Does Christianity begin when Gentiles join the community?
In Acts 11:19, Luke reports that those who were scattered after the action against Stephen and the subsequent distress traveled as far as Phoenicia, Cyprus and Antioch. He concludes the verse with the remark, “They spoke the word to none except Jews.” However, he then continues in verse 20: “But among them were some men from Cyprus and Cyrene who, on coming to Antioch, spoke to the non-Jewish Greeks also, preaching the Lord Jesus.” How can the situation best be imagined that Greek-speaking Jews proclaim “Jesus as Lord” to Greek-speaking non-Jews? At this point Luke writes less clearly. The people who had come from Jerusalem would not have stood in the market place in Antioch and begun to speak there. Those who stemmed from Cyprus and Cyrene were Jews, and the contact address, so to speak, for Jews to go to when they came into a strange city, was the synagogue. This was not a closed cultic space, open only on the Sabbath, but the administrative and communication center of the Jewish com
