A few weeks ago, I received a brief e-mail from someone whose name I did not recognize. Following is what he wrote: “We MUST rightly divide the Word. Learn that Jesus preached to the JEWS. Peter was a disciple for the JEWS. On the other [hand, GWS] Paul is the disciple for Gentiles. Baptism does nothing for salvation! Ye MUST be born again!” My reply was: “Five out of your six statements are true. Number 5 is false. See 1 Peter 3:21. How can baptism save us, yet do “nothing for salvation”? You contradict the Word.”
Some may not know what he was getting at, and he did not state it explicitly, which accounts for my brief answer. His position is actually this: Peter preached the gospel to the Jews; they needed to be baptized; Paul preached to the Gentiles, and they did not need to be baptized. This is what he means by “rightly dividing the Word.” The position is nonsense to anyone who knows the New Testament. In effect, he asserts there are two different gospels—one for the Jews and one for the Gentiles. Where does the New Testament teach such an idea?
If anyone ever needs to convince somebody of this faulty theology, the following Scriptures will disprove the error. First, when Jesus gave the Great Commission in Mark 16:15, He said to preach, notice, THE GOSPEL, to EVERY creature. He did not say there were two different gospels by which Jews and Gentiles would be saved. In fact, the phrase, the gospel (sometimes with modifiers), appears about 75 times from Acts onward. Similarly, Jesus told the apostles to be witnesses to Him “in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth” (Acts 1:8). Nothing indicates the apostles would preach one gospel in Jerusalem and another gospel to the rest of the world.
In fact, the book of Ephesians stresses that Jesus broke down the middle wall of partition between Jew and Gentile (2:14-16), who are now reconciled in one body. How? By having two gospels? This is the book that stresses unity—one Spirit, one Lord, one God and Father of all (4:4-6). There cannot, therefore, be two faiths—nor one baptism for Jews but none for Gentiles. We are all children of God “through faith in Christ Jesus,” and we all put on Christ through baptism (Gal. 3:26-27).