The First Missionary Journey
The First Missionary Journey
The missionaries chosen, set apart by the church in obedience to the Spirit’s leading, were Barnabas and Paul, who then invited Mark (Barnabas’ cousin) to accompany them. They sailed to Cyprus, Barnabas’ home country, and then northwest to land on Asian soil at Perga in Pamphylia. By this time Mark had had enough and returned to Jerusalem. Perhaps he was scared of the swamps of Pamphylia where (conjecturally) Paul caught malaria which damaged his eyesight. At all events, when they had climbed the plateau and reached Galatia, Paul seems to have had some disfiguring eye disease (Gal. 4:13–15). The first Galatian city he visited was Pisidian Antioch, where he preached in the synagogue and many Jews were converted. But when the unbelieving Jews contradicted Paul’s message, he took a bold step (which in the future he would often repeat) and turned to the Gentiles. Driven out of the city by opposition, Paul and Barnabas moved on to three more Galatian towns, Iconium, Lystra (where pagans nearly worshiped them as gods and Jews stoned Paul as a blasphemer) and Derbe. Then, retracing their steps, they strengthened the new converts and in every church appointed elders to care for them.5
Back in Antioch they gathered the church together and reported what God had done, especially “how he had opened the door of faith to the Gentiles” (Acts 14:27). But the church’s rejoicing soon gave place to controversy, for there arrived in Antioch from Jerusalem a group of so-called “Judaizers,” who started teaching that unless Gentile converts were circumcised and kept the law of Moses they could not be saved (Acts 15:1–5). Paul engaged them in a vigorous debate. And when even Peter, in a temporary lapse due to fear rather than conviction, withdrew from fellowship with Gentile Christians, Paul had to rebuke him publicly (Gal. 2:11–14).
It appears that the insidious influence of the Judaizers had penetrated even to the Galatian churches. This prompted Paul to write the first of his many letters. In his Letter to the Galatians he defended his apostolic authority as derived from Christ, assured them that there was no discord between him and the Jerusalem apostles, rejected the Judaizers’ gospel as being no gospel at all, emphasized that salvation is by God’s grace alone through faith alone without the addition of circumcision or the works of the law or anything else, and begged his Galatian readers to stand fast in their Christian liberty.
The church of Antioch decided to send Paul and Barnabas to Jerusalem to settle the issue which had been raised by the Judaizers, and this led to “the Council of Jerusalem” (described in Acts 15) in about AD 49 or 50. After much debate Peter (who by now had recovered from his lapse) recounted the conversion of Cornelius. Then Paul and Barnabas told what God had done through their ministry among the Gentiles. Finally, James, the Lord’s brother, clinched the argument from Old Testament Scripture. Gentile converts, he concluded, did not need to be circumcised in order to be saved. Nevertheless, in order to respect the scruples of weak Jewish consciences and so promote Gentile-Jewish fellowship within the church, they were to be asked voluntarily to follow certain Jewish food and marriage regulations.6