Paul then moves to a time which we understand to be fourteen years after his conversion, although it is possible to read 2: I as meaning fourteen years after he first met Peter (1: 18); it is not entirely clear. During this period of fourteen years he had preached to the Gentiles in Asia Minor and Cyprus, according to Acts 13 and 14. 2: 1 tells us that he returned to Jerusalem, in the company of Barnabas and also Titus, a Greek Christian. Controversy was obviously developing over the issue of whether the Gentiles must follow the Jewish Law to become Christians, 2:3-5. Paul's slightly strange references to the Jerusalem apostles in 2 :6-9 indicates that he was not on familiar terms with them although he had previously met Peter and James. The discussion that ensued between Paul, James, Peter and John was friendly (2:9). The Jerusalem apostles agreed that Paul had been given the task by God of preaching to the Gentiles, in the same way that Peter had been given the task of preaching to the Jews (2:8). The Jerusalem apostles had no new suggestions to make to Paul about the work among the Gentiles (2:6) and accepted what Paul was doing in not telling the Gentiles to accept the Jewish Law when they became Christians. They all shook hands with one another as a sign of their full agreement that they were partners in God's work. The only request that the Jerusalem apostles made to Paul was that the poor Christians of Judaea might receive some help from Christians in other churches. Acts 11:27-30 refers to widespread famine during the reign of the Roman emperor Claudius; the Judaean Christians may have been badly affected by food shortages.

Scholars have asked what the relationship was between this important but small meeting described by Paul in Galatians 2: 1-10 and the Church meeting described in Acts 15. Obviously, Paul's account is firsthand evidence of a meeting at which agreement was reached on a vital issue and nowhere in Paul's letters is there any reference to any further meeting on the same matter. Two suggestions are made about the relationship of the two meetings. It is possible that in Galatians and Acts we have two accounts of one meeting, despite the differences in .the account in Acts, which can be accounted for to a considerable extent as the reporting of someone who was not there himself but had to depend on what others had told him. There are clearly points in common between the two accounts; the same leaders take part in discussing the same issue and reach, more or less, the same conclusions. If we put aside the idea of a great Church council, like those of later times which hammered out Church doctrines, the reference in Acts 15:6 to apostles and elders need not refer to a very large group. Paul's own account need not mean that only the three Jerusalem apostles he named were present in the discussion. So the suggestion that Paul and Luke both refer to one and the same meeting, at which the issue of the Gentiles and the Jewish Law was decided, can be reasonably supported. The other suggestion, preferred by some scholars, is that the meeting Paul describes in Galatians took place during a visit which he made to Jerusalem for the purpose of taking money to help the Judaean churches; such a visit is described in Acts 11:30. In this suggestion, the meeting described in Acts 15 followed the earlier small meeting.

In the end, it is not very important which suggestion we decide to follow; what is important is that agreement was reached by the leaders of the Church on a matter which led irrevocably to the separation of the Church from Judaism. A Church controlled by Judaism could not have become a universal Church.