In the second chapter of his letter to the Galatians, Paul recounts how on a visit to Antioch he publicly rebuked Peter’s “hypocrisy” in withdrawing, under pressure from a delegation of the Jerusalem church, from table fellowship with Gentile believers. The New Testament scholar James D. G. Dunn contends that for Paul this event resulted in a decisive break with the church that had sponsored his original missionary journey. Significantly too, it was in this context—as an answer to the social problem of relations between the circumcised and the uncircumcised in the church and not as a solution to individual guilt and fear of judgment—that Paul first wrote the formula, “justification by faith and not by the works of the law” (Galatians 2:16). Dunn concludes, “The Antioch incident was probably one of the most significant events in the development of earliest Christianity. It shaped the future of Paul’s missionary work, it sparked off a crucial insight which became one of the central emphases in Paul’s subsequent teaching, and consequently it determined the whole character and future of that young movement which we now call Christianity.”

It is a large claim, but Dunn actually underestimates how widely Paul’s stinging rebuke reverberated, for its echoes produced an earthquake that finally left the ancient world in ruins. Toward the end of Economy and Society, Max Weber cites Galatians 2 and Peter’s participation in ritual meals with Gentiles to highlight the differences between the antique and the medieval cities. Ancient cities, Weber notes, were socially structured by a separation between those who made a claim of descent from the founding clans (patricians) and those who could make no such claim (plebeians), a separation often spatially represented by the isolation of plebeians either at the foot of the sacred hill of the polis or in ghettos clustered at the walls.

Continued at The Politics of Baptism | First Things.