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l...@bigfoot.com wrote:
> I am wondering if any of the Reformers addressed the issue of eating
> blood. I am especially interested in references in the writings of
> Luther or other very early German Reformers. I would also be
> interested in quotes from Calvin or other non-German Reformers.
>
> If anyone happens to know of any patristic references to this issue,
> please let me know. The only one I know of is a statement in
> Tertullian's Apology refuting the idea that Christians eat babies
> (something people had said previously about Jews), saying that
> Christians do not even eat the blood of innocent animals, much less
> babies.

Regino, the abbot of Prüm in what is now Germany, showed that the
Biblical prohibition of eating blood was still respected in his day. He
wrote: "The apostles' letter sent from Jerusalem advises that these
things must necessarily be observed. (Acts 15) Also [Christians must
abstain from eating] something caught by a beast, for that too is
likewise strangled; and from blood, that is, it must not be eaten with
blood."

"At the same time, this must also be considered: that a thing
strangled, and blood, are viewed in the same way as idolatry and
fornication. Wherefore, it should be proclaimed to all what a grievous
sin it is to eat blood, since it is placed together with idols and
fornication. If anyone shall violate these commands of the Lord and the
apostles, let him be suspended from the communion of the church until
he should appropriately repent."

Libri duo de ecclesiasticis disciplinis et religione Christiana (Two
Books Concerning the Ecclesiastical Teachings and the Christian
Religion), by Regino; see Migne's Patrologia Latina, Volume 132,
Paris, 1853, columns 354, 355.

17th-century theologian Étienne de Courcelles explains Acts 15:28, 29
in these words:

"The apostles did not intend here to transmit injunctions about
avoiding things from which nature would shrink back, and which were
prohibited by the laws of the Gentiles, but only about things which at
that time generally held sway, and in which the recently-converted
Gentiles would not have thought themselves sinning, unless admonished.
For just as it is granted that they knew that they must avoid every
form of idol worship, yet they did not immediately grasp that things
sacrificed to idols were to be shunned; in the same way, although they
would reckon it a crime to shed human blood, yet they did not think the
same about eating animal [blood]. The apostles, by their decree, wished
to remedy the ignorance of these persons; whereby relieving them of the
yoke of circumcision and other legal precepts, they nonetheless advised
that those things must be retained that were already observed from
antiquity by the foreigners remaining among the Israelites, [things]
such as were transmitted to