Main news for 27 July 2026

The apostles’ preaching touched the hearts not only of Jews but also of Gentiles, since the Kingdom from the very beginning was open to everyone who was ready to entrust himself to the Savior. Something else is interesting: these recent Gentiles who come into the Church are perceived by the sacred writer as an integral part of the new people of God, as those who were “appointed beforehand” to eternal life, to the life of the Kingdom. In principle, of course, there is nothing especially unusual in such a vision of the Church as the new people of God. According to the ideas generally accepted in the synagogue milieu of that time, the people of God had been conceived by God before the creation of the world, just as the Messiah had been. And already during the lifetime of the first Christian generation the Church transferred this understanding to itself as the new people of God.

But with regard to the Gentiles the situation was not so unambiguous. Of course, the prophets said more than once that with the coming of the Messiah the Gentiles would turn to the God of Israel and enter the people of God as an integral part of it. But such entry evidently did not mean that God’s plan for His people included the Gentiles too from the very beginning. It was a manifestation of God’s mercy: though He had promised the Gentiles nothing in advance, through the Messiah He nevertheless gives them the possibility of becoming participants in His plan for the salvation of the world. And the Church, as can be seen, extended this idea of God’s providence to all its members, regardless of origin.

Such a rethinking of the boundaries of the people of God was extremely important. Under the traditional Jewish definition of those boundaries, no Gentile, even one who believed in the God of Israel, fell within them unless he accepted Judaism in its fullness and became a Jew. The Church, however, from the very beginning linked the boundaries of the people of God not with the Jewish people as an ethnic group and not with the Synagogue, but with the person of the Messiah. The people’s boundaries were expanded by such an approach, but the former covenants that God had made with His people were not thereby devalued: relationship with God is a single and spiritually whole process, in which every stage is important, beginning with Abraham and ending with Christ. And there was also the covenant with Noah, that collective image of all the righteous of the Gentile world, to whom the new view of the people of God opened a path into the Church without passing through the Synagogue. Thus the Kingdom united the former people of God with every righteous person who sought true life in all its fullness.

Act 13:48

NOTES

At first glance, what is happening here is the birth of a new religion: the Christian proclamation, not being...

Paul and his companions no longer strictly followed the rule followed by the first witnesses, who had been forced to leave Jerusalem because of persecution. Those witnesses testified only to Jews; these were ready to testify to anyone ready to listen and accept their witness. In this respect the situation had changed radically. And the point is not simply the widening of the audience. The point is where the boundary of God's people runs. To those first witnesses it seemed self-evident that these boundaries coincided with the boundaries of the Jewish people.

They were, of course, Christians, or more precisely messianists, since messianists from among the Gentiles came to call themselves Christians. They had no doubt that Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah and the Son of God. But they were just as sure that one could follow Him only by being a Jew. And if you were not born a Jew, then first you needed to become one by accepting Judaism, and only then could there be talk about the Messiah.

They saw the Church as a continuation of the Jewish people and as part of it, as its messianic component. Paul and his companions saw the situation quite differently. For them the Church was not a simple continuation of the Jewish people and not its messianic part. For them the Church is the people of God in all its fullness. And belonging to it is not determined by belonging to the Jewish people. Of course, the Church is open to every Jew who accepts Jesus as the Messiah and as the Son of God. But it is just as open to anyone else, even if that person has no connection to Jewishness at all.

Only one thing matters: a person must accept Jesus as the Messiah and as the Son of God. And he must have his own deeply personal relationship with Him. The point here, of course, is not that Paul deliberately revised the traditional norms of the Torah in order to widen the boundaries of the Church. The point is that God opened His Kingdom to the Gentiles, and Paul could not fail to know this. And the boundaries of the Church, the one with a capital letter, coincide with the boundaries of the Kingdom. To cross them, one does not have to be a Jew.

This means that if somewhere in a large, or not very large, city the Jewish community as a whole remains indifferent to the witness about Christ, then one can and must testify to everyone else. Not in spite of the local synagogue, but simply because in that same city there may be people ready to enter the Kingdom and therefore the Church. To make their entrance into the Church depend on the attitude of the Church of the local Jewish quarter would be wrong and unjust toward them. More than that, it would be a direct violation of God's plan and an obstruction of His action in the world. No true witness of Christ would do such a thing, including, of course, Paul and his companions.

Paul and Barnabas say that the Word of God must first be preached to the chosen people—the Jews. Yet the preaching addressed to the Jews is also heard...

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