nces to the community of faith recur throughout Paul's work, which articulates a vision of faith in which "there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free: but Christ is all, and in all" (Col. 3:11). Compare as well the first part of Acts 11, wherein Peter establishes that the mission of the Church extends to both Jews and Gentiles, more specifically to those of Judea (Acts 11:1) and to the Grecians (Acts 11:20), i.e., pagan non-Jews on one hand and Hellenized/Romanized Jews on the other.
The evangelical and imperative and universalist tendency of the Church mandated dispersion of the new religion's mentors to all nations. Eberts explains how the first generation of evangelists accomplished this:
The Twelve of Galilee, under Peter, went to Galilee and beyond, to the village culture existing there. The Brethren, under James, addressed . . . "Hebrews"--Jews who spoke Aramaic . . . and tended to isolate themselves from the prevailing Greek society. The Hellenists, led by Stephen and Philip, directed their mission to "Hellenists"--Jews who spoke Greek . . . in the synagogue, and related themselves to Hellenistic culture. The last, the Apostles, under Barnabas and Paul, worked with synagogues in what is now Turkey and Greece, ministering especially to "godfearers"--Greek men and women attracted to Judaism but who were not proselytes (Eberts 305-6).
Dispersal fostered variety. Eberts remarks (305) that "Christianity has never been a monolithic movement." Gibbon's view of the effect of Christianity's doctrinal disputes is also instructive here: "alike scandalous to the church, alike pernicious to the state, still more minute in their origin, still more durable in their effects" (Gibbon 2:805; emphasis added).
The variety of interpretations metamorphosed into competing interpretations, inflected by the growing strength of ecclesial protocols that distinguished between laity and cle...