Paul: A Biography

by N.T. Wright

Peter came to Antioch, perhaps in early 48. His arrival is unexplained, but then all Peter’s movements are unrecorded after his surprising escape from prison in Acts 12:17; all we know is that he worked as a traveling missionary. The key point is that he had initially been happy to go along with the practice of the local Jesus-followers, having Jewish believers and Gentile believers living together as “family,” sharing the same table. This was, after all, the principle that he, Peter, had himself embraced in Acts 10–11, when he visited Cornelius, justifying his actions to critics in Jerusalem. “What God made clean,” he had been told, “you must not regard as common.”5 Peter had acted on that principle, reckoning that the power of the gospel had “cleansed” the Gentiles of the ritual or moral defilement that they possessed in Jewish eyes, defilement that would normally be seen as a barrier to the intimacy of table fellowship.