Israel, the people of God, and the nations

Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, Mar 2002 by Schnabel, Eckard J

VIII. THE APOSTLES UNDERSTOOD THEIR MISSIONARY RESPONSIBILITY

The apostles were convinced that the promised era of salvation had become a present reality with the ministry and especially the death and resurrection of Jesus the Messiah-the time when God would restore the fortunes of Israel and draw the nations to Zion. This ingathering of the nations had to wait until Jesus, the Son of Man, had proclaimed the dawn of God's kingdom to Israel and had died and was raised from the dead.47

The disciples, after Easter and after Pentecost, understood what their task was until the Parousia and the visible consummation of God's Kingdom. Jesus had called them right from the beginning with the purpose of training them to be "fishers of men" (Mark 1:17). He had helped them get experience in fulfilling this task (Mark 6:7-13 par.). He had emphasized the international, cross-cultural nature of their mission that would extend to "all nations" (Matt 28:19-20) after his resurrection, and he had confirmed the universal scope of their mission before the ascension (Acts 1:8). The fact that the remaining eleven disciples insisted that there must be twelve apostles as witnesses of Jesus' resurrection (Acts 1:21-22) shows that they fully understood their responsibilities. In other words, the disciples must have grasped the notion that their proclamation of Jesus the Messiah would lead to an inclusion of the nations of God's kingdom, as final act before the consummation.

I do not agree with the interpretation, recently put forward again by J. Dunn, that the apostles stayed in Jerusalem, maintaining the continuity with Jesus' mission to Israel that has not yet been completely fulfilled, and that they "do not themselves take the message to the end of the earth."48 It is hardly conceivable that the Twelve had left the practical realization of the missionary task entrusted to them by the risen Lord to coincidences of more or less accidental developments.49 This is the impression which Luke's depiction of the earliest Christian mission in Acts seems to convey: first, the first missionary sermon, preached by Peter, appears to be a spontaneous statement (Acts 2:12-14, 37-38) explaining to a bewildered crowd the significance of the outpouring of the Spirit; second, there is no hint at missionary travels of the Twelve; third, the first journey that Luke mentions is the flight of some Christians of the Jerusalem church to Judea and Samaria after the martyrdom of Stephen, and Luke specifically points out that the apostles were spared this initial persecution (Acts 8:1); fourth, the first major expansion of the Jerusalem church into Samaria is related, as regards initiative and quantitative success, to one of the leaders of the Greek-speaking house churches rather than to an apostle, and appears as a spontaneous event in the midst of a persecution rather than as a planned undertaking. Hence some regard the leaders of the Jerusalem church as a conservative body that was never responsible for new ventures.50 Several observations indicate, however, that this is not the whole picture.