Up to now the message has spread by accident — people running from trouble and talking as they went. In this part it becomes deliberate: a church sends two men out on purpose, and the shape of the next thirty years is set.

Cornelius

Cornelius is a centurion at Caesarea — a Gentile who prays and gives generously, but who has not become a Jew. He is told in a vision to send for Peter. At the same hour Peter, on a rooftop in Joppa and hungry, sees a sheet let down full of animals a Jew would never eat, and hears a voice telling him to kill and eat. He refuses three times. The answer comes back: do not call unclean what God has made clean.

Peter goes, and preaches, and while he is still speaking the Holy Spirit falls on the whole Gentile household — before baptism, before circumcision, before anything. Peter’s conclusion is simply that if God has given them the same gift, who was he to stand in the way.

He is called to account for it in Jerusalem, and his defense is to tell the story. They accept it, though the argument is not finished. It comes back in Part Five, and it is still smoldering years later in Galatians.

Acts 10:1–11:18

Antioch, and the name

Antioch in Syria was the third city of the empire — large, Greek-speaking, and mixed. Believers scattered by the persecution reach it and, for the first time, preach to Gentiles as well as Jews. A great number believe, and Jerusalem sends Barnabas to look into it. He is glad, and then he does the thing he is best at: he goes to Tarsus, finds Saul, and brings him back. They teach there together for a year.

And in Antioch the disciples were first called Christians. Most likely it was a label put on them by outsiders — Christ’s people — rather than one they chose. That is roughly ten years after Pentecost, and some three hundred miles from Jerusalem.

Acts 11:19–26

Herod

Herod Agrippa has James the brother of John put to death with the sword. This is the only apostolic death the New Testament records, and Luke gives it a single verse. He arrests Peter as well, intending the same, and Peter walks out of the prison past the guards while the church is still praying for him — and the servant girl who answers the door is so startled she leaves him standing in the street.

Herod dies shortly after, in A.D. 44, struck down at Caesarea after accepting the crowd’s acclaim as a god. The Jewish historian Josephus records his death independently, which is one of the places where Acts and the secular record touch.

Acts 12:1–24

The First Journey

The church at Antioch sends Barnabas and Saul out, with John Mark along to help. They sail to Cyprus, then cross to the mainland and work through the towns of the interior — Pisidian Antioch, Iconium, Lystra, Derbe.

Three things happen on this trip that matter later. On Cyprus, before the Roman proconsul, Luke begins calling him Paul — the Roman name, as the audience becomes Roman. John Mark leaves them partway through and goes home, which causes a serious quarrel in Part Five. And at Lystra, after the crowd first tries to worship them as gods, Paul is stoned and dragged out of the city for dead.

He gets up and goes back in. On the way home they revisit every town they had been driven out of, appointing elders, telling the new believers plainly that entering the kingdom of God involves many hardships. Nobody was being sold an easy road.

Acts 13:1–14:28

They come home to a question that has to be settled: what exactly must a Gentile become in order to belong? That is the next part.