the blood of fowls, and it would be in the use of them that the eating of blood began first to be practised. And in breaking the neck of an animal the Jew held that the blood was caused to flow into the limbs in such wise that it could not be brought out even by salt. See T. B. Chullin, 113 a.