I wouldn’t disagree with your comments on the outward thrust of Acts. Yes, the Spirit is driving the church outwards to declare to the world what God has done for Israel through Jesus, and by Acts 10 this is beginning to have an impact on the Gentile world. The point I was trying to make was simply that this outward thrust is not envisaged in Peter’s Pentecost speech, which, as I see it, has to do with the fate of Jerusalem. The whole point of Acts 10 is that Peter has not yet grasped the possibility that Gentiles would come to faith in Jesus, so it shouldn’t be too surprising if in chapter 2 he is pre-occupied with the fate of Israel.

I would question whether we should read Paul’s later charismatic theology into Peter’s use of Joel 2. Peter describes essentially prophetic gifts and I think that they are directed, as in Joel, towards the coming judgment on Jerusalem. Paul, as far, as I am aware, has no interest in Pentecost as an initiating event, and although it would be natural to suppose that his theology of the gifts had its origins in this outpouring of the Spirit, to me it seems exegetically unwise to distort Peter’s rather distinctive eschatological message by retrojecting the later perspective on to it. Peter’s ‘last days’ are basically Joel’s ‘great and terrible day of the Lord’: a period or moment of eschatological crisis for Israel, but it is entirely a misreading of the Old Testament to see in this a reference to the end of history.

Why isn’t Israel’s story our story? If we have been grafted into the stem of the olive tree which is Israel, why isn’t Israel’s story our story? I am not making anything up here. That is Paul’s argument.