C. Peter’s Action Endorsed at Jerusalem (11:1–18)
1. Peter Called to Account (11:1–3)
1The apostles and the brothers who were in Judaea heard that the Gentiles also had received the word of God.1
2So, when Peter went up to Jerusalem, those who were of the circumcision party remonstrated with him.2
3“Why,” they asked, “did you go in to visit uncircumcised men and actually share a meal with them?”
1 The news of Peter’s revolutionary behavior, in entering a Gentile house at Caesarea, reached Jerusalem before he himself did. The Western text makes him spend a fairly long time at Caesarea, and then engage in a teaching ministry in the region between Caesarea and Jerusalem.3 There may be some truth in this, although the Western reviser’s main concern was probably to avoid giving the impression that the outpouring of the Spirit at Caesarea was followed immediately by controversy within the Spirit-filled community at Jerusalem. But however long the interval was, Peter’s action could not fail to arouse alarm at Jerusalem. Hitherto, even if Stephen and his fellow-Hellenists incurred popular hostility, the apostles had been able to enjoy a measure of general goodwill; but if the news got around that the leader of the apostles himself had begun to fraternize with Gentiles, that goodwill would soon be dissipated. And in fact it may well have turned out so. It was not long after this that Herod Agrippa I, appointed ruler of Judaea by the Emperor Claudius in A.D. 41, executed James the son of Zebedee and then, in view of the approval with which this action met, arrested Peter in his turn (12:1–3). About the same time, too, James the brother of Jesus emerges as acknowledged leader of the Jerusalem church, rather than any one of the twelve apostles (cf. 12:17; 15:13).
2–3 When Peter arrived home, then, he was immediately taken to task by “those who were of the circumcision”4 (as the phrase may be rendered fairly literally). The same phrase is used of the Jewish believers who accompanied Peter from Joppa to Caesarea (10:45), but there it simply denotes people who were of Jewish stock as distinct from Gentiles. Here it refers more particularly to those Jewish believers who were specially zealous for the law and insisted that there should be no social intercourse between circumcised and uncircumcised. Paul uses the phrase in this sense in Gal. 2:12 when he speaks of those visitors from Jerusalem to Antioch who persuaded Peter to abstain from table fellowship with Gentile Christians. “Why,” Peter was asked on the present occasion, “did you go to uncircumcised men and eat with them?”
In the original form of the story, Martin Dibelius suggests, Peter had no more need to defend himself for preaching the gospel to Cornelius than Philip had for preaching it to the Ethiopian eunuch.5 In the original story the issue of eating with Gentiles was not raised; it was introduced later because of the part which it came to play in the discussion of the terms to be laid down for the admission of Gentile believers to church membership. There is, indeed, no express reference to eating with Gentiles in the narrative of chapter 10. But the problem is present in the narrative by implication. It was the thought of eating with Gentiles in particular that made the idea of entering a Gentile house so objectionable, for Gentile food was “profane and unclean”; and it is the thought of eating with Gentiles that supplies the link between Peter’s vision in which the levitical food restrictions were abrogated and his practical application of that lesson in ignoring the ceremonial objections to entering a Gentile house.
4Then Peter began and set the events before them in order.
5“I was at prayer in the city of Joppa,” he said, “and in a trance I saw a vision—something like a great sheet descending, let down from heaven by four corners, and it came right to where I was.
6When I had looked at it carefully I was able to make out the four-footed animals of the earth, wild beasts, creeping things, and birds of the sky.
7I also heard a voice saying to me, ‘Get up, Peter, kill and eat.’
8But I said, ‘No, Lord; nothing profane or unclean has ever entered into my mouth.’
9A voice came from heaven a second time and answered,6 ‘You must not regard as profane what God has cleansed.’
10This happened three times; then everything was drawn up again into heaven.
11At that moment, I tell you, three men stood at the house where we were;7 they had been sent to me from Caesarea.
12The Spirit told me to go with them without making any distinction. And these six brothers went with me, and we entered the man’s house.
13He told us how he had seen the angel in his house, standing there and saying, ‘Send to Joppa and fetch Simon, surnamed Peter;
14he will speak words to you by which you and your household will be saved.’
15When I had begun to speak, the Holy Spirit fell on them as he did on us at the beginning.
16Then I remembered what the Lord said: ‘John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.’
17If, then, God gave them the same gift as he gave to us when we believed on the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I to be capable of hindering God?”8
4–10 Peter’s best defense of his conduct was a straightforward narration of his experience. So he told them of his vision on the roof of the tanner’s house at Joppa. In this repetition of the story variety of expression is combined with similarity in construction. Although it abridges the fuller account in chapter 10, yet it introduces one or two details which are absent there. In verses 5 and 6 there is a vividness in Peter’s description of the great sheet which contrasts with the comparative colorlessness of the third-person account in 10:11–12.9 Whereas three categories of animal are distinguished in 10:12, 11:6 distinguishes four, adding wild beasts to the domestic quadrupeds, as in the creation narrative of Genesis.10 The wording of Peter’s refusal in verse 8 is closer even than that of 10:14 to Ezekiel’s protest when he was directed to eat “unclean” food: “abominable flesh has never entered into my mouth” (Ezek. 4:14).
11–14 Then he told how Cornelius’s messengers came to invite him to Caesarea, and how he went with them at the Spirit’s prompting, “without making any distinction” (v. 12). The six members of the believing community in Joppa who had accompanied him to Caesarea had come with him also to Jerusalem, and they were present as witnesses to the truth of his account. The reference to “the angel” in verse 13 implies that the story of Cornelius’s supernatural visitant is already known—known, that is to say, to Luke’s readers rather than to Peter’s hearers (although we are probably intended to understand that what we have here is a brief summary of the story as told by Peter). According to this account, the angel informed Cornelius that the words which he would hear from Peter (cf. 10:22) were words which would bring salvation to himself and his household. It has already been made clear that Cornelius was acceptable to God as a man who feared him and practised righteousness (10:35). Throughout the Bible, divine judgment is regularly pronounced in accordance with a person’s works;11 but salvation is not of works but of grace (cf. 15:11), and salvation did not enter Cornelius’s house until Peter came there with the gospel. The “household” (v. 14) included not only Cornelius’s immediate family in the modern English sense, but all who were under his authority—slaves, attendants, and other dependents.12
15–17 Then Peter reached the climax of his narration, telling how he had scarcely begun to address Cornelius and his household when the Holy Spirit descended on them, just as he had descended on Peter and his fellow-disciples at Pentecost.13 The words of the risen Christ to his disciples, “John indeed baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit in a few days’ time” (1:5), were quickly fulfilled in Jerusalem on the day of Pentecost, but as Peter saw what took place in the house of Cornelius, and heard those Gentiles speak with tongues and magnify God, the words came afresh to his mind, and he recognized that now they were being fulfilled anew. God evidently made no distinction between believing Gentiles and believing Jews; how could Peter maintain a barrier which God plainly ignored? To do so would be to oppose God. There is no express mention here (as there is in 10:47–48) of the baptism of the Gentiles, though it is perhaps implied in the language of verse 17.
3. Peter’s Defense Accepted (11:18)
18When they heard this, they fell silent. Then they glorified God. “So,” they said, “to the Gentiles also God has granted repentance to life!”
18 Nothing could be said to counter Peter’s argument. His critics were silenced. God had acted, and had clearly shown his will. That he had bestowed his blessing on Gentiles also—or even on Gentiles—giving them through his Spirit a change of mind and heart and the assurance of eternal life, was a matter for wonder and praise. Their objections ceased; their praise began. The practical problems which were to become so acute when large-scale Gentile evangelization began did not arise at this stage. Even so, it may be surmised that the endorsement of Peter’s action was more wholehearted on the part of his fellow-apostles than on the part of the zealous rank and file of the Jerusalem church.14 This may have been one reason for the speed with which James the Just was henceforth acknowledged as the undisputed leader of the mother-church: James at least enjoyed a public reputation which was unspotted by any suspicion of fraternizing with Gentiles.15 But the apostles had at least admitted the principle of evangelizing Gentiles, and had done so in time to recognize the same principle being worked out farther north on a scale previously unimagined.
D. Antioch Becomes a Christian Base (11:19–30)
1. Gentile Evangelization in Antioch (11:19–21)
19Now those who had been dispersed because of the tribulation that broke out over Stephen made their way as far as Phoenicia, Cyprus, and Antioch, speaking the word to none except Jews only.
20But there were some of them, men of Cyprus and Cyrene, who on coming to Antioch spoke to the Greeks16 also, telling them the good news of the Lord Jesus.
21The hand of the Lord was with them, and a great number believed and turned to the Lord.
19 Luke’s narrative now goes back to the same point of departure as we found in 8:4, which opens with the same words. There he related how those who were dispersed by the persecution which followed Stephen’s death “went about spreading the good news”; here he tells how some of them made their way north along the Phoenician seaboard, from which some took ship for Cyprus, while others continued farther north until they reached Antioch on the Orontes.
Antioch on the Orontes (modern Antakya in the Hatay province of Turkey), situated some eighteen miles upstream, was founded in 300 B.C. by Seleucus Nicator, first ruler of the Seleucid dynasty, and was named by him after his father Antiochus. He had already given his own name to Seleucia Pieria at the mouth of the Orontes, the port of Antioch (cf. 13:4). As the capital of the Seleucid monarchy Antioch rapidly became a city of great importance. When Pompey reorganized Western Asia in 64 B.C. he made Antioch a free city; it became the seat of administration of the Roman province of Syria. It was at this time the third largest city in the Graeco-Roman world (surpassed in population only by Rome and Alexandria). It was planned from the first on the Hippodamian grid pattern; it was enlarged and adorned by Augustus and Tiberius, while Herod the Great provided colonnades on either side of its main street and paved the street itself with polished stone. The produce of Syria and lands farther east passed through it on its way to the west; it was a commercial center as well as a political capital. Because of its situation between the urbanized Mediterranean world and the eastern desert, it was even more cosmopolitan than most Hellenistic cities. Here Christianity first displayed its cosmopolitan character.
Jewish colonization in Antioch began practically from the city’s foundation. By the beginning of the Christian era, proselytes to Judaism are said to have been specially numerous in Antioch;17 we have already met Nicolaus, a proselyte from Antioch, as a leader among the Hellenists in the primitive Jerusalem church (6:5). Many other nationalities were represented among its residents: it is Antioch that the Roman satirist Juvenal has in mind when he complains that “the sewage of the Syrian Orontes has for long been discharging itself into the Tiber.”18 The city’s reputation for moral laxity was enhanced by the cult of Artemis and Apollo at Daphne, five miles distant, where the ancient Syrian worship of Astarte and her consort, with its ritual prostitution, was carried on under Greek nomenclature.19 But a new chapter in the history of Antioch was about to be written, for it was to be the metropolis of Gentile Christianity.20
20 Thus far, the Hellenistic disciples who had fled from the persecution in Jerusalem had confined their evangelizing activity to the Jewish communities of the various places to which they came. The members of those communities were predominantly Hellenists like themselves. The idea that the gospel could have any relevance for non-Jews was not one that would naturally occur to them. But in Antioch some daring spirits among them, men of Cyprus21 and Cyrene,22 took a momentous step forward. If the gospel was so good for Jews, might it not be good for Gentiles also? At any rate, they would make the experiment. So they began to make known to the Greek population of Antioch the claims of Jesus as Lord and Savior. To present him as Messiah to people who knew nothing of the hope of Israel would have been a meaningless exercise, but the Greek terms kyrios (“Lord”) and sōtēr (“Savior”) were widely current in the religious world of the eastern Mediterranean.23 Many were trying to find in various mystery cults a divine lord who could guarantee salvation and immortality to his devotees; now the pagans of Antioch were assured that what they vainly sought in those quarters could be secured through the Son of God who had lately become man, suffered death, and conquered the grave in Palestine.
21 This enterprise met with instant success. The Gentiles took to the Christian message as the very thing they had been waiting for, as something that exactly suited their case, and a large number of them believed the gospel and yielded their allegiance to Jesus as Lord. It may be that some of the Gentiles who believed belonged to the class commonly called God-fearers, who already knew something of the Old Testament revelation by attendance at the Jewish synagogue;24 it would be in accordance with the analogy of other places if such people formed the nucleus of the new church of Antioch. But Luke does not say so, and we cannot be sure. At any rate, the power of God was manifest in the conversion of the Gentiles in this city. An Ethiopian chamberlain might have become a Christian some time previously while traveling home along the Gaza road, and a Roman centurion and his household might have believed the gospel as an apostle unfolded it in their home at Caesarea, but the scale of Gentile evangelization in Antioch was something entirely new.
2. Barnabas and Saul’s Ministry at Antioch (11:22–26)
22When word of this came to the ears of the church at Jerusalem, they sent off Barnabas all the way to Antioch.
23When he arrived there, and saw the grace of God, he rejoiced, and encouraged them all to adhere to the Lord with resolute hearts;
24for he was a good man, full of the Holy Spirit and faith. A large number were added to the Lord.25
25Then Barnabas set out for Tarsus to search for Saul,
26and when he had found him, he brought him to Antioch. So they spent a whole year meeting together in the church and teaching a great multitude. It was in Antioch that the disciples first came to be known as “Christians.”26
22–24 The leaders of the Jerusalem church recognized the novelty of the situation at Antioch when news of it reached them. They considered themselves responsible for the direction of the movement in all its extensions. Therefore, as Peter and John had earlier gone to Samaria to investigate Philip’s missionary service there, so now Jerusalem sent a delegate to Antioch to look into the strange events that were being enacted in that city. It was a critical moment: much—far more than they could have realized—depended on their choice of a delegate. In the providence of God, they chose the best man for this delicate and important work—Barnabas, the “son of encouragement” (4:36). Barnabas himself was a Cypriot Jew by birth, like some of those who had begun to preach the gospel to the Antiochene Gentiles, and his sympathies would in any case be wider than those of such Jerusalem believers as had never set foot outside Judaea. It may indeed be that he took the initiative in offering his services for this mission, and his offer was eagerly accepted.27
To Antioch, then, Barnabas was sent, as the representative or “apostle”28 of the mother-church. When he reached Antioch, his generous spirit was filled with joy at what he found. Here was the grace of God in action, bringing blessing not only to the local Jews but also to the Gentile population as they heard and accepted the good news. True to his name, he gave them all the encouragement he could. Missionaries and converts alike had begun well; what they needed was the gift of perseverance, and he urged them to carry on and maintain their loyal service to the Lord in whom they had believed. The presence of a man of such sterling character and faith, a man “full of the Holy Spirit,”29 gave them the stimulus they needed to prosecute their evangelism still more vigorously; the number of converts increased rapidly.
25–26 Soon the scale of Barnabas’s responsibility was such that he could not hope to discharge it single-handedly. He had to find a colleague. But it was no easy matter to find the right man for the situation. Barnabas, however, decided that he knew the man, if only he could locate him. Several years had gone by since Saul of Tarsus had been escorted to Caesarea by his new friends in Jerusalem and put on board a ship bound for his native city. Barnabas could think of no one more eminently suited for the responsibility of sharing his ministry in Antioch. He therefore went to Tarsus in person to seek him out30—a task of some difficulty, perhaps, since Saul appears to have been disinherited for his joining the followers of Jesus and could no longer be found at his ancestral home. Barnabas found him, however, and took him to Antioch. There for a whole year the good work proceeded apace under their joint direction. More converts were added to the believing community, and when they were added, they received systematic instruction in the principles of the new way on which they had entered.
No difficulty seems to have been felt at this stage about the uniting in one believing community of Jewish converts and Gentile converts. The new way was wide enough to accommodate believers of the most diverse backgrounds. Antioch was a cosmopolitan city, where Jew and Gentile, Greek and barbarian rubbed shoulders, where Mediterranean civilization met the Syrian desert; racial and religious differences which loomed so large in Judaea seemed much less important here. The church of Antioch from the outset had an ethos quite distinct from that of the Jerusalem church. The pagans of Antioch, too, knew all about these people, for they did not keep quiet about their faith, but proclaimed it wherever they went. Christ—Christos, the Greek form of the title Messiah (“the anointed one”)—might be the name of an office to Greek-speaking Jews, but to the pagans of Antioch it was simply the name of a man of whom these people were always talking: a curious name, to be sure, unless it was the same as Chrēstos (“serviceable”), a name attested for slaves and free persons alike.31 “Who are these people?” one Antiochene would ask another, as two or three unofficial missionaries gathered a knot of more or less interested hearers and disputants around them in one of the city colonnades. “Oh, these are the people who are always talking about Christos, the Christ-people, the Christians.” Just as, in Palestine, the adherents of the Herod dynasty were called Herodians, so, says Luke, in Antioch the adherents of Jesus the Christ first came to be popularly known as Christians.32
27About that time prophets came down from Jerusalem to Antioch.33
28One of them, named Agabus, stood up and indicated through the Spirit that there would be a great famine over the whole world. (This took place under Claudius.34)
29Then each of the disciples decided on a sum of money, according to each one’s means, to be sent as a charitable offering to their brothers who lived in Judaea.
30This they did, and sent it to the elders by Barnabas and Saul.
27 The gift of prophecy in the apostolic church was like the gift of tongues in that it was exercised under the inspiration of God; it differed from it in that it was expressed in the speaker’s ordinary language. The place for this spiritual gift in the church is recognized in the Pauline letters: Paul regarded it as of high value and ranked the prophet next after the apostle.35 Here and there the narrative of Acts illustrates how it was exercised.
28 Among the prophets who came to Antioch from Jerusalem in those days was one called Agabus,36 who announced by inspiration that there would be a great famine throughout the whole Roman world.37 It may be that Agabus had in mind the famine conditions which would make their contribution to the expected woes of the end-time (cf. Mark 13:8).38 Such famine conditions, says Luke, were actually experienced in the principate of Claudius (A.D. 41–54). We know from other sources that Claudius’s principate was marked by a succession of bad harvests and consequent scarcity in various parts of the empire—in Rome, Greece, and Egypt as well as in Judaea.39
If a true tradition is reflected in the Western reading of this passage, according to which Agabus uttered his prophecy “when we were gathered together,”40 then Luke may have had personal cause to remember the prophecy and the effect which it produced on the church of Antioch. This reading does at least show the influence of the tradition preserved in the so-called anti-Marcionite prologue to the third Gospel, and elsewhere, that Luke was a native of Syrian Antioch.41 If Luke was one of the Antiochene Gentiles who were evangelized in those days, we can readily appreciate both his interest in Antioch and his enthusiasm for the Gentile mission.
29–30 How the Christians of Antioch inferred from the general terms of Agabus’s prophecy that Judaea would be specially hard hit by the predicted famine Luke does not say. We know that Judaea did in fact suffer severely from a famine at some point between A.D. 45 and 48. At that time Helena, queen-mother of Adiabene, a Jewish proselyte, bought grain in Egypt and figs in Cyprus and had them taken to Jerusalem for distribution, while her son King Izates sent a large sum of money to the authorities in Jerusalem to be used for famine relief.42 The church of Antioch similarly organized a relief fund for the mother-church.43 The various members of the church appear to have allocated a fixed sum out of their income or property as a contribution to this fund, much as Paul was to advise the Corinthian Christians to do when he was organizing a later relief fund for Jerusalem (1 Cor. 16:1–4). When the collected sum was ready to be sent to Judaea, Barnabas and Saul were deputed to take it there. On their arrival, they handed it over to the elders, who from now on play an increasing part in the leadership of the church of Jerusalem.44 This is the second occasion in Luke’s record on which Paul visited Jerusalem after his conversion (the first being briefly described in 9:26–30). He himself records two visits which he paid to Jerusalem; the possibility arises that the famine-relief visit of Acts 11:30 is identical with that described in Gal. 2:1–10, when he went up to Jerusalem with Barnabas in the fourteenth year after his conversion (which is the most probable interpretation of Gal. 2:1).45 More common, however, is the identification of the visit of Gal. 2:1–10 with that of Acts 15; this raises problems which will be considered later.46