Peter, James, and the Question: Who Actually “Ends the Debate”?

J. Neil Daniels

If you listen carefully to a lot of Catholic apologetics on Acts 15, you can almost hear the script. It goes like this: the council argues; Peter stands up as the unique rock and voice of the Church; he defines the doctrine; everyone falls into line; James simply works out the pastoral details. In that telling, Peter “ends the debate,” and we are meant to see here an early snapshot of Vatican I.

The trouble is that Luke’s narrative refuses to cooperate with that script.

Take the sequence seriously. After “much debate” (15:6), Peter speaks (15:7–11). His speech is indeed theologically decisive: salvation by grace, one way for Jew and Gentile alike. But Luke does not write, “And after Peter spoke, no one dared to add anything.” He writes:

“All the multitude kept silent, and they were listening to Barnabas and Paul as they were relating what signs and wonders God had done among the Gentiles through them” (15:12).

So whatever “ended the debate” means, it cannot mean, “No one else testified. No additional voices mattered.” The very next thing that happens is that the floor is handed to Paul and Barnabas, and the church listens. In other words, the council is not treating Peter’s voice as exhaustively sufficient; it is treating him as one crucial witness in a chorus of apostolic witnesses to the same divine pattern.

Then James stands up. Our Catholic friend wants James to be merely the local administrator who rubber-stamps Peter’s doctrinal definition. But James himself does not talk that way. He begins by summarizing Peter (“Simeon has related…”), then immediately says,

“With this the words of the prophets agree, just as it is written” (15:15).

So the structure is:

Peter, Paul, and Barnabas say: “Here is what God has done.”
James says: “And here is how Scripture says this was always God’s plan.”

The doctrinal judgment rests finally on the harmony of event and Scripture. James does not say, “With this, the authority of Peter agrees, therefore case closed.” He says, in effect: the prophetic Word backs this up; Amos saw this coming.

Even more awkward for the Roman narrative is the way James phrases his proposal: “Therefore I judge…” (διὸ ἐγὼ κρίνω; 15:19). He is not correcting Peter; he is drawing an administrative and pastoral conclusion from the combined testimony of Peter, Paul, Barnabas, and the prophets. But the simple fact remains: if you are hunting for someone who frames the council’s “decision,” James is the one who takes that role in the text, not Peter.

Then there is the final decree. If Acts 15 were meant to be a template for papal ex cathedra pronouncements, you would expect something like: “Peter, servant of Christ and head of the universal Church, to the faithful in Antioch…” Instead we get:

“The apostles and the elders, brothers,
To the brothers in Antioch and Syria and Cilicia who are from the Gentiles, greetings” (15:23).

The subject of the decision is corporate: “the apostles and the elders, with the whole church” (15:22). The self-understanding is corporate: “it seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us” (15:28). Peter is neither sidelined nor enthroned. He is one of the leading apostolic voices, submitting alongside the others to the Spirit speaking in the Word.

So when a Catholic interlocutor insists that “Peter ended the debate,” the honest answer is: only if we redefine “ended the debate” to mean “spoke first among several witnesses whose testimony was weighed against Scripture in a collegial council that issued a joint decree.” At that point, “proto-papal infallibility” has become a very elastic concept indeed.

Acts 15 and the Strange Middle Category of Catholic Infallibility

Now, all of that is exegetical. It already undercuts the idea that Acts 15 gives us a neat blueprint of papal infallibility. But there is a deeper doctrinal problem lurking behind the Roman use of this chapter, and it shows up when you listen carefully to how Catholic theology tries to hold two commitments together:

Public revelation has ended. The canon is closed; there is no new inspired, apostolic revelation being given after the first century.
The Magisterium is infallible. Popes and councils can define new dogmas that are irreformable and universally binding on faith and morals, under the Spirit’s protection from error.

Those two claims don’t sit easily together. If God is no longer revealing Himself in a way that adds to the deposit of faith, then on what basis can later human statements be irreversibly and universally binding as to what must be believed?

Rome’s way of squaring the circle is to invent a middle category between ordinary human teaching and inspired Scripture. Call it “infallible but not inspired.” Catholic manuals will tell you: inspiration means God is the principal author of a text (Scripture); infallibility means God merely prevents error while the human author remains the real writer. So, when a pope or council speaks infallibly, God is not “breathing out” new revelation; He is simply guarding them from mistake.

On paper, the distinction is clear:

Inspiration: God writes it.
Infallibility: God stops you from being wrong while you write it.

In practice, though, if you have a statement that is:

guaranteed by God to be without error in faith and morals,
addressed to the whole Church as binding,
and incapable of later revision,

then functionally you have something that behaves a lot like new revelation, even if you carefully refuse to call it that.

This is where Acts 15 gets dragged into the argument. Our Catholic friends want to say: “Look, here is a council that speaks infallibly—‘it seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us’—but it’s not inspired Scripture. So you can have infallible, non-inspired teaching.” The Jerusalem decree, on this telling, becomes the paradigm for later councils and papal definitions.

But notice what has just happened. Acts 15 is now being used to prove not only that councils can be infallible, but that there exists this hybrid category of utterance: divinely protected from error, but not revelatory. The trouble is that Luke never invites us to make that move. He presents the decree as a faithful application of previously revealed truth—Amos 9, the Abrahamic promise, the gospel already preached and lived—not as a new layer of permanent dogma being stacked on top of the apostolic deposit.

In other words, the council’s authority is derivative and ministerial. It does not create truth; it recognizes and applies truth God has already made known. The “it seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us” is not a charter for ongoing, quasi-revelatory papal or conciliar pronouncements. It is a confession that the Spirit who acted in history and spoke in Scripture has now guided the church to see clearly what was there all along.

When Rome turns Acts 15 into a model for later infallible definitions, it is quietly switching categories. A one-off, inspired, apostolic-era council, directly guided by apostles who also wrote Scripture, gets turned into a warrant for post-apostolic institutions claiming irreformable doctrinal authority without inspiration. That is not exegesis. That is retrofitting.

Florence, the Jerusalem Decree, and the Elasticity of “Infallible”

Things get more tangled when you ask how Rome handles the content of the Jerusalem decree. The letter to the Gentile churches lays four obligations on them: abstain from things sacrificed to idols, from blood, from what is strangled, and from sexual immorality (Acts 15:29). If we treat the council as infallible, then those four items are, at least at that moment, non-negotiable requirements for Gentile believers.

Now watch what happens downstream in Catholic theology. The usual move is to classify three of these items as time-bound “disciplinary” provisions, aimed at easing table fellowship between Jewish and Gentile Christians, while treating the prohibition of sexual immorality as a permanent moral norm. That allows Roman theologians to say, “We’re not contradicting Acts 15; we’re simply recognizing that some of its provisions were temporary disciplines, not dogmas.”

But where, exactly, does the text of Acts 15 signal this neat division? Luke does not say, “These first three are merely transitional pastoral accommodations, but the fourth is an unchangeable moral absolute.” The four are presented as a unit, and the rationale James gives is rooted both in the prophets and in the fact that “Moses from ancient generations has in every city those who preach him” (15:21). The whole package is tied to the mixed Jew-Gentile environment and to the Noahic and Mosaic background, not sliced into “discipline versus dogma.”

This raises an awkward question. If Acts 15 is an instance of the Church speaking infallibly, then on what principled basis does a later council or magisterial consensus decide that part of its decree was temporary and no longer binding, while another part remains permanently obligatory? Who gave the later church the right to reclassify elements of an “infallible” apostolic council as now-optional?

Consider, for example, the prohibition of eating blood. That goes back to Genesis 9:4, prior to Sinai. It is reaffirmed in the Mosaic law. It is then reaffirmed again in Acts 15, decisively after the inauguration of the New Covenant. It is not obvious how you simply tuck that away into a “temporary discipline” category without at least entertaining the possibility that the earlier decree, if it intended to bind all Gentile Christians for all time, may have been mistaken—or that your later practice is out of step with it.

And that is precisely the problem for the Roman system. If you insist that:

Acts 15 is paradigmatically infallible;
and infallible decrees cannot be reversed;
and yet, over time, some parts of the decree are quietly treated as no longer binding,

then you have to resort to the language of “development.” You say things like, “The core doctrinal principle remains; only the disciplinary application has changed.” But unless the original text itself marked those distinctions, you are retroactively imposing them to protect the premise of irreformability.

At that point, the rhetoric of “infallibility” starts to feel very elastic. It begins to look like a self-protecting mechanism: the system must never admit that an earlier magisterial act was simply wrong, so it reclassifies the earlier content as disciplinary, local, provisional—anything but erroneous.

Acts 15 as a Witness to Scriptural, Not Papal, Authority

If we stop trying to make Acts 15 do Roman work and simply let it be what it is, it turns out to be a beautiful, and deeply Protestant, chapter.

The council faces a real doctrinal crisis: Are Gentiles saved by grace through faith alone, or must they submit to circumcision and the law of Moses to be saved? The stakes could not be higher. If the Judaizers win, Galatians is lost; the Reformation is strangled in its cradle.

How does the church respond?

They do not canvass the opinions of a single universal bishop.
They do not appeal to an abstract promise of indefectibility attached to one office.
They do not rest content with, “Peter has spoken; we need not look at anything else.”

Instead, they gather the apostles and elders. They listen to testimonies of what God has done. Then they open their Bibles. The turning point is not a naked institutional fiat; it is James saying, “With this the words of the prophets agree.” The authority that governs the council is the apostolic gospel revealed in Christ and attested in Scripture, not the bare fact of ecclesiastical office.

This is precisely what the Reformers meant by sola Scriptura. They did not mean “no church, no councils, no teachers, just me and my Bible under a tree.” They meant: the Church is real, its officers are real, its councils are real—but all of them are ministerial and fallible, standing under the judgment of the Word of God. Councils can err; popes can err; only Scripture, as the written apostolic norm, is the final, non-negotiable standard.

Acts 15 is a vivid case study in that principle. A council is called; arguments are heard; Scripture is consulted; a judgment is rendered that coheres with the apostolic gospel. That is not sola ecclesia. That is the Church standing under Scripture, led by the Spirit, recognizing what God has already revealed and done.

Why Acts 15 Cannot Bear the Roman Weight

So where does that leave us?

Exegetically, Acts 15 does not depict a pope defining dogma for the universal Church. It shows a conciliar, collegial process in which Peter, Paul, Barnabas, and James all contribute, and in which the decisive authority is the Word of God, not the office of a single man seated in Rome.

Theologically, the Catholic attempt to use Acts 15 as a prooftext for infallible-but-not-inspired dogmatic definitions only highlights the internal tension of the system. Once you grant that later human utterances can be irreformable, universal, and divinely protected from error, you have effectively reintroduced a form of ongoing revelation under another name. The middle category between Scripture and ordinary teaching becomes a kind of doctrinal no man’s land: not quite Bible, but functionally very close.

Historically, the way Rome handles the content of the Jerusalem decree—as partly temporary discipline, partly permanent moral norm—shows just how flexible “infallibility” has to become to avoid admitting any real contradictions. When earlier statements no longer fit later practice, they are reclassified, rather than corrected. That is not a mark of confidence in the clarity and sufficiency of the apostolic deposit; it is a symptom of a system that must constantly protect its own claims.

Acts 15, read plainly, is not Rome’s ally. It is a quiet but powerful witness against the whole edifice of papal supremacy and post-apostolic infallibility. It shows us a Church that listens to God’s acts in history, searches the Scriptures, and submits to the Spirit who speaks in the Word. In other words, it shows us the kind of Church that does not need a pope to be preserved in the truth—because it already has something far better: the finished, sufficient, unrepeatable revelation of the Lord Jesus Christ, once for all delivered to the saints.