<p>15:5 <i>But there rose up certain of the sect of the Pharisees who believed, saying: It is needful to circumcise them, and to charge them to keep the law of Moses</i>- One of the major themes of Acts is how right from the beginning, there was a struggle within the body of believers. And Paul&rsquo;s letters repeatedly address the problem. The Jewish believers polarised around the Jerusalem ecclesia, and tended towards a keeping of the Law of Moses. They couldn&rsquo;t really accept that Gentiles could be saved, and saw themselves as a sect of Judaism (&ldquo;the sect of the Nazarenes&rdquo;). They were called &ldquo;the circumcision party&rdquo; (Acts 11:2), and &ldquo;the sect of the Pharisees-who-believe-in-Jesus&rdquo; (15:5). The Lord had foretold that His true people would soon be thrown out of the synagogues and persecuted by the Jews, just as they had persecuted Him. But these brethren so accommodated themselves to Jewish thinking that this didn&rsquo;t happen. However we cannot but be impressed that some amongst the Lord's sworn enemies, the Pharisees, came to believe in Him. His hopefulness for them therefore paid off we recall his hope that the cured leper could make a witness to the priests, Lk. 5:14; whereas we would likely have given up with them as hopeless cases. There were very few Pharisees, relatively speaking; 5000 at the most and maybe as few as 1000. That a significant number became Christians therefore shows the power of the Lord's example, and reflects quite some humility amongst these men. So let's not think that their legalism about circumcision reflects total unspirituality amongst them.</p><p>Ironically, the Greek word for &lsquo;heresy&rsquo; is the very word used to describe those divisions&nbsp; / &lsquo;sects&rsquo; which should not be amongst us (see its usage in Acts 15:5; 24:5). To divide the Lord&rsquo;s body is itself a heresy; and yet it is so often done in order to protect His body, supposedly, from heresy. Yet the difference between the heresy and the heretic is often fudged. The person gets attacked rather than their beliefs. So often we&rsquo;ve seen this happened. A brother may, e.g., have views of the interpretation of prophecy which are found obnoxious by some. Yet the criticism of him will tend to get personal; his character is besmirched, because it&rsquo;s felt that this is justified because he supposedly has &lsquo;heretical&rsquo; views.</p><p>Pharisees, Sadducees and Essenes (John the Baptist&rsquo;s followers) were all converted into Christianity (Acts 6:7; 15:5; 19:1-5). There is no specific statement that they dropped all their previous understandings; indeed Acts 15:5 shows that there were Christians who still called themselves &ldquo;Pharisees&rdquo;. The uniting and defining feature was their common acceptance of Jesus as Messiah, baptism into Him and commitment to Him. The &ldquo;one faith&rdquo; referred to the believers&rsquo; faith in one and the same person- the one Lord, Jesus (Eph. 4:4-6), rather than only one set of doctrinal propositions about Jesus being &ldquo;the faith&rdquo; and all else being apostate. Given the breadth of doctrinal belief within the synagogue system, it&rsquo;s highly significant that the Lord assumed His followers would remain within that system until they were cast out. He established no principle of leaving a community because one disagrees with some of their theological tenets. He in fact taught the opposite; that there is no guilt by association by such things, and His emphasis was on the heart and human behaviour being transformed. &nbsp;It seems to me a romanticizing of the New Testament evidence to suggest that the early church was totally doctrinally united, but was soon fractured by doctrinal declension from a specific set of doctrines and interpretations which were set in stone by the apostles. Rather the amazing unity of the church was and is remarkable in that it was achieved <em>despite and in the face of </em>those differences. What split the church was fleshly behaviour, which in turn utilized doctrinal differences to justify the various divisions.</p>