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2.5.4 - A History of Christianity in the Apostolic Age
Primitive Jewish Christianity
The Widening Field - Acceptance of the Gentiles
That Peter should respond at once to the invitation of Cornelius, and should enter his house and preach the Gospel to him was entirely in accord with his character as revealed on many other occasions. It was the same impulsive and uncalculating spirit that led him at a later time to throw aside all traditional scruples, and to live in intimate fellowship with the Gentile Christians of Antioch. He was just the man to whom such a request as that of Cornelius would appeal most strongly, and he was just the man who would accept most unquestioningly the divine evidence of his conversion, and be quickest to act upon that evidence and receive the new convert as a Christian brother.
But Peter had been from the beginning the foremost of the disciples, and the influence of his example, and of the experience which he had to recount to his Jerusalem brethren, could not but be very great. Had the experience befallen some other disciple of less personal weight and authority than he, its effect upon the mother church would very likely have been far less.
But it has been objected by many that the conversion of Cornelius under the preaching of Peter destroys the independence and originality of Paul’s work as an apostle to the Gentiles; and it is maintained also that Paul’s reference to Peter in Gal. 2, as the apostle of the circumcision, proves that the latter cannot have preach the Gospel to Gentiles as he is represented as doing in the case in question.
But though Paul claims that he has labored more abundantly than all the other apostles [1 Cor. 15:10] and though he speaks of himself frequently as the apostle to the Gentiles and of the large work that he has done among them, and though he more than once expresses the intention not to build upon another man’s foundation, he nowhere says or implies that he was the first to preach the Gospel to the Gentiles, and there is nothing in the circumstances to lead to such a conclusion.
His consciousness of independence and originality in his apostolic labors rested not upon the knowledge that he had begun the work among the Gentiles, and that no one had thought of doing it before him, but upon the conviction that he had been called not by man, but by God, to be their great apostle, and to do for them what others had done and were doing for the Jews.
So far as his reference to Peter is concerned, his designation of him as the apostle of the circumcision no more proves that Peter cannot have preached, even on a single occasion, to the Gentiles, than does the fact that Paul calls himself, in the same passage, the apostle of the uncircumcision prove that he never preached to the Jews, when we know from his own words, in 1 Cor. 9:20, that he must have done so frequently.
But it is objected finally, that the trouble at Antioch to which Paul refers in Gal. 2:11 sq., is inconceivable if the case of Cornelius be historical; for if James, and the Christians of Jerusalem in general, had signified their approval of Peter’s conduct in eating with an uncircumcised Gentile in Caesarea, they could not have found fault with him for doing the same thing later in Antioch; and Peter, though he might have been weak and vacillating, could not have been so characterless, as to violate on that occasion, out of mere cowardly deference to the opinion of James, and express divine command which had led him to take such a decisive step as to preach the Gospel to Cornelius and break bread with him.
The objection, however, implies a misunderstanding of the incident, for which Luke himself is in part responsible. In Acts 11:3, the disciples of Jerusalem are represented a s contending with Peter because he had gone in to men uncircumcised and had eaten with hem; but it is a striking fact that, in the address which follows, Peter does not defend himself against that charge, but against the charge of recognizing a Gentile as a Christian disciple and admitting him to baptism, which is an entirely different matter.
It is no less striking that the members of the church of Jerusalem glorify God not because he has broken down the wall between the Jew and the Gentile, and has made it lawful for the Jewish Christian to eat bread with his Gentile brother, but only because he ahs granted to the Gentiles repentance unto life. In other words, they recognized just what was recognized at a later time at the apostolic council, the legitimacy of Gentile Christianity; but they did not admit the right of any Jew to cease observing the Jewish law, and to disregard the prohibition against eating with the uncircumcised. The latter step was not taken even at the council some years later and we certainly cannot suppose that it was taken at this time.
Luke evidently did not realize the difference between the two steps. He supposed that the settlement of the one question was the settlement of the other, and he therefore did not distinguish them in his account. [It is perhaps for this reason that Luke says nothing – if indeed he knew anything about it – of the Antiochian trouble that succeeded the conference at Jerusalem. Not realizing that any other question was involved at Antioch that had been discussed and settled just before at Jerusalem, he may have bee totally unable to understand the situation, and therefore simply omitted all reference to it.
But his failure to do so should not lead us to the conclusion that the whole account is unhistorical, and that the incident recorded never took place.
It may fairly be doubted whether the idea of eating with Cornelius and the other Gentile converts presented itself to Peter, for they would certainly not expect him to. It may well be that he only preached the Gospel to them, and in view of the bestowal of the Holy Spirit recognized them as Christians and directed them to be baptized.
At any rate, if he did more than this, if he actually ate with the Gentile converts, he did it not because his conscientious scruples had been removed by the vision on the housetop, but because of Christ’s acceptance of the Gentiles as his disciples, which was made evident by the outpouring of the Spirit. It was the presence of the Spirit, not the vision of the housetop, that he regarded as the decisive fact, both in Caesarea and later when he defended his course in Jerusalem.
But the outpouring of the Spirit, while it meant divine recognition of Gentile Christianity, did not necessarily mean that a Jew, because he was a Christina, had a right to violate the divine law, and if Peter at this time took, it to mean that, and acted accordingly, he certainly did not secure the approval of his brethren, and did not repeat his act for many years.
We conclude then that whatever may be thought of the accuracy of Luke’s account in all its details, there is no adequate ground for doubting that Peter preached the Gospel to the Gentile Cornelius, and that the legitimacy of his action was acknowledged by the Christians of Jerusalem, or at any rate by the most influential among them. But that they admitted that it was lawful for a Jewish Christian to break bread with hi Gentile brethren, or in other words, to disregard the Jewish law in any particular, must be unequivocally denied.
Used by permission of the publisher.
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