Note 3 at Acts 14:27: Jesus had administered miraculous cures to some Gentiles during His earthly ministry (the centurion and his servant-Mt. 8:5-13; Lk. 7:1-10 and the Syro-Phenician woman and her daughter-Mt. 15:21-28; Mk. 7:24- 30), but it was clear that His earthly ministry was to the people of Israel (Mt. 15:24). However, after His resurrection and ascension, His followers were to share the gospel with everyone, Jews and Gentiles (see note 1 at Jn. 12:23, p. 418).

Philip had shared the gospel with the Ethopian eunuch, who was either a Gentile or a proselyte to Judaism (Acts 8:26-39), and Peter's miraculous experience with Cornelius (Acts 10:1-48) had been debated by the leaders of the church (Acts 11:1-18) who admitted that the Lord had, "granted repentance unto life" (Acts 11:18) unto the Gentiles. This caused some disciples who were scattered from Jerusalem to share the gospel with individual Gentiles (Acts 11:20-21) but no one had ever actively sought to evangelize the Gentiles as we see Paul and Barnabas doing here.

This was a dramatic new development in the preaching of the gospel and it caused such an uproar among the Jewish believers that a special council of the Jerusalem church elders was convened (Acts 15:6). Paul and Barnabas (Acts 15:4, 12) as well as Peter (Acts 15:7-11) gave testimony of how the Lord had granted salvation to the Gentiles through faith alone without their conversion to Judaism, and the elders gave their blessing to Paul to be the apostle to the Gentiles (Rom. 11:13; Gal. 1:7-8).

Millions upon millions of Gentiles have professed faith in the Lord Jesus Christ over the centuries and the Gentiles have actually been the ones whom the Lord chose to preserve Christianity after the Jews as a whole rejected it. All of this came as a results of Paul's first missionary journey.