Which apostles were jewish

A completely different way to tackle this may be to look at how the apostles behaved toward the question of spreading the gospel to non-Jews at the start. While Jesus did bring the gospel to the Samaritan's directly See the story of Jesus and the Samaritan women in John 4 - which completely surprised the disciples that he even spoke with them it's not until well after the start of the church in Jerusalem that they even officially consider the possibility of extending the church to the gentiles.

Even though Philip pretty quickly spread the gospel to the Ethiopian Eunuch Acts , and others, apparently not the apostles, spread the word to gentiles Acts :. In fact, it was so bad that God had to send Peter a vision and directly send him to Cornelius, a Gentle, and poured out his Spirit on them in order to finally get the point across to the church that the good news was for everyone, even though he told them that directly in the Great Commission.

Even after this the Gentiles were accepted, but then many started saying that the Gentiles had to essentially convert to Judaism and obey all the Mosaic laws - which leads to "the Jerusalem Council" in Acts 15, where it was decided this line of reasoning was incorrect. Paul would end up fighting against that position for the rest of his career, with evidence found liberally throughout his letters.

So, what is the point of all this? If any of the original apostles were not Israelites, how could the infant church adopt a position that excluded Gentiles at the start? Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top.

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Improve this question. Community Bot 1. Add a comment. First, God dealt once and for all with the true enemies holding humanity in bondage — sin, death, and the devil — through the suffering, death, and resurrection of Jesus. But there was more than one twist to the story. This revision of the traditional Jewish understanding explains both the subsequent behavior of Paul and why he initially persecuted the Jesus community, which was our first question.

This was an unprecedented and unworkable state of affairs: such persons were neither pagans nor Jews. Both their Greek and Roman neighbors and their Jewish co-worshipers naturally wanted them to pick a side, if only so as not to provoke the god s of either group.

This, Fredriksen argues, is the rationale for Paul the Pharisee persecuting the early Jesus assemblies. But once Paul becomes persuaded — by Jesus himself — he joins the movement full throttle.

Because if this is indeed the plan, then there is nothing to do but to join the front lines. Of these, I will discuss three. First, Fredriksen de-emphasizes the centrality, radicality, and divinity of Jesus for Paul. Paul remains as he always was, only now he thinks gentiles coming to know God happens in a different order than he once supposed.

This severely underplays the irruptive, shattering effect that encountering Jesus had on Paul — by his own testimony. Not only did everything change as a result of this encounter: Jesus became the single driving fact of his existence.

Jesus was not merely an elevated human figure, or the crucified man of Golgotha though he was all those things too. Wright of being; Paul had no doctrine of the Trinity.

But the architects of that doctrine in the fourth and fifth centuries were not spinning out abstruse metaphysics from thin air. They were exegetes of the biblical text, not least the letters of Paul. But as Rowan Williams points out in his recent book on the doctrine of Christ, there is a line to be drawn from St.

Thomas Aquinas, St. Augustine, and the councils of Nicaea and Constantinople all the way back to the writings of St. It has to be drawn , but the line is intelligible nonetheless. Second, Fredriksen is adamant that both the earliest believers, and Paul among them, for the first three to four decades of the Jesus movement, trusted that Jesus would return in their lifetimes. This apocalyptic understanding of the first generation of the church traces itself back to German scholarship in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, especially the work of Albert Schweitzer.

There can be no doubt that the early Jesus-confessing Jews in Jerusalem, Judea, Galilee, and Syria were apocalyptic in just this way. Indeed, I fail to see on what basis one might come to a different conclusion. Fredriksen pops each of those bubbles with relish. No: while those things may be good endeavors, the New Testament imagines nothing of the sort. The End is near, the texts announce, just barely around the corner.

Be ready. Here, though, is where Fredriksen overplays this point. She implies, and at times explicitly claims, a connection between the sort of apocalyptic hope of Paul and Peter and James and the millenarian prophecies of groups who predict the date and time of the end of the world.

But Paul never hazarded any such prediction. Neither he nor any of his brother apostles were ever shown up in their false prophecies: they made none, so there was nothing to disconfirm. The irony is that Fredriksen seeks to show historical respect to Paul by describing his faith as it ostensibly was; but to do so, in this case, is quite the backhanded compliment, since it means that he must have been flat wrong.

Fredriksen also errs in another way. Each of those seven texts is a letter from Paul, in her estimation all from the sixth decade of the first century.

The logical distinction here is between the claim that Jesus may return at any time and the claim that Jesus will return within a specific, known time frame.

I believe she is mistaken. The phenomenon is endemic in scholarship of the Bible because it is endemic in Christian history and theology. And it is nowhere more prevalent than in interpretation of Paul. Common Christian teaching on this point says something like the following.

The coming of Jesus is the end of the Law of Moses. Paul, on the other hand, suggests that the situation was rather messier and more prolonged than that.

In his letter to the Galatian Christians, he describes a public confrontation between himself and Peter in Antioch, where he accused Peter of hypocrisy. Peter had apparently been happy to waive the Jewish food laws and eat with gentile Christians until a party of Jewish Christians arrived. Paul seems to suggest that there were groups of Jewish Christians who travelled round, trying to enforce circumcision and observance of the law on new converts, and that they were causing considerable division and unrest in the churches.

Acts 15 reflects something of the same situation, and suggests that it was solved by a council in Jerusalem, which heard both sides and then made a considered decision. Luke's intention here is to give a general overview of the process, rather than a detailed blow-by-blow account. As far as he is concerned, the matter is settled. From the point of view of the modern reader, it is a bit more complicated than that.

Although the inclusion of gentiles among the followers of Jesus is not an issue any more, Christians do still have major disagreements, so this early record of how disputes were handled and how boundaries were drawn is still of interest to us. When we read Acts 15 in the light of Galatians 1 and 2, it is clear that the argument was both lengthy and vicious, and that Luke is telescoping the process in his account.

Luke is clear that some boundaries were imposed on gentile converts. They were not admitted without any restrictions. He reports the decision of the Jerusalem council three times in Acts , , But that doesn't make its meaning crystal clear.

The decree has come down to us in slightly different forms, with different families of manuscripts clearly understanding it in slightly different ways.

The New Revised Standard Version translation says that gentile Christians must "abstain from things polluted by idols and from fornication and from whatever has been strangled and from blood.