Mission to the Gentiles in Luke-Acts as fulfilling God's promise to Israel

Abstract

The overall narrative in the Acts of the Apostles displays a noticeable dual-emphasis of the author: emphasis on the mission to the Gentiles despite the obstructions of the Jews and emphasis on the Jewish roots of the Gentile mission, which results in an ambivalent attitude toward the Jews and Judaism. These seemingly contradictory emphases easily push careless readers to an unbalanced interpretation and reading of Acts, and the Holocaust is the ultimate horrible consequence of the anti-Semitic interpretation of Acts. This thesis argues that the two emphases, rather than being contradictory, are mutually intertwined: Jewish roots help illuminate the origin and meaning of the mission to the Gentiles, and the mission to the Gentiles fulfills the promise God made to Israel. A good example of this is the Apostolic Letter composed at the Jerusalem Council, which was held to address and solve the problem of the conditions by which the Gentiles could be members of the church (cf. Acts 15:2). In this study, I will place the Apostolic Letter (15:23-29) within a larger theological and narrative framework of Luke-Acts—the fulfillment of God’s promise to Israel— and argue that, as Luke’s rhetorical device, the Decree (15:20, 29; 21:25) not only serves to explain some already existing practices among Jewish and Gentile Christians, but more importantly, serves as a guiding principle for concrete table fellowship between Jewish believers and Gentile believers within a community that calls its believers to be of “one heart and soul” (4:32).