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2.5.7 - A History of Christianity in the Apostolic Age
Primitive Jewish Christianity
The Widening Field - The Church at Antioch
In Antioch, then, under the circumstances described, we may suppose that there came into existence at an early day a Christian community, composed, if not wholly, at least in large part, of uncircumcised Gentiles, with whom a Jew could not lawfully fraternize.
This community, whatever the attitude of its individual members toward Judaism, did not bear the character of a Jewish sect. There cannot have been within it any Jewish Christians who still continued to observe the Mosaic law strictly and literally in all its parts, though there may have been many such in the city.
It is possible that there belonged to the circle some Jewish disciples who laid aside their ancestral scruples and mingled freely and intimately with their Gentile brethren, as there certainly were some years later. [Gal. 2:11 sq.]
But there can hardly have been many such at this early day, for had the practice become general, the question as to its legitimacy would have been raised at the council of Jerusalem, and found some settlement which would have made the Antiochian episode referred to in Gal. 2:11 sq. impossible.
But whether there were or were not many Jewish Christians in Antioch that treated the Gentile disciples as brethren, and as members of a common household of faith, there was at any rate a growing number of Christians there who were not circumcised, and who did not pretend to be Jews in any sense.
In Antioch, there was for some years the most important Gentile Christian community of which we have any knowledge. It constituted for a time the center of Gentile Christianity, as Jerusalem was the center of Jewish Christianity, and it was one of Paul’s headquarters during a considerable part of his career as an apostle.
With the rise of such a Gentile Christian community in Antioch, a community which was not bound to the synagogue and did not pay allegiance to it, there began a separate and independent development, the results of which were of permanent and world-wide significance.
Not the conversion of Cornelius, or of any individual Gentile, marks the cardinal epoch in that development, but the origin of such a Christian community as has been described, wherever and whenever it took place.
The latter step was a natural result of the former, but those who recognized the conversion of Cornelius could hardly have foreseen it.
Had it been, it may well be doubted whether that conversion would have found any general sanction in Jerusalem. It is significant that the process by which Gentile Christianity attained the footing that it finally enjoyed was gradual, and that the successive steps were taken only one at a time.
The early disciples of Jerusalem would never have taken any of those steps of their own impulse. They simply followed the inevitable logic of events; they did not lead.
Christianity had an expansive power that was too strong for the bonds that they had put upon it, and it burst those bonds, we may say, of itself.
It was not deliberately sent or carried to the heathen; it went to them and made a home for itself on Gentile soil, even while the original disciples were still steeped in Jewish prejudices and entirely unable to recognize that the faith they preached was anything but a Jewish faith.
The steps in the process of emancipation followed one another in natural sequence. Only as we trace them one by one can we understand the final step, and realize that it was inevitable. That final step, with the momentous transformations that resulted, we shall have to consider in a later chapter, after we have studied the Christianity of Paul, the great apostle to the Gentiles, who was chiefly instrumental in bringing it about.
Used by permission of the publisher.
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