Why was the distinction between Jew and Gentile an issue in the early church?

Answer 1

The distinction between Jew and Gentile was relevant because the earliest Christians were born Jewish.

The main issue between Jewish-born Christians and Gentiles was a question of whether a Gentile would need to accept all of the Jewish Laws and Precepts before accepting Christ. This would put a major impediment on Peter and Paul's attempts to get Greeks (who were not at all interested in circumcision, eating kosher, or ceasing work on the Sabbath) saved by Jesus. However, they had to contend with the fact that the Law of the Old Testament was an eternal law for the Jewish people. The understanding that they came to was that the Jewish-born Christians (and their descendants) were still bound by the Old Testament Law, but the Gentiles were not intended by that original covenant and therefore only the New Testament applied to them. As a result, this created two streams of Christianity, Jewish-born Christians and the new majority of Gentile Christians within the same church. Eventually, when the Jewish-born Christians became such a small minority that most of them had married Gentile Christians, they stopped following the Jewish Laws and simply merged themselves into the Gentile Christian mentality that the Old Testament Law no longer applied to them.