Ancient church councils (pre-ecumenical)

Church councils are formal meetings of bishops and representatives of several churches who are brought together to regulate points of doctrine or discipline. The meetings may be of a single ecclesiastical community or may involve an ecclesiastical province, a nation or other civil region, or the whole Church. Some of those convoked from the Church as a whole have been recognized as ecumenical councils and are considered particularly authoritative. The first ecumenical council is that of Nicaea, called by the Emperor Constantine in 325.

Pre-ecumenical councils, those earlier than AD 325, were mostly local or provincial. Some, held in the second half of the 3rd century, involved more than one province. The sui generis Council of Jerusalem was a meeting, described in the Bible in Acts 15 and possibly in Galatians 2, of the apostles and elders of the local Church in Jerusalem.

In spite of lacking the authority of the decisions of ecumenical councils, the teachings and decrees of these pre-ecumenical councils are sometimes considered to be binding on the faithful in varying degrees, in particular certain councils held in Carthage and Elvira. But even the Council of Jerusalem's decisions, known as the Apostolic Decree, in particular the obligation to abstain from eating blood or what has been strangled, are not accepted by all Christian churches.

The Acts of the Apostles records, without using for it the term "council" or "synod", what has been called the Council of Jerusalem: to respond to a consultation by Paul of Tarsus, the apostles and elders of the Church in Jerusalem met to address the question of observance of biblical law in the early Christian community, which included Gentile converts. This is the only such meeting recorded in the New Testament, and may be referred to also in the Epistle to the Galatians. This meeting of the Church in Jerusalem was not a gathering of representatives coming from all areas, like an ecumenical council. It is called the Apostolic Council, because of the participation in it of the apostles. This gives it a character different from the normal pre-ecumenical church councils. It took place around the year 50.

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