Expositor's Bible Commentary Commentary Acts 11:18

"And when they heard these things, they held their peace, and glorified God, saying, Then to the Gentiles also hath God granted repentance unto life." — Acts 11:18 (ASV)

On hearing about Peter’s experiences, the Christians at Jerusalem “remained silent” and “praised God.” This probably means that his critics, at least for the moment, were silenced, while those more receptive to God’s working acknowledged that Peter was right and credited God rather than human ingenuity for what had happened. In view of what Peter reported, the Jerusalem church could come to no other conclusion than that “God has even granted the Gentiles repentance unto life.” This was a response of momentous importance by the church at Jerusalem, and Luke meant his readers to appreciate it as being as significant in validating a later Gentile mission as Cornelius’s conversion itself. But while of vital significance for the acceptance of Gentiles, it said nothing about the many related questions that soon were bound to arise. For example, what lifestyle was appropriate for Gentiles coming to Christ directly out of paganism? How should they relate themselves as Christians to Jewish Christians and to Jews, both of whom followed a Jewish lifestyle? And how should the Jerusalem church relate itself in practice to these new Gentile believers that it had in theory accepted? These are matters the Jerusalem church did not address itself to in ch. 11. Yet such matters were logically involved in its response and were to be taken up again later (cf. 15:1–35).

And just as there were ideological issues left unresolved in the response of the church in ch. 11, so there are also a number of historical matters about which Luke gives us no information, though we would like very much to know. For example, whatever happened to Cornelius and his fellow Gentile Christians after Peter left them? Did they join with Philip and his converts in Caesarea (cf. 8:40) to form a worshiping community there? Or did they somehow inaugurate a distinctive form of Gentile Christian worship? Or, being doubtless all associated in one way or another with the Roman army and the Roman administration in Palestine, were these Gentile believers in Jesus transferred to other posts in the empire by Rome, either through due course or because of their recent alignment with a minority group within Palestine? Luke does not tell us.

Neither does Luke tell us how such a response affected the Jerusalem church itself. Did it lose some goodwill among its Jewish compatriots because it accepted Cornelius? Were there believers within its ranks who felt badly about this decision and who expressed their dissatisfaction—now or later—in ways disruptive for a further Gentile outreach? Was this one reason why the church soon found it appropriate to have as its leader the Pharisaically trained and legally scrupulous James the Just rather than one or more of the apostles (cf. comments on 12:2)? Again, Luke does not tell us, though some of these matters will come to the fore later in Acts.