Acts 15:2

Acts 15:2. No small dissension and disputation with them. It has been suggested that not improbably these Judaizing teachers succeeded in persuading certain of the Antioch Christians to adopt at least some of their views; for, at a later period, after the Jerusalem decision by the apostles, we find the same question again agitating the Antioch believers, and even seriously affecting the policy of such men as Peter and Barnabas (see Galatians 2:11-13).

They determined that Paul and Barnabas, and certain other of them, should go up to Jerusalem. In Galatians 2, where Paul gives his own account of this momentous journey to Jerusalem, he says he went up ‘by revelation.' Such an intimation of the Divine will at a crisis like this, in the first days of the faith, is what we should expect. On several occasions of Paul's life a Divine revelation was vouchsafed to him, on the Damascus journey (Acts 9); again, when he was about to carry the gospel from Asia into Europe (Acts 16:9); in the temple of Jerusalem, when he received the commandment to preach to the Gentile world (Acts 22:18); when the ship in which he was being conveyed a prisoner to Rome was sinking in the tempest (Acts 27:23; see also 2 Corinthians 12:1-9). In the midst of the confusion excited in the Church of Antioch by the teaching of the extreme party at Jerusalem, we may well suppose that the Divine voice came to Paul, instructing him to propose the mission to Jerusalem, still the residence of several, if not of all, the surviving apostles, and for that reason, as well as for its own sacred associations, regarded with deep reverence and veneration by the other churches.