Atos 15:20

20. Write Four things are to be prohibited on the grounds of being specially offensive to Jews, namely: 1, idolatrous meats; 2, fornication; 3, flesh of strangled animals; and, 4, eating of blood. These grounds, of course, permit both cautions against committing acts offensive to the ceremonial feelings of the Jews, as the first, third, and fourth, or offences against true morality specially offensive from ritual reasons, as the second.

1 . As to idolatrous meats: after parts of the animal idolatrously offered were given to the priests, others were eaten in a banquet, or salted for use, or even sold in the market. From idolatrous feast and market meat the Jew abstained with abhorrence. For he held the meat to be offered to devils, and that the eater ceremonially consecrated himself to the devil so honoured. 2. Fornication was held by the heathen in many cases to be not a sin, but a religious rite performed to some voluptuous deity. Antioch was celebrated for its temple and groves of Daphne, in which licentiousness was a consecrated religious rite. There was no one thing in which Christianity produced a greater revolution than in re-creating the virtue of chastity. But it is against unchastity as connected with idolatry, and avowed to be sacred, that the caution is here directed, and the present grounds are its special offensiveness to the Old Testament conscience. 3 and 4. The shedding of blood was, in the Mosaic ritual, the sacred sacrificial mode of death. Without the shedding of blood there was no remission. Hence, the blood was the symbolical, if not the physical, seat of life. Christians can see that thus the type and the antitype were to harmonize. And as the seat of life, the Jew was taught to hold it sacred from his eating. And as the strangled animal retained his blood, so he was not to be eaten. All these views of reverence for blood were cherished to educate the Jewish mind to the great thought that death is the wages of sin; and that by a death realized by the shed blood is to be the remission, both typical and real. So far as the special reasons for giving these cautions in the document to be issued are concerned, they soon ceased, and the prohibitions ceased with them. But reasons immutable render the second prohibition immutable.