Tuesday 15 January 2019

Guy Brandon on Eating Blood


The Jubilee Centre has published a piece from Guy Brandon, the third in a series on the laws in Leviticus, this one looking at the command in 19:26 which prohibits the Israelites from eating blood.

Whilst agreeing there are no kosher laws for Christians, he takes more seriously than many do the letter from the Jerusalem Council sent to Gentile believers in Antioch, Syria and Cilicia, in which they say… ‘You are to abstain from food sacrificed to idols, from blood, from the meat of strangled animals and from sexual immorality (see Acts 15:23-29; cf. 21:25).

‘To summarise: the prohibition on eating blood is one of the only demands made of Gentile Christians (i.e. most of us) in the New Testament. Paul, Peter and other giants among the apostles and elders all agreed on it, and – while ensuring the burden on non-Jewish converts was as light as possible – they nevertheless felt this important enough to state unequivocally. It reiterates a command given by God to Noah, and by extension to all humanity, and that remains consistent across the entire arc of scripture. Hermeneutically, it is very difficult to argue that it is now irrelevant.’

The article is available here, and from here as a pdf in the Jubilee Centre’s Engage magazine.

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