non-Jewish, Jewish Gentiles

Acts 10:36-43

“As I began to speak, the Holy Spirit fell on them just as on us at the beginning. And I remembered the word of the Lord, how he said, ‘John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.’ If then God gave the same gift to them as he gave to us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could stand in God's way?” When they heard these things they fell silent. And they glorified God, saying, “Then to the Gentiles also God has granted repentance that leads to life.”

N. T. Wright, Acts for Everyone (Part One)

[C]learly the major concern, which if allowed to stand would blow a hole right through the worldview of the “circumcision group,” was that these Gentiles had been admitted as full members of the new and rapidly developing Jesus-family without having had to become Jews in the process.

We can only conclude [from Luke’s “major repetition within his normally fast-paced narrative”] that for Luke the admission of Gentiles into God’s people, reformed around Jesus, without needing to take on the marks of Jewish identity, i.e., circumcision and the food taboos, was one of the central and most important things he wanted to convey (173).

[T]he question of the value of circumcision and the food laws . . . were the equivalents of the national flag at a time when the whole nation felt under intense pressure. To welcome Gentiles as equal brothers and sisters must have looked like fraternizing with the enemy. To be “zealous for the law,” including circumcision and the food laws, must have looked like the only way that would fit in with the will of God for his people (174).