The 17th-century theologian Étienne de Courcelles (1586-1659) was equally convinced that Christians should not eat blood. He 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 Noah and his sons.”g