The disjunction, Peter, is overstated. On the one hand, as far as the New Testament narrative takes us, the dominant thought is that Gentiles share in the ‘resurrection’ life of renewed Israel. It is the historic people of God - that is, national Israel as it existed at that moment - that is ‘raised’ metaphorically and in certain sense literally through the resurrection of Jesus. Gentiles are joined to that ‘raised’ existence through belief in the announcement that was made to the ancient pagan world.

On the other hand, as far as the New Testament narrative takes us, I think it is correct to say that the dominant thought is that Gentiles share in the death of Jesus which is for the sake of Israel. The issue, as I’ve said repeatedly, is not whether Jesus can be said to have died for the whole world but how that belief is fundamentally constructed in the New Testament.

Even John’s description of Jesus as the ‘Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world’ (Jn. 1:29) is not such a universal statement as it at first sounds if we read it in the light of Revelation 5, where it is said that the Lamb is worthy to open the seals of the scroll because ‘by your blood you bought people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation, and you have made them a kingdom and priests to our God, and they shall reign on the earth’. We naturally suppose that this verse simply states that Jesus died for people from all nations - and maybe that’s correct. But there are echoes of Isaiah 66:18-21, for example, in this passage which suggest a background narrative in which God sends ‘survivors’ of the judgment on Israel to proclaim to the nations what he has done for the sake of his people, and from the nations which come to Jerusalem bringing scattered Israel with them, God will take priests (cf. Is. 61:5-6).

This narrative of Israel’s redemption and the impact of that redemption on the nations, which is everywhere present in the New Testament, is barely acknowledged in what I called the ‘truncated mythology of personal salvation’ that has dominated evangelical theology.

The question of whether Paul has in mind both Jews and Gentiles in Romans 6:3-7 is a difficult one. I’m inclined to think that this forms part of an argument addressed principally to Jews - or that he is speaking as the voice of redeemed Israel. The question of 6:1 (‘Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound?’) was asked in 3:8 in a context that seems to have a Jewish reader in mind (cf. 3:1, 9); and 7:1 is addressed to Jews. But in any case, there is no question, as I said above, that when Gentiles become part of Israel’s eschatological narrative, they come to share in the story of suffering and vindication, death and life. Paul is not arguing here that Jesus died for the Gentiles; his point is that through baptism Gentile believers have come to share in the dying to the old and the living to the new. In Romans 3:21-26, by contrast, the argument about Jesus’ death as a propitiation is directed at Israel.

I also think that the basic argument of Romans 5:12-19 has in view Israel, which is redeemed from its many trespasses against the Law by the obedience of the one man Jesus Christ. Genesis 1-3 is relevant not because Paul is speaking here of a universal redemption but because, as he has argued at a number of points, Israel is as subject to sin as the rest of humanity.

2 Corinthians 5:11-21 is also difficult, but again I would suggest that there is a narrative at work that militates against the simple reductivist mythology of ‘Jesus died for my sins’. I would point out that the ‘we’ in this passage refers to the apostles as representatives of redeemed Israel and envoys of YHWH to the nations - indeed, this is the ‘we’ of the whole letter so far. They are controlled by the love of Christ, they have died to themselves because he died for them, they share directly in his suffering as apostles (cf. 4:7-18), and they now live exclusively for him. So they have been reconciled to God - and they have been given a ministry of reconciliation to the whole world as envoys of Christ (5:18-20). In that sense it can be said that ‘in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself’ - not because Jesus died for the sin of the world but because God is ‘not counting their trespasses against them’. Verse 21 then reasserts the fact that Jesus was made a ‘sin offering’ (if that is the correct interpretation) for Israel so that redeemed Israel (represented by the apostles) might become the ‘righteousness of God’ demonstrated to the world. Again, there are important narrative distinctions at work here that are excluded from the personal salvation mythology.

There is nothing in the Cornelius incident to suggest that Jesus was understood directly to have died for the Gentiles. The emphasis in Peter’s preaching is on the fact that Jesus has been appointed judge of the pagan world (Acts 10:42-43; cf. 17:30-31; Rom. 2:6-10).