But some men came down from Judea and were teaching the brethren, "Unless you are circumcised according to the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved." And when Paul and Barnabas had no small dissension and debate with them, Paul and Barnabas and some of the others were appointed to go up to Jerusalem to the apostles and the elders about this question. So, being sent on their way by the church, they passed through both Phoenicia and Samaria, reporting the conversion of the Gentiles, and they gave great joy to all the brethren. When they came to Jerusalem, they were welcomed by the church and the apostles and the elders, and they declared all that God had done with them. But some believers who belonged to the party of the Pharisees rose up, and said, "It is necessary to circumcise them, and to charge them to keep the law of Moses."
Then it seemed good to the apostles and the elders, with the whole church, to choose men from among them and send them to Antioch with Paul and Barnabas. They sent Judas called Barsabbas, and Silas, leading men among the brethren, with the following letter: "The brethren, both the apostles and the elders, to the brethren who are of the Gentiles in Antioch and Syria and Cilicia, greeting. Since we have heard that some persons from us have troubled you with words, unsettling your minds, although we gave them no instructions, it has seemed good to us in assembly to choose men and send them to you with our beloved Barnabas and Paul, men who have risked their lives for the sake of our Lord Jesus Christ. We have therefore sent Judas and Silas, who themselves will tell you the same things by word of mouth. For it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay upon you no greater burden than these necessary things: that you abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols and from blood and from what is strangled and from unchastity. If you keep yourselves from these, you will do well. Farewell."
Now, some people who came from Judea were teaching the brothers that "Unless you are circumcised according to the custom of Moshe, you cannot be saved." There came to be unrest, and not a few disputes with Paul and bar-Nevua' against them; they arranged for Paul and bar-Nevua' and some others from among them to go up to the emissaries and elders in Jerusalem about this question.
Then it seemed good to the emissaries and the elders, with the whole assembly, to select men from among them to send to Antioch with Paul and bar-Nevua', Judah called bar-Tzaba and Silas, leading men among the brothers, having written by hand as follows:
"The emissaries and elder brothers, to the brothers from Antioch, Syria, and Cilicia who are of the nations: Hail.
"Since we have heard that some of us went out and troubled you with words that unsettled your lives, which we did not admonish them to, it seemed good to us, having reached unanimity, to select men and send them to you along with our beloved bar-Nevua' and Paul, people who have put their lives at stake for the name of our Lord Jesus the Anointed. So we have commissioned Judah and Silas, announcing these things to them by word. For it seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to put no further weight on you than these necessities -- stay away from things offered to idols, blood, and what has been strangled, and from sexual sin; if you guard yourselves carefully against these things, you will do well.
a. of the party of the Pharisees/from the sect of the Pharisees | τῆς αἱρέσεως τῶν Φαρισαίων [tēs haireseōs tōn Farisaiōn]: The linguistic matter I want to highlight here is in the Greek rather than the English; it lies in the word αἱρέσεως (whose dictionary form is αἵρεσις [hairesis]). But its most famous descendant is the term "heresy."
Dan Brown would have us believe that αἵρεσις comes from αἱρέω [haireō], meaning "to choose," and that "heresy" was originally a slur thrown by Catholics at people who chose how to think, instead of following the Catholic Magisterium blindly. Dan Brown is incorrect -- or rather, he's right that αἵρεσις comes from αἱρέω (which has several senses besides "to choose"). But subscribing to Christian orthodoxy is just as much a decision as subscribing to anything else; and in any case it's unclear to me why we should be prejudiced in favor of people choosing what their religious beliefs are, as if "choice" were an admirable phenomenon in itself rather than "a description of most of the things human beings do while awake."
The genuinely relevant fact is that αἱρέσεις [haireseis] was a standard term for "parties" of various sorts, especially in the religious and philosophical worlds. In the first century , secular philosophy fell into four chief αἱρέσεις: i) the Epicureans, who really were not hedonistic -- more like Buddhists in Græco-Roman dress; ii) the Middle Platonists, who were eclectic, religiously-inclined thinkers who rejected the skepticism that once dominated the Academy; iii) the Pyrrhonists, a distinct variety of skepticism; and iv) the Stoics, by far the largest group and the most widely respected of the four.
Templar Judaism also fell into four principal theological factions at the time, although this was just happenstance -- its four have nothing to do with the αἱρέσεις of pagan philosophy. They were the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the Essenes, and the Hellenists. (You may have been expecting the Zealots here, but these were more of a political party than a doctrinal or halakhic one.)
The Pharisees were the doctrinal ancestors of rabbinic Judaism; they formed the largest group and had sub-movements among themselves. The Sadducees were an aristocratic, comparatively skeptical party drawn almost exclusively from the priesthood, recognizing a far narrower Biblical canon than the Pharisees -- which they could well afford to do, since they were concerned with the Temple and not the synagogue. Only these two sects were present on the Sanhedrin, the supreme religious court. I don't know if a rule existed against admitting Essenes onto the Sanhedrin, but there probably didn't need to be: They considered the temple system hopelessly corrupt, mostly led ascetic lives at the fringes of Jewish society, and were in any case not numerous.
As for the Hellenists, these were primarily a cultural rather than a theological grouping; they were the Jews of the Mediterranean diaspora, whose mother-tongue was Greek rather than Aramaic, and whose Bible was the famous Septuagint. Most would, in all likelihood, have resembled the Pharisees more than the Sadducees or Essenes. But, besides cultural differences, they probably showed a greater and more direct Platonic influence on their faith; certainly we see this in Philo of Alexandria, one of the best-known Hellenist Jews.
This analogy is very imperfect, and must be read only with that precaution in mind. But I think the reader will perhaps get a decent picture of these sects if they imagine first-century Palestine as a little like Georgian Britain. The Church of England will do for our Pharisaic analogue, as the mainstream religious body. There are also a certain number of deists (or even, gasp, atheists) among the aristocracy, à la the Sadducees. Here and there one finds recusant Catholic families, hidden away like Essenes with their old-fashioned, weird practices and ideas; and finally, to stand in for the Hellenists, there are members of the Church of England from the North American colonies. They are Anglicans in good standing, sure; but they exhibit perspectives and opinions, and a certain manner, that -- while licit in theory, maybe -- would eventually lead someone saying something like, "She just wouldn't do as the wife of the future Bishop of Lichfield."
b. James/Jacob | Ἰάκωβος [Iakōbos]: The Bible is less full of Jameses/Jacobs than of Maries/Miriams, but it has its share. This is James the son of Alphæus, the one known as "St. James the Less"; this probably means he was the younger of the two Jameses among the Twelve, but possibly that he was the shorter. (St. James the Greater, James bar-Zebedee, had already been martyred -- see Acts 12.) St. James the Less is also traditionally, though not unanimously, identified with all of the following:
The expression "brother of the Lord" poses us a puzzle, given the doctrine that the Mother of God a virgin not only when she gave birth to Jesus, but perpetually. "Brothers of the Lord" is therefore interpreted by most Catholic and Orthodox commentators as an allusion to cousins. Aramaic and Hebrew lack a distinct term for "cousin"; Greek does have one, ἀνεψιός [anepsios], but the term can also mean "nephew," and in any case, ἀνεψιός would not be a natural translation of אֲחָא ['àḥâ'], "brother," the Aramaic word presumably used by, e.g., the Nazarene villagers from Mark 6:3. There are also a minority of Catholic and Orthodox scholars who interpret Jesus' siblings as stepsiblings -- children of St. Joseph from a prior marriage.
I'm slightly more inclined to take the former interpretation than the latter. If they were Jesus' stepfamily, then St. James the Less et al. would have been older than Jesus; however, James is not supposed to have been martyred until 62 (or in some versions, 69), which would put him in his seventies or eighties at the time of his death. Obviously this is perfectly possible, but it would be uncommon -- median life expectancy for those who lived through infancy was somewhere around the mid-sixties -- so it seems a little more natural to think these siblings were younger than Jesus, which would likely make James likely somewhere in his fifties at his death. Hence, if we're accepting the tradition that the Theotokos was perpetually virgin (and we are), the "cousins" explanation is the most economical.
As to how they were related more precisely, one widespread theory here is that Mary the Mother of God and Mary the wife of Clopas were sisters. It may sound ludicrous to suggest that two sisters would have the same name, but this was actually not at all uncommon in the ancient world; distinction, when necessary, would be made by nicknames, not infrequently based on birth order. (In Rome, whose naming conventions were in this respect similar, a household of e.g. the Flavian family that had four daughters would have been perfectly capable of naming all four "Flavia" and addressing them as "Prima," "Secunda," "Tertia," and "Quarta" without anybody batting an eye.)
Finally, St. James the Less is probably the only James who could have referred to himself simply as "James," without specification, and be recognizable to Christians elsewhere who did not personally know him. This in turn makes him the most plausible candidate for the authorship of the epistle, unless it is pseudepigraphical -- or, in English, forged.
That James is in fact a forgery is a prominent theory, to be fair. However, it's not an idea I find persuasive. The arguments against its authenticity include such keen observations as "His Greek is pretty good," clearly an impossible feat for a Jew who had spent his entire life in multi-lingual Palestine -- specifically, the northern bit, which literally had the epithet "of the Gentiles." Or that classic of entirely too much New Testament scholarly conjecture, the what-is-even-your-point-here argument, "He borrowed from I Peter, maybe." The reason this tells against the letter's authenticity in the first place is ... what? Seriously, why is this an argument? Are we supposed to think the apostles were each concerned to maintain the originality of their "brand"? Though, if we do accept it, it becomes really formidable: The borrowing couldn't go the other way, you see, because [file not found]. And obviously James (who was from the Galilee) wouldn't have had any turns of phrase in common with Peter (who by contrast was from the Galilee) inherited from any third source. Not after knowing each other for decades because they had both devoted themselves to, and been trained by, the same rabbi at the same time.
c. from the pollutions of idols and from unchastity and from what is strangled and from blood/from the pollutions of idols, and from sexual sin, and from the strangled and blood | τῶν ἀλισγημάτων τῶν εἰδώλων καὶ τῆς πορνείας καὶ τοῦ πνικτοῦ καὶ τοῦ αἵματος [tōn alisgēmatōn tōn eidōlōn kai tēs porneias kai tou pniktou kai tou haimatos]: The context suggests that these are specifically ritual provisions, designed to promote harmony between Gentile and Jewish Christians without laying an excessive burden on the former. This explains the first two rules, which one would otherwise think would go without saying among Christians whether Gentile or Jewish; "the pollutions of idols" most likely means the meat of animals sacrificed to idols.
The mention of "the strangled" is probably an extension of the forbidding to eat blood (since an animal killed by strangling would still have the blood in it), whose source lies in Leviticus 17:10-14; note than the next two verses of Leviticus, possibly building on those five, penalize anyone who eats carrion or animals that have died naturally with ritual impurity.
Partly for this reason, the term πορνεία -- which literally means "whoring, prostitution," deriving from πόρνη [pornē], "sex worker, prostitute" -- most likely means incest in this context. More specifically, it likely indicates incest as defined by the very next chapter of Leviticus; some translations simply render the term as "unlawful marriage" here. Again, it would go without saying among Christians that they must not practice things like adultery, polygamy (which was in any case illegal under Roman law), concubinage, etc. However, the Roman definition of incest was more permissive than that of Jewish culture, and the Greek definition was more relaxed still -- Leviticus 18 contains at least ten prohibitions, mostly pertaining to incestuous marriages, that were stricter than those observed by first-century Greeks. (If you were wondering, yes, this probably does explain why some kind of something was going on in Corinth. Although, to be fair to the rest of the Greeks, Corinth had a seedy reputation with the rest of the Empire; a slang term for seeing a prostitute was κορινθιάζομαι [korinthiazomai] or "to Corinthianize"!)
d. synagogues | συναγωγαῖς [sünagōgais]: I've departed slightly from my usually-preferred hyper-literalism in this word. The literal meaning is "gatherings" or (by extension) "gathering-places, gathering-houses." I'm not clear at what point this became the typical Greek term for synagogues. (The Hebrew term קָהָל [qâhâl] or "community" was also used, not only in the Holy Land but in the Diaspora; the Romaniyot and Ladino languages, which are to Greek and Spanish roughly as Yiddish is to German, derived the term kal "synagogue" from this, a word I gather is still used by Romaniotes and at least some Sephardis.) The Greek term was borrowed into Latin, synagōga. This suggests that the Romans became familiar with Jewish houses of worship -- familiar enough to perceive that they needed a specialized word, as a distinct kind of thing from temples -- either once some Jews were already in the habit of calling these places συναγωγαῖ, or once the Greeks had already begun to use the word with the specific sense "synagogue."
e. Cilicia | Κιλικίαν [Kilikian]: Cilicia is the area colored red in the map below (off-white is the Roman Empire ca. 106; most of the borders are as near as makes no difference).As it happens, Tarsus, St. Paul's hometown, is in Cilicia. (Centuries later, during the High Middle Ages, there was an Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia, founded by refugees who had fled the Caucasus when the Seljuq Turks invaded.)
f. greeting/hail | χαίρειν [chairein] ... Farewell | ἔρρωσθε [errōsthe]: My use of the archaic hail here is not only or even primarily a nod to the Hail Mary. Ancient salutations, whether at the beginning or end of an encounter (be it in person or by letter), were often some form of "in good health": conventionally, an imperative form. The Latin salutations salvē and valē, pls. salvēte and valēte, from verbs meaning "to be healthy" and "to be strong," are a typical pair. Technically, Greek did differ slightly (the verb χαίρω [chairō], of which χαίρειν is the infinitive, means "to be glad"), but not very much and not importantly. Likewise, the English hail (the greeting, not the precipitation -- that's just a homophone) meant "Be well," showing its kinship with its surviving cousins whole and hale. The closing salutation ἔρρωσθε, a rather un-transparent form of the verb ῥώννυμι [rhōnnümi], aligns better with the common pattern, pretty much literally meaning "fare well."
g. risked their lives/put their lives at stake | παραδεδωκόσι τὰς ψυχὰς αὐτῶν [paradedōkosi tas püschas autōn]: We meet again, παραδίδωμι [paradidōmi]. This is one of those words that is just too useful to mean one thing, and so comes rapidly to mean half a dozen unrelated, frequently incompatible things. Its basic meaning is "to hand over," which even in English can cover things as unlike each other as the second action of I Corinthians 11:23 and the second (anticipated) action of Matthew 26:15. The wordplay it introduces into many passages, although I find said wordplay entertaining and sometimes illuminating, is therefore likely accidental most of the time.