BIOGRAPHY, AS WE said before, involves thinking into the minds of people who did not think the same way we do. And history often involves trying to think into the minds of various individuals and groups who, though living at the same time, thought in very different ways from one another as well as from ourselves. Trying to keep track of the swirling currents of thought and action in Paul’s world is that kind of exercise.
We have already explored, at least in a preliminary way, the different points of view that might explain the reaction to Paul’s work in the cities of South Galatia. The Roman authorities wanted to keep the peace and engender social stability. The leading local citizens, eager to put on a good face before the imperial world, did their best to work to the same end. The Jewish communities, wanting to live at peace while maintaining their integrity, cherished their special exemption from worshipping “the gods,” including, of course, the imperial divinities. These visions of stability were inevitably disrupted by Paul’s message, backed up as it was with powerful deeds, announcing the fulfillment of Israel’s scriptures in the messianic events involving Jesus.
The message generated a different vision, a new social reality. It challenged the regular Jewish taboos against fraternizing with non-Jews, not because Paul had suddenly invented the eighteenth-century ideal of “tolerance,” but because he believed a new world order was coming to birth in which all Messiah people were welcome on equal terms, in which all were assured they were the “heirs” of the “kingdom” that was even now being launched. The events of Jesus’s death and resurrection and the powerful gift of the divine spirit meant that the “powers” that had held the pagan world captive had been overthrown and that pagans who now came to believe in the Messiah were free from the defilements of idolatry and immorality.
All this formed a tight nexus of One-God beliefs, on the one hand, and a new social and cultural reality, on the other. Later generations have sometimes tried to flatten this out into abstract theology. Some in our own day have tried it the other way, seeing only sociology. But these are oversimplifications. Paul’s vision, Jewish to the core but reshaped around the messianic events involving Jesus, was a hundred percent theological and a hundred percent about the formation and maintenance of a new community. And that meant trouble.
Trouble came not only from the context of southern Anatolia or even northwest Syria. A quite different view of reality obtained in Jerusalem, the city Paul knew only too well from his days as a leading young “zealot.”
Jerusalem at this time was still very much the center of the Jesus movement. James, the brother of Jesus himself, was the acknowledged and unrivaled leader; he would retain that role until he was murdered by hard-line activists in AD 62. Peter and John, the two remaining members of the three who were closest to Jesus in his last days (John’s brother James had been killed by Herod Agrippa in the early 40s), and James seem to have formed a new kind of triumvirate; “James, Peter, and John,” as we saw earlier, could be spoken of as “pillars,” the sustaining structure of the “new Temple.” They believed that Israel’s God had come back in person and was now dwelling among and within the followers of Jesus. This belief had now taken root, providing Jesus’s followers with a strong, though controversial and dangerous, sense of identity.
It was still, of course, a Jewish identity. Like Paul in southern Anatolia, but very unlike him in the conclusions they were drawing, the early community in Jerusalem saw itself as the fulfillment of the ancient promises to Israel. This is not to say that the Jerusalem church was all of one mind. Acts reveals significant divisions. But anyone living in Jerusalem in the middle years of the first century was bound to face the challenge posed by the question: When is the One God going to do at last what he has promised and liberate his ancient people once and for all from the shame and scandal of Roman rule? And since Rome was widely seen as the ultimate form of monstrous pagan rule over the people of God, how and when was the One God going to overthrow the monsters and set up, on earth, his own unshakable kingdom?
That question was far more pressing in Jerusalem than it was for Jews out in the Diaspora. It was one thing for long-term Jewish residents in a city like Pisidian Antioch or indeed Tarsus to reach an accommodation whereby they could keep the Torah themselves while being grateful that Rome had given them dispensation from the otherwise mandatory public observances, festivals, and so on. This is not to say that Jews in that situation did not dream of a different future. The scriptures still spoke of a coming time when the knowledge and glory of the One God would fill the whole world. Some Jews out in the non-Jewish world would see themselves as a secret advance guard, pointing the way to that coming time, that future “kingdom.” Most, though, would be content to find a modus vivendi that enabled them to be loyal to Israel’s God without coming into direct confrontation with the Roman authorities. But in Jerusalem things were not so easy.
We know about the situation in Jerusalem through the detailed and colorful accounts of Josephus, a younger contemporary of Paul’s. He was anything but a neutral observer. He himself was a wealthy Jewish aristocrat who claimed to have tried out the various Jewish “schools of thought” and who had served as a general in the army at the start of the war against Rome (AD 66–70) before switching sides and ending his days on an imperial pension in Rome. To read his descriptions of Jerusalem in the middle of the first century is to be plunged into a highly complex and confusing world. Different parties, groups, messianic and prophetic movements, teachers, and preachers all claimed that Israel’s God was acting here or there or in this way and anathematized, often violently, those who saw things differently or who followed rival leaders. When the Romans closed in on Jerusalem in the last months of the war, crucifying so many Jews that they ran out of timber for crosses, Josephus records sorrowfully that more Jews were in fact killed by other Jews than by the Romans themselves. And that was not because the Romans were being lenient.
Matters were not helped by the sequence of inept Roman governors sent to keep the peace during the period. There were times—not least under the two kings named Herod Agrippa, both of whom were friendly with the Roman imperial family—when some must have hoped for a settlement, a live-and-let-live arrangement. That would never have been enough for the zealous young Saul of Tarsus, who longed for the ultimate kingdom of God. The Jerusalem of the 40s, 50s, and 60s was home to an entire generation who took the hard-line view, hating the thought of compromise with the pagans and looking for something more like Hezekiah’s heaven-sent victory over Sennacherib or the overthrow of the Egyptians in the Red Sea. What must it have been like to be a Jesus-follower in a Jerusalem like that?
What mattered, once again, was loyalty. Whose side are you on? Are you an out-and-out zealous supporter of the One God and his Torah, ready to do whatever is necessary to defend God’s honor and establish his kingdom—or are you a compromiser? Are you ready to do deals with the pagan world when it suits you? Are you prepared to go soft on your true allegiance, choosing to overlook the fact that the pagans worship idols and behave in unmentionable ways as a result? That, after all, was how the wilderness generation had behaved; remember Balaam, remember the Moabite women, remember Phinehas and his “zeal”—and the great covenant promises that Phinehas received as a result (“It was reckoned to him as righteousness”). The scriptures were quite clear that utter loyalty to the One God meant refusing all compromise with the pagan world. The social and cultural pressure to affirm that ancient loyalty and to be seen to abide by it was intense. Now think what it would have been like to be a follower of Jesus in that world. You would face a very different challenge from those faced by Jesus-followers in Syria or Turkey.
If, as we have seen, the Jerusalem church had by this time established a sense of identity as some kind of counter-Temple movement, this did not mean its members were being “anti-Jewish.” If anything, they were putting themselves on a par with many other groups who regarded the present Temple hierarchy (the wealthy, aristocratic Sadducees, including the high-priestly family) as a corrupt and compromised bunch, out for their own ends and too eager to do deals with the Romans. The early Jerusalem church seems to have lived in some ways like other groups who believed that God was ushering in “the last days”—whatever they may have meant by that. In the excitement of the early stages, they had shared their property communally; this eager social experiment may well have contributed to their later poverty. They lived a life of prayer, fasting, community, and care for the poor and widows. So far as we can tell they conformed faithfully to Jewish law. From this point of view, they must have seemed to many onlookers like a strange messianic variation on the Pharisees’ movement, coupling a fierce loyalty to Israel’s One God with their own belief, as yet perhaps comparatively inarticulate, that the One God had revealed himself in and as the crucified and risen kingdom-bringer, Jesus himself.
I doubt if anyone, even Paul himself, could have written the book we would all like to read—a careful analysis of exactly which groups in Jerusalem believed what, how their various hopes and expectations lined up, which scriptural texts they used, and so on. But they all believed in the hope of Israel—the hope for a great divine rescue, which for the Jesus-followers had already been launched though obviously had not yet been fully implemented. They all believed in utter loyalty to Israel’s One God. Fierce division existed over what precisely that loyalty should mean, but it would have taken a bold maverick to suggest that there might be forms of loyalty in which Israel’s ancestral traditions, focused on the Torah, would not play a central role. According to Acts, it was Peter himself who first broke the taboo and went to preach to and to share table fellowship with non-Jews; he received strong divine validation for this radical move and persuaded his suspicious colleagues in Jerusalem that this had been the right thing to do.1 But this move too seems not to have been thought through with regard to what they believed about Jesus himself. It was a pragmatic decision. This is how the spirit had led; therefore this must be what God wants.
It remained easy, then, for most of the Jerusalem-based Jesus-followers to see their movement as a Jesus-focused variation on the Jewish loyalist agenda. God might, to be sure, bring in some non-Jews. That had always happened in Israel’s history, as the book of Ruth and various other passages made clear. But one could hardly imagine that the God whose scriptures warned constantly against covenant disloyalty would suddenly declare the Torah itself redundant.
But that is what many in Jerusalem, including many Jesus-followers, believed that Paul had been teaching. We see this later on, when Paul returns to Jerusalem for the last time in the mid-50s after his extensive travels in Greece and Turkey. Having just written the letter to the Romans, the greatest early Christian treatment of the complex covenant dealings of Israel’s One God with his people, Paul finds himself speaking to an angry mob for whom the merest mention of “going to the Gentiles” is clear evidence that he is a careless compromiser.2 This kind of reaction to garbled rumors, both in Syrian Antioch and in the new churches of southern Anatolia, was, it seems, already alive and well in the mid-40s. After all, Jews, including Jewish Jesus-followers, traveled regularly to and from Jerusalem. Something so strange and dramatic as the message about Jesus and the effects it was having would be an obvious topic of conversation. The word would get out that Paul and Barnabas, not content with belonging to a strange mixed community in Syrian Antioch, had been going around the world telling Jews that they no longer need to obey the law of Moses! If Paul was really saying that God had made a way through the problems that Moses had left behind him—that now they could be “justified” from all the things that were still a problem under Moses3—then this was basically saying that the Torah itself could be set aside. Who could tell what appalling results might then follow?
All this focused on the covenant sign of circumcision. Some Jews in Paul’s day had tried to “explain” the practice of circumcision by pointing out its moral effects, suggesting that cutting off the foreskin would reduce lust. I know of no evidence that this actually worked, though the strong Jewish taboos against sexual immorality certainly had a restraining effect by contrast with the normal non-Jewish approach. But for centuries before Paul’s time circumcision had come to have a strong symbolic value. Going back to Genesis 17 and strongly reinforced at various points in the Pentateuch, the eighth-day circumcision of male babies was the mandatory sign of covenant membership. Some other nations had had similar practices, but by Paul’s day the phrases “the circumcision” and “the Jewish people” were virtually synonymous. This meant that if any non-Jewish males wished to become part of the Jewish community they, like the Hivites in Genesis 34, would have had to have been circumcised.4 It is true that the prophets and Moses himself had spoken of “the circumcision of the heart” as the ultimate reality to which physical circumcision was meant to point. That deep reality was associated with the promise of ultimate covenant renewal. But nobody in the early years of the first century imagined that, if the One God really did renew the covenant, physical circumcision might be dispensed with for the non-Jews who would be included. On the contrary. Circumcision became a touchstone, a telltale symbol, a sign once more of loyalty.
When we think of loyalty and of the ways in which a tight-knit community in an overheated political situation actually functions, we realize what was at stake. The Jesus-followers in Jerusalem faced trouble from the start. Many had dispersed following the early persecution, but there was still a tight core, focused particularly on James himself. From at least the time of Stephen’s killing they had been regarded as potentially subversive, disloyal to the Temple and its traditions. Now this disloyalty was showing itself in a new way: they were allied with a supposedly Jesus-related movement, out in far-flung lands, teaching Jews that they didn’t have to obey the Torah! That was the kind of movement, loyal Jews would naturally think, that would introduce one compromise after another until any Jews still attached to it would find themselves indistinguishable from pagans. Here in Jerusalem all loyal Jews knew that the pagans were the enemy whom God would one day overthrow, just as he overthrew Pharaoh’s armies in the Red Sea. But out there in the Diaspora this new movement was, it seemed, treating pagans as equal partners.
The word on the street in Jerusalem, then, would have been that these Jesus-followers were not really loyal Jews. They were letting the side down. That was how the forces of darkness always worked, and there were many in Jerusalem who would be on the lookout for the first signs of it among the local Jesus movement. Already viewed with suspicion, the Jesus-followers might be in danger. They would be hoping against hope that the Jesus movement in the wider world—not least that wild man Paul—would not land them in any deeper trouble, any guilt by association. From all that they had heard, the signs were not encouraging.
These cautious historical proposals about the real-life situation faced by Jesus-followers in Jerusalem and by their colleagues (if they saw them as such) in the Diaspora offer a corrective to the oversimplifications that have all too easily crept into readings of Paul. This has been a particular problem for modern Western readers. Our philosophies have tended to split the world in two: “science” deals only with “hard facts,” while the “arts” are imagined to deal in nebulous questions of inner meanings. Equally, in popular culture, inner feelings and motivations (“discovering who you really are” or “going with your heart”) are regularly invoked as the true personal reality over against mere outward “identities.” Some types of Protestantism have imbibed this deeply, supposing that “the gospel” is all about inner feeling, a disposition of the heart, and not at all about outward reality or actions, whether moral or “religious.” Sometimes people have thought that this is the one and only meaning of Paul’s teaching about “justification by faith not works.” But things were not nearly so simple.
In this climate of thought it has been easy for us to imagine that we have understood why Paul was insisting that circumcision no longer mattered for membership in God’s family. Obviously, we think, he was interested in a person’s inner reality, over against those fussy legalists who thought you had to obey a string of ritual instructions! He believed, we say, in a message of love rather than law, of inward feeling rather than outward conformity, of faith in the heart rather than rule-book religion or liturgical performance. In particular, we suppose, Paul believed that God didn’t require a perfect moral obedience from people, because God in any case always preferred right feelings (including “faith”) to right actions (which might make you proud). And so we could go on.
These caricatures are themselves full of contradictions. Anyone who thinks that having right “feelings” doesn’t make people proud is singularly blind to the currently fashionable notion that what matters is a correct “attitude” on the questions of the day. But that doesn’t make the caricatures any the less powerful. And none of them will help us understand what happened when people in Jerusalem heard what Paul was doing and teaching and reacted with alarm.
* * *
Four things then happened in quick succession. First, Peter came to Antioch and shared in the life of the church for a while. How long, we do not know, though this and the following incidents—including the writing of Paul’s first letter, that to the churches in Galatia—must be dated around AD 48. Second, some others came to Antioch from Jerusalem, claiming to have been sent by James. This precipitated a small earthquake in the Antioch church and a controversy described by Paul himself so sharply that we blush, even at this distance, to overhear such a devastating denunciation. Third, perhaps weeks and months later, Paul received bad news from the little communities of non-Jewish believers in southern Anatolia, so recently founded by himself and Barnabas. All this is interconnected with so many tightly interlocking loops of first-century Jewish and early Christian understanding, misunderstanding, claim and counterclaim, that it makes the fourth event particularly difficult to understand, but particularly important to grapple with. The fourth event was Paul’s writing of his famous first letter, Galatians.
He then set off for Jerusalem in the hopes of sorting it all out with those who seemed to be causing the trouble. Of course, they thought he was the one causing the trouble. Controversies are always like that. Generations of Christians who have read Galatians as part of holy scripture have to remind themselves that, if Galatians is part of the Bible, it is Galatians as we have it that is part of the Bible—warts and all, sharp edges and sarcastic remarks included. Perhaps, indeed, that is what “holy scripture” really is—not a calm, serene list of truths to be learned or commands to be obeyed, but a jagged book that forces you to grow up in your thinking as you grapple with it.
In any case, I do not think that when Paul began to dictate the letter (you can tell he’s dictating, because at the end he points out that he is writing the closing greeting in his own hand), he was thinking, “This will be part of ‘scripture.’” However, he believed that the One God had called him to be the apostle to the non-Jews, the Gentiles. He believed that Jesus had revealed himself to him and commissioned him with the news of Jesus’s victory over death and his installation as Lord. Paul believed that Jesus’s own spirit was at work through him to establish and maintain the life-changing communities of people whose lives had themselves been changed by the power of the gospel. And now he believed, as part of that, that he had a responsibility to state clearly what was at stake in the controversy in Antioch, in Jerusalem, in Galatia itself. His own obvious vulnerability throughout this process was part of the point, as he would later stress in another letter. His writing, just like the gospel itself, was part of a radical redefinition of what “authority” might look like within the new world that the One God had launched through Jesus.
Understanding a letter like Galatians—where the author is dictating so fast and assuming so much shared understanding that he skips over a hundred things we wish he had spelled out more fully—is notoriously like listening to one side of a complicated telephone conversation. Speaker and hearer assume a great deal that the listener has to fill in. Misunderstandings are easy, particularly when, in the case of a letter like Galatians, controversies from much later periods have imposed their own grid of expectation and have thus highlighted, and perhaps distorted, some of Paul’s key themes. Ideally, the more we understand about the larger worlds within which the whole conversation was taking place, the more we will see why Paul needed to say exactly what he said.
We return, then, to the sequence of events in Antioch. The first occurrence is easy to understand. Peter came to Antioch, perhaps in early 48. His arrival is unexplained, but then all Peter’s movements are unrecorded after his surprising escape from prison in Acts 12:17; all we know is that he worked as a traveling missionary. The key point is that he had initially been happy to go along with the practice of the local Jesus-followers, having Jewish believers and Gentile believers living together as “family,” sharing the same table. This was, after all, the principle that he, Peter, had himself embraced in Acts 10–11, when he visited Cornelius, justifying his actions to critics in Jerusalem. “What God made clean,” he had been told, “you must not regard as common.”5 Peter had acted on that principle, reckoning that the power of the gospel had “cleansed” the Gentiles of the ritual or moral defilement that they possessed in Jewish eyes, defilement that would normally be seen as a barrier to the intimacy of table fellowship.
So far, so good. With the second event, however, everything changes. Some people—we don’t know who they are, but Paul says they “came from James” in Jerusalem—arrived in Antioch and insisted that if these Gentiles wanted to be part of the true family, to share in the great rescue operation that the One God had now set in motion, they would have to be circumcised. Paul, describing this moment to the Galatians, says that this made Peter change his mind. Up to this point he had happily sat down to eat with the Jesus-believing Gentiles, but now, seeing that the newcomers were taking a hard line, he drew back. Granted the status that Peter himself had in the movement, it isn’t surprising that the other Jewish Jesus believers followed suit. And, says Paul, “Even Barnabas was carried along by their sham.”6
It was not, then, simply a matter of teaching, of theoretical disagreements. It was about practice, the practice that revealed an underlying belief. The original practice in Antioch had reflected the belief that all Jesus believers, whether circumcised or not, belonged at the same table. The people who came from Judaea to Antioch were clearly saying that table fellowship with uncircumcised Gentiles was wrong and that Jewish Jesus-followers, as loyal Jews, should withdraw.
The lasting shock of this moment is concentrated in Paul’s use of the word “even.” There is pain in that word, like someone trying to take a step on a foot with a broken bone in it. Even Barnabas! Barnabas had been with him through the joys and the trials of the mission in Galatia. They had shared everything; they had prayed and worked and celebrated and suffered side by side. They had themselves welcomed many non-Jews into the family. And now this. So what had happened?
Paul is careful not to say that James had actually sent the people who came from Jerusalem. However, they seem to have come with some kind of claim to be acting on James’s authority. And the focus of their concern, readily explicable in view of the tensions in Jerusalem we explored a moment ago, was the vital importance of maintaining covenant loyalty. Circumcision was nonnegotiable because the purity of God’s people was essential. If God was indeed bringing in his kingdom, rescuing Israel and the world from the powers of darkness to which the pagan nations had given their allegiance, then of course a clean break was vital. If pagans were allowed into the covenant people, the people who would inherit God’s new creation, they would have to exhibit covenant loyalty too. And that meant circumcision.
From the perspective of a Jerusalem full of eager, zealous kingdom-minded Jews, all this made sense. From the perspective of Paul, who had already thought through what it meant that God was bringing his kingdom through the crucified Messiah, it made no sense at all. Paul had come to believe that Jesus couldn’t simply be added on to the earlier picture of God’s rescuing kingdom. The shocking and unexpected events of the Messiah’s death and resurrection, coupled with the dramatic sense of personal renewal for which the only explanation was the outpoured divine spirit, meant that everything had changed. A new world had been launched. And if people were trying to live in that new world while wanting at the same time to put on a good face before people who hadn’t realized just how radical this new world was, they were precisely “putting on a face,” playing a part, covering up reality with a mask. They were, in short, “playacting.” The Greek word for “playacting” is hypokrisis, from which we get the English term “hypocrisy.”
We can imagine the uproar and confusion, the mutual accusation and recrimination that followed. Paul gives a quick summary of what he himself had said in confronting Peter; how much of this anyone might have been able to hear in the confusion we cannot tell, and as with other summaries we may assume that Paul originally said it at much greater length. The problem was personal as well as theological. As one of the recognized “pillars,” Peter had drawn the other Jewish Jesus-followers with him in stepping back from the common table. Once he had made this move as one of the best-known figures in the whole movement, it would have been very hard for the other Jews to hold their nerve. This made it no doubt harder for Paul to confront him, but also all the more necessary. Peter had to be stopped in his tracks. Paul has acquired over time a reputation for being a cantankerous and controversial figure, and no doubt there was that element in his makeup. But if you see a friend about to step out, unawares, into the path of oncoming traffic, leading a group with him, the most loving thing to do is to yell that they must stop at once. That is exactly what Paul did:
When Cephas came to Antioch, I stood up to him face to face. He was in the wrong. . . . When I saw that they weren’t walking straight down the line of gospel truth, I said to Cephas in front of them all: “Look here: you’re a Jew, but you’ve been living like a Gentile. How can you force Gentiles to become Jews?”7
Forcing Gentiles to become Jews. That may not have been what Peter thought he had been doing, but Paul looks behind the immediate issue (Peter and the other Jews withdrawing from table fellowship with Gentile Jesus-followers) to the clear implication and effect. Once you create a circle within a circle, you are sending a message to those in the outer ring that they should move into the inner one. But Peter had been already “living like a Gentile”—not in the sense that he had been worshipping idols or indulging in sexual immorality, but in the sense that he had been in the habit of eating with people without regard for the Jew/Gentile distinction. He was therefore “in the wrong.” Either his present behavior meant that his previous stance had been wrong, or his previous stance, being right, meant that his present behavior was wrong.
Paul was in no doubt which of these was the correct analysis:
We are Jews by birth, not “Gentile sinners.” But we know that a person is not declared “righteous” by works of the Jewish law, but through the faithfulness of Jesus the Messiah.8
This is where, traditionally, interpreters have jumped to the wrong conclusion. The question of “righteousness” has dominated Western theological discussion, and most have assumed that Paul here suddenly switches from talking about Peter eating with Gentiles (or not eating, as the case may be) and starts talking about “how someone is justified” in the traditional Western sense, in other words, how someone previously a “sinner” comes to be “righteous” in God’s sight.
Now, Paul clearly believes in the importance of sin and of being rescued from it. But that is not what is at stake in Jerusalem, Antioch, or Galatia. What matters is status within the covenant family. The word “righteous,” like the Greek and Hebrew words that term often translates, refers here to someone “being in a right relationship” with the One God, and the “relationship” in question is the covenant that God made with Abraham. As we will see presently, for instance in the decisive conclusion to the central argument in Galatians 3:29, the question Paul has to address is: How can you tell who are the true children of Abraham? And his answer is focused firmly on Jesus. So Paul’s point to Peter is simple. What matters is being part of the covenant family, and the covenant family is not defined by Jewish law, but “through the faithfulness of Jesus the Messiah.”
Here again we meet the powerful and many-sided word “faithfulness,” pistis in Greek. As we have seen, that same Greek word can mean “faith” in its various senses and also “faithfulness,” “loyalty,” or “reliability.” Here and elsewhere Paul seems to play on what seem to us multiple meanings; they may not, of course, have looked like that to him. The point is that, in a world where the key thing for a zealous Jew was “loyalty” to God and his law, Paul believed (1) that Jesus the Messiah had been utterly faithful to the divine purpose, “obedient even to the death of the cross” as he says elsewhere;9 (2) that following Jesus, whatever it took, had to be seen as itself a central expression of loyalty to Israel’s God; (3) that the followers of Jesus were themselves marked out by their belief in him, confessing him as “Lord” and believing that he was raised from the dead; and (4) if this Jesus-shaped loyalty was the vital thing, then nothing that the law could say was to come between one Jesus-follower and another. In other words (continuing Paul’s description of what he said to Peter):
That is why we too believed in the Messiah, Jesus: so that we might be declared “righteous” on the basis of the Messiah’s faithfulness, and not on the basis of works of the Jewish law. On that basis, you see, no creature will be declared “righteous.”10
This adds another element, which Paul does not here spell out. Once Jewish law is made the standard for membership, that very law will raise sharp questions about anyone at all, Jews included. Read Deuteronomy and see that Israel as a whole will rebel, turn away from the One God, and suffer the consequences. On this basis, Paul urges Peter (and all the others listening to the confrontation or who hear his letter when it is read out loud) to think through the quite new position:
Well, then: if, in seeking to be declared “righteous” in the Messiah, we ourselves are found to be “sinners,” does that make the Messiah an agent of “sin”? Certainly not! If I build up once more the things which I tore down, I demonstrate that I am a lawbreaker.11
In other words, if we start with the normal Jewish categories that Paul states above (“We are Jews by birth, not ‘Gentile sinners’”), in which Gentiles are automatically “sinners” because they don’t have the law, then if someone like Peter finds himself called to live on equal terms with “Gentile sinners” because that is required by his membership of the Messiah’s people, does that mean that the Messiah is now condoning or colluding with “sin”? This, we recall, is exactly the kind of thing that people in Jerusalem would be worried about. They might see this as fraternizing with the enemy, just when they, back home, were doing their best to stay loyal to God and the law and so to hasten the coming kingdom! They might see, in Paul’s claim to be following the Messiah, a false Messiah who was leading people astray. This, they might say, is just what the law itself had warned might happen.
Paul counters this line of thought at once. If Peter or anyone else starts by pulling down the wall between Jew and Gentile (as Peter had indeed done: “You’re a Jew, but you’ve been living like a Gentile”) and then decides to rebuild it, all he is doing is pointing the finger back at himself. He is admitting that he was wrong to “live like a Gentile,” and he is invoking the law, which will simply remind him that he is in any case a lawbreaker.
There is only one way forward, and that is to go where the Messiah has led, through death to new life. This journey is the same for all the Messiah’s people, Jew and Gentile alike. Here we come to the very heart of Paul’s understanding of what had happened in the messianic events involving Jesus. It is the central principle around which his answer to the three very different situations—in Jerusalem, in Syrian Antioch, and in Galatia—had been thought out. Paul describes this in the first-person singular (“I”) not because he is holding himself up as a shining example of a particular spiritual experience, but because if even he, as a zealous Jew, had to tread this path, then it would be obvious that it was the only way to go:
Let me explain it like this. Through the law I died to the law, so that I might live to God. I have been crucified with the Messiah. I am, however, alive—but it isn’t me any longer, it’s the Messiah who lives in me. And the life I do still live in the flesh, I live within the faithfulness of the son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.12
Through the law I died to the law, so that I might live to God. That is one of the most extraordinary statements ever written by a Jew of the first or perhaps any century. It tells us at the same moment that Paul regards himself as a loyal Jew, loyal to God and the law—and that he had come to see the law itself as pointing forward to a kind of “death,” pointing to something beyond itself, something that could only be attained by coming out of the law’s own private sphere and emerging into a new world. The law itself had envisaged a moment when it would be upstaged by a new reality, the messianic reality. Though Paul does not mention baptism in this passage—he will come to that a chapter later—the sequence of thought he describes here is exactly what, in his view, baptism is all about (as in Romans 6), which is leaving the old life behind and coming through “death” into a new life entirely. And insofar as he is still the same flesh-and-blood human being (“the life I do still live in the flesh”), he now finds his identity not in his human genealogy or status, but in the Messiah himself and his (the Messiah’s) faithfulness and loyalty. If, in other words, it’s loyalty to God and the law that you want, then the Messiah’s death and resurrection has defined for all time what that actually looks like. When someone comes to be part of that messianic reality, then this, rather than their previous standing as “Jew” or “Gentile” (along with any outward marks of that standing), is the only thing that matters.
The mention of the Messiah’s “love” (“who loved me and gave himself for me”) is not merely an appeal to emotion, though it is that as well. The idea of a “love,” coming from Israel’s God and rescuing people from the fate they would otherwise suffer, goes all the way back to the covenant between God and Israel and the rescuing act of the Exodus. Paul will develop this thought elsewhere. For the moment, as a summary of what he said to Peter in Antioch (and with “certain persons from James” listening in, no doubt shocked at what they were hearing), it leads directly to Paul’s conclusion:
I don’t set aside God’s grace. If “righteousness” comes through the law, then the Messiah died for nothing.13
In other words, if Peter and, by implication, those who have come from James try to reestablish a two-tier Jesus movement, with Jews at one table and Gentiles at another, all they are doing is declaring that the movement of God’s sovereign love, reaching out to the utterly undeserving (“grace,” in other words), was actually irrelevant. God need not have bothered. If the Torah, the Five Books of Moses, was sufficient for all time to define the people of God, then there is no need for a crucified Messiah. Or to put it the other way, if God has declared, in the resurrection, that the crucified Jesus really was and is the Messiah, then God is also declaring that Moses could only take them so far. He pointed to a promised land, an “inheritance,” but could not himself take the people into it. Galatians is all about the ultimate “inheritance” that God had promised. And, as we shall see presently, Paul insisted that the “heirs” of this “inheritance” could not be defined by the Torah, but only by the Messiah himself, the ultimate “heir.”
So much, then, for the confrontation between Paul and Peter at Antioch. It has been commonplace among New Testament interpreters to assume that Paul lost the argument and so had to set off on his later missionary journeys without the support of the Antioch church. I see no good reason for this conclusion. The distance from Syrian Antioch to South Galatia is not great, and the entire situation assumes that people could and did travel quickly and easily between the two. Had Paul lost the argument, I think it extremely unlikely that he would have referred to it at all, let alone in these terms, in writing to Galatia. In any case, he later returns to Antioch without any hint of trouble.14 But this brings us to the point where we have to back up and examine the third element in the situation at Antioch. What had been going on in Galatia itself?
* * *
The situation behind Paul’s letter was clearly complex. To reconstruct it, we will not be relying simply on “mirror reading” from what Paul actually says, though there is bound to be some of that. We will also be doing our best to understand the larger situation in Jerusalem, in Galatia, and in Paul’s base at Antioch.
Once again we must avoid oversimplifications, especially any suggestion (this has been common) that the Galatian Jesus-followers, having been taught good Reformed theology, were now embracing Arminianism or Pelagianism and trying to add to their God-given salvation by doing some “good works” of their own. We should also, of course, avoid the equal and opposite suggestion, that Paul was simply trying to manipulate communities, putting forth a “sociological” agenda and using “theological” arguments as a smokescreen for his real purposes. Neither of these proposals will do. All the signs are that Paul understood the scripturally rooted purposes of the One God to have been fulfilled in the Messiah, Jesus, and that he understood this to involve the creation of a particular type of community. As far as he was concerned, therefore, what we call “theology” and what we call “sociology” belonged firmly together.
But, at around the same time as “certain persons came from James” to Syrian Antioch, it appears that certain persons, also claiming the authority of the Jerusalem church, came to Galatia. Their message was similar to the one the James people seem to have been articulating in Antioch. And that message was that all the fraternizing with Gentiles had to stop. Any Gentiles who wanted to be regarded as members of the true people of Israel, the family of Abraham, would have to be circumcised. God’s kingdom would indeed come, rescuing God’s people from the world and its wicked ways, but the only people who would inherit that kingdom would be the circumcised.
This sharp message for the little groups of Jesus-followers in Galatia also involved a personal attack on Paul himself. Paul, said the messengers, was only ever a second-order representative of the Jesus message. He had picked up his “gospel” in Jerusalem, but had failed to grasp one of its essential elements or perhaps had simply chosen not to pass it on. If the Galatians appealed to the top of the tree, to Jerusalem itself, they would find a different story from the one Paul told them.
We do not have to look far below the surface to see why all this seemed so urgent to the messengers and so important locally to many people in South Galatia. Jerusalem, as we have seen, was awash with zealous speculation about the coming kingdom, in which “the Gentiles” were usually the wicked villains who would at last receive their punishment. People disagreed on what exactly it meant to keep the Torah, but everyone agreed that keeping the Torah mattered. People might disagree as to why exactly Gentiles posed a threat to the ancestral beliefs and hopes of Israel, but everyone agreed that the Gentile threat was real. So any claim that Israel’s Messiah was now welcoming Gentiles on equal terms into a new community where normal Torah standards (including the covenant badge of circumcision) were set aside must have seemed a contradiction in terms. It would be like a grand-society wedding at which the noble-born bridegroom arrives, only to announce that he is running off with a gypsy girl he’d met down the street. Any Gentiles who thought they were now sharing the divine promises of Israel’s worldwide inheritance were deceived. And any Jews who were tempted to treat uncircumcised Gentiles as “family” were compromising the integrity of God’s people. They were placing the promised inheritance itself in jeopardy.
We noted a moment ago the pressure on the Jerusalem-based Jesus-followers themselves. We can see how natural it would be for them to want to demonstrate to their suspicious friends and neighbors in Jerusalem just how loyal they really were by trying to put matters right. If only those Gentiles who believed in Jesus would get circumcised, everybody would be happy! The charge of disloyalty would collapse. And so, just as Saul of Tarsus had set off a decade earlier to round up those blaspheming Jesus-followers, someone else—a shadowy, unnamed figure, presumably with a few friends—set off with a different though related agenda. He would bring this new movement into line. Paul would recognize what this person was doing. It is the sort of thing he would have done himself. It is quite likely that he knew the person in question.
At the same time, pressure would be mounting on the Jewish communities in South Galatia. As long as everybody in that thoroughly Romanized province knew who the Jews were within a particular town or city, all would be well. People might sneer at them for their funny customs, but at least everybody would know that they had official permission to forgo participation in the local cults, particularly the exciting new cults of Rome and Caesar, which were celebrating the new worldwide reality of peace and prosperity provided by the “Lord” and “Savior” in Rome itself.
But one of the first and most important things that happened whenever non-Jews were grasped by the gospel of Jesus was that, once they had heard that there was a true and living God and that he loved them personally, they would turn away from the idols they had previously worshipped. So suddenly a new group would emerge, in a world without privacy, where people knew one another’s business, and where social deviance was quickly noted and usually resented. This new group, the Jesus-followers, was not, or not obviously, Jewish; the males were not circumcised, the Sabbath was not being observed, and so on. But on the other hand, like the Jews, the members of this group were staying away from the regular rituals, the weekly, monthly, or annual ceremonies and celebrations. So if the Jesus-followers in Jerusalem were suspected of disloyalty because of their attitude toward Israel’s Temple and Torah, the Jesus-followers in the Diaspora would be suspected of disloyalty toward their own communities, and toward Rome itself, because of their attitude toward the local cults.
The Jewish communities in cities like Pisidian Antioch, Iconium, and Lystra—all Roman colonies, we recall—would then find themselves caught in the middle. We can imagine the civic authorities challenging them. “Who are these people,” they would ask, “who have suddenly stopped worshipping the gods? Are they Jews or are they not? We need to know! Sort it out or we will have questions to ask.” Local synagogue communities might well be divided in their response, but the social pressure would build up. The situation was intolerable. Something would have to be done. So we can easily imagine that local Jewish leaders would want to put pressure on local Jewish Jesus-followers to persuade their surprising new friends, the Gentile Jesus believers, to come into line. “Persuade them to get circumcised,” they urged. “Use any tactics, any pressure you like, but get it done. Otherwise we’re all in trouble.”
These reconstructions of the likely scenarios in Jerusalem and in Galatia are, of course, guesses. But they fit with what we know of the larger world of the time and with the kinds of challenges that local communities often faced. Above all, they make very good sense of the letter Paul then wrote. Nor should we imagine that these pressures—the grinding of gears between different social and cultural groupings—were seen, either by the people concerned or by Paul himself, as (in our terms) “sociological” rather than “religious” or “theological.” Such distinctions make no sense in the first century. Everybody knew that divine worship was central to communal life. It kept things together and fostered social stability. For Jesus-followers, worshipping the true and living God, who had acted dramatically in the gospel events and who was now continuing to act powerfully by his spirit, generated and sustained a new kind of communal life, holding it together and fostering its stability—at the necessary cost of disrupting the tidy patterns of all the other communal life of the region.
Paul, therefore, had a complex and challenging task. He would understand only too well the different anxieties, the complex web of social, cultural, religious, and theological pressures and agendas. He would see the communities he had founded caught in the middle—and would be shocked at how easily they, or some of them, had succumbed to the teaching of whoever it was who was “troubling” them. He would be personally hurt (this comes through at various points in the letter) that they would be disloyal to him after all that they had seen him go through on their behalf. But above all he would be shocked that they seemed not to have grasped the very center of it all, the meaning of Jesus himself and his death and resurrection and the fact that through him a new world, a new creation, had already come into being. They were in serious danger of stepping back from that new reality into the old world, as though the cross and resurrection had never taken place, as though the true and living God had not revealed his covenant love once and for all not only to Israel but through the personification of Israel, the Messiah, to the world.
It would take a whole separate book to work through the letter to the Galatians and explain how Paul, in his rapid-fire writing, hits these nails on the head with all the tools of rhetoric and irony available to him and at the same time with pathos and personal appeal. He has several things to say, and they come tumbling out on top of one another.
He interrupts his own opening greeting to insist that his “apostleship” was a direct gift from God and Jesus, not a secondhand or second-rate thing he got from elsewhere. “Paul, an apostle,” he begins—and then interrupts himself by adding, in brackets as it were, “my apostleship doesn’t derive from human sources . . .” Then he recovers his balance and states the foundation principle. His apostleship derives from God himself, and from Jesus the Messiah, our Kyrios,
who gave himself for our sins, to rescue us from the present evil age, according to the will of God our father, to whom be glory to the ages of ages. Amen.15
Each element here is vital. The “good news” Paul has announced is what the One God always planned and intended. It is not a sudden afterthought. The message about Jesus may look to Jews in Jerusalem or Galatia as though it’s a strange, peculiar eccentricity. But it is in truth the leading edge of the long-awaited new creation. This is central and will remain so throughout Paul’s work.
The central point concerns the difference between “the present evil age” and the new day that has dawned. Paul here affirms the well-known and widespread ancient Jewish belief that world history is divided into two “ages,” the “present age” of sorrow, shame, exile, and death and the “age to come,” when all things will be put right. That belief was common for centuries before Paul, and it remained the norm all the way through the much later rabbinic period. But for Paul something had happened. The living God had acted in person, in the person of Jesus, to rescue people from that “present age” and to launch “the age to come.” The two ages were not, as it were, back to back, the first stopping when the second began. The new age had burst upon the scene while the “present age” was still rumbling on. This was the direct effect of the divine plan by which Jesus “gave himself for our sins”; the power of the “present age” was thereby broken, and the new world could begin. There is a sense in which the whole letter, and in a measure all of Paul’s work, simply unpacks and explains this opening flourish.
It is always risky to summarize, but part of the point of the present book is to invite readers to so live within Paul’s world that they will be able to read the letters in their original contexts and so grasp the full import of what was being said. So, for Galatians, we may simply note five points that come out again and again. Each could be spelled out at length.
First, to repeat, Paul is offering a reminder that what has happened through Jesus is the launching of new creation. The messianic events of Jesus and the spirit are not simply another religious option, a new twist on an old theme. If they mean anything, they mean that the creator God has called time on the old creation and has launched the new one in the middle of it. No wonder this new reality is uncomfortable. “Circumcision . . . is nothing; neither is uncircumcision! What matters is new creation.”16 The messengers from Jerusalem and the local pressure groups are trying to put the hurricane of new creation back into the bottle of the old world. It can’t be done. The Messiah’s death has defeated the powers of the world. That is why non-Jewish idolaters have been set free from their former slavery. Paul’s analysis is sharp: “If you try to reverse this—as you would be doing, were you to get circumcised—you are saying you don’t believe in the new creation. You are saying that the Messiah didn’t need to die. You are saying you still belong in the old world. You are cutting off the branch you have been sitting on.”
Second, what has happened in the gospel events, and what has happened in Paul’s own ministry, is in fact the fulfillment of the scripturally sourced divine plan. Paul’s long explanation of his own early days in the movement, designed to ward off the charge that he got his gospel secondhand and muddled it up as he did so, echoes again and again the “call” of the prophets and of the “servant” in Isaiah who was to be the light of the nations. “Whatever Jewish messengers may tell you,” Paul is saying, “I can show you that what has happened through Jesus and what has been happening through my own work is what Israel’s scriptures themselves always envisaged.” Paul’s own commissioning on the Damascus Road and his subsequent visits to Jerusalem make it clear that his gospel was firsthand. The only thing the Jerusalem apostles contributed to it was support. Likewise, Paul’s suffering, which the Galatian churches had witnessed up close, was itself a dramatic signpost to the gospel. In particular—and this forms the central theme of the letter—the divine promises to Abraham have been fulfilled in Jesus the Messiah. God promised Abraham a worldwide family. In the Psalms and Isaiah this was focused on the coming king, the son of David who would be the son of God. In Jesus, God has done what he promised, launching the movement through which the new creation is coming about, the kingdom of God on earth as in heaven.
This leads Paul, third, to the vital point. All this has effectively bypassed the problem posed by Moses. The third chapter of the letter to the Galatians outflanks the eager Torah loyalty of the Jerusalem zealots and their diaspora cousins. Moses himself leaves Israel, at the end of Deuteronomy, with the warning of a curse, and the curse will culminate in exile, just as it had for Adam and Eve in Genesis 3. Moses’s Torah was given by God for a vital purpose, but that purpose was temporary, to cover the period before the fulfillment of the promise to Abraham. Now that this has happened, the Torah has no more to say on the subject.
All those who belong to the Messiah are the true “seed” of Abraham, guaranteed to inherit the promise of the kingdom, of new creation. Abraham believed God, quotes Paul from Genesis, “and it was counted to him for righteousness.”17 There is the phrase that, we have suggested, had haunted Saul of Tarsus from his days as a young zealot. Phinehas acted with zeal for God and the law, “it was counted to him for righteousness,” and God established his covenant with him. Mattathias, the father of Judas Maccabaeus, had quoted this phrase, referring to Abraham and Phinehas, as he commissioned his sons for their life of holy zeal.18 Now Paul is reinterpreting both covenant and zeal. God has fulfilled his promises to Abraham, but this does not drive a wedge between holy Jews and wicked Gentiles; instead, it is establishing a Jew-plus-Gentile family of faith—as God always intended.
Fourth, this has been accomplished through the long-awaited “new Exodus.” Every Jew knew the story: slavery in Egypt; divine victory over Pharaoh; Israel (as “God’s firstborn son”) redeemed and brought through the Red Sea; the gift of the Torah on Sinai; the glorious divine presence coming to dwell in the Tabernacle; Abraham’s children heading home to the “inheritance” of the promised land. Paul retells that story in Galatians 4:1–7 with Jesus and the spirit at the heart of it. The whole world is enslaved; God sent his son to redeem and his spirit to indwell; Abraham’s children are assured of their “inheritance.” There is a sting in the tail, however.19 Paul warns the Galatians that they are now in danger of behaving like those Israelites in the wilderness who wanted to go back to Egypt. If they get circumcised, they will be saying that they prefer the old slavery to the new freedom.
So, finally and decisively, the living God has created the single family he always envisaged, and it is marked by faith, pistis. God had not promised Abraham two families, a Jewish one and a non-Jewish one—which is what would have been implied by Peter’s behavior at Antioch, where Jewish and non-Jewish Jesus-followers were to eat at separate tables. Nor would it do to create that single family artificially, as it were, simply by circumcising male Gentile converts. If covenant membership were available through the Torah, the Messiah wouldn’t have needed to die.
How can you tell, then, where this single family is? The only sure indication is pistis—faith, faithfulness, loyalty. All of those and more besides. Not, of course, a generalized “religious faith,” but “Messiah faith,” the faithfulness of the Messiah himself, whose death overcame the power of sin and thus delivered people from the present evil age; the faith evoked by the gospel message, the kind that echoed the Messiah’s own faithfulness by confessing that Jesus is Kyrios and believing that God raised him from the dead; the loyalty that now clings to that message and refuses to be blown off course. Paul has taken one of the central themes that had motivated both the Torah loyalists in Jerusalem and the Caesar loyalists in Galatia and replaced it with a word, elevated almost to a technical term, that denoted loyalty to the One God, the true and living one now made known in and as Jesus and now active through the spirit. It was a new, contested loyalty. Without leaving this home base of meanings, however, the word pistis encompassed so much more, especially the personal knowledge and trust that sprang up in hearts and minds at the news of Jesus, the sense of God’s intimate presence and love.
This, then, is Paul’s famous doctrine of “justification by faith.” It is not that “faith” in the sense of a “religious awareness” is somehow a kind of human experience that is superior to others, but that those who believed the gospel and who were loyal to the One God it unveiled were to be known, and were to know themselves, as the single worldwide family promised to Abraham. And that meant a new community sharing a common table despite all differences: neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, no “male and female,” since “all are one in the Messiah, Jesus.”20
A new kind of community, then, as the advance guard of the new creation. A dramatic new vision, claiming the deepest of roots in Israel’s scriptures and the most personal of relationships with Israel’s God. Paul tells the Galatians that because they are new-Exodus people, the true “children” of God, “God has sent the spirit of his son” into their hearts, “calling out ‘Abba, Father!’”21 The spirit thus anticipates and points to the ultimate inheritance, the promised land of new creation itself. And anyone who tries to disrupt this new reality, anyone who, for whatever mixture of motives, tries to drag them back into the old world—such a person is to be shunned. Anyone who suggests that Jerusalem is still the center of everything, so that its leaders must have the last word, is to be reminded that what counts is the heavenly Jerusalem.22 There cannot be “another gospel,” whether the “gospel” of Caesar or a supposed “gospel” of Torah-plus-Jesus. “What matters is new creation.”23
How much of all this the churches in Galatia would have understood at first hearing we may doubt. But the letter would be read aloud to them over and over again. It would have been discussed, argued over. Whoever had delivered the letter would almost certainly be called upon to explain what Paul meant. The teachers in the churches—teaching being a vital part of early church life—would do their best to help converts understand the dense web of scriptural references and allusions. We do not know how effective it was at the time, whether some non-Jewish Jesus-followers in Galatia did go ahead and get circumcised or whether they all decided to go with Paul rather than with the eager zealots who had been urging them to become full Jews. (The next time Paul is in the area Luke tells us little about the state of the churches in question.) Since we do not know who it was that had come to Galatia as an anti-Pauline missionary, we have no idea what happened to this person and his colleagues afterward.
Not that Paul had time to worry about that. He and Barnabas were already packing their bags for the trip to Jerusalem. It was time to discuss, face-to-face, the issues that had threatened the unity of the new movement and with it, from Paul’s point of view at least, the integrity of the gospel itself.
* * *
Paul never mentions the “Jerusalem Conference” described in Acts 15, so we cannot be sure what he thought of it all. Clearly things could not go on as they were, with different groups sending frantic and contradictory messages this way and that. At least, if things did go on as they were, they would precipitate a major and lasting rift among the Jesus-followers.
Why would this matter? It is interesting that, from the first and despite great pressures to split, all the early leaders of the movement seem to have valued unity, even if they had very different suggestions as to how to achieve it. Partly this may have been pragmatic. They were under multiple pressures from the outside, and they needed to hold together. But for Paul himself, right across his letters, and it seems for the Jerusalem leadership as well, it mattered that the followers of Jesus should find a way of living together as a single family despite the inevitable tensions that a new but suddenly far-flung movement would experience. This reminds us again—and it will be a feature of much of Paul’s life—that there really was no analogy in the ancient world for a movement of this kind. As we saw, the Roman army and civil service, on the one hand, and the network of Jewish synagogues, on the other hand, provide partial parallels, but Paul is trying something different from either. The challenge facing Paul and the others was how to live as an extended family without ties of kinship or ancestral symbols, without the geographical focus of Jerusalem and the Temple, and without a central authority like that of Caesar.
To Jerusalem, then, they went; not for reasons of sacred geography (Paul was now skeptical of that, as he hints in Galatians when he says that “the present Jerusalem” is “in slavery with her children”24), but because that was the center of the protest movement that was objecting to what Paul and Barnabas had been doing. The meeting took place, fairly certainly, in either late 48 or early 49.
We can imagine the conversations on the way. Paul would now be somewhat uneasy after Barnabas’s (I assume temporary) change of stance in Antioch. Paul the thinker, the scholar, the teacher would be eager to go into full sail, to expound the scriptures at length, to explain in great detail how the message about Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection not only made sense of all the old prophecies, but pointed directly to a new day in which all humans, Gentiles as well as Jews, would be welcomed into a single family.
Barnabas, we may suspect, would be urging restraint. He would have picked up the signals from the Jerusalem visitors in Antioch: they had always been suspicious of Paul, and the longer he went on, the more they would stop listening to the scriptural detail and start feeling that he was bullying them into a corner. The Jerusalem Jesus-followers might not have been able to refute his scriptural arguments, but they would still take it all with a pinch of salt and conclude that there must be a flaw somewhere, since they knew ahead of time that Paul was a dangerous and subversive character. In addition, Paul was an upstart former persecutor, presuming to tell them about the meaning of Jesus’s work just because he knew his Bible rather well, whereas they had known Jesus personally! Much better, Barnabas would suggest, for them to tell the stories of what had happened in Galatia, and indeed of what had been happening in Antioch itself, of how non-Jews had found the spirit powerfully at work in their lives and communities. Much wiser, then, to put Peter and James on the spot, to get them to recall Peter’s visit to Cornelius, to challenge them to expound the relevant scriptures. Let them do the theological heavy lifting.
The journey itself was encouraging. As the two traveled south through Phoenicia and Galilee and into Samaria, approaching Jerusalem, they told the little groups of believers they encountered on the way what had happened in the Galatian churches. The response was encouraging. This would not only have strengthened their resolve; it would have given them practice in telling their stories to good effect. That was what they then did in Jerusalem, setting out in one story after another the extraordinary things that God had done through their work. They would have explained too the violent opposition they had received, but the important thing was the way that Gentiles had been grasped by the gospel and transformed by the spirit. We can imagine Paul biting his lip, restraining his desire to expound Genesis, Deuteronomy, Isaiah, and the rest, and Barnabas shooting him warning looks and hoping and praying that the plan would work. It did.
The hard-line party made its position clear: Gentile converts must be circumcised and keep the Torah. There was general discussion, in which Paul and Barnabas played a restrained part but held themselves back, we suspect, from any larger theological discourse. There were plenty of people who wished to contribute, and their testimony carried its own power. Finally Peter and James stood up to speak.
Peter went back again to what had happened when he visited Cornelius and God visibly gave his spirit to the Gentiles without their needing to be circumcised. Something had happened to these Gentiles as a result of which the normal Jewish taboos preventing contact with impure people were no longer relevant. What’s more, Peter drew attention to something we have already noted—a recognition, precisely among devout Jews, that Mosaic law in its entirety, as it stood, left its adherents in a bad place. It simply warned that Israel was hard-hearted and that this would result in the covenantal curse. Why, then, should Jewish Jesus-followers place a restriction on Gentile converts that the Jewish people themselves, according to their own scriptures, find to be a burden? Peter left the assembly in no doubt that the sheer grace of God, through the message of Jesus, had transformed the hearts and lives of non-Jews without those non-Jews having to come under Mosaic law, without their being circumcised.
We sense the sigh of relief from Paul and Barnabas. They exchange quick glances. This was what they needed Peter to do. He has reinforced the impact of their own missionary stories, and they now add some more. The meeting, they think, has turned the corner.
The final word is then left to James, who we know from various sources was held in enormous respect not simply because he was Jesus’s own brother, but because he devoted himself so assiduously to prayer. James sets all the strange stories they have heard in the context of scripture. What has happened, he says, is the clear fulfillment of ancient biblical hopes, that when God finally sends the Messiah, the true son of David, then his inheritance will consist of the whole world. God will “rebuild the Tabernacle of David which had collapsed,” and the result will be that “the rest of the human race may seek the Lord, and all the nations upon whom [God’s] name has been called.”25 The point could have been made from other prophets or indeed from a good many psalms, but the message is clear as it stands. Ancient Israel’s messianic expectation had included the promise that David’s son would be Lord of the whole world. This does not explicitly indicate that such a new community would leave behind the restrictions of the Mosaic code. But everybody knew that Moses’s Torah was for the nation of Israel. If the other nations were now coming in, then a new dispensation had been inaugurated for which the Mosaic restrictions were no longer relevant.
Barnabas and Paul allow themselves a quiet smile of gratitude. This is what they have been hoping for. The crisis has been averted.
The main point at issue had thus been dealt with—though we should not imagine that everyone meekly acquiesced. Things do not work like that in real communities. Just because an official pronouncement has been made, that does not mean that all churches will at once fall into line. However, there was an important pragmatic consequence. Just because they did not need to be circumcised, that didn’t mean that Gentile Jesus-followers were free to behave as they liked. They were to be careful to avoid giving offense to their Jewish neighbors, including their Jesus-believing Jewish neighbors. For that reason, there were certain areas where their freedom would need to be curtailed. There was to be no sexual immorality (one of the major differences between Jewish and pagan lifestyles) and no contact with what has been “polluted by idols” or “sacrificed to idols” or with meat that has been slaughtered in a nonkosher way, so that one would be eating blood, the God-given sign and bearer of life. There were, then, some typically Jewish taboos that were still to be observed, at least when in close contact with Jewish communities; the Jesus-followers were to take care when surrounded with Jewish sensibilities.
But the main point at issue—circumcision—was conceded. A letter was agreed upon, from the whole church to “our Gentile brothers and sisters.” That already made the point that the uncircumcised believers were indeed part of the family. The letter was sent to Antioch, Syria, and Cilicia (Cilicia, the broad swath of southern Turkey, had by this time been divided between the Roman provinces of Galatia and Syria, but the name was still in common use for the area as a whole). In addition to its main points, the document also made it clear that, although the people who had arrived in Antioch and in Galatia had come from Jerusalem, they had not been authorized by James and the others. A delicate diplomatic solution all around.
Like many diplomatic solutions, it was designed to keep things together at least for a while, though it left many questions unaddressed. Paul and the others would have to go on grappling with them, as we shall see. But the hard-liners in Jerusalem, though no doubt bitterly disappointed at losing their demand that Gentile converts be circumcised, would at least have been mollified by the thought that the main causes of Gentile pollution, the idolatry and sexual immorality that were the norm in non-Jewish societies, would be avoided.
Supposing Paul’s story had ended at this point, in AD 49 in Jerusalem, what would we say about him? What motivated him, and how had he come to this point? If Galatians was the only thing he had ever written, we would already know that he was a man of enormous intellectual reach and energy. The letter still feels hot off the press, covering huge areas in swift strokes, leaving much to be filled in but focusing intently on what really mattered, what had already come to define Paul. “I have been crucified with the Messiah. I am, however, alive—but it isn’t me any longer; it’s the Messiah who lives in me. And the life I do still live in the flesh, I live within the faithfulness of the son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”26 It doesn’t get any clearer or any more intimate than that. Paul’s own answer to the question of what motivated him to do what he did was Jesus—Jesus crucified and risen, Jesus as the living embodiment of the love of the One God.
Paul’s own answer to the question of what happened on the road to Damascus and what it meant is equally clear. “God set me apart from my mother’s womb, and called me by his grace . . . so that I might announce the good news about him among the nations.”27 This was not a “conversion” in the sense of leaving behind the Jewish world and starting or propagating a new “religion.” But it was a “conversion” in the sense that Israel’s Messiah himself, going down into death, had taken with him the whole world, including the whole Jewish world and its traditions, in order then to emerge from death in a new form; and in the sense that all those who now belonged to the Messiah shared that death, that resurrection, and the new identity that followed. There had never been a moment when Paul had not been out-and-out loyal to the One God. But the One God had unveiled his age-old purpose in the shocking form of the crucified Messiah, and that changed everything. A contested loyalty.
If we find all this puzzling or paradoxical, we can be sure that many of Paul’s friends and associates, not to mention his opponents, would have said the same thing. The letter we know as 2 Peter puts it like this, speaking of Paul’s letters (the only New Testament reference, outside Paul himself, to Paul as a letter writer):
There are some things in them [i.e., in Paul’s letters] which are difficult to understand. Untaught and unstable people twist his words to their own destruction, as they do with the other scriptures.28
It is not particularly remarkable that some found Paul’s letters hard to understand and open to misinterpretation. What is remarkable is that Paul’s writings were already being referred to as “scriptures.” That points us to the larger question his work raises to this day. What was he doing that caused these little communities, with all their problems, contested loyalties, and external threats, not only to survive, but to thrive? This question is sharpened to a point by what happened next.