It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.

- Harry Truman

AM Psalm 131, 132, [133] • PM Psalm 134, 135
1 Samuel 13:5-18 • Acts 8:26-40 • Luke 23:13-25

This story from Acts 8 is loaded with competing details so as to avoid a controversy among early Christians over who was the first Gentile convert to Christianity, and which of the apostles or disciples should get credit for it.

On the desert road between Gaza and Jerusalem, a divinely inspired Philip approaches the chariot of a very wealthy “Ethiopian” (“Ethiopian” was a genuinely benign designation in Roman times for a very black-skinned person). He turns out to be the Treasurer of “the Kandace of Kush.” (The “Kandace” is the official title for the ruler of Kush, who by Kushite law had to be female.) Kush was a wealthy country controlling the caravan routes in what is now the Sudan. The eunuch was returning to Kush after a pilgrimage to Jerusalem for a Jewish religious festival.

The fact that the Ethiopian was also a eunuch is also an important detail, although not because he was some sort of marginalized person saved out of pity. As a common matter in Biblical times and even later, deliberately castrated boys were trained to become royal house servants, palace guards, and permanent boy soprano singers. The best and brightest of them later received advanced education to become scribes, court historians, chiefs of protocol, finance managers, and in the case of this Ethiopian also gained proficiency in foreign languages. They were thought to be particularly trustworthy, in that no one could accuse a eunuch of lusting after members of the royal family thereby threatening the dynastic succession.

The Ethiopian is reading aloud (not at all unusual reading behavior in the ancient world) and in Hebrew from the Book of Isaiah. Philip approaches this potentate, and asks if he understands the meaning of a passage. Philip explains it as foretelling the sufferings and death of Christ and then launches so convincingly into the life and teachings of Jesus that the enthusiastically converted Ethiopian eunuch asks for immediate baptism at the next oasis. After this, Philip on that desert road, much like Christ on the Road to Emmaus, quietly disappears.

So does Philip get credit for winning over the first Gentile convert? The Ethiopian is certainly not a Jew. Jews did not proselytize in foreign lands, and forbade the admission of eunuchs into the Temple precincts (frankly making his story of participation in a Jewish festival a bit problematic). So this must be the first incidence of Gentile conversion, right?

Well, it is until Acts 10. There, St. Peter himself, who outranks Philip especially since he is later to be designated the first Pope, converts not only the unambiguously Gentile Cornelius the Roman centurion, but all his family and friends in Caesarea as well. And to trump Christ’s dramatic disappearance at the breaking of the bread in Emmaus, the Holy Spirit in the forms of tongues of fire dances atop the heads of the converts and they began to speak in tongues.

Fortunately for us Episcopalian converts, who first “converted’ us is not crucial, and it doesn’t matter whether tongues of fire or speaking in tongues accompanied this event. It’s that we live our lives for the better afterwards. (Just for the record, if I had to nail it down to one person for me, it was through the lived example of a cradle Episcopalian from Mississippi.)

Written by Tony Stankus

Tony is the first librarian at the U of A ever to be promoted to the rank of Distinguished Professor. Now 70, he became a convert at age 66, because he could no longer resist the transcendent joy of the liturgies at St. Paul’s, nor the warmth of its people and priests.