first political act in the history of Christianity and the Starting-point from which we can seek to reconstruc t the nature of Jesus’ teaching and the Origins of the relig ion and church he brought into being. We have two near-contemporary accounts of this Council. One, dating from the next decade, was dictated by Paul himself in his letter to the Christian congregations of Galatia in Asia Minor. The second is later and comes from a number of sources or eyewitness accounts assembled in Luke's Acts of the Apostles. It is a bland, quasi-official report of a dispute in the Church and its Satisfactory resolution. Let us take this second version first. It relates that fierce diss ension and controversy’ had arisen in Antioch because ‘certain persons’, from Jerusalem and Judea, in flat contradiction to the teaching of Paul, had been telling converts to Christianity that they could not be save d unless they underwent the Jewish ritual of circumcision. As a result, Paul, his colleague Barnabas, and others from the mission to the gentiles in Antioch, travelled to Jerusalem to consult with 'the apostles and elders’. There they had a mixed reception. They were welcomed by ‘the chur ch and the apostles and the elders’; but 'some of the Pharisaic party who had become believers’ insisted that Paul was wrong and that all converts must not only be circumcised but taught to keep the Jewish law of Moses. There was ‘a long debate’, followed by speeches by Peter, who Supported Paul, by Paul himse lf and Barnabas, and a summing up by James, the younger brother of Jesus. He put forward a compromi se which was apparently adopted ‘with the agreement of the whole Church’. Under this, Paul and his colleagu es were to be sent back to Antioch accompanied by a Jerusalem delegation bearing a letter. The letter set out the terms of the compromise: converts need not submit to circumcision but they must observe certain precepts in the Jewish law in matters of diet and sexual conduct. Luke's record in Acts states that this half-way position was arrived at ‘unanimously’, and that when the decision was conveyed to the Antioch congregation, ‘all rejoi ced’. The Jerusalem delegates were thus able to return to Jerusalem, having solved the problem, and Paul carri ed on with his mission. This, then, is the account of the first council of the Church as presented by a consensus docu ment, what one might call an irenic and ecumenical version, designed to present the new religion as a mystical body with a coordinated and unified life of its own, moving to inevitable and predesti ned conclusions. Acts, indeed, says specifically that the ruling of the Council was ‘the decision of the Holy Spirit ’. No wonder it was accepted unanimously! No wonder that ‘all’ in Antioch rejoiced at the encouragemen it t brought’ Paul's version, however, presents quite a different picture. And his is not merely an eye-witness account, but an account by the chief and central participant, perhaps the only one who grasped the magnitude of the issues at stake. Paul is not interested in smoothing the ragged edges of controversy. He is presenting a case to men and women whose spiritual lives are dominated by the issues confronting the elders in that room in Jerusalem. His purpose is not irenic or ecumenical, still less diplomatic. He is a man burning to tell the truth and to imprint it like fire in the minds of his readers. Paul writes with passion, urgency and fear. He disa grees with the account in Acts not merely because he sees the facts differently but because he has an altogether more radical idea of their importance. For Luke, the Jerusalem Council is an ecclesiastical incident. For Paul, it is part of the great est Struggle ever waged. What lies behind it are two unresolved questions. Had Jesus Christ founded a new religion, the true one at last? Or, to put it another way, was he God or man? If Pau! is vindicated, Christianity is born. If he is overruled, the teachings of Jesu s become nothing more than the hallmarks of a Jewish sect, doomed to be submerged in the mainstream of an ancient creed