Week 8 - Chapter 8 - The Acts of the Apostles (and Gospel of Luke continued) -

The two core issues which Luke deals with in his Gospel and Acts are 1) the failure of the mission to the Jews, traditionally the people of God, and 2) the place and role of the Gentiles, who were quickly becoming the majority of followers of Jesus.

It seems that, as one progresses through the Synoptic Gospels and Acts, there is a sliding scale from the largely Judaic milieu in Mark, through recognition of the increasing number and importance the Gentiles in the Church in Matthew (with perhaps some defensiveness toward non-Christian Jews, perhaps reflected in Matthew 10:5, where Jesus directs the first mission to be to the Jews and specifically not to the Gentiles), and then on through the Gospel of Luke and Acts, with the increasing acknowledgement of the growing presence of Gentile converts and the evolution of the mission – perhaps enhanced by the fact that Luke himself was a Gentile, with a different perspective than a Jewish Christian would have had.

The process that we viewed in the Gospels is carried in Acts to its logical conclusion. We read about Peter’s vision from God in Acts 10:9-16, in which God declared all sorts of birds and animals clean. Peter is then summoned to the household of Cornelius, a Roman centurion who was also a devout follower of the one God. He and his family were receptive to the message of the risen Christ – and the positioning of Peter’s vision just prior to his visit with Cornelius indicates that the Gentiles, like those multitudes of God’s creatures, are also clean and can be accepted as equal partners in the faith community of the Christians. At Acts 15, all the leading members of the Church, the apostles and elders, meet in Jerusalem to consider the burning question of the standard of Torah observance which is to be expected of these Gentile converts. Did they have to be circumcised? What about observance of the Jewish dietary laws and other parts of the Mosaic law?

Luke makes it clear that, after a report from Paul and Barnabas on the promising results of their mission to the Gentiles, and a vigourous debate, Paul submitted that scripture (Amos 9:11-12) foretold that the Lord would rebuild David’s tent and that the Gentiles as well as Hebrews would seek the Lord there. Paul asked the council not to make it difficult for the Gentiles to convert but rather to insist on just four basic laws being followed – 1) that they not eat food that had been sacrificed to idols, 2) that they be sexually moral, 3) that they not eat meat from animals that were strangled, and 4) that they not drink blood. According to de Silva, these were very fundamental rules to the Jews which represented prohibitions on behaviour that they found particularly repugnant. And, interestingly, de Silva says that these rules pre-dated the Mosaic Torah. (I can’t help wondering when these rules, which seem like a reasonable compromise to allow Gentiles to be accepted into the fold, were abandoned by the early Church. Did these practices lapse as paganism died, or were they abandoned as the congregation of Jewish believers became less influential in the Christian church?)

While it is a bit of an anti-climax to see the belief in Jesus dwindling among the Jews, we do see how the Church was able to create a vital mission into the Gentile lands. We see the faith being promulgated further and further outside of Palestine “even to the ends of the earth” – even as far as Rome, which was the “end of the earth” to the Jews from Palestine. In many episodes Luke indicates that the mission to the Gentiles, the spreading of the Gospel outside of their Jewish homeland, is the mission which has been ordained by God.