“My rabbi tells me that ‘binding and loosing’ is regularly used by the Jews to indicate that a rabbi ‘forbids’ or ‘sanctions’ a certain action—for example, the eating of a particular food. Thus in the Acts of the Apostles, the Lord would be said by the Jews to ‘loose’ the eating of food that was before unclean, saying to Peter, ‘Arise, kill and eat.’ And I can conceive that a gospel might describe Jesus as saying to Peter, ‘I give thee this power of loosing unclean food, that thou and the rest of my disciples may henceforth eat with the Gentiles, and in their houses, asking no questions concerning the food.’ But I do not myself believe that Christ used the phrase ‘bind and loose’ in this sense. I think he connected it with that strange doctrine of forgiveness of sins on which he laid so much stress, and that it was uttered after the resurrection, when the term ‘church’ might be more naturally used.” Scaurus was so far right in this that I afterwards found in the fourth gospel a doctrine, not indeed about “binding and loosing,” but about “imprisoning and loosing” or “arresting and loosing”; and this was connected with “sins,” and Christ gave this power to the disciples after the resurrection. Scaurus continued, “Look at Matthew’s words in one of these passages, ‘But if he refuse to hear the church, let him be unto thee as the heathen and the publican,’ and then, at some interval, ‘Where two or three are gathered together in my name, I am there in the midst of them.’ Then look at the last words of Matthew’s gospel, uttered after the resurrection, ‘Behold I am with you always.’ Does not the saying, ‘I am there in the midst of you when you are gathered together,’ come more appropriately from Christ, appearing after the resurrection, than from Christ before the resurrection? I think so. The context indicates a tradition of some utterance made after the resurrection, conveyed through some apostle in a Jewish form, promising Christ’s presence to the disciples. Paul assumes such a presence, writing to the Corinthians ‘When ye are gathered together, and my spirit, together with the power of the Lord Jesus Christ, to deliver over such a one to Satan.’ These last words about ‘Satan’ I do not profess to comprehend fully; but they seem to me to imply the opposite of ‘loosing’—some kind of’ ‘binding’ or ‘remanding to prison.’ And it is to take place in the presence of Christ, with Paul’s spirit, when the church of Corinth is ‘gathered together’.” I thought Scaurus was probably right as to the date of this promise. But I was much more impressed by what he said concerning the tradition, in Luke, “_Eat those things that are served up to you_.” This, in Luke, was almost meaningless to me, but it had been full of meaning in Paul’s epistle to the Corinthians, where the apostle spoke about meat sold in Gentile markets: “If an unbeliever invites you, and ye desire to accept, _eat everything that is served up to you, asking no questions_.”