journey was a three-year stay at Ephesus.
Paul’s missionary activity produced three vital effects in the early Church. First, his tireless journeying spread the Faith throughout the Roman Empire in centers of political and economic importance, which allowed for the rapid growth of the Church as the Faith spread easily along the Roman roads and waterways of commerce and government business. Second, Paul did not simply preach the Gospel and leave the new converts to their own devices. Rather, he chose and mentored men, known as “elders” (in Greek, presbuteroi, from which the word “presbyters,” or “priests,” derives) to lead their communities, providing continuity and an established hierarchical foundation. Third, Paul kept in contact with his nascent Christian communities by writing letters, which comprise thirteen of the twenty-seven inspired books in the New Testament. Paul’s missionary journeys successfully solidified the Faith in the Roman world. His success was grounded in the saving message of Jesus itself and was aided by Paul’s versatility and adaptability; “he had the power to translate the Palestinian Gospel into language intelligible to the Greek world.”17 We cannot overstate the importance of Paul to the history of the Church. The Apostle to the Gentiles was “the greatest of converts, the greatest of disciples, greatest of missionaries [and] the follower in whom more than any other is mirrored the Master.”18
A Gentile Converts
The presence of Jewish communities throughout the Roman Empire helped the early Church grow by providing groups in major centers where the first Christian missionaries could bring the Gospel. The earliest members and converts to the Faith were Jews, and the early Christians were very conscious of their connection to Judaism. But Paul’s experience had proved that the Faith met resistance in the Jewish synagogues of the Roman Empire, so his missionary focus shifted to the Gentiles, who eagerly responded to the message and became members of the Church. One early Gentile conversion is recorded in the Acts of the Apostles and involves a vision received by Peter.
The Jewish people were a separated people in the ancient world. Their kosher laws forbade the eating of foods common in the Gentile world, which had produced a division between Jew and Gentile. When Peter was near the city of Joppa, he fell into a trance while waiting for something to eat. He saw the sky open and a blanket coming down from heaven filled with animals. A voice commanded him to get up and eat, but Peter refused, for the food was unclean. The scene repeated itself three times before the vision ended. Eventually, Peter realized that the larger meaning of the vision was that the divide between Jews and Gentiles was over because of Christ. The purpose of the dietary laws, to remind the Jewish people of their salvation from slavery in Egypt by the Lord, was abrogated by the New Covenant of Christ. After the vision, men sent by a Roman centurion came to the house where Peter was staying and asked him to come to Caesarea. The centurion had received a visit by an angel, directing him to send for Peter.19
A Roman centurion was akin to a noncommissioned officer in our modern militaries. To be a centurion, a soldier was required to have at least sixteen years of military service. These officers were the backbone of the Roman military structure. A Roman legion, comprised nominally of five thousand soldiers, was organized into ten cohorts with six “centuries” per cohort. Within a century, a centurion commanded eighty men (originally, it was one hundred, hence the term “centurion”).20 Cornelius, the centurion who sent for Peter, was a member of the Italian cohort, and therefore a foreigner, but was known as a “God-fearing” man by the Jews. When Peter entered his home, Cornelius fell on his knees before him. He told Peter about his angelic visitor. Peter then realized the importance of his own vision of unclean food — there was to be no partiality between Jew and Gentile in the New Covenant. Peter preached about Christ to Cornelius’s household, during which the Holy Spirit descended upon the inhabitants and all were baptized. The conversion of Cornelius the centurion was a monumental event in the life of the Church. It signified that the Gospel was meant not just for Jews but for the whole world. The conversion brought division within the Church, which faced an important test in her early life.
The Council of Jerusalem
Throughout Church history, the Church faced many important questions, the answers to which impacted her life for centuries. In the early days, the first question was what to do with the Gentiles. Paul’s missionary activity and Peter’s visit to Cornelius’s household, among other evangelization efforts, brought Gentile converts to the Faith. However, some believed these new Christians should adopt the Jewish dietary restrictions and the law of circumcision. This group, known as the Circumcision Party, was angry that Peter ate with Gentiles, and criticized him upon his return to Jerusalem. In an attempt to placate the Circumcision Party, when Peter later went to Antioch, he refused to eat with the Gentile converts there. Paul, in a spirit of fraternal correction, rebuked Peter for this action.21 The issue became a debate as groups formed around James the Less, bishop of Jerusalem, who believed that all Christians should follow the Jewish customs, and Paul, who argued that Christ had fulfilled the Law and instituted the New Covenant, thereby abrogating the need to follow the dietary restrictions and circumcision of the Old Covenant.
In an effort to resolve the conflict, the apostles gathered in Jerusalem, where, after some debate, Peter spoke in favor of not requiring the Gentiles to be circumcised and abide by the dietary restrictions. James agreed, but proposed that Gentile converts follow the traditional law of “strangers among the Jews” as given by Moses — that is, do not eat meat offered to false gods or the flesh of strangled animals, and refrain from engaging in temple prostitution.22 James’s amendment was accepted, and the apostles promulgated their decision by sending Paul, Barnabas, and a few other men with letters to Antioch to inform the Christian community in the city. The Council of Jerusalem set the procedure for how disagreements and questions of importance would be settled by the Church’s leadership: collegiality with Petrine leadership.
In these first decades, the family of God had undergone an amazing transformation. What began as a small sect within a recognized group in the Roman Empire evolved into a separate community. Commanded by the Lord to take the Gospel to the four corners of the world, the Church’s mission of evangelization resulted in converts from every walk of life and nationality embracing Christ and joining the new family of God. An important question concerning the addition of the Gentiles was settled through an exercise of apostolic leadership. The family was small but growing and would soon come into contact with the world’s only superpower.
1. Acts 1:8
2. Tim Gray and Jeff Cavins, Walking with God: A Journey through the Bible (West Chester, PA: Ascension Press, 2010), 262.
3. Ibid., 264.
4. Ibid., 266.
5. This makes sense when reading the narrative in the Acts of the Apostles, which describes a large number of people hearing the apostles speaking in their native languages — such a number would not have fit inside the Upper Room. Cisterns were also near the Temple, which could have been used for the baptisms that occurred after Peter’s preaching. See Gray and Cavins, 265.
6. Acts 2:41.
7. Acts 6:3.
8. Benedict XVI, Wednesday General Audience on Stephen the Protomartyr, January 10, 2007, in Jesus, the Apostles, and the Early Church (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2007), 136.
9. Acts 12.
10. James became the patron saint of Spain, known as “the Moor-slayer,” as his intercession was invoked throughout the Reconquista, the centuries-long war of liberation by Catholic forces against the Muslim occupiers.
11. The Church used to celebrate the feast of the Dispersion of the Apostles liturgically on July 15.
12.
