'And some of them were men of Cyprus and Cyrene, which, when they ware
come to Antioch, spake unto the Grecians, preaching the Lord Jesus. 21.
And the hand of the Lord was with them: and a great number believed,
and turned unto the Lord.'--ACTS xi. 20, 21.
Thus simply does the historian tell one of the greatest events in the
history of the Church. How great it was will appear if we observe that
the weight of authority among critics and commentators sees here an
extension of the message of salvation to Greeks, that is, to pure
heathens, and not a mere preaching to Hellenists, that is, to
Greek-speaking Jews born outside Palestine.
If that be correct, this was a great stride forward in the development
of the Church. It needed a vision to overcome the scruples of Peter,
and impel him to the bold innovation of preaching to Cornelius and his
household, and, as we know, his doing so gave grave offence to some of
his brethren in Jerusalem. But in the case before us, some Cypriote and
African Jews--men of no note in the Church, whose very names have
perished, with no official among them, with no vision nor command to
impel them, with no precedent to encourage them, with nothing but the
truth in their minds and the impulses of Christ's love in their
hearts--solve the problem of the extension of Christ's message to the
heathen, and, quite unconscious of the greatness of their act, do the
thing about the propriety of which there had been such serious question
in Jerusalem.
This boldness becomes even more remarkable if we notice that the
incident of our text may have taken place before Peter's visit to
Cornelius. The verse before our text, 'They which were scattered abroad
upon the persecution that arose about Stephen travelled, ... preaching
the word to none but unto the Jews only,' is almost a _verbatim_
repetition of words in an earlier chapter, and evidently suggests that
the writer is returning to that point of time, in order to take up
another thread of his narrative contemporaneous with those already
pursued. If so, three distinct lines of expansion appear to have
started from the dispersion of the Jerusalem church in the
persecution--namely, Philip's mission to Samaria, Peter's to Cornelius,
and this work in Antioch. Whether prior in time or no, the preaching in
the latter city was plainly quite independent of the other two. It is
further noteworthy that this, the effort of a handful of unnamed men,
was the true 'leader'--the shoot that grew. Philip's work, and Peter's
so far as we know, were side branches, which came to little; this led
on to a church at Antioch, and so to Paul's missionary work, and all
that came of that.
The incident naturally suggests some thoughts bearing on the general
subject of Christian work, which we now briefly present.