Did the ending of kosher rules for Christians start with Jesus himself? Did He nosh a nice ham and cheese with his goyim buddies?
If not, when did Christians stop following the kosher rules?
Acts 10:9-15. “On the morrow, as they went on their journey, and drew nigh unto the city, Peter went up upon the housetop to pray about the sixth hour: And he became very hungry, and would have eaten: but while they made ready, he fell into a trance, And saw heaven opened, and a certain vessel descending upon him, as it had been a great sheet knit at the four corners, and let down to the earth: Wherein were all manner of fourfooted beasts of the earth, and wild beasts, and creeping things, and fowls of the air. And there came a voice to him, Rise, Peter; kill, and eat. But Peter said, Not so, Lord; for I have never eaten any thing that is common or unclean. And the voice spake unto him again the second time, What God hath cleansed, that call not thou common.”
So, yes, all the apostles would have kept kosher until this incident.
Well, Jesus is reported to have flouted some of the hygiene laws to make the point that it isn’t what goes into a man’s mouth than makes him unclean, it’s what comes out.
And there’s that bit where Peter is instructed (in a dream or vision, by a voice he responded to as ‘Lord’) to eat animals he considered unclean; I know this is supposed to be an analogy of the gentiles, but that doesn’t necessarily disqualify it as having a more mundane interpretation too.
OTOH, in Acts 15, James instructs his audience to abstain from blood and the meat of strangled animals.
How much of this had to do with Paul’s efforts to spread Christianity to the Gentiles? It certainly makes it easier to add converts if they don’t have to change the foods they eat. I mean all that “love they neighbor” crap is hard enough without having to ditch the har gow, or have to decline when the waiter says: “today the chef is serving a wonderful Anatolian kid goat simmered in a sauce of its mother’s milk, accomplanied by fresh Mediteranian scallops.”
Also there were some Christians, called Judaizers, that maintained that they were bound by the Jewish customs. http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/08537a.htm
Wasn’t it part of the deal struck between Paul and James, that Gentiles need not uphold the Jewish laws, while (converted) Jews had to?
UM. See the last paragraph in my cite.
That is incorrect.
The symbolism of this vision, as John Mace pointed out, was that The Good News about the Christ was no longer to be a “Jew-Only” affair, and henceforth preaching about the Christ/Messiah was to include Gentiles. This was a vision, and Peter himself clarifies it’s meaning, in the verses that followed: (KJV)
Bolding mine
Christians are no longer required to keep the dietary restrictions of the Law Code. But these are not the scrpitures that make that case.
As I said above, just because the vision is argued to have a spiritual interpretation, doesn’t mean it cannot have an additional mundane one. That’s the whole reason why spiritual parables/analogies etc work - they reflect a plausible real-world scenario.
There is no need to misapply a scripture because it might mean something else. There are adequate scrpiptures that show that the Messiah (Christ) was for the Jews, and sent for the Jews. There are also scriptures that show that the Apostles largely recognized that the rigidity of the Law Code no longer applied to them after the Christ arrived and was killed.
There were disputes however, especially among the [now Christian] Pharisees, who were known to be sticklers in matters of the Law.
At any rate, there is no need to take liberties with this text–and expand it to mean something that it just doesn’t say. There are other texts that say just that, and don’t require us to guess, speculate or put words into the author’s mouth that they just didn’t say.
I recall someone’s saying that the Last Supper was a Seder. Is that right?
http://www.jewfaq.org/holidaya.htm
Yep, generally, it’s believed to have been such.