Why the gospel was not for the whole world

The New Testament gospel came in two parts—two proclamations distinct from each other with respect to content, audience, and geographical reach.

The first proclamation was addressed to Israel. It was that the God of Israel would soon “judge” his unrighteous people and inaugurate a new order under the rule of Jesus of Nazareth, who had been condemned by the leaders of the nation and executed by the Romans.

The second proclamation was addressed to the nations or gentiles, and the apostle Paul was the outstanding spokesperson and herald. The God of Israel had set him apart to “proclaim the good news” (euangellizomai) concerning Jesus Christ “to the nations” (Gal. 1:15-16*).

The distinction emerges in the process outlined in Romans 15:8-12. First, Christ became a servant to Israel to confirm the righteousness and faithfulness of Israel’s God. Then, the nations are invited to praise Israel’s Good because he has shown mercy to his people. Then the nations begin to hope that they too will be ruled by Israel’s messiah.

But which nations?

I encounter a lot of resistance to the idea that the apostolic mission, as it is presented to us in the New Testament, had in view quite narrowly the nations of the Greek-Roman world and then—even more controversially—that the conversion of the Roman Empire over the coming centuries was, in effect, the proper fulfilment of that mission.

One obvious objection is that European Christendom was hardly the happy-ever-after realisation of the Kingdom of God that we have been led to expect. My answer is that kingdom language throughout scripture has to do with the actions of the God of history in history and, therefore, that we should not be surprised by the messiness. The kingdom of God is not experienced as an ideal state of affairs; it is not to be equated with the final renewal of heaven and earth.

The historical reality is that, within a plausible time frame, the nations of the Greek-Roman world did what Paul demanded of them: they abandoned their idols, worshipped the one God of the Jews, the creator of all things, and confessed his Son as Lord.

The other objection would be that the disciples and apostles were sent to proclaim the gospel about salvation in Jesus to the whole earth. I can’t say that this is an exhaustive study, but here are some of the reasons why I think that the mission to the nations was geographically circumscribed.

Why the mission to the nations was geographically circumscribed

1. Jesus tells his disciples that the Spirit will come upon them and that they will be his “witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and as far as the end of the earth” (Acts 1:8*). The “end of the earth” is the place from which an invading nation may be sent against Israel (Deut. 28:49). A great nation is coming from the “end of the earth” to fight against Jerusalem (Jer. 6:22). The language keeps us within the frame of a story about Jerusalem and Rome. The news that God is saving his people from the crisis is then proclaimed by envoys “to the end of the earth” (cf. Is. 8:9; 48:20; 62:11). That is where the book begins.

2. Under house arrest in Rome, Paul testifies to the leaders of the Jews concerning the kingdom of God, “trying to convince them about Jesus both from the Law of Moses and from the Prophets” (Acts 28:23). The salvation of Israel from its enemies, both internal and external, is being proclaimed at the end of the earth, at the end of the book

3. Luke has Paul give notice to the “men of Athens” that the times of pagan ignorance are coming to an end and that the God of the Jews, who cannot be worshipped in the form of images “fashioned by human craft and imagination,” has “fixed a day on which he will judge the oikoumenē in righteousness, by a man whom he appointed, giving assurance to everyone having raised him from the dead” (Acts 17:29-31).

The Greek term oikoumenē does not mean “empire,” but in Luke-Acts it patently denotes a civilisation that was coterminous with the Roman Empire: “In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world (oikoumenēn) should be registered” (Lk. 2:1). Nero is acclaimed as “saviour and benefactor of the oikoumenēs” (OGIS 668.3-5), and as “the expectation and hope of the world (oikoumenēs)…, the good genius of the world (oikoumenēs) and source of all good things” (OxyP 7.1021.5-10).

4. The business of the silversmiths in Ephesus is put in jeopardy because the proclamation of a coming judgment is beginning to threaten the pre-eminence of the cult of the “great goddess Artemis… whom the whole of Asia and the oikoumenē venerate” (Acts 19:26-27). The significance of the gospel for the particular political-religious entity is emphasised.

5. Paul is accused before Felix, by the fawning leaders of the Jews, of being “a plague and a fomenter of sedition among all the Jews throughout the oikoumenēn, a ringleader of the sect of the Nazarenes” (Acts 24:3-5*).

6. Paul’s avowed ambition was to preach the good news about Jesus and bring into existence communities of obedient Jews and Gentiles from Jerusalem to Spain (Rom. 15:19, 24, 28). He proclaimed the impending annexation of the Roman Empire for the rule of the Son, for the sake of the glory or renown of his God. The ends of the earth do not only hear about the salvation of Israel; they are challenged to turn and be saved by the living God, besides whom there is no other: “Turn to me and be saved, all the ends of the earth! For I am God, and there is no other” (Is. 45:22).

7. There is a key and recurrent Old Testament story that controls the shift from the proclamation to Israel to the proclamation to the nations.

One good place to find its influence is Paul’s quotation of Habakkuk 2:4 as part of his argument about the gospel in Romans 1:1-17. Habakkuk complains that widespread injustice goes unpunished in Israel. The good news in the first place, therefore, is that God will punish wickedness in Israel by means of the Chaldeans. But will the dreadful pagan power be allowed to wreak havoc among the nations indefinitely? No, the cup of judgment will sooner or later come round to the Chaldeans to drink (Hab. 2:16). And what about righteous Jews, with all this indiscriminate violence going on? They will live by their faith.

So what follows the prophetic message concerning the Jews is a prophetic message concerning the enemies of the Jews. As Paul puts it in Romans, there will be wrath against the Jew first, then against the Greek; and there will be salvation for the Jew first, then for the Greek (Rom. 1:16-17; 2:9-10). What happens to this oikoumenē matters.

8. The “man of lawlessness” in 2 Thessalonians 2:3-12 is a figure like the bogeyman Antiochus Epiphanes who embodies the disruptive and repressive presence of pagan power in the midst of Israel.

In Psalms of Solomon 1, Jerusalem laments Pompey’s attack on the city in 63 BC. The wealth of the Romans “was extended to the whole earth, and their glory to the end of the earth”; they “exalted themselves to the stars,” they were arrogant, “they did not acknowledge God” (1:4-6). “Their lawless deeds were beyond the nations before them; they profaned the sanctuary of the Lord with profanation” (1:8*). The Romans brought a lawlessness that exceeded that of Antiochus Epiphanes.

The apocalyptic vision of 2 Thessalonians is woven from the same threads—the same biblical and apocalyptic traditions—for a similar purpose. The parousia of the Lord Jesus collides with the parousia of the lawless Roman intruder who “opposes and exalts himself against every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, proclaiming himself to be God” (2 Thess. 2:4, 8-9). The story about Rome is definitive for the eschatological vision.

9. The apocalyptic chaos unleashed by the Lamb in Revelation culminates in judgment against Rome as both a degenerate and corrupting geopolitical power and as a vicious persecutor of the churches (Rev. 17-18). Rome has come to be seen as the beastly embodiment of satanic hostility, so once the city has been overthrown, the beast is destroyed in the lake of fire, and the Satan-dragon is imprisoned in the abyss for a very long period of time (Rev. 19:20-20:3).

We again have a profoundly significant narrative about Jesus, who will “tread the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God the Almighty,” who is “King of kings and Lord of lords” (19:15-16), which finds fulfilment in the radical overhaul of a particular civilisation. The focus has shifted from Greece to Rome, but it is essentially what Paul predicted in Athens.

10. The “eternal gospel” proclaimed by a first angel of three in Revelation 14:6-7 is to be heard throughout the earth by all nations and peoples, but its subject is the judgment that is about to come upon Rome—“Babylon the great, she who made all nations drink the wine of the passion of her sexual immorality” (14:8).

11. There is no mission to any region beyond the Greek-Roman world in the New Testament. Jews from Parthia, Media, Elam, and Mesopotamia heard Peter’s Pentecost sermon (Acts 2:9), and the Ethiopian eunuch, presumably a Jew or a proselyte, went home baptised (8:26-39), but this is at most marginal overspill. Perhaps it meant that more distant nations would hear about what was happening between Israel and Rome, but no attempt is made to follow up on these initial contacts.

12. Otherwise, aggressive nations from beyond the Euphrates—principally the Parthians—are depicted merely as a threat to Rome, an instrument of divine judgment, not as a people-group to be converted to belief in Jesus: “The sixth angel poured out his bowl on the great river Euphrates, and its water was dried up, to prepare the way for the kings from the east” (Rev. 16:12). Rome has become “Babylon the great” (14:8; 16:19; 17:5; 18:2, 10, 21), and perhaps there is a memory here of the entry of Cyrus’ troops into Babylon along the drained river-bed of the Euphrates (Herodotus 1.191).

The story is the thing

The point to underline is that this narrowing of the scope of the New Testament vision is not incidental or trivial. It is of the essence. There is a powerful narrative logic which says that judgment against Israel is necessarily followed by judgment against the enemy of Israel, the more powerful nation by which Israel was judged. This does not rule out the possibility that more distant nations—the Parthians, the Ethiopians, the peoples of India—would get wind of what was going on and respond in some way. But that’s not the core eschatology. It’s not the telos.

God saved his people from a long history of failure and insubordination that would come to a head in the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple by the armies of Titus, and this act of salvation would have an extraordinary knock-on effect for the idolatrous Greek-Roman world—an act of divine judgment that would be concretised historically in the conversion of the empire.

And that is almost the end of the biblical story.