In the presence of the entire community, Paul angrily denounced Peter’s defection. In admitting gentiles to the Lord’s Supper, he, Paul, was not doing anything new, he protested. It was “the truth of the gospel” and this had been affirmed recently in Jerusalem. It had been the essence of Jesus’s message that nobody be excluded from the messianic banquet. It was James who had shifted the goal posts and betrayed the baptismal affirmation: “No more Jew or Greek!”76
