NOTES for Act 28:28
Paul's words about salvation sent to the Gentiles are sometimes perceived as a kind of spiritual revolution. Yet there is nothing entirely new or unusual in them. The prophets said more than once that with the coming of the Messiah the Kingdom would be opened not only to Jews but also to Gentiles who at that time would turn to the God of Israel. What was unusual in this case was only the fact that recent Gentiles were ready to accept the Messiah whom the Jews had rejected. From the point of view of the ideas generally accepted in the Synagogue at that time, this seemed almost incredible: it was precisely the Jews who accepted the Messiah, precisely they who had to decide who the true Messiah was, and those Gentiles who were interested in Judaism and worshiped the God of Israel were by definition left only humbly to accept the choice of their elder spiritual brothers. In reality everything turned out quite differently: the Messiah was accepted more readily by recent Gentiles than by Jews. And one of the reasons for this was precisely the Gentiles' freedom from those religious theories and concepts that so often prevented Jews from seeing the Messiah in Jesus. And Paul sees no breach of subordination in bearing witness to Gentiles where Jews do not accept his witness, or where they have not yet made up their minds. The matter here is not even priorities, not who should hear first, and it should be noted that both always heard, since Paul always began his preaching in the local synagogue. The matter is that no one is given the right to close the road to the Kingdom to others. The apostle constantly reminds people of this in his epistles; he continually says that the circumcised, that is, religious people, Jews, must not impose their religiosity on secular people, the uncircumcised, Gentiles. And if Paul now made the possibility of witnessing to Gentiles depend on the sanction of the local Jewish community, it would mean that he was making the Kingdom dependent on religion. The apostle, of course, could not allow that, for he understood perfectly that Christianity is not a religion and does not depend in any way on a person's religiosity. And if now some part of the synagogue, guided solely by religious considerations, closed the path to the Kingdom for those who were ready to go, such a state of affairs would contradict not only all the apostle's principles, but also the will of God, who wants to save everyone without regard to his religious affiliation and to the opinion of his fellow believers concerning the path he has chosen. In essence, to refuse to preach in such a situation would have been for the apostle equivalent to betraying his witness and the people who believed his witness. It is not surprising that Paul continued his preaching: for him the Kingdom came first, not peoplehood and not religion.