Acts 21:21

Acts 21:21. And they are informed of thee, that thou teachest all the Jews which are among the Gentiles to forsake Moses, saying that they ought not to circumcise their children, neither to walk after the customs. This was, no doubt, the general opinion current among those Jewish Christians who had not personally come under the influence of Paul. A widespread feeling existed in Jewish Christian communities that the famous apostle of the Gentiles taught the chosen people ‘to forsake Moses,' to give up their cherished rites and ceremonies, to discontinue in their children that peculiar and time-honoured custom of circumcision which for so many centuries had distinguished the child of Israel from the child of the Gentile foreigner. This assertion was false. Paul's teaching here is best summarised in his own words to the Corinthian Church: ‘Is any man called being circumcised? let him not became uncircumcised. Is any called in uncircumcision? let him not be circumcised. Circumcision is nothing, and uncircumcision is nothing, but the keeping of the commandments of God. Let every man abide in the same calling wherein he was called ' (1 Corinthians 7:18-20). Paul never taught the Jewish Christian to abandon the law and the customs of his fathers. He himself, on the contrary, on several occasions conspicuously observed the strictest rites of Judaism; as, for instance, when he shaved his head at Cenchrea, when he lived as a Jew with the Jews, when, in the circumstances about to be narrated, he took upon himself the Nazaritic vow. Yet, as it has been well observed, ‘fanaticism is sometimes clear-sighted in its bitterness, and the Judaisers felt that when it was proclaimed that circumcision was nothing in its bearing on man's relations to God,' the day would come at no far distant date when circumcision would cease to be practised, and the time-honoured ceremonial law of Moses, which enjoined it as the initial and principal rite, would become a dead letter.