Acts 10:1
Acts 10:11At Caesarea there was a man named Cornelius, a centurion in what was called the Italian Regiment.
JW publications acknowledge Cornelius as the first Gentile convert and emphasise the cross-cultural breakthrough his baptism represented for the early church. The Watchtower passes lightly over the fact that Cornelius is described as "devout and God-fearing" while serving as an officer in the Italian unit, and that Peter is sent to baptise him without any instruction to leave his commission.
Cornelius is introduced as a Roman officer in active service — hekatontarchēs of the speira called Italikē. The narrator makes the military identification a defining feature of who he is. Verse 2 then describes him as devout, God-fearing, charitable, and a man of prayer. The combination is the point: he is a faithful man IN his armed service, not after leaving it. Peter's commissioning vision (vv.9-16) and the baptism that follows (v.48) say nothing about resigning the commission. Read with the centurion of great faith in and the soldier-converts of John the Baptist in , the New Testament's pattern is reform within the office of the sword-bearer (), not categorical departure from it.
The NWT renders hekatontarchēs as "army officer" and speira as "unit" — modernising substitutes for the consensus "centurion" and "cohort/regiment." Both are within the words' ranges and not directly doctrinally loaded. The flatter modern terms do quietly reduce the technical military weight of Cornelius's role; "centurion" carries the texture of a career officer in the Roman army that "army officer" softens. The interpretive lift the Watchtower performs from this verse is not in the translation but in the silence around what Peter does NOT tell Cornelius to do.