Acts6chapter 6

Jerusalem held two kinds of Jews: those born locally who spoke Aramaic, and "Hellenists" — Jews raised abroad in Greek-speaking cities who had come back to live near the temple, often in old age. They had their own synagogues and their own language, and they were outsiders in their own holy city.

A widow without a son had no income at all. Jewish charity ran a daily food dole and a weekly basket for the poor, and Luke's word for the complaint is about that daily table. Foreign-born widows were being overlooked — a classic case of the local majority looking after its own first.

The solution reads like a small piece of civic organization: the whole body chooses seven trusted men, and the apostles lay hands on them. Every one of the seven names is Greek. The church handed the complaint to the group that had raised it.

The "Synagogue of the Freedmen" was a congregation of former slaves and their descendants, likely Jews taken to Rome as captives and later freed. Men from Cyrene, Alexandria, Cilicia, and Asia met there — which is how a young man from Tarsus in Cilicia comes into the story.