Anyone not Jewish, which is most of the planet. The more interesting question is what the New Testament does to the category once Christ has arrived.
Ask who are the Gentiles today and the definition is short. Anyone who is not Jewish, which is the overwhelming majority of people alive.
The word translates goyim in Hebrew and ethne in Greek, and both simply mean the nations. It is a description of origin, not a verdict on a person, and the New Testament spends a lot of effort dismantling the idea that it ranks anybody.
Which makes the more interesting question not who they are but what happened to the category once Christ arrived.
The ordinary Hebrew word for nations or peoples. Used hundreds of times, and not originally a term of contempt at all.
Genesis 12:2. I will make you into a great nation, and the word is goy. The category the English word marks off is one Israel was placed inside.
The Greek equivalent, and the root of the English word ethnic. Matthew 28:19 tells the disciples to make disciples of all ethne, meaning every people group.
From the Latin gentilis. It is a translators' convention rather than a biblical term, and different English versions render the same word as nations, peoples or Gentiles in different verses.
Once you know the word just means the nations, a lot of verses read differently. Light to the nations, glory among the nations, the nations will come to your light. None of those were ever bad news.
“For he himself is our peace, who has made the two groups one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility.”
Ephesians 2:14The Jerusalem temple had a barrier separating the outer court from the inner ones, with an inscription warning that anyone crossing it was answerable with their life.
Arland Hultgren writes that “Christ has torn down the wall, or boundary” that stood between the two groups.
Peter, a devout Jewish man, is given a vision and then sent to a Roman officer's house. Acts 10:28 has him saying God has shown him not to call anyone impure.
The Jerusalem council decides that non-Jewish believers do not have to become Jewish first. That ruling is why the church is not a sect within one nation.
Notice what is not decided at that council. Nobody says Gentiles are now Jews, and nobody says Jewish believers must stop being Jewish. Two groups remain two and are made one, which is a harder and better arrangement than either alternative.
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Manage My Giving"Each of you should give what you have decided in your heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver."2 Corinthians 9:7
This subject attracts errors from opposite directions, and both need naming.
A specific modern ethnic group is the real Israel, and everybody else is an outsider Gentile with a lesser standing before God.
The church replaced Israel entirely. God finished with one people and started another, and the old covenant story is now somebody else's history.
The first is false and we will say so directly. Identity doctrines that assign true Israelite status to one modern ethnic group and demote everyone else are reading ancestry into texts that are about covenant. Galatians 3:29 settles the question: if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham's seed and heirs according to the promise. Descent has been relocated. Any system that ranks people before God by bloodline is racism using Scripture as cover, whichever group it happens to elevate.
The second error is the mirror image and it has a far longer and uglier history in the church. Paul spends three whole chapters on it in Romans 9 to 11, and Matt Skinner notes that “Paul never says that the existence of the church does away with Israel”. His picture is a wild branch grafted into a cultivated tree, and the instruction attached to it in Romans 11:18 is do not boast over those branches. The grafted branch is the one warned about arrogance.
There is a line we do not cross here. Saying the New Testament relocates descent into Christ is a theological claim about covenant. It is not a position on any modern government, border or conflict, and anyone who moves from one to the other in a single step has added something the text does not supply. We will teach the covenant and we will not hand anybody a foreign policy.
What does follow is simpler and more demanding. If the wall came down, then every version of it a church rebuilds is a problem. Congregations still sort people by background, class, language and accent while quoting Ephesians 2 from the platform, and the letter was written to a church doing exactly that.
What does Paul warn the grafted branch about in Romans 11?
Romans 11:18. The warning about arrogance is aimed at the newcomer, not at the tree. A branch that has been grafted in is in no position to look down on the root that is carrying it.
Ephesians 2:15 uses a phrase worth slowing down on. Not one group absorbed into the other, but one new humanity created out of the two.
Neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. Three divisions named and all three relativised.
No longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God's people and also members of his household. The status word changes from guest to family.
A great multitude from every nation, tribe, people and language. The distinctions are still visible at the end. They are named, not erased.
James quotes Amos, that the rest of mankind may seek the Lord, including all the Gentiles who bear my name. He reads the prophets as having planned this all along.
That last detail is the one that settles it. The council does not decide to make an exception for outsiders. James argues from the prophets that this was the direction of travel from the beginning.
If you are reading this and you are not Jewish, then the answer to the question is you.
Which means the Bible you are holding was written almost entirely by people from a nation you do not belong to, about a covenant you were not party to, in a story you enter late and from outside. That is worth sitting with rather than skipping, because it changes the posture you read in.
Ephesians 2:12 describes the starting position bluntly. Separate, excluded, foreigners to the covenants, without hope and without God in the world. Then verse 13, but now in Christ Jesus you who once were far away have been brought near.
Nobody in that sentence argued their way in or qualified. The wall was taken down from the other side, and the right response to being let in somewhere is not to start sorting the room.
For related ground, see the Edomites, Abraham, God's chosen people, the new covenant, Old Testament and New, Zion and who the Pharisees were.
Anyone not Jewish, from words that simply mean the nations, named in Ephesians 2 as people who were far off and have been brought near by a wall being demolished, with identity doctrines that rank people by bloodline refused in one direction and replacement teaching refused in the other.
It is persuasive when it is presented well and it does not survive the texts it leans on. Send your questions in and somebody at Sound of Heaven will work through them with you.
Anyone who is not Jewish. That is the whole definition, and it covers the overwhelming majority of people alive. The word translates the Hebrew goyim and the Greek ethne, both of which simply mean the nations or the peoples. Gentile is not a biblical word at all, it is an English word from the Latin gentilis that translators adopted, and it does not carry any built-in judgment about the people it names.
No. It is a description of national origin rather than a verdict on a person. Some New Testament passages use it in a pointed way, in the same manner that any writer might say everyone else does this, but the word itself is neutral. Israel is even called a goy in Genesis 12:2, where God promises to make Abraham into a great nation, using the very word usually translated Gentile elsewhere.
Most likely an allusion to the barrier in the Jerusalem temple that separated the court open to non-Jewish visitors from the inner courts, which carried an inscription warning that anyone crossing it was responsible for their own death. Arland Hultgren writes that Christ has torn down the wall, or boundary. Paul is using a structure his readers could picture to describe something that has been done to the category itself.
We do not teach that. Paul spends Romans 9 to 11 arguing the opposite, and Matt Skinner notes that Paul never says the existence of the church does away with Israel. The image Paul uses in Romans 11 is a wild branch grafted into a cultivated tree, and his warning to the grafted branch is do not boast. Whatever else that picture allows, it does not allow a replacement.
No, and the teaching that says so is false. It works by claiming that a particular group today is the true Israel while others are merely Gentiles, usually reading identity into passages that are about covenant rather than ancestry. Galatians 3:29 says that if you belong to Christ then you are Abraham's seed, which relocates descent entirely, and using Scripture to rank people by bloodline runs against the whole direction of the New Testament.