Missionary Success Research Articles

‘Take Up Your Mat and Walk’: [Dis-] Abled Bodies of Communication and Early Christian Wandering

Early Christianity relied heavily on walking, yet New Testament Studies has largely neglected the cultural significance of walking in the ancient world and its connection to Early Christian communication. Walking, often seen as a conscious cultural act, is often overlooked in scholarly discourse, with the focus primarily on its symbolic aspects. Drawing from interdisciplinary research in classics, cultural studies, and social science, this study aims to explore how early Christian bodily movement and communication have been perceived and culturally appropriated in European and North American scholarship. It presents three case studies: the portrayal of disabled bodies’ movements in healings, the interpretation of Jesus and his disciples as itinerant wanderers, and the examination of walking in Pauline literature as a means of profiling missionary success.

A “Moors’ Lovefeast” and Masked Enslavement in the Eighteenth-Century Moravian Church

Abstract This article analyzes context and circumstances of an event described as a “Moors’ lovefeast,” which took place in the Moravian Church settlement of Herrnhaag in December 1742. Several of the “Moors” in attendance hailed from the West Indies, others from North America and Africa. Likewise present were a Malabar, a Tatar, and a German Sinto. Adding to the cosmopolitan luster of the Herrnhaag congregation, their presence broadcasted a powerful message of missionary success and eschatological expectation. Some of these men, women, and children were or had been enslaved, but the prestige bestowed on these so-called “Moors” contributed to masking their enslavement. A close reading of the available sources shows how contemporary practices of enslavement fed into Moravians’ methods of representing missionary success as well as their unique spirituality and eschatological vision.

“I Dreamed of an Alliance between the Authority of Dogma and Political Liberty”: Mormonism and Socialism in France in the Nineteenth Century

“I Dreamed of an Alliance between the Authority of Dogma and Political Liberty”: Mormonism and Socialism in France in the Nineteenth Century

Apologetics and Antiquity: Book of Mormon Reception, 1830–1844

Apologetics and Antiquity: Book of Mormon Reception, 1830–1844

Harold B. Lee and Mormonism's Black Priesthood and Temple Ban

Harold B. Lee and Mormonism's Black Priesthood and Temple Ban

Uzak Doğu'dan Yansımalar: Çin'deki Katolik ve Nesturî Varlığının Karşılaştırılması

Orta çağda Batı Avrupa'dan Fransisken rahipler ve Suriye'den Nesturî rahipler, kendi Hıristiyan mezheplerini ve doktrinini yaymak ve bölgede kiliselerini kurmak için Uzak Doğu'ya gittiler. Benzer hedefleri paylaşsalar da, Fransiskenler ve Nesturîler farklı ikna yöntemleri kullandılar, bu nedenle misyonerlik çalışmalarının sonuçları ve mirası, önemli ölçüde birbirlerinden farklıydı. Moğol bozkırlarındaki mezar taşlarının da kanıtladığı gibi, Nesturîler Uzak Doğu'da dikkate değer ölçüde başarılıydılar; ancak kendi ülkelerinde (Mezopotamya), ironi bir şekilde, giderek marjinalleştirildiler. Buna karşılık, Katolik Fransiskenler ve Uzak Doğu'ya giden diğer Avrupalı seyyahlar, benzer misyonerlik başarısı elde edemediler ve 14. yüzyılın ortalarından sonra bölgede neredeyse hiç izleri kalmadı. Bununla birlikte, kendi ülkelerindeki okuyucuları için yazdıkları seyahatnameler ve mektuplar, hem Orta Çağ'ın sonlarında Avrupa’yı dışa açma hırsları üzerinde hem de on yedinci yüzyıl Çin'indeki Katolik misyonunun dönüşü üzerinde büyük bir etkiye sahipti. Özetle, Nesturîlerin mirası Orta Asya’daki taş anıtlardı ve Fransiskenler ise Batı'da ilham verici metinler bıraktılar. Uzak Doğu'daki Hıristiyan misyonerlik faaliyetinin ilgili uygulamalarının karşılaştırılması, ortaçağ kültürler arası seyahatin hem menşe bölgelerini hem de varış bölgelerini çeşitli şekillerde nasıl etkilediğini daha iyi tanıtabilir. Bu nedenle, Orta Çağ'ın sonlarında Uzak Doğu'daki Hıristiyan varlığı ortadan kalksa da bu misyonerlerin geldiği toplumlar için kalıcı sonuçlar doğurmuştur.

The Multiple Publics of a Transnational Activist: Abdürreşid İbrahim, Pan-Asianism, and the Creation of Islam in Japan

The Russian Muslim Abdürreşid İbrahim (1857-1944) was not only a successful journalist and reform-minded Islamic scholar. He was also a transnational activist who became influential in different local contexts, notably Russia, the Ottoman Empire, and Japan. During his four-month stay in Japan in 1909, he cooperated with Japanese pan-Asianists and helped found the first pan-Asianist society, which focused on building ties between Japan and Asia’s Muslims. Researchers have predominantly regarded İbrahim as a pioneering figure in an emerging anti-Western coalition of pan-Islamists and pan-Asianists, or as a Muslim missionary aspiring to convert Japan to Islam. This article will demonstrate, however, that İbrahim’s pro-Japanese pan-Asianism, as well as his missionary zeal, should both be read as flexible stances in reaction to the expectations of different publics. An ostentatious pan-Asianism and the exaggeration of his missionary success equally served the transnational activist to attract attention and assert his importance in varying local contexts.

Repercussions from the Far East: A Comparison of the Catholic and Nestorian Presence in China

In the middle ages, Franciscan monks from Western Europe and Nestorian monks from Syria traveled to the Far East to spread the gospel and to establish their churches in the region. Although they shared similar goals, Franciscans and Nestorians employed different methods of persuasion, so the results and legacy of their missionary work differed considerably. The Nestorians were remarkably successful in the Far East, as proven by the gravestones in the Mongolian steppes; in their home countries, ironically, they were increasingly marginalized. In contrast, the Franciscans and other European travelers to the Far East did not achieve similar missionary success and scarcely left a mark on the region after the mid-fourteenth century. The travelogues and letters they composed for their audiences at home, however, had a great impact, both on late-medieval European ambitions to open up the world and on the return of the Catholic mission in seventeenth-century China. In summary, the Nestorians’ legacy was stone monuments in the East and the Franciscans left inspiring texts in the West. A comparison of the respective practices of Christian missionary activity in the Far East may further recognition of how medieval cross-cultural travel affected both the regions of origin and the regions of destination in various ways. Therefore, even though the Christian presence in the Far East vanished in the late middle ages, it had lasting consequences for the societies from whence the missionaries came. It not only broadened the West’s knowledge of the Far East but also influenced the renewal of Christian missions in the region from the seventeenth century onwards.

Wer ist der Jüngling? Die Taufe des Gundaphor in den Thomasakten und der Kult des Asklepios

AbstractThe Acts of Thomas relate the Apostle Thomas’ missionary journey to India and his missionary successes. The narrative tells that Thomas baptized important persons of the Indian society. The description of king Gundaphor’s baptism ends in a vision: “And when they had come up out of the water, a youth appeared to them, and he was holding a lighted taper; and the light of the lamps became pale through its light.”1 The following essay discusses the question of the identification of this literary figure of the young man in the context of similar evidence from the cult of Asclepius. It also reflects on the explanation of this figure from a methodological point of view. It analyzes the modern perception of these texts and its contribution to the understanding of the ancient liturgies of baptism and their ritual shape. While the rituals, procedures, places, and notions of the cult of Asclepius were firmly embedded in Christian world views of late antiquity and the early middle ages, the allusions to the cult of Asclepius in the Acts of Thomas rather suggest the reverse situation for that earlier epoch: The Acts of Thomas explain Christian baptism in terms of the theory of the cult of Asclepius. As it becomes difficult, furthermore, to distinguish between elements of ritual description and ritual explanation in the guise of the narrative, these observations advise caution in the use of the descriptions of the liturgies in the Acts of Thomas for reconstructions of the history of Christian baptism.

Letters from Eighteenth-Century Sonora: Father Segesser Writes to His Family in Switzerland

Letters from Eighteenth-Century Sonora: Father Segesser Writes to His Family in Switzerland A Research Note Raymond Harris Thompson At the very end of the seventeenth century a ten-year-old boy in Lucerne, Switzerland, decided to become a Jesuit missionary saving souls in faraway lands. He was inspired by the missionary success of St. Francis Xavier in India and Japan in the sixteenth century. During his training for the priesthood, he vigorously campaigned for such an assignment. He was selected in 1726 to go to Paraguay, but that was not to be (Hausberger 1995:298). Unbeknownst to him, his future was being decided by events unfolding in northwestern Mexico, where Benito Crespo y Munroy was appointed Bishop of Durango in 1723. The bishop conducted an inspection of the huge territory under his jurisdiction and discovered a severe shortage of missionaries in the Pimería Alta on the northern fringe of his diocese. On 22 August 1727 he wrote to King Philip V of Spain, urging that three new missionaries be dispatched to northwest Mexico. The king agreed, and on 20 October 1728 ordered Viceroy Juan de Acuña y Manrique to take appropriate action. On 27 April 1730 the Viceroy instructed Bishop Crespo to establish three missions in the Pimería Alta and to assign Jesuit priests to them. As a result of this ponderous long-distance bureaucratic activity that boy, now Father Philipp Segesser, S.J., was one of the three new Jesuit missionaries Bishop Crespo welcomed to Durango on 19 July 1731 (Hammond 1929). Thus began the thirty-one-year missionary career [End Page 225] of Father Segesser in the Sonoran missions of San Xavier, Guevavi, San Ignacio, Tecoripa, and Ures. Although he was extremely busy assembling material for his mission, less than two weeks after being welcomed by Bishop Crespo, he wrote on 1 August to his younger brother, Ulrich Franz Joseph, city councilman and Ratsrichter (council notary) of Lucerne, Switzerland. After more than six years of disappointments and delays, months of waiting, and difficult travels, he was finally totally involved in missionary activities. The ten-year-old boy in him could not resist the desire to take time out and share with his family the excitement and promise of this development. That letter (Letter 46, reproduced here), and others like it, enabled Father Segesser to stay in contact with the old, patrician, close-knit, wealthy, and devoutly Catholic family into which he was had been born on 1 September 1689. Such contact became very important to him after he left his homeland forever to serve as one of three new Jesuit missionaries on the northern frontier of New Spain. From the time when he was in Bavaria preparing to become a member of the Society of Jesus until his death in 1762 at the Mission of San Miguel de los Ures, he carried on a lively correspondence with his family in Lucerne. The Segesser family was justly proud of its Jesuit missionary son and intensely interested in his life in faraway and exotic New Spain. They often copied his letters for distribution to friends and relatives outside Lucerne. More importantly, they saved seventy-six of them in a family archive (now in the Lucerne State Archive). Unfortunately, none of the letters they wrote to him have survived. Theodore Edward Treutlein (1945) translated the longest of Segesser’s letters and considered, but never found the time, to translate more. This trove of letters constitutes the kind of archival resource that needs to be made available to scholars and the reading public. An effort to do just that began almost fifty years ago with that indefatigable chronicler of northwestern New Spain, Bernard Lee Fontana, then ethnologist on the staff of the Arizona State Museum. He learned of the existence of the letters in the Segesser family archive during his correspondence in the mid-sixties with Swiss scholar Gottfried Hotz, who was writing a book on the Indian hide paintings Father Segesser had sent home to his family (Hotz 1960). I had just become head of the Department of Anthropology and director of the Arizona State Museum, and I supported an effort to obtain copies of the letters...

‘Wipe the Dust off your Feet’

This article looks at the missionary – widely defined – as a character in late eighteenth-century literature. Specifically, it asks why authors would choose to include stories about failures in missionary endeavours. The paper argues that the answer lies in the pervasive influence of biblical stories on colonial religious discourse. The authors treated here view the failed missionary as a harbinger of the gospel's ultimate success because Jesus himself said as much to his apostles, warning of opposition and rejection prior to the kingdom's ultimate victory. Whether consciously or not, biblical precedents shape the expansionist, Christian rhetoric of these eighteenth and early nineteenth-century writers in such a way that they can accommodate both missionary successes and disappointments in their narratives, without doubting their religious superiority over the non-Christians they describe.

The 16PF and Marital Satisfaction Inventory as Predictors of Missionary Job Success

The present study evaluated the 16PF and Marital Satisfaction Inventory (MSI) in terms of their ability to predict missionary success, as measured by supervisor evaluations and attrition data. A sample of 158 missionary candidates from a large, evangelical mission agency completed the 16PF and the MSI as part of the application process to become career missionaries. The supervisor's recommendations for return to the team were positively correlated with group-orientation on the 16PF. Attrition was negatively correlated with the trait of enthusiasm on the 16PF. Job performance was positively correlated with the trait of group-orientation on the 16PF and negatively correlated with marital distress and dissatisfaction with time spent together on the MSI. Job satisfaction was positively correlated with the traits of being cool and reserved, and conservative on the 16PF.

‘Culture’ as a tool and an obstacle: missionary encounters in post‐Soviet Kyrgyzstan

The relatively large number of converts from Islam to evangelical Christianity in post‐Soviet Kyrgyzstan is exceptional in the Muslim world and has challenged local confidence that Islam is an inseparable element of Kyrgyz nationality. I argue that part of the missionary success stems from unexpected synergies between communist cultural legacies and new evangelical approaches. Both communists and evangelicals attempted to advance their ideals by disconnecting religion and culture. But although these efforts delivered tangible results, they also had the (unintended) consequence of folklorizing and objectifying ‘culture’, thereby partly re‐inscribing the ethnic boundaries that they intended to overcome.RésuméLe nombre relativement important de musulmans convertis au christianisme évangélique dans le Kirghizstan post‐soviétique est exceptionnel dans le monde musulman et ébranle la croyance locale que l'islam est indissociable de l'identité nationale kirghize. L'auteur affirme qu'une partie du succès des missionnaires provient de la synergie inattendue entre l'héritage culturel communiste et la nouvelle approche évangélique. Les communistes aussi bien que les chrétiens évangéliques ont tenté de faire progresser leurs idéaux en dissociant religion et culture. Bien que ces efforts donnent des résultats tangibles, ils ont aussi eu la conséquence involontaire de folkloriser et d'objectiver la « culture », en retraçant ainsi les frontières ethniques qu'ils avaient cherchéà abolir.

Imperial Fault Lines: Christianity and Colonial Power in India, 1818-1940 (review)

Reviewed by: Imperial Fault Lines: Christianity and Colonial Power in India, 1818–1940 Susan Thorne (bio) Imperial Fault Lines: Christianity and Colonial Power in India, 1818–1940 by Jeffrey Cox; pp. ix + 357. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002, $55.00. Jeff Cox tackles big questions. Even better, he answers big questions on the local ground. The results here, as in his previous work, illuminate the struggle between piety and power that some would deem constitutive of our very humanity. Cox's first monograph, The English Churches in a Secular Society: Lambeth, 1870–1930 (1982), took on secularization theory in the kind of place one would not expect to find organized religion in good health even in its Victorian heyday. In the underutilized archives of local churches and chapels in this impoverished south London borough, as well as in the borough press and in the accounts of contemporary social surveyors, Cox uncovered surprising evidence of considerable home missionary success. It was not modern imperatives, much less intellectual enlightenment, that left Britain's churches and chapels bereft of popular support. Declining church attendance in twentieth century Britain was, rather, a function of the Victorian churches' institutional emphasis on social provisions that would subsequently be displaced by a welfare state Nonconformists helped to build. Imperial Fault Lines tackles the other major question in Protestantism's modern social history, the nature of the relationship between Christian missions and colonialism. As Cox notes in his crisply written and generous introduction, scholarly assessments of Christian missions run the ideological gamut. Anti-colonial nationalist historians have generally viewed missionaries as cultural imperialists, agents of the civilizing mission, universally and inevitably complicit in colonial racism and exploitation. Missionaries' present-day defenders, by contrast, deny that missionaries were interested in politics at all, claiming that their (self-professed) motives were exclusively spiritual. Agnostics on the question levy perhaps the most damning of all charges in their insistence that missionaries [End Page 295] in the colonies were marginal figures who exerted little or no influence on colonial outcomes. Were missionaries imperialists in Christian disguise or were they sincere in their professions of faith? Were missionary motives primarily religious or political? Were missionaries racist agents of colonial exploitation or "friends of the native"? Did missions matter at all or were missions a simple waste of Victorian time and money? Cox engages these questions in the local mission fields of colonial South Asia. It is worth noting that Cox began working on this project in the early 1980s, well before British historical studies' recent imperial turn; it was Cox's decision to learn the languages necessary to examine the foreign missionary encounter from as many archival and oral perspectives as possible that delayed publication. Our reward for his diligence lies in the degree to which this book succeeds in bringing converts and missionaries, colonized and colonizers, into the same field of vision. Cox acknowledges the power differentials on which the missionary presence in the Punjab was predicated, as well as the racial prejudice to which most missionaries succumbed. Cox insists, however, that social relations on the colonial ground continually frustrated missionary intentions, whether benighted or benevolent. Cox continually draws attention to the unintended and often contradictory consequences of missionary exertions in the field. Liberal missionaries' efforts to befriend the "natives" were as likely to be foiled by the temptations of racial privilege as their more authoritarian counterparts' efforts to keep the "natives" in their place were to being undermined by the missionaries' dependence on native agency. Perhaps the most striking example of missionary rhetoric's divergence from colonial reality lies in the fact that the missionary field force was not white and male as missionary hagiography might lead one to expect. Women played a prominent role in the foreign mission field from the outset; and by the twentieth century's turn, the majority of missionary employees were female. Here, as in his study of Lambeth, Cox emphasizes the relatively autonomous logic of institutional development. The professionalization of mission work that accompanied the missionary movement's growing emphasis on establishing schools and hospitals provided employment opportunities for white women as well as Indian converts. Contrary to the conventional wisdom of secular mission historiography...

Jesuit Reactions to the Restoration of the Hierarchy: The Diocese of Liverpool, 1850–1880

In the haphazard circumstances of the English mission, the Society of Jesus offered the virtues of discipline and organisation, the methodical self-programming of the Spiritual Exercises, and a record of missionary success from China to Peru’. The healthy survival of Catholicism in Lancashire through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries owed a great deal to the active ministry of the Jesuits and by the 1770s they were running fifteen missions in the county. After the suppression of the Society in 1773 they continued to run these as ex-Jesuits but the years of the suppression became increasingly difficult. One important issue concerned the ownership of the Society’s funds and property: the Vicars Apostolic believed these should continue to be applied to the purposes for which they had originally been entrusted to the Society, that is the good of religion in the various Districts; some of the ex-Jesuits, however, believed they were the obvious inheritors and should control and benefit from the accumulated funds.

The Clan Ranald and Catholic Missionary Successes, 1715-1745

The Clan Ranald and Catholic Missionary Successes, 1715-1745

Religion Mixed with Politics: The 1836 Conversion of Mang'osid of Fond du Lac

After suffering a humiliating political defeat in I836, Mang'osid, a Minnesota Ojibwa leader, converted to Christianity. This article examines incidents that precipitated conversion and continuing importance of Ojibwa political concerns in shaping villagers' response to conversion. The article concludes with observations regarding play of forces involved in an act of conversion, which apparently bore little relationship to message of Christianity and were instead related to Ojibwa political concerns. The conversion of Native Americans to Christianity continues to yield important insights into dynamics of intercultural dialogue and exchange between Native Americans and Euramericans. As recent studies by Axtell, Jennings, McLoughlin, Morrison, Ronda, and Salisbury attest, conversion and missionization efforts reveal themselves to be complex processes in which both Indians and Euramericans were active participants.1 That conversion attempts should be complex is unsurprising; Christian missionaries, with their linked program of conversion and civilization, profoundly challenged Native American societies at every level. Native Americans were asked to accept not simply a new religion but a new and radically different culture and society as well. Also unsurprising is fact that tribal political divisions often emerged after some portion of a native population embraced Christianity, with its concomitant acceptance of new social norms and behavioral standards. In his early and influential treatment of Euramerican Protestant conversion efforts, Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., describes the development of a tribewide split along Pagan and Christian lines in numerous Native American societies.2 Political divisions based on acceptance or rejection of Christianity were practically inevitable, Ethnohistory 37: z (Spring I990). Copyright ? by American Society for Ethnohistory. ccc ooI4-I8oi/90/$I.50. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.183 on Sun, 11 Jun 2017 18:35:05 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Conversion of Mang'osid of Fond du Lac I27 Berkhofer argues, because Euramerican missionaries demanded from their converts wholesale rejection of every aspect of their traditional cultures. Such radical culture change was bound to fuel opposition from tribal members, who continued to value their own culture. Berkhofer also articulates important idea that missionaries made very limited headway while societies retained their political autonomy. As long as Indian tribal members enjoyed a traditional way of life free from outside interference, their reaction to missionaries was one of simple repudiation.3 It was not until peoples experienced the loss of political that missionaries were able to exert significant influence on even a portion of group. Most recent studies of conversion and missionization have focused on peoples who typically passed through earlier stages of . . . domination, underscoring contention that missionary success indeed depended on the disintegration of some native social forms.4 As a result of this focus on tribal peoples who had already experienced significant erosion of their political and social autonomy, scholarly understanding of those societies that entertained missionaries while retaining much of their social integrity is limited. Even Berkhofer, in his development of four basic of native responses to missionization and conversion efforts and to political schisms they engendered, pays relatively little attention to first of these sequences, which occurs, he indicates, in still-autonomous communities. The native-oriented Indians persecuted missionary to cause his voluntary withdrawal, Berkhofer notes. Once successful in ousting missionaries, community reintegrated itself, suffering, evidently, no long-term effects from its brief exposure to missionaries and their message of religious and social change. Although Berkhofer acknowledges that process of driving out missionaries could be socially disruptive, even violent, he nonetheless perceives that process as a straightforward one. Since tribal societies were highly integrated because people shared common values and goals, this sequence was not characterized by complexity that attended three later sequences that occurred once autonomy was lost. Anthropological theory lends further support to Berkhofer's idea of a relatively simple process of rejection. Anthropologists call contact under these conditions [of tribal autonomy] 'nondirected' or 'permissive,' Berkhofer observes. Independent tribal peoples, even though they might have experienced much contact with European or Euramerican societies, still adopted customs and artifacts of other peoples as they chose.5 This paper examines experience of Minnesota Ojibwa comThis content downloaded from 157.55.39.183 on Sun, 11 Jun 2017 18:35:05 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Pretraining Variables in the Prediction of Missionary Success Overseas

A set of twelve variables was obtained statistically in order to predict missionary success from a combination of pretraining data which included elements of personality, interpersonal skill, attitudes, and bio-graphical information. This data was gathered from structured interviews, open-ended references, and psychological tests available from each subject's application file. A screening sample of 111 vocational missionaries who had served overseas a minimum of one year was used to derive the predictors, and a calibration sample of 42 missionaries with the same qualifications was used for cross-validation purposes. The twelve significant variables selected account for 56 percent of the variance of the criterion (success). Cross-validation yielded mixed results.

Missionary Women as Models in the Cross-Cultural Context

Long neglected in missionary histories, women missionaries are the unsung heroes of the past century, and well may be the source of much of this century's missionary success stories, says Fran Hiebert in this provocative article. Instead of claiming to be the champions of women, Western mission agencies may need to repent and look for some ashcloth if they are not going to lose their credibility vis-à-vis the church in the Two-Thirds World.

The Matthean Community and the Gentile Mission

The importance that Matthew attached to the gentile mission is clear from the climactic position in which he has placed the universal mission mandate. From this, however, it cannot be inferred that all the members of the evangelist's community were in agreement on this issue. Indeed, Matthew's inclusion of a particularist form of the mission mandate in his Central Section suggests that the gentile mission was controverted at the time of the gospel's composition. A consideration of the development of Christianity's relationship to Judaism before and after the year 70 provides an opportunity to test this conclusion, insofar as the turning to the gentiles was connected with the separation from Judaism. The teaching and practice of the historical Jesus provided the post-Easter community with no clear directive with regard to missionizing gentiles. His attitude of "expectant universalism" could be taken to authorize the gentile mission, since in Jesus' coming the endtime had arrived, but it also could be understood to exclude it, since only if impenitent Israel were converted could the kingdom of God be revealed and the eschatological pilgrimage of the gentiles take place. The first missionaries to the gentiles were the Hellenists, who were suited to this task both by their use of Greek and by their attitude towards the ritual law, which may have been derived from community tradition concerning Jesus' stance on this matter. The actual catalyst for the admission of gentiles to baptism-without circumcision-may have been the appearance of charismatic phenomena among the "friends of the synagogue" of the Hellenists. Paul's radical rejection of the law as a way of salvation led to serious misunderstanding with the Jerusalem leaders in the attempt to resolve the controversy over the circumcision of gentile converts in Antioch. These leaders saw in Paul's missionary successes a sign that God was raising up from the gentiles a new people to his name, and on this basis they withheld their support from the Judaizers. For Paul, on the other hand, the agreement to separate missions and the acceptance of the collection for the Jerusalem poor was a sign of the leaders' recognition of the ΧΟνωνία between Jews and gentiles in the one people of God. It was on this basis that he opposed Cephas in Antioch for respecting James' insistence that Jewish Christians observe the kosher laws and abstain from table fellowship with gentile Christians. Neither Peter nor Barnabas could accept Paul's view of the matter, which amounted to an attempt to force Jewish Christians to live as gentiles, abandoning the law as a way of salvation. At this point Jewish Christianity and Pauline Christianity seem to have gone their separate ways, although Peter did not ally himself unambiguously with either extreme. A sign of Jewish Christian fidelity to the law after Antioch is to be found in the "apostles' decree," which demands of gentile Christians living in predominantly Jewish (or Jewish Christian) localities that they refrain from the same four things that are forbidden to "sojourners" in the Holiness Code. No observant Jewish Christian community living in Palestine during the two decades prior to the outbreak of the Jewish War had occasion to embark on a mission to gentiles, and the character of Matthew's special tradition points to just such a community. As a result of the Jewish War the Matthean church settled in a Greek-speaking area, probably Syria, where the gentile mission was already established. But the immediate catalyst for turning to the gentiles was the campaign of vilification and persecution to which the community was subjected by post-70 Pharisaism, which was no longer satisfied with merely halakic conformity on the part of Jewish Christians. However, the decision at Jamnia seems not yet to have been taken, and some of Matthew's community, in hope of a reconciliation, held back from the fateful step of the gentile mission. Such a step would not have meant the incorporation of gentiles into a Jewish Christian community but rather a definitive break with Judaism, and this is why the issue of circumcision, which had been the center of controversy in connection with earlier gentile conversions, does not arise in Matthew's gospel. The evangelist represents those in his community who believed that the time had come to move in a new direction, but in his initiative he was unable to appeal to the example of Peter, whose authority lies behind the special tradition of the community. Rather, by placing the universal mission mandate on the lips of Jesus as he addresses the Eleven Disciples in the gospel's final scene, the evangelist uses a "deus ex machina" to gain acceptance for the gentile mission and to heal the divisions within the community which had arisen over this issue.