The Welcome Must Be Explained in Jerusalem

News moves faster than Peter. He stayed “certain days” in Caesarea (10:48), and by the time he reaches Jerusalem the report has already spread through the whole of Judaea. “The apostles and brethren” are named together: the question will not be settled by the Twelve alone.

“Contended” is diakrino, the very verb the Spirit used when he told Peter to go “nothing doubting”, without making distinctions (10:20). His critics now make exactly the distinction he was told not to. “Come up” is the usual verb for travel to Jerusalem, which stands higher than any road that reaches it.

The charge is about a meal, not a baptism. “Men uncircumcised” is blunter in Greek, literally “men having a foreskin”, a deliberately coarse phrase. Jesus heard the same kind of complaint: “This man receiveth sinners, and eateth with them” (Luke 15:2). Table fellowship was where the line was felt.

“Rehearsed” meant recounted in 1611, with no sense of practice. “By order” is kathexes, in sequence, the word Luke uses in the preface to his Gospel when he promises Theophilus an account “in order” (Luke 1:3). Peter answers an accusation with a narrative, not a ruling.

Peter tells it in the first person and adds a detail the earlier account lacked: the sheet “came even to me”, right down to where he was. He places himself in Joppa but does not mention the tanner, which his critics might have held against him too; that omission is an inference, not a claim of the text.

“Fastened mine eyes” is atenizo, the steady gaze Peter fixed on the lame man at the temple gate (3:4). “Considered” is katanoeo, to look closely and take in. Peter is telling his hearers that he inspected the sheet’s contents with care; this was no half-seen blur on a hungry afternoon.

The command is repeated without softening, “slay and eat”, although the audience is the very circumcision party that objects. The King James varies the English, “kill” in 10:13 and “slay” here, but the Greek verb thuo is the same in both.

Peter now says “entered into my mouth” rather than “eaten”. The phrase recalls Jesus’ saying that “not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man” (Matthew 15:11), a saying Matthew records Peter asking Jesus to explain (15:15). He had heard the answer years before and still refused on the roof.

Peter adds “from heaven” to the voice’s second word, a detail his hearers need, since the question before them is whose authority overruled his scruple. The sentence itself is quoted exactly as in 10:15, word for word in the Greek.

“Drawn up” is anaspao, to pull up, a different verb from the one in 10:16. Luke uses it in Luke 14:5 for pulling an ox out of a pit on the Sabbath. “All” is added: the sheet and every creature in it went back together, none left behind for Peter to choose among.

“Immediately” ties the visitors to the vision in time, which is the heart of Peter’s case: it was not a dream he later matched to a convenient event. Several of the best manuscripts read “the house where we were”, which quietly includes others as witnesses from the very start.

“These six brethren” implies a gesture: the six men from Joppa have come to Jerusalem and are standing in the room. With Peter they make seven, and some commentators note that Roman and Egyptian law used seven witnesses to seal an important document, a background the text does not mention.

Peter reports the angel second-hand, as Cornelius told it to him; he did not see it himself. In Cornelius’s own words the messenger was “a man … in bright clothing” (10:30), and Peter calls him an angel, as the Book of Acts did in 10:3.

The angel’s promise appears here in fuller form than in chapter 10: “all thy house shall be saved”. Household salvation becomes a pattern in Acts, with Lydia and her household (16:15), the Philippian jailer told “thou shalt be saved, and thy house” (16:31), and Crispus with “all his house” (18:8).

“Began” and “beginning” share one Greek root, arch-. Peter sets two beginnings side by side: his first words in Cornelius’s house and the first outpouring on the apostles at Pentecost, some years before. He counts himself among those who received “at the beginning”.

The saying is Jesus’ in 1:5, which itself reshaped the words of John the Baptist (Luke 3:16). Remembering a word of Jesus at a moment of confusion is how the women at the tomb came to understand: “they remembered his words” (Luke 24:8). Peter’s memory is part of his evidence.

“The like gift” is isen dorean, an equal gift, isos being the word behind English terms like isosceles. “Withstand” is koluo, the same verb as “forbid” in 10:47. Having asked who could forbid the water, Peter now asks who he was to forbid God.

“Held their peace” is hesuchazo, to fall quiet, the silence of the lawyers in Luke 14:4 when Jesus asked about healing on the Sabbath. In 5:31 Peter said God exalted Jesus “to give repentance to Israel”; now the same gift is said to be granted to the Gentiles, and by the critics themselves.

Phenice is Phoenicia, the coastal strip of Tyre and Sidon. Cyprus was Barnabas’s home island (4:36). Antioch on the Orontes was, by Josephus’s reckoning, the third city of the Roman world after Rome and Alexandria, with a large Jewish quarter. Up to this point the travellers keep to Jewish hearers.

Cyrene was a Greek city on the coast of Libya with a large Jewish population; Simon of Cyrene carried Jesus’ cross (Luke 23:26), and Cyrenians had their own synagogue in Jerusalem (6:9). Lucius of Cyrene, named among the teachers at Antioch in 13:1, may have been one of these men.

“The hand of the Lord was with him” is said of the infant John the Baptist (Luke 1:66), and the Old Testament uses the hand of the LORD for his power at work. “Believed, and turned” are two verbs; “turned” is epistrepho, the Greek for the Hebrew shuv, the prophets’ word for returning to God.

“Came unto the ears” is a Hebrew turn of phrase (Isaiah 5:9). Jerusalem sends an envoy, as it sent Peter and John to Samaria (8:14). Antioch lay about three hundred miles north. Choosing Barnabas, a Cypriot, to visit a work begun by men of Cyprus looks deliberate, though that is an inference.

In Greek, seeing grace, charis, and being glad, echare, sound alike, and the pairing is hard to miss. “Exhorted” is parakaleo, and Barnabas’s name was interpreted in 4:36 as “son of consolation”, paraklesis, from the same root: he does what his name says. “Cleave unto” is prosmeno, to stay on with.

“Good man” is rare in Acts; Luke uses it of Joseph of Arimathea, “a good man, and a just” (Luke 23:50). “Full of the Holy Ghost and of faith” is the exact description given to Stephen in 6:5. The Stephen whose death scattered these believers is echoed in the man sent to strengthen them.

“To seek” is anazeteo, to search up and down, a word for real effort; Luke uses it of Mary and Joseph searching Jerusalem for the boy Jesus (Luke 2:44–45). Tarsus lay about a hundred miles from Antioch around the Gulf of Issus, and Saul had been there since 9:30, perhaps for several years.

“Christians” has a Latin-style ending, -ianus, like the Herodians of the Gospels, the kind of name outsiders gave to a party’s followers. The word appears only three times in the New Testament: here, on Agrippa’s lips (26:28), and in 1 Peter 4:16. “Were called” is chrematizo, the verb for divine warning in 10:22, here meaning publicly named.

The prophets “came down” from Jerusalem, the downhill verb again. Prophets form a recognised group in Acts, including Judas and Silas (15:32). Codex Bezae adds here “and there was much rejoicing; and when we were gathered together”, which, if original, would be the first “we” in the book.

Agabus returns in 21:10–11, binding his own hands and feet with Paul’s girdle. “All the world” is oikoumene, the inhabited Roman world, as in the census of Luke 2:1. Ancient writers report repeated grain shortages under Claudius (AD 41–54), and Josephus describes famine in Judaea in the mid forties.

“Relief” is diakonia, service, the word used for the daily ministration to the widows in 6:1. This is the first collection sent to Jerusalem, and it begins a thread through Paul’s life: the contribution “for the poor saints which are at Jerusalem” (Romans 15:26) that he carries at the end of his third journey.

“Elders”, presbuteroi, appear here for the first time as leaders of the Jerusalem church, and the apostles are not named; the persecution of chapter 12 may explain their absence, though that is inference. Whether this visit is the one Paul describes in Galatians 2:1–10 is one of the long-running debates about Acts.