tioch" (Acts 11:26) and which implies the universalist/catholic character that the Church was later to assume. In the first part of Acts 11, Peter establishes that the mission of the Church extends to both Jews (circumcised) and Gentiles (uncircumcised), 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 Jews on the other.
Of special note is the fact that representatives of the "church which was in Jerusalem" (Barnabas) and of the church in Tarsus (Saul/Paul) assemble for more than a year in Antioch, teaching new articles of faith (Acts 11:29). Eberts (306-7) characterizes the teaming of Barnabas and Paul as the apostolic Christian mission. The year in Antioch can also be interpreted as time spent by two Christian apostolic leaders rationalizing Church direction so as to irrevocably include Jew and Gentile while maintaining a connection to the church's roots in Jerusalem. To put it another way, Acts 11 is an early exercise in establishing the distinctive Christian identity, an identity to be refined in subsequent centuries.
The institutional Christianity implied by Acts 11 (and indeed by the whole of Acts) did not happen overnight. The behavior of the key players as individual disciples of and believers in Jesus and as exponents of the Word to specific groups cannot be ignored. In this regard, Eberts's sociological discussion of the earliest decades of Christianity's development focuses not so much on rival doctrines that were brought under Pauline authority as on various strands of doctrinal thought, each of which made some contribution to what eventually became orthodox Christianity. As he puts it, "Christianity has never been a monolithic movement" (Eberts 305).
Eberts identifies four distinct early-Christian groups in ethnic or, more exactly, ethno-religious-geographical terms:
The Twelve of Galilee, under Peter, went to Galilee and beyond, t...