Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert, “Judaizers, Jewish Christians, and Others,” in The Jewish Annotated New Testament, second edition, edited by Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 638.
Paul himself did not use the term “Christian”; “Christian” did not exist as a distinct category for him. Acts 11.26 (see also Acts 26.28) suggests that it was in Antioch that the category “Christian” was first applied, but Acts postdates Paul by several decades. Paul himself uses different terminology; he differentiates between the “gospel for the circumcised” for which Peter, the “apostle to the circumcision” (Gal 2.8) is in charge, and the “gospel for the uncircumcision” (Gal 2.7), his own mission. In such terms circumcision clearly functions as a boundary marker between Jews and Gentiles in the early Jesus movement. Similarly, in the Acts of the Apostles, the leaders of the earliest community of Jesus’ followers in Jerusalem, James and his colleagues, address the newly established community of Antioch with its many non-Jewish members as “brothers from among the nations in Antioch and Syria” (Acts 15.23, my emphasis), versus the “circumcised believers” (Acts 10.45; 11.2, etc.). The Petrine (i.e., related to Peter) mission, the “gospel for the circumcised,” would then appear to be for Jews who come to “believe in” Jesus (and who may still have understood themselves to be Jews.) Those people whom Paul evangelizes are former pagans who have become followers of Christ. Modern scholars subsequently restate this distinction by referring to the two types of early believers as “Jewish Christians” and “Gentile Christians.” However, no New Testament author uses either of these labels.
The Amateur Exegete 