Acts 15:15

To this agree. That is, to this action on God’s part the OT prophets agree. They had looked forward to the conversion of the Gentiles, which now was taking place.

As it is written. The quotation in vs. 16, 17 is from the LXX of Amos 9:11, 12. The audience, familiar with the OT Scriptures, might recall other like prophecies, as Paul did in Rom. 15:9-12. The fact that James’s quotation is from the LXX, and that the LXX of this passage clinches his argument more strongly than does the alternative reading of the Masoretic text, has raised the question as to whether the council was conducted in Greek. In favor of the idea that it was, is the fact that many Jews, even in Palestine, were bilingual, and that the question at issue here was one that centered about Greek-speaking Christians. Christians from Antioch were present (see Acts 15:2) who may or may not have known Aramaic, and Titus, and uncircumcised Gentile (see Gal. 2:3), who probably did not understand Aramaic, no doubt also was there. For the sake of these, Greek would have been an appropriate language to use.

However, there are good reasons to suppose that James made his speech in Aramaic, probably quoting Scripture in the closely related Hebrew language. James stands, both in the NT and in early Christian literature, as the leader of Jewish Christianity. The issue in question was essentially a Jewish one, and had been raised by the most Jewish of Christian Jews, the Pharisees. In view of this it would seem reasonable to expect that a discussion among the apostles in Jerusalem at this time would probably have been carried on in Aramaic. This does not mean, however, that Luke is in error in quoting the LXX, the Bible version familiar to his Greek readers. The Hebrew of Amos 9:11, 12, as it is in the Masoretic text, would not be inappropriate to his argument, and if he did not use that, he may have quoted from a form of the Hebrew text that was more closely related to the LXX than is the Masoretic. Discoveries at Qumran have shown that such texts existed for at least parts of the OT (see Vol. V, p. 93).