But redeemed humanity gathers in two families: Israel, those twelve tribes descended from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; and everyone else, all seventy nations, descended from Noah’s three sons. If, for this vision to be realized, gentiles in the Christ movement had to remain gentiles, so too then did Jews have to remain Jews—that people constituted by the family connections and God-given privileges and promises that Paul in Romans chapters 9 through 11, and again in chapter 15, so proudly pronounced. “For the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable!” The day of that realization verged on arriving, this earliest community was convinced, because their messiah, slain and resurrected, was about to return. -Paula Fredricksen, When Christians Were Jews, p.162