Gentiles 

Today, as in Jesus' time, a gentile is known as a non-Jewish person. The Jews of Jesus’ time would have considered Roman citizens, Roman military, Greeks, Syrians, and slaves as gentiles. The Jews lived among the gentiles, but it is estimated that they comprised only about 10-20% of the population of the Roman Empire. Within their ranks, the gentile was an outsider. The gentiles in power of the Roman Empire were thought of as oppressors and persecutors.

Some of the more high-minded or religious among the gentiles were tolerated by the Jews. They permitted some of the more “devout” or “God-fearing” men among them entry and access to the temples, but they were generally not viewed favorably by the Jews. Even so, there was a court of the gentiles in the Jerusalem temple, and Paul's first converts to Christianity came from this fringe group.

Gentile philosophy appealed more to the elite, and the gentile religions appealed more to the average person. However, these religions were scaffolding for the saving message of Jesus.

Gentile society was demarcated into five classes, and most people were content with the class into which they were born. Jesus mingled freely with the gentiles and had great success appealing to them with the gospel of the kingdom. Jesus was open and welcoming to the gentiles, and they, in turn, accepted him and his teachings when the Jews would not.

The Hebrews had settled into the lands of the gentiles after their liberation from captivity. However, the rigidity of their religious practices and traditions proved to be more constricting and inflexible than even Roman rule. And this rigidity prevented them from accepting Jesus’s open message of the spiritual fraternity of humankind.

The gentile society of Jesus’ time was one of domestic peace and prosperity and consisted of five distinct classes of people:

1. The aristocracy. The monied and privileged classes that wielded official power.
2. The business groups. These were the merchants, the bankers, and the international traders – importers and exporters.
3. The small middle class. Even though this group was relatively small, it was influential; it provided the moral foundations of the early Christian church. It consisted of craftsmen and tradesmen, and many Jews – particularly the Pharisees – belonged to this class.
4. The free proletariat. These were the working-class people, and they had little standing in society. They loved their freedom, but they were often in competition with slave labor. They were looked down upon by the upper classes.
5. The slaves. Fully half of Roman society were slaves and the result of Roman military conquest. Many of them were superior individuals who availed themselves of societal avenues that helped them move up in class. But most of this class was average and ordinary. It was from this class and the proletariat that many early Christians sprang.

People of these times were not particularly class-conscious, and they did not regard these class strata as unjust. The lower classes did not look to a new religious movement to relieve their lot in life. They generally thrived in the class into which they were born, but if one desired to improve upon one's lot in life, there were avenues that one could access to rise, even to the upper strata of gentile society.

While morally somewhat inferior to the Jews, the gentiles of Jesus’ time possessed a natural goodness that enabled the teachings of Jesus to flower. Jesus often marveled at the faith of the gentile. The gentile philosophy consisted of four main branches that had been derived from the Greeks: Epicurean, Stoicism, Cynicism, and Skepticism.

All of these philosophies were semi-religious and mainly attractive to the upper classes of gentiles, but they were not religions of salvation for the common man.

Religion had evolved from earlier ages when it was a tribal or national issue. By the times of Jesus, gentile religion had grown to address more of the spiritual aspirations of the average individual. The following are the gentile religions that were active in the times of Jesus:

• The pagan cults that comprised mythology, patriotism and tradition.
• Emperor worship, which was highly distasteful to both Jews and later, Christians. It was this clash of values that later led to persecution of both Jews and Christians by the Romans.
• Astrology, still active today, is a pseudoscience/religion that sprang from Babylon.
• The mystery religions, which promised salvation for the individual. These mystery religions appealed greatly to the common man—the lower classes—and paved the way for the superior teachings of Jesus, sonship with God.

The mystery religions arose out of the need for a religion that would address individual survival and personal religious experience. But even though these are elements of Jesus' teachings, the mystery religions failed to address these aspirations. It took the appearance of Jesus to fully satisfy these longings with the true bread and water of life.

The Jews of Jesus' times were very rigid in their self-concept; and this rigidity extended to their attitude towards the gentiles, which comprised all non-Jews. Accordingly, Jews generally viewed the gentiles and their ways with scorn and disapproval. There was little room in their preconceived ideas for compromise; they were largely self-righteous and fixated on the letter of the law. The coming Messiah would have to be part of their own national and racial history, not shared with gentiles. The Jews looked to the Messiah to deliver them from the yoke of gentile bondage.

When Jesus came with his lack of prejudice toward the gentile and his kindness for those the Jews considered heathens, they found it nearly impossible to accept his openness and his inclusion of all as part of the spiritual fraternity of humankind. To the Jews, God (Yahweh) belonged to them; they were not willing to entertain the “strange doctrines” that Jesus proposed. Moreover, Jesus made it clear that he came to dismantle much of the rigidity of the Jewish religion – a religion that permeated every aspect of Jewish life.

In the end, these circumstances became insurmountable for the Jews to overcome; their divine destiny to be the bearers of Jesus' religion of the kingdom proved impossible to achieve. Even though the prophets of the Old Testament foretold a time when a new spirit of religion would overtake the old ways of rigid tradition, these prophecies were not enough to break the stranglehold of the institutional religion under which the Jews labored. In turn, the momentum of the new religion passed out of their hands to the gentiles.

When the Jews' hopes for a national Messiah were not fulfilled, Jesus soon became the redeemer of the church that grew from Paul’s activities. Thus, the transplantation of Jesus’ teachings from Jewish to gentile soil was effectively achieved. These early gentile Christians embraced Paul’s doctrines, establishing Jesus as a redeemer, unintentionally replacing Jesus' original concept of a purely spiritual brotherhood of the kingdom.

Early in his life, Jesus was determined to find out all he could about the gentiles: how they lived and how their minds worked. He spent six months in Sepphoris while he was transferring the head-of-household duties to James. He worked with gentiles, lived with gentiles, and made a deep study of their ways.

Mangus, a gentile centurion, greatly impressed Jesus with his display of faith. This centurion entreated Jesus to save the life of his favored servant. Even before Jesus could enter the centurion’s home, the soldier sent a group of friends to say on his behalf: “I am not worthy that you should come under my roof. Neither did I think myself worthy to come to you; wherefore I sent the elders of your own people. But I know you can speak the word where you stand, and my servant will be healed.”

Jesus responded by telling the apostles and others present: “I marvel at the belief of the gentile. Verily, verily, I say to you, I have not found so great faith, no, not in Israel.”

Another gentile – Norana, the Syrian woman – likewise so impressed Jesus by her faith in his ability to heal her daughter that he declared to her: “O woman, great is your faith, so great that I cannot withhold that which you desire; go your way in peace. Your daughter already has been made whole.” And it was not only Norana’s persistent faith that appealed to his merciful heart; Jesus also appreciated her wry sense of humor when she answered Simon, who likened her to a dog, by saying “I am only a dog in the eyes of the Jews, but as concerns your Master, I am a believing dog. I am determined that he shall see my daughter, for I am persuaded that if he shall but look upon her, he will heal her. And even you, my good man, would not dare to deprive the dogs of the privilege of obtaining the crumbs which happen to fall from the children’s table.”

Later, he told the apostles: “And so it has been all the way along; you see for yourselves how the gentiles are able to exercise saving faith in the teachings of the gospel of the kingdom of heaven. Verily, verily, I tell you that the Father’s kingdom shall be taken by the gentiles if the children of Abraham are not minded to show faith enough to enter therein.”

The Greek-speaking Syrians appreciated Jesus's message in a deeper way than the Jews. They understood that Jesus was like God, and God was like Jesus. They resonated with the teaching that God was no respecter of persons and that he did not play favorites. They grasped the universe's unfailing order and dependability. They did not fear Jesus or his message, as the Jews did; they accepted him wholeheartedly.