Unless we distinctly apprehend the deep difference, almost casually brought out by this question of the (converted) Jew among Gentiles and his obligation to eat with his Gentile brother, a difference between 'apostolic' Christianity as Luke gives it, and the 'gospel' of Paul, we can have no adequate appreciation of the great Epistles produced during this period of conflict. The basis of Luke's pleasing picture of peace and concord is a fundamentally different conception of the relation of Law and Grace. Paul and Luke both hold that the Mosaic commandments are not binding on _Gentiles_. The point of difference--and Paul's own account of his Conference with the Pillars goes to show that Luke's idea is also theirs; else why need there be a division of 'spheres of influence'?--is Paul's doctrine that the believing Jew _as well as the Gentile_ is "dead to the Law." And this doctrine was never accepted south of the Taurus range. Agreement and union were sure to come, if only by the rapid disappearance from the church after 70 A.D. of the element of the circumcised, and the progressive realization in 'Syria and Cilicia' of the impracticability of the Jerusalem-Antioch plan of requiring Gentiles to make their tables innocuous to the legalist. If only the participation of Paul and Barnabas be excluded from the story of Acts xv. (or better, restored to its proper sequence after Acts xi. 30) we have every reason to accept Luke's account of an Apostolic Council held at Jerusalem not long after "Peter came to Antioch" to settle between the churches of northern and southern Syria the knotty question of the Christian Jew's eating or not eating with Gentiles. It is almost certain that Syria did adopt this modus vivendi for "the brethren which are of the Gentiles _in Antioch, Syria and Cilicia_" (Acts xv. 23); for we can trace its gradual obsolescence there. In Revelation (a book of Palestinian origin republished at Ephesus _c._ 95; _cf._ Rev. ii. 14, 20, 24) in the _Teaching of the Twelve_ (125), and in the 'Western' text of Acts xv. (150?) there is a progressive scaling down of the 'burden.' Gentiles are at last asked to do almost nothing more than Paul had demanded on moral grounds without recognition of the validity of "distinctions of meats." In A.D. 120 the 'burden' is: "Concerning meats, keep what thou art able; however, abstain at all events from things offered to idols, for it is the food of dead gods."