§21 Paul, Not the Rival Evangelists, Is on the Galatians’ Side (Gal. 5:7–12)
5:7 / Paul now changes his tactic somewhat and begins to use an approach common to persuasive speech—friendship through shared antipathy. Paul places himself and the Galatians in one camp against an opposition seeking to separate the Galatians from their goal. Paul affirms that in the past his readers were heading toward the goal in exemplary fashion—you were running a good race. They had been obeying the truth. The sense conveyed by the word “obey” is of having accepted a way of life and been willing to be shaped by it. But someone has stepped into their path and driven them off course—who cut in on you? Paul uses both singular (5:10) and plural (5:12; cf. 1:7) to refer to his opponents and never names them.
Paul uses the athletic imagery of running for living the Christian life (see also Gal. 2:2; Rom. 9:16; 1 Cor. 9:24–27; Phil. 2:16; 3:14; 2 Thess. 3:1). Athletic imagery was used frequently also in the ancient philosophers and expressed the idea of intense focus on the goal of the philosophical life. Philo speaks of “athletes of virtue” (Good Person 13.88 [Colson, LCL]). The image continues in Christian discourse. John Chrysostom speaks of raising Christian children as “rearing … athletes for [God]” (On Vainglory and the Upbringing of Children 90; quoted from M. Wiles and M. Santer, eds., Documents in Early Christian Thought [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975], p. 223).
The tense of the verb “cut in” (enekopsen) is aorist, which expresses a past action. As he indicated in 4:19, so here Paul considers that the Galatians have lost ground with Christ. Burton writes: “That Paul uses the aorist (resultative) rather than the present (conative) indicates that he is thinking of what his opponents have already accomplished in their obstructive work” (Galatians, p. 282).
This is the first time Paul has spoken of the truth as something to be obeyed, although he has elsewhere equated the gospel with the truth (2:5, 14) and his preaching as truth telling (4:16). Paul has presented himself as one who obeys God (in 1:10a the NIV translates “obey” as “win … approval”).
5:8 / Contrasting their previous obedience to the truth with the persuasion by which they are now being affected, Paul clarifies that God, the one who calls (cf. 1:6), is not the source of the influence the Galatians are experiencing. With the image of the race in the background, Paul is saying that his converts are now off course, following the wrong call.
5:9 / The saying “a little yeast works through the whole batch of dough” is found also at 1 Corinthians 5:6. It appears to have been common in the ancient Greek-speaking world to use yeast as a symbol for evil’s powerful corrupting capacity (cf. Mark 8:15). In this case Paul is warning that even though there may be only a few advocating circumcision their influence could damage the nature of the Galatian churches.
5:10 / Even though throughout most of the letter it is clear that Paul doubts his Galatian readers’ good sense, here he appeals to it in an attempt to encourage them to trust him and his gospel. Paul writes that he is confident in the Lord that they take no other view than the one he is presenting. Continuing to place himself alongside his readers, Paul depicts them as under the influence of a confuser (cf. 1:7).
The phrase in the Lord occurs frequently in Paul’s letters, along with the phrase “in Christ.” Paul sees himself as living in the Lord, in Christ. He reminds the Galatians that this is the basis of his confidence. The inference is that those who are contending for the Galatians’ confidence are not in the Lord (cf. 5:8).
With the same confidence, Paul declares that the one confusing them will pay the penalty. This is another way for him to assert that he and his gospel are on God’s side. Those who present an alternate gospel stand under the judgment of God. Paul assures his converts that if they do as he suggests everything will work out well and the troubles will pass.
5:11 / After implicitly asking his readers to trust him because he trusts them, Paul must clear up any grounds for their mistrust of him. He responds to rumor—probably stemming from the “confusers”—that he has been preaching circumcision—by pointing out the ludicrousness of such a rumor. If he were preaching circumcision he would not be being persecuted. Identifying his gospel here, as elsewhere, with the cross, Paul argues that his difficult position arises from the fact that he does not preach circumcision but the offense of the cross. Paul’s message was that a human named Jesus, who was humble, obedient, and accepting of death on a cross, had been raised by God and now was the one before whom “every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Phil. 2:10–11). Such a message was absurd to people in general (cf. 1 Cor. 1:18) and was scandalous to Jews. Yet the cross was the defining moment in God’s salvific dealings with humanity. Paul says this another way in 2:21: “if justification could be gained through the law, Christ died for nothing.” If he were to advocate circumcision for Gentiles he would be nullifying the death of Christ. Paul asks the Galatians, his brothers, to consider how preposterous such a thought is.
As he does elsewhere, Paul takes opportunity to defend himself against any lurking accusations about his credibility and to express boldly the radical position in which he stands. He is one whose proclamation brings him persecution. Paul’s uncomfortable position in the world is confirmation of the truth of his message and the integrity of his life.
Acts states that the Jews persecuted Paul (e.g., Acts 26:21). Paul himself mentions the Jews as his persecutors (2 Cor. 11:24). The gospel would have been abhorrent to Jews, as it had been to Paul (Gal. 1:13; Phil. 3:6). Paul also includes other “servants of Christ” (2 Cor. 11:23) among his adversaries. On account of his law-free gospel for Gentiles, he experienced active opposition from some Jewish Christians. It behooved Jewish Christians to advocate circumcision so that they could interact with Gentile Christians without risk of being persecuted themselves (6:12; see notes on 4:17 and cf. Phil. 3:2–3). Paul may be including in his reference to persecution the fact that his cherished Galatian churches are being negatively influenced by the rival evangelists.
Paul regarded the cross as the pivotal point of his message and so as synonymous with the gospel (cf. 1 Cor. 1:17). The “message of the cross” is the saving power of God (1 Cor. 1:18), and thus those who oppose the gospel are “enemies of the cross of Christ” (Phil. 3:18). This identification of his gospel with the cross was a scandalous move, for the cross signified for the ancients the punishment due to the worst of society’s offenders. Even the modern symbol of the electric chair does not match what Justin Martyr calls the “despised and shameful mystery of the cross” (Dial. 131 [ANF 1.265]).
5:12 / Confident that he has his readers on his side at last, Paul expresses the outrageous wish that the rival evangelists would let the knife slip on themselves. It is a darkly brilliant sentiment, showing that just as the result of his gospel is freedom, the result of his opponents’ is the worst form of impotence. Paul plays with a concept similar to the one he used in 4:9, where he describes the life to which the Galatians were being attracted as akin to their former life of slavery to impotent and grasping masters. According to Deuteronomy 23:1 any male whose penis is cut off shall not be admitted to the assembly of the Lord. Paul’s wish that the rival evangelists emasculate themselves may then also include a wish for a graphic demonstration that their message is alienated from God’s plan.
Paul’s use of the designation agitators for his rivals betrays more of his negative regard for them. This term is used elsewhere in the NT to signify political agitation (Acts 17:6; 21:38). Paul may be tarring his opponents with the same brush with which they tarred him, that of lacking integrity and agitating for some sort of political advantage.
5:7 / See V. C. Pfitzner, Paul and the Agon Motif (NovTSup 16; Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1967), esp. pp. 136–38.
5:8 / The Greek word for persuasion (peismonē) occurs only here in the NT, and outside the NT it occurs rarely. Longenecker notes that later extrabiblical writings use the word with negative connotations to mean “empty rhetoric” (Galatians, p. 231). Paul may be using the word with this nuance, thereby denigrating his rivals’ message as empty in distinction from his, which is “the truth.”
5:10 / In the Greek the word krima, here translated “penalty,” is lit. “judgment.” The word translated “pay” (bastasei) has the sense of “bearing” or “enduring.”
5:11 / Given that Paul states that his coming to faith in Christ was also a call to preach to Gentiles as Gentiles (1:16), it is doubtful that by still preaching circumcision Paul means that in his early Christian days he preached circumcision. The Acts account of Paul circumcising Timothy (16:3) is problematic. As mentioned in the Introduction, many scholars now tend to deal with discrepancies between Paul’s self-presentation and the account in Acts by giving priority to Paul’s own words. Even if the incident in Acts 16 did occur, it is to be noted that since he was the son of a Jewish mother, Timothy was effectively a Jew and not a Gentile.
Donaldson suggests that Paul is speaking of his former life as an advocate for Judaism to the Gentiles; the sense is: “In my former life in Judaism I admit that I preached circumcision to the Gentiles; but then God called me to preach Christ crucified, and I preach circumcision no longer” (Paul and the Gentiles, pp. 282–83).