1 Corinthians 10:25
1 Corinthians 10:2525Eat anything sold in the meat market without raising questions of conscience,
This verse is rarely quoted in JW publications, and for a visible reason — Paul's instruction to "eat anything sold in the meat market without raising questions of conscience" sits awkwardly beside the Watchtower's reading of the apostolic decree at as a perpetual absolute on all four items. When v.25 does appear, it is treated narrowly as Paul's advice about idol-meat and not extended to the wider hermeneutical question of how the decree itself functions.
Paul, who was personally present at the Jerusalem council and helped deliver the decree (), writes here that the Corinthian believers may buy meat from the market and eat it without asking where it came from. Much of that market meat had been offered to idols. Paul reads the idol-food item of the decree pastorally — as conscience-sensitive guidance for mixed congregations, not as a perpetual absolute. The same hermeneutic has to be applied across all four items in the decree (). Either the decree is perpetual law on every item — in which case Paul contradicts himself here — or it is contextual pastoral guidance, in which case the blood item cannot be lifted out and treated as a permanent transfusion ban. There is no consistent reading that makes one item alone perpetual while the other three are negotiable.