Table-fellowship between Jews and Gentiles in Luke–Acts

One issue in Luke–Acts towers above all others as significant for the emergence and subsequent sectarian identity of the type of community for whom Luke wrote: namely, table-fellowship between Jews and Gentiles. An almost universal failure to appreciate the centrality of this phenomenon, both to Luke's history of Christian beginnings and to the life of his own community, is one of the most outstanding deficiencies in Lucan scholarship. It is a deficiency attributable to a methodology which is historical or theological or both, but which fails to enlist insights from the social sciences in an attempt to uncover crucial but largely unsuspected patterns of significance in the text. All Lucan commentators, of course, devote some attention to the account of the conversion of Cornelius in Acts 10 and to the Council of the Jerusalem church which discusses this event in Acts 11.1–18. Many of them even mention that Peter's fellow-apostles and disciples are concerned that he has entered a house inhabited by Gentiles and eaten with them (11.3). But this aspect of the incident is usually submerged in sweeping statements that the Cornelius account is intended to pave the way for ‘the mission to the Gentiles’, a catch-phrase beloved of writers on Luke and apparently expressive of his deepest intentions in the work.