Acts 11
The full text of Acts 11 in the Trinity Bible Version — clear modern English, translated from the original Greek. Free to read.
1 The apostles and the believers throughout Judea heard that the Gentiles also had received the word of God.
2 So when Peter went up to Jerusalem, the circumcised believers took issue with him,
3 saying, "You went into the house of uncircumcised men and ate with them."
4 Then Peter began and explained it to them step by step:
5 "I was in the city of Joppa praying, and in a trance I saw a vision. I saw something like a large sheet being let down from heaven by its four corners, and it came right down to me.
6 I looked into it closely and saw four-footed animals of the earth, wild beasts, reptiles, and birds of the air.
7 Then I heard a voice say to me, 'Get up, Peter. Kill and eat.'
8 I said, 'Certainly not, Lord! Nothing impure or unclean has ever entered my mouth.'
9 But the voice from heaven spoke a second time: 'Do not call anything impure that God has made clean.'
10 This happened three times, and then it was all pulled back up into heaven.
11 Right then, three men who had been sent to me from Caesarea stopped at the house where we were staying.
12 The Spirit told me to go with them and not to hesitate. These six brothers also went with me, and we entered the man's house.
13 He told us how he had seen an angel standing in his house and saying, 'Send to Joppa for Simon who is called Peter.
14 He will bring you a message through which you and all your household will be saved.'
15 As I began to speak, the Holy Spirit came on them just as he had come on us at the beginning.
16 Then I remembered the word of the Lord, how he said, 'John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.'
17 So if God gave them the same gift he gave us who believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I to think I could stand in God's way?"
18 When they heard this, they had no further objection and praised God, saying, "So then, God has granted even the Gentiles repentance that leads to life."
19 Now those who had been scattered by the persecution that broke out over Stephen traveled as far as Phoenicia, Cyprus, and Antioch, telling the message only to Jews.
20 But some of them, men from Cyprus and Cyrene, went to Antioch and began to speak to the Greeks as well, telling them the good news about the Lord Jesus.
21 The Lord's hand was with them, and a great number believed and turned to the Lord.
22 News of this reached the church in Jerusalem, and they sent Barnabas to Antioch.
23 When he arrived and saw what the grace of God had done, he was glad and encouraged them all to remain true to the Lord with all their hearts.
24 He was a good man, full of the Holy Spirit and faith, and a large number of people were brought to the Lord.
25 Then Barnabas went to Tarsus to look for Saul,
26 and when he found him, he brought him to Antioch. So for a whole year Barnabas and Saul met with the church and taught great numbers of people. It was at Antioch that the disciples were first called Christians.
27 During this time some prophets came down from Jerusalem to Antioch.
28 One of them, named Agabus, stood up and predicted through the Spirit that a severe famine would spread over the entire Roman world. (This happened during the reign of Claudius.)
29 The disciples, each according to his ability, decided to send help to the brothers and sisters living in Judea.
30 This they did, sending their gift to the elders by Barnabas and Saul.
Translation notes (8)
- Acts 11:3a The Greek phrase andras akrobystian echontas is literally 'men having a foreskin', a blunt idiom for Gentiles. The charge centers not on Peter's preaching but on synephages autois, 'you ate with them': table fellowship with Gentiles was widely held to compromise Jewish purity, making shared meals the flashpoint of the early church's Gentile question.
- Acts 11:5a Greek ekstasei (ἐκστάσει), 'trance', denotes a state in which ordinary perception is suspended; the same word describes Peter's experience in the original account of Acts 10:10. The added phrase achri emou, literally 'as far as me', appears only in this retelling, stressing that the sheet descended directly to Peter himself.
- Acts 11:12a The Greek behind 'not to hesitate', meden diakrinanta, can also mean 'making no distinction', echoing the point of Peter's vision; Codex Bezae lacks the phrase, and later manuscripts read the middle form diakrinomenon. The six brothers were the believers from Joppa (Acts 10:23), a body of witnesses well beyond the two or three required by Deuteronomy 19:15.
- Acts 11:16a Peter here quotes the risen Jesus's promise recorded in Acts 1:5, itself echoing John the Baptist's words. Greek distinguishes the two baptisms grammatically: hydati (ὕδατι), a bare dative, 'with water', against en pneumati hagio (ἐν πνεύματι ἁγίῳ), 'with the Holy Spirit', where the preposition en may suggest the Spirit as the element in which believers are immersed.
- Acts 11:18a Greek tēn metanoian eis zōēn is literally 'repentance unto life'; the rendering 'repentance that leads to life' makes explicit that eis marks result rather than describing a quality of the repentance. The verb hēsychasan, 'they fell silent', signals that the circumcised believers' objections of verse 2 ceased before their praise began.
- Acts 11:20a Some manuscripts read 'Greeks' (Greek Hellenas), while others read 'Hellenists' (Greek Hellenistas, referring to Greek-speaking Jews); the contrast with 'Jews only' in verse 19 favors the reading 'Greeks,' referring to Gentiles.
- Acts 11:28a Greek oikoumenē (οἰκουμένη), literally 'the inhabited world', in this period commonly denoted the Roman Empire, hence 'the entire Roman world'. Claudius reigned AD 41–54, and Josephus records a severe famine in Judea under the procurators Fadus and Alexander (about AD 46–48), while Suetonius notes repeated food shortages during Claudius's reign.
- Acts 11:29a Greek adelphois (ἀδελφοῖς), literally 'brothers', commonly designates a whole community of believers regardless of sex, hence 'brothers and sisters'. The word translated 'help' is diakonia, 'service' or 'ministry', the same term used elsewhere for the relief collection Paul later organized for Jerusalem.
About this translation
The Trinity Bible Version (TBV) is Trinity Bible's own modern English translation, worked directly from the original Greek and honest to the earliest manuscripts. It was completed in 2026 — the most modern English Bible translation — and is exclusive to Trinity Bible. Every chapter, including all of Acts, is free to read here on the web.
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