R. L. Solberg Versus Acts 15: Did the Apostles Really Reject the Torah?
Recently, R. L. Solberg published a teaching offering a reinterpretation of Acts 15.[1] Solberg is a popular YouTuber whose ministry is devoted entirely to trying to convince Christians that the Law of Moses no longer serves as an authoritative standard for Christian ethics.
Acts 15 is frequently subjected to antinomian reinterpretation because, as scholars widely recognize, it clearly demonstrates that the Apostles expected Gentile believers to obey certain commandments found in the Law of Moses. As Dr. William H. Willimon observes, “Nowhere does Luke suggest that Jesus abrogates the Torah. Even gentiles are to keep that part of the Torah which applies to them as non-Jews.”[2] Likewise, Dr. Bill T. Arnold writes that “it certainly can no longer be asserted…that Acts 15 is an example of the early church placing aside the Mosaic law” and that “the Jerusalem Council was turning to the Torah as a definitive and irreplaceable authority, and seeking in its pages guidance on how it relates to the Gentile believers”[3] Finally, Dr. Richard M. Davidson concludes that “the Jerusalem Council undoubtedly concluded that the practices forbidden to the uncircumcised stranger or alien in Leviticus 17; 18 were what should be prohibited to uncircumcised Gentile Christians. What was required of the Gentile ‘strangers’ in the OT was still required of them in the NT.”[4]
I plan to do a full response to Solberg’s video eventually, but since the subject is fresh in my mind from watching his video yesterday, I wanted to put together this brief article highlighting several of his claims that are contradicted by the text.
Solberg: “This chapter so clearly teaches that the Law of Moses is not binding on followers of Jesus.”
The text: This chapter clearly teaches that the Apostles believed the Law of Moses remained in effect. For one, the Apostles’ decree explicitly imposes four commandments from the Law of Moses upon Gentile believers (Acts 15:20, 29; cf. 21:5). How can the Apostles be rejecting the Torah while simultaneously requiring Gentile believers to obey it?
Solberg: “The Pharisees were right” that Gentiles could not keep Torah without first getting circumcised.
The text: The Apostles were right and the Pharisees were wrong. Uncircumcised Gentiles can keep Torah without being circumcised, which is why the Apostles go on to require uncircumcised Gentiles to keep certain commandments from the Torah. This fact is clear from the Torah itself, which gives many commandments to uncircumcised Gentiles who sojourn with Israel, and from other passages in Paul’s letters in which he requires Gentile believers to obey various commandments from the Law of Moses (e.g., Eph 6:1–3; Rom 13:8–10).
Solberg: Three of the four commandments of the Apostolic Decree are not binding on followers of Jesus.
The text: All four commandments of the Apostolic Decree are binding on followers of Jesus. The text explicitly requires Gentile believers to obey all four commandments (Acts 15:20, 29; cf. 21:5). This agrees with the view widely held among the early Christians for the first several centuries (Didache 6:3; Tertullian, Apology 9:13; Apostolic Constitutions 6:12; Socrates Scholasticus, Church History 5:22; Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lecture 4:28; 17:29).
Solberg: “The prohibitions against eating blood and meat from strangled animals aren’t spoken of anywhere else.”
The text: These commandments are, in fact, spoken of again in Acts 21:25, several years after the Jerusalem Council. James applies these commandments to “the Gentiles who have believed,” indicating that he regarded them as binding upon every Gentile believer.
Again, this agrees with the view widely held among early Christians. Tertullian wrote that Christians “have not even the blood of animals at their meals” and that they “abstain from things strangled” and that they consider transgressing these rules to be “unlawful” (Tertullian, Apology 9:13). Cyril of Jerusalem calls the Apostlic Decree “universal from the Holy Ghost” (Catechetical Lecture 17:29) and condemns those who “lap up blood” and “devour things strangled” (Catechetical Lecture 4:28).
Solberg: “When Paul does talk about food sacrificed to idols, he says it’s not intrinsically sinful or prohibited.”
The text: If Solberg’s view were true, then Paul would be at odds with Jesus himself, who explicitly condemns eating food offered to idols (Rev 2:14, 20). In reality, Paul agrees with Jesus and the other Apostles that believers must abstain from things polluted by idols. He teaches that eating such food in an idol’s temple constitutes fellowship with demons and provokes the Lord to jealousy (1 Cor 10:14–22).
That seems pretty sinful.
Solberg’s confusion appears to arise from Paul’s distinction between knowingly participating in idolatrous worship and purchasing food from the marketplace for ordinary consumption, where the food may or may not have been previously associated with an idol. In the latter situation, Paul permits believers to eat whatever is sold in the marketplace, provided that they receive it with thanksgiving and do not cause a fellow believer to stumble (1 Cor 8:1–3, 7–13; 10:25–26, 30). Thus, Paul distinguishes between “food polluted by idols” with food or objects that may have some indirect association with idols. From Paul’s perspective, marketplace food is not the same as food polluted by idols. But the text is clear that he certainly regards eating food offered to idols as sinful. He explicitly teaches that eating and drinking in an idol’s temple makes a person a “participant with demons,” insisting that believers cannot partake of the Lord’s table while also partaking of the table of demons (1 Cor 10:20–22).
Solberg: There was no expectation for Gentile believers to grow in obedience to the Law of Moses beyond the four prohibitions of the Apostolic Decree.
The text: Acts 15:21 suggests that Gentile believers would hear the Law of Moses proclaimed in the synagogue each Sabbath and thereby continue learning its commandments. This interpretation agrees with the views of several modern scholars[5] and with the early medieval exegete Bede.[6]
Moreover, the four commandments themselves imply a broader scope of observance. The clearest example is the command to abstain from “sexual immorality” (πορνεία). This term functions as a general category encompassing the many specific commandments detailed in Leviticus 18 and 20. Abstaining from sexual immorality therefore entails obeying the Torah’s prohibitions against such practices as homosexual acts, adultery, incest, sexual relations during menstruation, and so forth. To understand what this command required, Gentile believers necessarily had to consult the Law of Moses and its definition of impermissible sexual conduct. As Dr. Arnold writes, “In a concrete way, the Apostles were relying on the sexual purity laws of Leviticus 18 to articulate a minimum sexual ethic.… The foundation of the new Christian ethic for Gentiles was, in fact, Mosaic Torah.”[7]
Finally, anyone familiar with the New Testament recognizes that these four commandments were not the only commandments the Apostles expected Gentiles to obey. For instance, in Ephesians 6:1–3, Paul explicitly instructs his readers, including Gentile believers, to obey the Fifth Commandment, which he quotes directly. Likewise, in Romans 13:8–10, he commands believers to “fulfill the law,” citing Leviticus 19:18—“love your neighbor as yourself”—along with four of the Ten Commandments. He then adds “and any other commandment,” clearly indicating that he expected them to obey more than the commandments he specifically listed.[8]
Solberg: The early Christians did not meet in synagogues to learn from the Torah.
The text: The early Christians met in synagogues (Acts 9:20; 13:5, 14–16, 26, 43–44, 48; 14:1; 17:1–4; 10, 17; 18:4, 19, 26; 19:8), where the Law of Moses was regularly proclaimed (Acts 13:14–15, 27). In his own epistle, James presents the synagogue as the customary gathering place for his readers (James 2:2, “assembly” = συναγωγή). As Dr. A. Boyd Luter writes, “[T]he members of James’s audience in the Diaspora (1:1) almost surely were involved in either traditional Jewish synagogues or newly organized messianic synagogues.”[9]
Solberg’s video raises many other concerns, but these were among the issues that stood out to me as I watched it yesterday. If we are to be faithful students of the Scriptures, we must allow our theology to be shaped by the Apostles’ teachings as presented in the text rather than twisting the text to fit our preferred conclusions.
[1] R. L. Solberg, "Acts 15 in Context: Testing 119 Ministries," YouTube, July 23, 2026.
[2] William H. Willimon, Acts, IBC (Atlanta, GA: John Knox Press, 1988), 131.
[3] Bill T. Arnold, "Lessons of the Jerusalem Council for the Church’s Debate over Sexuality," The Asbury Journal 69 (2014): 75–76.
[4] Richard M. Davidson, "Dealing with Doctrinal Issues in the Church: Part 2," Ministry: International Journal for Pastors 85 (2013): 23.
[5] See, e.g., Eyal Regev, “The Gradual Conversion of Gentiles in Acts and Luke’s Paradox of the Gentile Mission,” in Law and Narrative in the Bible and in Neighbouring Ancient Cultures, ed. F. Avemarie and K. P. Adams (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012), 349–371; Benjamin G. Frostad, "He Made No Distinction: Gentiles and the Role of Torah in Acts 15" (MA Thesis, Briercrest Seminary, 2021); Ariel Berkowitz, Torah Rediscovered, 5th ed. (Shoreshim Publishing, 2012); Douglas Hamp, "Acts 15 Gives Four Torah Commands—Then Tells Them to Learn the Rest," YouTube, July 24, 2026; Benjamin Szumskyj, "The Role of the Law in the Sanctification of the Believer Today: A Brief Introduction to Pronomianism" (Ph.D. diss., Liberty University, 2024); G. Scott McKenzie, "Pronomian Paradigm: A Pro-Torah, Christocentric Method of Theology and Apologetics" (Ph.D. diss., Liberty University, 2024); Tim Hegg, "Acts 15 and the Jerusalem Council Did they conclude the Torah was not for Gentiles?" TorahResource (2008): 1–14; Barney Kasdan, Acts of the Emissaries: The Early History of the Yeshua Movement (Clarksville, MD: Lederer Books, 2022), 115. Brian L. Allen, “Removing an Arrow from the Supersessionist Quiver: A Post-Supersessionist Reading of Colossians 2:16–17,” JSPL 8 (2018): 134.
[6] Bede writes regarding Acts 15:21, "Although they are not now weighed down by us with the full rigor of the precepts, nevertheless, as time goes on, in coming together very often for the reading of the law and the prophets, little by little they will receive the principles of life and the rules requiring the keeping of mutual love. For it is very certain that the primitive church, still practicing Jewish ways, continued to use these [readings] in their sabbath celebrations." (Commentary on the Acts of the Apostles 15.21, Francis Martin, ed., Acts, ACCS 5 [Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2006], 187–188)
[7] Arnold, "Lessons of the Jerusalem Council," 76.
[8] See Paul T. Sloan: "He explicitly requires that believing gentiles fulfill the Law (Rom. 13:8, 10), referring to actions of Spirit-led obedience whereby they keep Leviticus's requirement 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself' (13:9). And he refers to such love as an obligation (13:8), whose performance entails the implicit keeping of 'any other commandment' of the Law (13:9)" (Jesus and the Law of Moses: The Gospels and the Restoration of Israel within First-Century Judaism [Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2025], 226–227.
[9] A. Boyd Luter, The Epistle of James Within Judaism: The Earliest First-Century Window into Messianic Jewish Belief and Practice (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2024), 102
About David Wilber
David Wilber is an author, Bible teacher, and CEO of Pronomian Publishing LLC. He has written several books and numerous theological articles, with his work appearing in outlets such as the Christian Post and the Journal of Biblical Theology. David has spoken at churches and conferences across the nation and has served as a researcher and Bible teacher for a number of Messianic and Christian ministries…
