Come and study Holy Scripture with us as Father Stephen DeYoung teaches verse by verse on the podcast, The Whole Council of God.

Father Stephen is a former Protestant pastor and Bible teacher in the reform tradition,

but now an Orthodox priest serving at Archangel Gabriel Orthodox Church in Lafayette, Louisiana.

Okay, we'll go ahead and get started.

I'm going to get started here.

In just a moment, we'll be picking up in Acts Chapter 15.

As always, by the time anyone is hearing this recording,

the recording of the first Bible study on the Acts of the Apostles will be also

available to listen to, so you can go back and listen to the introduction to the book,

to get us caught up to sort of where we are now.

Last time at the end of Chapter 14, Saints Paul and Barnabas concluded their sort of first missionary journey.

They had been sent out from Antioch, and they went through portions of Asia Minor and then returned.

They also went through the other Antioch because, as we mentioned, there's more than one.

There's Antioch and Pisidia, there's more than one. There's Antioch and

Pasadioch, which was another place that they visited in addition to Antioch and Syria. And they had

returned at the end of the chapter to Antioch. We've seen already both in Antioch and in this

missionary journey that there's already coming to be some

strife between the early Christian communities and the local Jewish communities.

This was not, of course, St. Paul's intent.

His intent was not to create another separate group. His intent and his hope was that he

would go into the synagogues and proclaim that Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah and all of the

people of those synagogues would come to accept Jesus as the Messiah. But as we saw, some did and some did not.

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