Before we approach the exegesis of Galatians, there are three basic questions which we should ask, with some other minor questions which arise from them. The first is: Who were the Galatians to whom the letter was written? The second is: When was the letter written? The third is: Why was the letter written? Fortunately, there is no need to ask a fourth question: By whom was the letter written? Even extreme critics agree that it was written by the apostle Paul; indeed Galatians, along with Romans, Corinthians and Philippians, is sometimes used as a yardstick by which to judge the authenticity of other letters.
Basically, all of these questions must be answered from the evidence of the letter itself, with some help from Acts, and occasional assistance from other Pauline letters, notably the Corinthian letters and the letter to the Romans, though sometimes these other sources solve one problem at the expense of creating another.
Nevertheless, any problems thus created are minor, and the main answer seems clear in each case. In fact, it would not be unfair to say that some at least of the problems are of our own making, for the questions have at times been made unnecessarily complicated by a reluctance to accept simple solutions that will satisfy the available evidence.
Some theories propounded as explanations in the last thirty years have been so artificial and convoluted that they are unlikely to be correct. While it is a basic rule of textual criticism that ‘the more difficult the reading, the more likely it is to be correct’, this is not necessarily true in more general study of the New Testament. Several such theories will therefore be mentioned briefly in this commentary, but not seriously argued since (with all due deference to their learned proponents) they do not seem to merit it, especially not in a work of this size. Those who are curious are referred to lengthier commentaries for discussions, after which they can make their own judgments.
A further point to be made is that, while the three questions mentioned above are both interesting and relevant, it is not necessary to solve them completely before one can read and appreciate the message of the letter. Indeed, it might be fair to say that solution of the first two problems should hardly affect exegesis, particularly because exegesis should never be based on an unproven hypothesis, however likely that hypothesis may be.
The third question, on the other hand, is very important and must be solved basically by referring to the letter itself. Interest in the first two questions, and therefore space and attention given to them, is by no means as great in modern commentaries as it was in earlier works. The third, however, with its associated questions, remains just as absorbing a topic today. This modern neglect may be because it is realized that the hypothetical answers to the first two questions do not basically alter the exegesis of this letter. On the other hand, it may simply be the recognition that absolute certainty on these two questions is impossible on the limited evidence that we have, and no new relevant evidence is likely to emerge. In short, all that can be said has been said already, and said often. This shift of interest to the third question will also be reflected in the present commentary.
To whom was this letter sent? There are basically only two possibilities. The letter could have been sent to the ethnic Galatians, three Celtic tribes akin to the Gauls, who had invaded and subsequently occupied central Asia Minor in the third century before Christ, as the ‘North Galatian’ theory of its destination asserts. The other possibility is that the letter in fact was written to the racially mixed inhabitants of the Roman province of Galatia, and that the name ‘Galatians’ was simply used as a handy common term to cover them all, as the ‘South Galatian’ theory asserts. For, if this was so, then the letter was almost certainly sent to the Christian churches of the non-Celtic south, of whose evangelization we read in Acts 14.
Much here depends first on the linguistic usage of Paul when describing or identifying an area, secondly on the composition of the Roman province of Galatia at various times, and thirdly on the probable extent of Paul’s evangelistic journeys in that part of Asia Minor, to judge from the New Testament evidence. Can we then, on the basis of these, maintain the so-called ‘North Galatian’ position?
Despite much discussion on the subject (for which see larger commentaries), it now seems fairly well established that Paul in his letters (though not necessarily Luke in Acts) usually employed the title of the Roman province to describe an area and its inhabitants, rather than using ethnic or linguistic titles which might be more exact. This, if accepted, would support the view that, for Paul, ‘Galatians’ simply means ‘inhabitants of the Roman province of Galatia’. It is therefore important to consider the composition of the province at various times.
The province of Galatia took its origin from the Celtic kingdom of King Amyntas, who willed it to Rome, but which, at its height, covered a much larger area between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, always including but not limited to the central area inhabited by the three Celtic tribes. In the time of Paul, after several modifications of frontiers, the province still included large sections of Lycaonia, Pisidia and Phrygia, and was certainly not restricted to the old Celtic heartland. Even there, the Celts seem to have settled as overlords of an original Phrygian population so that the inhabitants were not monochromely Celtic. Although centuries later some certainly still spoke a Celtic language akin to Gaulish (according to Jerome), yet the city dwellers of the area at least were so Hellenized that they were usually known as ‘Gallograeci’, or ‘Hellenized Gauls’.
At first sight, this question of the racial origins of the recipients of the letter might not seem important, but, in past generations, some commentators (even the great Lightfoot) leaned heavily on supposed ‘Celtic’ characteristics of the recipients to explain the problems which led to the writing of Paul’s letter, and thus to establish its destination. This however is sentimental rather than scientific exegesis. The Corinthian Christians, as it has been well remarked, show many of the same characteristics as these ‘Galatians’, whoever they were, and no scholar has ever tried to prove that the Corinthians were Celts. In short, we are dealing here not with racial characteristics, but simply with the characteristics of ‘natural man’ and ‘natural woman’: that is what gives to the letter its universal application and contemporary value. We cannot therefore solve the problem of the destination of the letter in this way, by isolating the racial characteristics, real or imaginary, of its recipients.
Does the history of Paul’s evangelistic travels in the general area assist us to pinpoint the identity of the churches in question? So far from admitting the point that, if the letter is written to the inhabitants of the Roman province of Galatia in general, it could cover the northern Celts as well as other inhabitants in the south, many commentators have tried to settle the question summarily by claiming that Paul did not and could not have evangelized the northern area at all. In this case, of course, any other argument for a North Galatian destination would fall to the ground completely, for Paul seems clearly to be writing to his own converts. In all fairness, the letter itself gives us no direct clue as to the geographic area of Paul’s evangelism. The only two possible references in Acts to evangelism in the north are vague, although Acts 16:6 and 18:23 could perhaps be stretched to cover evangelism and pastoral care by Paul in this area. However, in either instance it would have involved a break with what seems to have been Paul’s general strategy of initial evangelism of the main cities of a district, and would also have involved considerable deviation from the most direct routes across Asia Minor, which he usually followed. Recent research on the system of Roman roads in Asia Minor has confirmed that communication (and therefore travel) in this northern area was much more difficult than in the south.
Other than these two passages, there is no reference in Acts either to any evangelism in the northern area or even to the subsequent existence of churches there. This does not of course make the existence of such churches impossible: the ‘silences of Acts’ on other matters are well known and recognized. But when this silence is taken along with the fact that no North Galatian churches are mentioned elsewhere in the New Testament, and that even the ‘delegates’ from Galatia, Gaius and Timothy, who accompanied Paul on his financial mission to Jerusalem, seem to have come from the south of the Roman province (Acts 20:4), it becomes almost conclusive.
True, Lightfoot made great efforts to establish from inscriptional evidence the existence of an early Celtic church, complete with its early martyrs, in Ancyra (modern Ankara), one of the original three Celtic cities, but he has not usually convinced other scholars. Even if there had been such a church, in a large centre like Ancyra, it would have been so Hellenized in thinking and outlook that it would hardly have differed from any other Hellenized city church of the eastern Mediterranean. Celtic gods would long ago have taken Greek names, as older Lycaonian gods had done further south (Acts 14:12), and the resultant pagan syncretism would have been the same whether in the north or the south of the area. An original Celtic background would therefore have had little bearing on the main question of the destination of the letter, as determined by the supposed racial characteristics of its recipients, which is Lightfoot’s argument: still more basically, if no such churches existed at the time, no letter would be directed to the area.
It is unconvincing to argue that Jewish influence, clearly a major factor among the ‘Galatians’, would have been as likely in the north as in the south. While perhaps not so numerous, there were certainly Jewish colonists in the larger northern cities, as shown by the tombstones discovered there, though, because of the difficulty of communication, these colonies were not so closely linked with Jerusalem and the mainstream of Jewish life as those further south were. That in itself, combined with the difficulties both of terrain and communication, would make pursuit of Paul by his opponents, the Judaizers, very unlikely in this northern area. If this is so, then the problem that gave rise to the letter could not have arisen there.
Lastly, it is sometimes argued that the supposed reference to the initial evangelism of the ‘Galatians’ as being due to Paul’s illness (4:13 – an uncertain interpretation) proves that the evangelism must have taken place in the ‘healthier’ area of the bleak northern plateau rather than in the southern area, with its supposedly ‘malarial’ climate. This is again in the area of speculation, not scholarship: would a sick man (if this is the correct interpretation of the passage) have deliberately tackled the rigours of the far harsher northern climate?
It is of course quite possible that Paul did evangelize the northern area, but, if so, we certainly cannot prove it from the evidence of Scripture, whether of Acts or the Pauline letters. The earliest patristic commentaries believed that this evangelism had taken place, but this is no proof. By their day, the older Roman province had shrunk once again to the original Celtic area in the north, with a few minor additions, so naturally they understood the name ‘Galatians’ in terms of the linguistic usage of their own day and took it to mean ‘ethnic Galatians’, living in the north, to whom they assumed that the letter had been sent.
To argue, with some advocates of the North Galatian theory, that to use the term ‘Galatians’ to describe Phrygians or Lycaonians would have been regarded by them as insulting is unfounded. The ‘Galatian’ was never a comic figure to the ancient world in the way that, say, the ‘Phrygian’ was, nor did the name in itself mean, as sometimes claimed, ‘country bumpkin’. Besides, what other single collective term could Paul have used to cover the different groups, and what more appropriate term than one taken directly from the name of the province? It does not therefore seem that the term ‘Galatians’ can be limited to the Celtic inhabitants of the north, while it may possibly include them, if indeed there were churches among them at the time.
Let us now turn to the South Galatian theory, which seems both simple and neat, and certainly fits such evidence as we have. Again, this does not necessarily prove it to be correct, but it certainly gives it probability. This theory assumes that the ‘Galatians’ addressed in the letter are those groups in the south of the Roman province who had been evangelized by Paul and Barnabas on their first missionary journey (Acts 13 and 14), and revisited by Paul and Silas on their second missionary journey (Acts 15:36 – 16:6). The ‘Galatians’ would then be the converts of Derbe, Lystra, Iconium, ‘Pisidian’ Antioch, and doubtless other small places whose names are unrecorded. We know the fact of their evangelization from the New Testament; we know of Jewish opposition (Acts 13:50; 14:19); and many other small details in the Galatian letter could be very well explained against this known background.
The triple mention of Barnabas in the letter (2:1, 9, 13) might confirm a southern destination, since Barnabas would have been well known to the southern Galatians (Acts 14:12), but quite unknown to the northern Galatians. If Paul did indeed evangelize North Galatia at the later date suggested, then Barnabas had long ceased to be his travel companion (Acts 15:39), in favour of Silas and Timothy (Acts 15:40; 16:3): why then mention him here? Admittedly, Paul also mentions Titus in the letter (2:1), one certainly unknown to the South Galatians: but there is a special reason in the context for this mention. In addition, it is only fair to say that Barnabas is also mentioned in 1 Corinthians 9:6, although there is no biblical evidence to show that he had ever visited Corinth.
Other supporting points in favour of a South Galatian destination could be made, although they are certainly not decisive, but merely makeweights. For instance, the reference to the reception of Paul by the Galatians as ‘an angel of God’ (4:14) might possibly be a reference to the way in which he had been hailed at Lystra as Hermes, messenger of the gods (Acts 14:12). However, it has been pointed out that this ‘angelic’ identification was not sustained by the Lycaonians for very long (Acts 14:19), so that perhaps we should not build too much upon it.
Of course, opponents of the South Galatian theory will simply say that this argument from Acts is an example of ‘drunkard’s search’. If a drunkard has lost a coin on a dark street with only one light, he will search for it beneath the light, not because the coin is more likely to be there rather than elsewhere, but simply because it is the only place where he can see to search for it. In fairness, we must acknowledge the validity of this attack, but say in reply that, if the letter is not written to this particular known group of Christians in the south, then we can know nothing of its possible recipients, for we are completely ignorant of conditions in North Galatia and its assumed churches.
It will be noticed that, in these arguments, both sides build heavily on the historicity of the travel account in Acts, even allowing for selectivity in the narrative, and the possible omission of much mat-erial considered by Luke as irrelevant to his main purpose. While a number of modern commentators on Acts (unlike Haenchen) have returned to a high view of its historical reliability (see Marshall), and while this is certainly the position of the present author, it is not strictly necessary to the argument here, except that, if we reject the evidence of Acts, we have no evidence whatsoever on either side as to the foundation of these churches. All would become pure speculation, and, while this may be legitimate, it is certainly not profitable, for one cannot base a logical argument upon pure speculation. The question of the historicity of the account in Acts becomes more directly relevant when considering the relative chronology of Paul’s various visits to Jerusalem, as recorded in Acts and Galatians respectively.
If then we return to the original question, ‘Who were the Galatians?’, we can only say that they were inhabitants of part or parts of the Roman province of Galatia, possibly including the Hellenized Gauls of the north, and certainly including the Hellenized Lycaonians and others of the south. It seems impossible that Paul would have written a letter directed to ‘the Galatians’ in general which excluded this latter group, particularly in view of his very close and early relations with them (Acts 13 and 14).
To put the matter in another way, it would be strange if we had a Pauline letter addressed to a group of otherwise unknown Christians in the north of the province, where Paul could have spent little time and about whom the book of Acts is strangely silent, but no letter to a familiar group in the south, of which we know much. Again, this is not a compelling argument, but it certainly increases the probability. All the rest of the ‘Pauline’ letters are written to churches whose early relationships with Paul are clearly spelled out in Acts: witness Thessalonians, Corinthians, Philippians and the ‘Asian’ letters. Romans is not an exception, for even Rome finds mention in Acts as an intended place of visit, if not of initial evangelism by Paul (Acts 28:16). It would be indeed strange if the Galatians were the only exception to this general rule.
The simple answer to this question is that the letter was written because of some serious problems that had arisen in Galatia. Paul never wrote letters without good reason, or, if he did, none such have survived. Normally, his letters were written either in reply to questions received from a church (1 Cor. 7:1), or to disquieting news that he has heard about a church (1 Cor. 1:11), or both. Even a letter like Romans, which at first sight seems to be of a more ‘casual’ nature, on closer examination proves to be not only an exposition of the gospel, but also a treatment of certain welldefined problems, of the existence of which at Rome Paul either knew or guessed (e.g. Rom. 14:1–9).
Therefore, we are really asking: what was the problem in Galatia? That it was a serious problem, we can tell from the abruptness with which Paul introduced the matter, without his usual opening section of tactful commendation of the local church (Gal. 1:6; contrast 1 Cor. 1:1–9). The problem seems to have been some new line of teaching, probably introduced soon after Paul’s departure (1:6), by an unnamed person (1:9) or persons (1:7).
Whatever its proponents believed or claimed, Paul utterly denies to this new teaching the title of a gospel (1:6): to him, it is only a distortion of Christ’s true gospel (1:7). It certainly involved the acceptance of circumcision as a necessity for salvation (5:2). Whatever its proponents may have initially said, this acceptance of circumcision involved in Paul’s eyes the obligation to keep the whole of the law of Moses (5:3). It is indeed very likely that the new missionaries themselves actually preached this total obligation, but there is no direct evidence in Galatians as to this, apart from a reference (4:10) to the new observance of ‘days, and months, and seasons, and years’ by the Galatian converts. These words, virtually a quotation from Genesis 1:14, are probably best taken as referring to Jewish festivals, but see the Commentary at 4:10 for alternate possible explanations of a more general nature.
Worse still, to Paul at least, this obligation to keep the whole law implied that salvation was to be attained by obedience to the law, not, as he had initially preached to them, by simple faith in Christ (3:2). That was what made it ‘no gospel’, an utter apostasy from Christ (5:4). To Paul, this move was therefore an abandonment of Christian liberty in exchange for the old slavery under the law from which they had just escaped (5:1), and a rejection of the gift of the ‘Spirit of freedom’ which to him was the fulfilment of the great promise made by God to Abraham (3:14).
It was therefore to Paul just as complete an apostasy as that faced by the writer of Hebrews (Heb. 6:4–6), and, as such, its proponents came under a similar solemn curse (1:8 and Heb. 6:8). Admittedly, in the letter to the Hebrews it was a case of open abandonment by the converts of their new-found Christianity in favour of their old Judaism: but Paul seems to have seen the Galatian declension as being just as serious, since it made obedience to the law just as essential to salvation as trust in the crucified Messiah.
To Paul, it was unbelievable that such foolishness could have occurred so quickly (1:6): he cannot understand it. It was as though advanced scholars were deliberately returning to the kindergarten ABC, to the elementary lessons which no doubt once had their rightful place, but had long ago been superseded in God’s plan (‘weak and beggarly elemental spirits’, 4:9). Whatever may be said about his later letters (see O’Brien on Col. 2:8), Paul does not seem to be referring here to ‘elemental powers’, much less to forces of evil, as the cause of their trouble or the object of their worship. It is the immaturity and futility of these observances to which Paul draws attention in this context. Indeed, he wonders if all his toil in evangelism of the Galatians had been for nothing after all (4:11).
Paul is so indignant and the matter is so urgent that we cannot expect a detailed account in the letter itself of the teaching brought by these new and unidentified missionaries. After all, both he and the Galatians knew well what the teaching was: why should he expand it? It is, however, fairly clear even from the limited evidence within the letter that the teachers were not simply Jewish missionaries, whether orthodox or sectarian, seeking to win Gentile Christian converts to the faith of Judaism, although, if some of the Galatian converts to Christianity had previously been Jewish proselytes, as in Acts 13:43, such an attempt at re-conversion would have been understandable. It is also most unlikely, as some have speculated, that they were simply local Gentiles who were attracted to Jewish forms of Christianity, or even that they were Jewish sectarians, tinged with Gnosticism, philosophic speculation and magical practices. Ephesians and Colossians know such groups, but not Galatians. Rather, they were Jewish Christians who were insisting on circumcision, and probably also full observance of the law of Moses, on the part of Gentile Christians, as essential for salvation.
That was the point at issue: Jewish Christians might still continue to circumcise their children, and presumably might also teach them to keep the law, without compromising the gospel. According to Acts 21:21, although Paul was accused of opposing these general practices among Jewish Christians, he in fact did not. Indeed, when in a Jewish environment, he observed the precepts of the law himself (1 Cor. 9:20 and Acts 21:26), and of course he himself had been circumcised, and he had indeed circumcised Timothy (Acts 16:3).
If all this is so, the teachers must have been the group often called by the handy, if coined, modern name of ‘Judaizers’. Paul himself uses only the verb, not the noun (2:14), and he uses it in the slightly different sense of ‘behave like a Jew’. Paul cannot be referring in Galatians to Jewish teachers attempting to proselytize Gentile Christian converts to Judaism, for that would have involved the complete rejection of Christ and his cross: and this the new teachers did not apparently do. Instead, according to Paul, they robbed the cross of all its importance (2:21), and removed its shame as a ‘stumbling block’ (5:11). Paul accuses them bluntly of doing this simply to avoid Jewish persecution (6:12). They may have been Jewish Christians desperately trying to accommodate Christianity to Judaism, as doubtless many did in early days, when, before the final breach with temple and synagogue (beginning with Acts 8:1), Christianity was still regarded by many Jews as a Jewish sect (Acts 28:22). No doubt this pressure for accommodation of Christianity to Judaism increased as the cataclysm of AD 70 grew steadily nearer, and national feelings mounted higher. But by religion these teachers were Christians, not Jews: that was what aroused Paul’s anger.
Can we find any other hints in Galatians that help us to pinpoint the identity of the teachers? From the indignant outburst of the first two chapters, it is obvious that these teachers also belittled Paul’s authority as an apostle: indeed, they probably denied him the title. Instead, they magnified the position of the Jerusalem apostles, particularly of the ‘three pillars’, Peter and James and John (2:9). That may give us a hint as to their origin and nature, and indirectly therefore as to their teaching. To them, the authority of their gospel depended on the authority of its apostolic proponents, and they seemed to have claimed Jerusalem and the ‘Jerusalem apostles’ as the source of their ‘gospel’, as distinct from that of Paul.
This of course will be denied both by Paul and the Jerusalem apostles themselves, for both of whom there was only one gospel, although it had admittedly two different ‘target areas’ (2:6–9), but that is not the point at the moment. It seems to be mistaken exegesis to assume that ‘the gospel to the circumcised’ (2:7) means a gospel which also preaches circumcision: it means ‘evangelism of Jews’ and no more: ‘the mission to the circumcised’ (2:8), in spite of Betz.
There is one other passage in Galatians that may help us: it is the passage dealing with the confrontation between Paul and Peter at Antioch (2:11 onwards). At first, Peter and the other Jewish Christians there had eaten freely with the Gentile Christians at Antioch, whether the reference is to ordinary meals or to the Lord’s Supper, or more probably to both. This would involve ignoring, for the time at least, the Jewish ceremonial food laws, for these were certainly not being observed by the Gentile Christians. However, when ‘certain men came from James’, Peter, along with the other Jewish Christians, stopped eating with the Gentile Christians, for fear of ‘the circumcision party’ (or possibly just ‘the circumcised’), something which aroused both Paul’s anger and his rebuke (2:14). Indeed, it is in this context that Paul uses the verb ‘to Judaize’ in the slightly different sense of ‘to live like Jews’ (2:14) with reference to Peter’s present behaviour, in opposition to his previous propensity to ‘live like a Gentile’.
It is important to note that, irritated as Paul may have been by the pre-eminence accorded by his adversaries to the three ‘Jerusalem pillars’, he, unlike some modern scholars, does not accuse either James or Peter or John of holding such ‘Judaizing’ views, still less of propagating them. Indeed, it is Peter’s ‘hypocrisy’ (or ‘play acting’), by behaving in a way which is contrary to his real beliefs, which annoys Paul particularly (2:13). How could Peter ever have believed this, after his experience with Cornelius, recorded in Acts 10? After all, this very matter of eating with non-Jews, and therefore presumably of eating ceremonially unclean food, had been the point at issue on that occasion too (Acts 11:3).
We may therefore assume that this ‘circumcision party’, in addition to insisting on circumcision and the observance of Jewish festivals, also pressed strongly the Mosaic food laws, whatever else they did about the rest of the Torah. After all, Sabbath, circumcision, and food laws were the three most obvious distinguishing features among the Jews of the Dispersion, and in that sense at least were the heart of the Torah.
The only other evidence in Galatians itself as to their teaching concerns again this basic demand for the circumcision of Gentile converts, of which we have already spoken, and which Paul had successfully opposed in the case of Titus (2:3). It seems wrong-headed exegesis to claim that Titus was indeed circumcised, but that he accepted it voluntarily rather than compulsorily: see the Commentary for details here. Titus, in fact, obviously represented everything that these new teachers opposed: he was an uncircumcised Gentile Christian, non-observant of the Jewish ritual law, yet fully accepted at Jerusalem as a brother.
All the evidence of Acts agrees with what we have gathered from Galatians so far. In Acts, Cornelius the centurion had been an uncircumcised Gentile like Titus, and yet the Spirit had come on him (Acts 10:44). He had been baptized (Acts 10:48), and Peter had thereafter eaten with him (Acts 11:3). This fact was bitterly resented by ‘the circumcision party’ at Jerusalem (Acts 11:2), a group clearly not simply equivalent to ‘the Jewish Christians’ in total, and equally clearly distinguished in the context from ‘the apostles and the brethren’ (Acts 11:1).
Who were the circumcision party, then? Almost certainly, they were the same as the ‘believers who belonged to the party of the Pharisees’ (Acts 15:5), who had laid down at the very outset of the Council of Jerusalem the demand that Gentile believers must be circumcised and taught to keep the law of Moses (Acts 15:5). If this is so, it is very reasonable to suppose that it was some of the same group who ‘came down from Judea’ to Antioch, and were equally bluntly teaching there that, without circumcision in accordance with the Torah of Moses, salvation in Christ was impossible (Acts 15:1). It is not surprising that teaching like this, in a mixed yet largely Gentile Christian church (Acts 11:20–21), caused a furore.
But if they were teaching like this in Antioch, it is also reasonable to suppose that it was some of the same group, or at least those with similar views, who were the source of the troubles in Galatia (1:7), for the teaching seems to have been the same. Certainly, in Paul’s later days, teachers spreading similar views seem to have travelled very widely in the wake of Paul (Phil. 3:2), and there is no reason why they should not have done so at an earlier stage also.
But if all this is true (and it is simple, consistent and likely), then, with apologies to Ropes and the title of his book, there is no ‘singular problem of Galatians’ to consider. The source of the teaching attacked by Paul is obvious, and its nature equally so. There is no need to postulate in Galatia (whatever the evidence of other places at a later period) Jewish-gnostic sects with their syncretistic teaching, or to suppose that the source of the Galatian problem was not Jewish Christians but Gentile Christians, possibly even some of the very Galatians themselves, in misdirected zeal for Jewish orthodoxy, as Ropes argues. Still less need we argue, with him, that there was also a ‘radical’ group of Gentile Christians in Galatia, who wished to reject the Old Testament roots of the gospel, and that Paul therefore had to fight on two fronts at once: in Galatians he fights on one front only.
If we start from the evidence of the letter itself, clearly it was written some time after the evangelization of the area by Paul. The duration of this gap is not certain, in spite of Paul’s expressed surprise that the Galatians had turned ‘so quickly’ to another gospel (1:6). This phrase might cover a period of months or a period of years, for Paul, in his indignation, may be speaking figuratively, not literally.
Nevertheless, a shorter rather than a longer period is more likely, as being the simplest interpretation. If, as most scholars assume, to proteron in 4:13 should be translated ‘on the former occasion’, and not simply ‘at first’ (see RSV), then at least two visits by Paul to the region must be assumed, although BAGD denies that any distinction is being drawn here between an earlier and a later visit. In any case, although in this letter Paul tells us much of his early life and of his relations with the Jerusalem apostles, whether at Jerusalem or at Antioch, he tells us absolutely nothing of the history of his visits to ‘Galatia’, wherever it was. Presumably this was because the chronology of their own evangelism was already well known to the Galatians themselves, whereas Paul’s exact relations with the Jerusalem apostles were hitherto unknown to them, and therefore needed to be explained, to avoid possible misunderstandings, and to strengthen Paul’s position.
For external information on Paul’s Galatian visits we must therefore turn to the book of Acts which, as we have seen, describes in detail the evangelism of South Galatia only, saying nothing of the north. This southern evangelism was done on the outward ‘leg’ of the first missionary journey by Barnabas and Paul (Acts 13 and 14), who then retraced their steps through the same area on the way home (Acts 14:21–23). This conceivably could be interpreted as the two Galatian visits, although admittedly, if so, they were undertaken very close to each other. The next possible date for a visit to the area would be after the Council of Jerusalem (Acts 15:41), which seems too late, and would pose other problems.
If these are accepted as the two visits mentioned in the letter, and if the situation addressed by Paul arose very soon after this initial evangelism, the letter to the Galatians could be very early. Indeed, it could just conceivably be the earliest of Paul’s letters. Incidentally, an early date, whether well before or during the early stages of the Council, would account for the otherwise puzzling fact that Paul nowhere appeals, in the letter to the Galatians, to the decrees of the Council, which, if quoted, would surely have ended the whole argument at once. However, if this visit on the way home is judged to be too close to the first visit to be counted as a separate occasion, we must see the required second visit as coming at the beginning of the second missionary journey when Paul, with Silas, traversed the area again (Acts 15:40). In that case, the omission of any reference to the decrees of the Council would be even more remarkable, since Acts 16:4 records the missionaries as publishing the decrees of Jerusalem among the churches on this visit. Of course, Paul may have had special reasons for not wanting to refer to this ‘conciliar’ weapon in writing to Galatia itself at the time.
If on the other hand we insist on a purely North Galatian destination for the letter, then both possible visits to the area recorded in Acts (16:6 and 18:23) would have been even later than this last postulated visit to the south, and well after the Council of Jerusalem. In that case, the letter must have been written considerably later, perhaps from Ephesus during Paul’s long Ephesian ministry (Acts 19:10), when the absence of any reference to the Jerusalem decree is a real problem. Of course, even if the destination was South Galatia, this place and late date of composition would be possible, provided that the interval between the initial evangelism and the fall of the Galatians into heresy was not thereby made too long to fit the wording ‘so quickly’ (1:6), for it is obvious that Paul must have written his letter as soon as he heard the bad news. There is therefore no necessary connection between destination and date: however, a northern destination makes an early date impossible, while a southern destination allows it, without compelling it.
Are there any other external criteria by which to date the letter? To travel further along this road, we must enter on highly debatable country. For instance, the letter to the Galatians clearly stands in some relation to the letter to the Romans, even if it is not a mere ‘rough draft’ of it, as some commentators have claimed: there are too many important differences to allow that. Nevertheless, all scholars would agree that the Galatian letter is earlier than Romans: and Romans can be dated to between 55 and 58 AD. How much earlier then is Galatians? Further, there is the obvious relationship of Galatians to the Corinthian letters, especially perhaps to 2 Corinthians, in particular to 2 Corinthians 10 to 13, although it is not necessary to the argument to claim that these chapters constitute a separate letter, as many, including Bruce, have done.
While Romans may have deep theological links with Galatians, the Corinthian letters (and especially these particular chapters of 2 Corinthians) have equally deep emotional links, perhaps because both deal with Paul’s personal relationships, whether with his converts or with Jerusalem. From this internal evidence, some scholars have tried to argue an order of Corinthians, Galatians, Romans, or even to ‘sandwich’ Galatians at a slightly earlier date between various parts of the Corinthian correspondence. This last is probably to put too much weight on the evidence, which after all is largely based on subjective judgments.
Indeed, equally tenable on these grounds would be an order of Galatians, Corinthians, Romans. A good case could be made for the view that, in the Corinthian letters, Paul is carefully qualifying some of the general statements that he has already made in Galatians (contrast, for instance, 3:28 with 1 Cor. 11:1–16), presumably because indiscriminate application of the new principle in local conditions had led to abuse in the Corinthian church. However, this is again somewhat subjective. In each of the letters, Paul is dealing directly with the problems of the particular church involved, and it may simply be that, in one church, Paul was basically addressing theological problems, and, in the other church, practical moral issues. That he will ultimately deal with both sets of issues theologically is characteristic of Paul.
While therefore it seems clear that Galatians is earlier than Romans, it is by no means as clear (while still possible) that Galatians is earlier than 1 and 2 Corinthians, although it certainly hangs closely with them.
One other suggestion based on stylistic and theological grounds is that Galatians is datable (history permitting) as being after the Thessalonian letters, because of their general simplicity and their central interest in eschatology. While the main lines of Paul’s theological thought were undoubtedly set by the initial revelation of Christ on the Damascus Road, to which he appeals on several occasions, and his subsequent period of reflection in ‘Arabia’ (1:17), there is no need to deny the possibility of progression in the deeper understanding and fuller expression of that faith as Paul’s life and Christian experience continued. If, for instance, we accept Ephesians and Colossians as Pauline in the full sense, such development seems incontrovertible: indeed, it seems obvious even in a ‘prison’ letter like Philippians.
If this is allowed, it would certainly be hard to date Thessalonians after Galatians. But the letters to the Thessalonians could obviously not have been written till some time after the evangelization of Thessalonica on the second missionary journey (Acts 17:1–10), so that already we are approaching the period of the Corinthian ministry and therefore the date of the Corinthian correspondence.
However, as Bruce wisely points out, the total span of years involved is not great, since most of Paul’s earlier letters seem to have been written within a decade. Even if we include the ‘captivity letters’, that adds only a few years more, which does not allow much time for major theological development within the period of the letter-writing. If, as Bruce guesses, Paul was converted in his thirties, and wrote the letters in his fifties, he has already had plenty of time to mature his thought, while his theological interests, as shown in the different letters, may well have varied, possibly according to the local needs.
The third and last way to approach the problem of dating is to compare the account of Paul’s visits as given in Acts with that given in Galatians itself, although this is notoriously difficult. Naturally, in his letter, Paul is describing past events. If we can identify the last event recorded in Galatians, then at least we shall have a date after which the letter must have been written, although we do not know how long afterwards. Contrariwise, if there is some significant and datable external event which is not mentioned in the letter, it is probable that the letter was written before that date, unless, of course, Paul omitted reference to the event, either accidentally or deliberately for some particular purpose of his own.
Such an event is the Council of Jerusalem of Acts 15, to be dated fairly certainly as about 49 AD. Paul in Galatians certainly does not refer explicitly to the Council, but some editors see oblique references in the opening chapters, either to the council itself, or to the cluster of hurried and semi-official meetings that doubtless preceded and accompanied it (Acts 15:4): for this possibility, see the Commentary. This again would be a pointer to the date.
All that we can say for certain is that (with deference to Bruce) Galatians is not likely, to judge from internal evidence, to be Paul’s earliest letter; that it was certainly written before Romans; that it belongs to the general thought-world of the Corinthian letters, but, if anything, is slightly earlier; that it could have been written either in the immediate context of the Council of Jerusalem or just after it.
As will be seen from the Commentary, this interpretation depends on a satisfactory harmonization of the accounts of Paul’s Jerusalem visits as recorded respectively in Acts and Galatians. At face value, Acts records three such visits (Paul’s initial visit, Acts 9:26; the socalled ‘famine visit’, Acts 11:30; and the ‘council visit’, Acts 15:2), and Galatians records only two: here again see the Commentary at 1:18 and 2:1. Yet Galatians 2 certainly describes the same theological climate as that recorded in Acts 15:1, which seems to have arisen only shortly before the Council of Jerusalem took place. This would involve equating the ‘second visit’ of Galatians 2:1 with the ‘third visit’ of Acts 15:2. These are not of course insuperable problems, but they do make absolute certainty difficult, in view of the insufficient evidence contained within the pages of the New Testament. For a detailed discussion of this complicated problem, see Marshall, pp. 243–248. It may perhaps be best to assume that Paul in Galatians omitted reference to the so-called ‘famine visit’ of Acts 11:30 as irrelevant to the question, and not concerned with theological issues at all. Otherwise, we should have to assume that Galatians 2:1 refers to the ‘famine visit’, and this would pose even more problems than it solved.
This is in many ways an even more interesting question, because it introduces at once the question of the relevance of the letter for Christians today. Various illuminating suggestions have been made by modern editors, not least by Betz, in addition to the obvious answers directly drawn from the text, already familiar from the older editors.
Of course, as Paul frequently says, the cross is always ‘a stumbling block’ and ‘folly’ to ‘natural’ men and women (1 Cor. 1:23). ‘Judaizing’ in the Galatian sense may not remove the cross altogether, but it does save from persecution because of the cross (6:12), and no doubt the desire to escape persecution was one Galatian motive for accepting circumcision, as Paul bluntly says. After all, most of the early persecution of the Christians in South Galatia was instigated, according to Acts, by those of Jewish faith, not by pagan religions or government officials (Acts 13:50; 14:19). It is very likely that pressure from this quarter continued, or even intensified, after Paul’s departure from the scene, although, as Cousar points out, such persecution was rarely directed to Gentile Christian converts, but rather to those converts won from Judaism.
Perhaps another reason for the rapid fall was the subtle attraction of trying to do something to earn their own salvation, impossible task though that might be. Human pride finds it very hard to accept free grace. Perhaps too there was something of intellectual pride in being now able to dismiss the simple Pauline gospel (1 Cor. 1:21) as a crude ‘first stage’ only: here was something to add to it, to ennoble it, to ‘respectabilize’ it in the eyes of the world. Perhaps there was also something of the lure of the outward and impressive as opposed to the inward and spiritual. Judaism was a very ‘visible’ religion in many ways in the ancient world, and even to keep Jewish festivals and food laws would give Gentile Christians a ‘stake’ in an impressive external system, as impressive outwardly as anything in their former paganism (compare the temptation faced in Hebrews).
All this to Paul was merely ‘to glory in your flesh’ (6:13), which must have been as attractive an option then as now. Triumphalism is never dead, even within the Christian church, though Paul tries to restrict all such triumphalism to the cross of Christ (6:14) by a typical and deliberate paradox.
But all of these possible reasons, valid though they may be, have been long recognized as factors, still operative today. What are the newer insights that modern editors have given us? It is only fair to say that, as with all ‘modern insights’, we may simply be reading back our own contemporary interests and current problems into the letter to the Galatians: that is always a danger. But, if Christian life and experience are eternally the same, and if fallen human nature has not changed over the centuries, it is highly likely that what are basic problems and tendencies today were also problems then, even if the outward expression of these tendencies was not the same. By using these methods, we may be able to see an immediate possible application of Galatians to the church of our own day, apart altogether from its great central doctrines, with their eternal relevance.
For instance, it may be that the Galatian problem sprang from misunderstanding of, or over-emphasis on, one aspect of biblical truth. To judge from the letter, the Galatian churches appear to have been what we would nowadays call somewhat ‘charismatic’, in the same way, although not perhaps to the same degree as, for example, the Corinthian church was. True, this aspect is not as prominent in Galatians as in the Corinthian letters, since it had not become an issue as it had at Corinth. We can tell the charismatic nature of the Galatian churches not only from the way in which Paul confidently appeals to their initial experience of the reception of the Spirit by faith (3:2), but also from the way in which he appeals to the performance of dynameis, ‘miracles’ (3:5), among the Galatians by the same Spirit as evidence of his continuing presence. This is indeed made doubly clear by the present tense of the two verbs, ‘supplies’ and ‘works’ (3:5).
Now, while it is perfectly true theologically that dynameis, ‘acts of power’, do not have to be physical miracles, that is the usual meaning in the New Testament, and it may well have been this that the Galatian church had come to expect. As the birth of the church at Lystra had been associated with one such act of power (Acts 14:10), this mention here is not surprising. This does not say that ‘miracles’ in this physical form should necessarily and universally mark every Christian church at all times: there are differing views on this matter held by equally godly Christian brothers and sisters. But it does seem from Scripture that this was the initial experience of the Galatian church in early days, as can be seen from the way in which the subject is mentioned so casually, indeed, almost incidentally here.
Have we perhaps therefore, as Betz suggests, an example of ‘discouraged charismatics’ in Galatia? One cannot live for ever on a continual diet of spiritual excitement and thrill, legitimate part of the Christian life though they may be. Indeed, as Cousar wisely observes, these things do not in themselves necessarily prove that God’s Spirit is at work. Steady persistence in the faith in difficult circumstances is the true test of spiritual life. Paul had warned at least the elders of the South Galatian churches in very sober words that they must ‘continue in the faith’, and that they must enter the kingdom of God ‘through many tribulations’ (Acts 14:22): had they perhaps not sufficiently heeded his words? The church of Galatia had been born in persecution (Acts 14:5, 19), a fact to which the letter also may refer (3:4). That this was continuing persecution may be shown by 4:29, and such persecution could only have increased their general discouragement.
It has been a common occurrence in church history for a church or group of this ‘pneumatic’ nature, when discouraged either by the sheer grind of continuance in everyday tasks, especially if accompanied by persecution, or by the lack of systematic Bible teaching, or possibly by the discontinuance of the experience of miracles as a regular part of their ongoing church life, to turn to outward and sometimes heavily structured forms of church life for spiritual reassurance: is that what was happening now in Galatia? It may have seemed to them that there was a security and religious continuity in the thousand years and more of Israel’s spiritual history, with its wellknown and tested religious precepts and practices.
In subsequent church history, disillusioned ‘enthusiastics’, as the sixteenth century would have called them, have often either abandoned the Christian faith entirely, or joined a church with a clearly set structure of creed and ritual, as indeed the Galatians were tempted to do in this case. This is in no sense to compare any branch of the Christian church to Judaism: it is simply to give an example of a similar psychological tendency, in similar circumstances. In either case the disappointed ‘enthusiastic’ is seeking external reassurance for faith, no longer in the exciting and the miraculous but instead in the organizational.
However, if, on this reasoning, one reason for the problem in Galatia may have been the misunderstanding by the Galatian converts of the doctrine of the Spirit, and of the place of the spectacular in the Christian life, perhaps a second cause was the misunderstanding of the closely associated doctrine of Christian freedom. Bruce, in the title of one of his books, has aptly called Paul ‘the Apostle of the Free Spirit’, and this he certainly was. The whole contrast in the letter to the Galatians is between freedom and imprisonment, whether it is the old imprisonment under the law before conversion to Christ, or the new imprisonment into which the Galatians were unconsciously slipping back. This, to Paul, is also the contrast between ‘the Spirit’ and ‘the flesh’, the spiritual world and the natural world (3:3). But he is equally concerned to assert that the liberty of the Spirit is not licence (5:13): that would equally be of ‘the flesh’, and therefore an equal bondage.
Perhaps the Galatians had not yet realized the truths of Romans 7, that even after conversion and filling by the Spirit, even after the possible occurrence of dynameis, ‘miracles’, or ‘acts of power’, every Christian man or woman is still at one and the same time both justified and yet a sinner, to quote a great Reformation doctrine. Did they think, as many have thought since, that they could never sin again after reception of the Spirit? Had they therefore failed to realize that liberty in the Spirit could only too easily become licence? So several modern commentators have suggested.
If so, one can easily imagine both their disillusionment and their frustration when they found that sin still remained as a force with which to reckon, both in their own lives and in the lives of other Christians around them. Liberty, so easily become licence, may have seemed to them to be too dangerous a concept to hold without stricter guidelines. Had Paul misled them after all, or had he oversimplified the position?
If, at this moment, they were faced with eager Jewish-Christian missionaries who offered them a detailed system of moral and ritual rules designed especially to control these manifestations of ‘the flesh’, this rigid outward discipline must have seemed very attractive to earnest souls who had come to the conclusion that the path of freedom did not work for them, as indeed the Judaizers had probably always maintained, and that their basic natures had not changed. The Corinthian correspondence gives examples of the gross moral lapses perfectly possible in the most ‘spiritual’ of young churches, especially where there are no strong past traditions of moral conduct, as there were in Judaism, but not in most forms of paganism.
Of course, Paul would demolish this spurious argument for Judaizing by pointing out that mere outward observance of formal rules was just as ‘fleshly’ as the immoral situations with which it was supposed to deal (Col. 2:16–18), but that would not lessen its appeal to the disillusioned and yet earnest. Practical antinomianism to them was not a vague possible danger, but an observed and experienced result, although it is unlikely that, as some editors hold, there was actually an organized ‘antinomian party’ in Galatia, with whom Paul also had to contend. Nevertheless, Paul would deal with this issue by his concept of ‘the law of Christ’ (6:2), the new law of love (5:14), which would make any form of selfish licence impossible, as well as by the doctrine of the indwelling Christ, whose living presence alone makes conformity to this new ‘law’ possible. Ultimately, the answer lies in Paul’s concept of Christian experience as being a sharing in Christ’s cross and resurrection (2:20). Not unconnected is the fact that, in Galatians, despite the mention of dynameis, ‘miracles’, as occurring (3:5), Paul does not dwell in this letter on the gifts of the Spirit, as he does in Corinthians. Rather, he stresses the fruit of the Spirit (5:22–24) as the truest proof of the Spirit’s presence, and as that which makes antinomianism impossible.
That raises the further question, Had Paul never dealt with these topics before? If he had, how could the Galatians have forgotten them so completely and so quickly? The latter is precisely Paul’s own despairing question (1:6); but first let us ask, If he had not dealt with them, what was the reason for it?
Had Paul perhaps not had time to develop these ‘protective’ doctrines in his hurried initial visit or visits to the South Galatians, as some have suggested? Or had he as yet had insufficient experience of ‘raw Gentile’ evangelism (as distinct from evangelism of Jews) to realize the necessity of steady and developed teaching on these points? Did he first raise these issues in the letter itself? This would not of course be theoretically impossible, and would in no way conflict with the doctrine of revelation, but it does not seem likely. There does indeed seem to be a steady development and increasing manysidedness in Paul’s theological thought over the years, whereby he never denies anything that he taught in early years, but often seems to amplify it. Those who follow this train of thought would claim with some justification that both Corinthians and Romans amplify, and, to that extent, qualify the simple all-embracing statements made within Galatians. If this is so, could not Galatians itself be amplifying the still simpler teaching given initially and verbally to the converts? Even within Galatians, the statements made by Paul to correct the error are somewhat blunt and unqualified (see Commentary for examples), compared with those of the later letters.
But all this bluntness and the rough-hewn nature of the statements does not necessarily mean that Paul had not made similar statements already in his initial preaching to the Galatians, still less that he was ignorant of the need for making them. After all, before his career as a peripatetic missionary, Paul had worked for a long time in the largely Gentile atmosphere of Antioch (Acts 11:26, with 11:20), where such moral problems must have existed. The reason for the sweeping statements may be simply that this letter was forged white-hot in the fires of controversy. Strong, bold pronouncements needed to be made anew to the Galatians, not qualified and carefully balanced theological statements, covering all possible later misunderstandings and eventualities. Further, Paul does not seem to be conscious of any new aspects in his teaching: rather, he appeals confidently to it as something already well known (1:8 and 5:21).
The pastoral situation faced in the Corinthian correspondence, or the reflective theological presentation of the letter to the Romans, were more suitable for these measured statements than the spiritual life and death struggle in Galatia. Besides (as hinted above), the whole stress in the letter to the Galatians is that the converts seem to have forgotten all the most elementary teaching given them by Paul. Their whole attitude is as much beyond Paul’s comprehension as it is puzzling to us today. They must have been ‘bewitched’, he says simply (3:1): no merely logical explanation of such total forgetfulness would suffice.
But unfortunately this is a situation only too familiar to any teacher of the Bible or indeed of anything else that runs counter to humanity’s natural wishes and inclinations. Paul’s great task in this letter is therefore to continually remind the Galatians of what he has already told them (1:9), and what they should know well already, rather than to introduce new and deeper doctrines, as in 1 Corinthians 3:1–2. That being so, it is gratuitous to assume that Paul in this letter is hastily applying theological ‘sticking plasters’, the need for which he had not foreseen previously. We cannot make easy excuses like this to explain away the total misunderstanding by the Galatians of the nature of the gospel, for, if we do, we shall even more readily make them for others or even for ourselves. The theological value of the letter to the Galatians lies in the fact that the Galatians are so similar to Christians of every age.
In the sixteenth century, a question like this would have been answered by Protestants directly and unanimously as ‘the doctrine of justification by faith’. Indeed, some of the greatest giants of the Reformation (like Luther and Calvin) virtually based this whole doctrine on Galatians and Romans. In more modern and critical times, the centrality of this doctrine to the letter has often been questioned. Justification by faith, it is sometimes said, is only one of many themes contained within Galatians, and not necessarily central to it.
Part of this reluctance is no doubt due to the ecumenical and eirenic spirit of the age, along with a reluctance to reopen old historical battles. Nevertheless, precisely because church reunion negotiations are widely taking place today, both the doctrine and Galatians itself are coming afresh under intense study, especially by Roman Catholics, Lutherans and Anglicans. Recent Lutheran-Catholic negotiations in the United States for instance have produced a very scholarly study on the doctrine, which is fully theological and does not minimize the wide differences that exist even today between the various viewpoints held on the matter.
More typical, however, is a product of the Anglican-Roman Catholic negotiations. Equally intended to deal with the doctrine of justification by faith as a possible point of difference between the churches today as it certainly was in Reformation days, it appeared under the title ‘Salvation and the Church’, maintaining that justification by faith was only one minor sector of Christian doctrine and should not be handled in isolation either from the general theme of salvation or from the overarching theme of the church. If justification by faith is denied a place as a central doctrine in theology, it is not surprising that its central place in the letter to the Galatians is questioned.
Now, to say that in Galatians Paul is dealing with the doctrine of justification by faith is probably a misnomer. Paul actually deals with the Christian experience of justification by faith and reception of the promised Spirit, and undergirds and vindicates this theologically by Scripture. Also to say that he deals with the doctrine narrowly or in isolation would be incorrect. It is true to say that there are numerous other topics also treated in the letter – salvation through Christ, union with Christ, unity in Christ, liberty in Christ, the promised gift of the Spirit, the fruits of the Spirit, the consequent practical demands of Christian living in everyday circumstances, and so on. Yet all of these stem from the new, totally transforming relationship with God in Christ which is enjoyed through faith, and Paul’s word for this is ‘justification’, which for him is no legal fiction, but a transforming spiritual experience.
There can be no doubt that the central topic of Galatians is the question as to how and why we are accepted by God initially, and how and why we continue to be acceptable to God thereafter: both of these have been challenged by the Judaizers. Modern commentators often show their own theological position by whether they translate the Greek word dikaioutai (2:16) as ‘justified’ (RSV), or ‘reckoned righteous’ (RSV mg.), or ‘put right’ (GNB), or even ‘made right’: but, important though these theological distinctions are, they pale into insignificance for Paul compared with the question as to how this new status is to be achieved and maintained.
Here Paul is clear and unequivocable. Our new standing is achieved only by faith in Christ (2:16), which is also faith in the cross as God’s chosen means of reconciliation (6:14–15). This faith in the finished work of Christ results in the promised gift of the Spirit (3:2), who is ours because we have become sons and daughters of God (4:6), and this brings in turn the new freedom of the Spirit (5:1). But, because faith in Christ also means union with Christ (2:20), this new liberty can never become licence to do as we please: the faith that justifies is a ‘faith working through love’ (5:6). This union with Christ by faith unites all humankind; differences of sex and race and status have become irrelevant in Christ (3:28), as has even the religious distinction between ‘circumcision’ and ‘uncircumcision’, Jew and Gentile (5:6). No reader of the letter can doubt that this is Paul’s message to the Galatians and, in this sense, justification by faith does indeed lie at the very heart of the letter, although the doctrine itself may not be stated in Galatians as clearly and unequivocally as in Romans 5:1, at a later period. But after all, Romans is basically a theological treatise, while Galatians is an emotional theological appeal.
If it is argued that this centrality of justification by faith is only so because the letter to the Galatians was written in controversy, the answer is that it was written in a controversy about the very nature of the gospel. So, if justification by faith is central to this letter, it is only because justification is central to the gospel itself. Always there will be the danger of leaning on our own efforts to win salvation, always there will be the temptation to lean on outward observances to secure it. Whenever this is so, Galatians will still speak to the church, and Paul’s impassioned arguments will still be as compelling as ever.
Another thing very clear on a plain reading of the letter to the Galatians is the use that Paul makes of Christian experience, as an argument. Whether it is an appeal to the experience of the Galatians before their conversion (4:8), or after their conversion (4:15), or to their experience of the Spirit both initially and continually at work in their midst (3:2–5), or to Paul’s own experience at and after his own conversion (1:13–17), or to his experience in connection with the Jerusalem apostles (1:18 – 2:14), it is basically always the same argument. How valid is this appeal?
It could be dismissed as a mere passing reference, and the consideration of plain remembered facts, if it were not so frequent and so fundamental to Paul’s argument. But is such argument from experience legitimate at all, in matters theological? Could not such experiences be illusory and deceptive, not in the sense that they never occurred, but in the sense that they are capable of other explanations? The modern reaction to ‘cheapjack’ theologies of ‘feeling’ and ‘experience’, aided by psychological explanations of that religious experience, is to distrust and totally denigrate the use of Christian experience as a theological argument. However, this extreme position clearly goes far beyond Scripture, including Paul. To say, with some, ‘You may have the doctrine, but I have the experience’, is rightly rejected as unconvincing, but, rightly understood, this contrast is false.
For instance, if ‘miracles’ (3:5) are to be adduced in themselves as a proof of the reality of Christian experience, the theologian of today might point to many other possible explanations of the events, psychological as well as physical. The student of comparative religion might point to the occurrence of such phenomena among those of other faiths besides Christianity, and even among those of no religious faith, and so on. This is a wise caution, but it is important to realize that Paul does not use bare experience in itself as an argument, still less as a proof. He uses as evidence that kind of experience which is enjoyed through believing response made by us to acts and words of God recorded in Scripture, which are themselves external to, and independent of, that experience. Such experience can therefore be both tested and verified by the Scriptures. Christian experience is to Paul a confirmation or seal of God’s truth, not an independent entity: Christ must still be accepted initially by faith, if he is to be accepted at all (2:16).
Yet Paul’s previous experience of bondage under Jewish law, and the Galatian experience of similar bondage under pagan superstitions, were real and remembered experiences, to which he could appeal. The joy and freedom which had been brought, not magically or irrationally, but by the knowledge of acceptance and forgiveness by God, was just as real a fact in either case. The continual presence of the Spirit in the hearts of the Galatians was demonstrated to them every time that they prayed (4:6). The fruits of the Spirit in their lives were plain for all to see (5:22–23). Nor were these fruits something laboriously produced by them, like ‘good deeds’ under the law, or indeed like the ‘bad deeds’ of unregenerate humanity; they were the spontaneous product of the new spiritual force at work within them. In that sense, to Paul, the fruits of the Spirit are a surer sign of God’s work in us than even the gifts of the Spirit, highly though he values them (1 Cor. 12 – 14).
This is therefore no shallow humanistic argument drawn from casual experience. Results of this kind, rightly seen and analysed, are the surest tokens of the spiritual forces that produce them. Christianity, in the last analysis, is not magical, but it is truly supernatural, since the transforming power of the Spirit lies at its heart. A new work of creation has been done in the Galatians (6:15) by God. Nothing less than this could account for the changes produced in the human life which has been brought into contact with God through the gospel, and this transforming power of the Spirit is basically Paul’s argument for the truth of his gospel.
When read in a contemporary context, Paul’s letter to the Galatians raises a number of other important issues in many minds.
In our modern ecumenical age, the necessity for Christian compromise is much in the air. We often wonder, for instance, if our Christian ancestors could not have avoided the bitterness, and even the bloodshed, of the religious wars of the past, by more readiness to exercise compromise, especially in matters which we can see clearly today not to be essential.
Approaching from this angle, it is natural to ask whether Paul’s approach to the Galatians (not to mention his approach to the Jerusalem apostles) was perhaps unnecessarily polemical. If the Galatians were being persecuted not so much for being Christians as for being uncircumcised Gentile Christians, and if the acceptance of a simple rite of circumcision would assure them of freedom from this persecution, was it not sheer stubbornness on Paul’s part to refuse? What if circumcision did lead to an obligation to observe certain Jewish festivals and certain ceremonial food laws? After all, there was nothing wrong or inconsistent with Christianity in these laws in themselves: many, if not all, Jewish Christians still observed them, as they had in their pre-Christian days.
This was notably true of the great mother church in Jerusalem, where many of the members had previously been Pharisees (Acts 15:5) or priestly Sadducees (Acts 6:7) before conversion, and who, for different reasons, would be equally shocked to the core at any failure to observe God’s law, for such it clearly was, if it had been given by God to Moses, and enjoined on God’s people. Would it not have been an act of self-sacrificing love on the part of Gentile Christians in Galatia to make a small surrender of religious ‘liberty’ in order to avoid putting a stumbling block in the path of these Hebrew fellow Christians? Indeed, was this not precisely the course which Paul himself advocated in 1 Corinthians 8:13, with reference to Jewish food laws? Was it not the course which he actually took, when he circumcised Timothy (Acts 16:3), before taking him as a travel companion? Why not allow it in Galatia, then? And why refuse to circumcise Titus now (2:3)? So some will argue.
The problem for the Jewish Christians can also be seen from another angle. The Christian church was still living in a very uneasy relationship with the temple and with orthodox Judaism, not to mention with the extremist political groups within Israel. Obviously, the parent church of Jerusalem would do everything in its power not to jeopardize this delicate relationship, endangered as it already was by false rumours of Paul’s attitude to law and circumcision (Acts 21:20–24). Was it not more important to maintain this Christian relationship with the parent body of Judaism than to enjoy some so-called liberty? They may well have hoped that perhaps Israel would yet heed the gospel and turn to her Messiah: the awful days of AD 70, with the consequential irreconcilable break between Christianity and the new ‘monochrome’ Judaism, were yet to come.
We can see how tempting, and even appealing, this line of argument might have been to the Galatians. We may be sure that this was one of the lines followed by the Judaizers of Galatia, and no doubt sincerely believed by them; but Paul would have none of it, as is clear both from the contents of this letter and his relations with the Jerusalem apostles (1:16 – 2:24). To him therefore there must have been a far deeper theological principle involved, outweighing all these considerations: compromise here, despite his flexibility elsewhere, was impossible.
With hindsight, we can see that Paul was right: had he yielded on this point, ‘then Christ died to no purpose’ (2:21), for Christianity would have become merely one more Messianic sect within Judaism. But the strange thing is that Paul seems to have been alone, or nearly alone, in this stand against the circumcision of Gentile Christians, which must have increased the suspicions of his Jerusalem opponents that his position on this matter was merely only one of stubbornness and intransigence. True, when the question was first raised at Antioch, which was a largely Gentile church, there was apparently widespread opposition to it, led not only by Paul but also by Barnabas, as is shown by the fact that both of them were sent to Jerusalem to plead their case (Acts 15:1–2). Paul certainly did not stand alone at that stage.
Indeed, when the matter was discussed at the Council in Jerusalem, Peter actually supported Paul and Barnabas in a typically forthright manner, quoting as precedent his own experience with the uncircumcised Cornelius (Acts 15:7–11). But on another undated occasion recorded in Galatians, Peter had been at Antioch, where he obviously had not been observing the Jewish food laws, for he, like the other Jewish Christians, had been enjoying table fellowship with the Gentile Christians there (2:12). However, when some of these ‘weaker brethren’ with Jewish scruples came (‘certain men from James’, 2:12), he ‘separated himself ’ at once from his Gentile brothers and sisters in Christ, as did all the other Jewish Christians of Antioch, even Barnabas himself (2:13). Paul says bluntly that they did this ‘fearing the circumcision party’ (2:12): but it could also have been seen by Peter and the rest as a temporary compromise, designed to avoid offending the scruples of the Jerusalem Christians. No doubt Peter saw this gesture as something quite different from the circumcising of Gentile Christians: but Paul would have none of this temporary compromise either. Was he perhaps being a little extreme, or was he right?
The well-known case of Titus could be compared, as another instance of Paul’s refusal to compromise, for instance. When the case for uncircumcised Gentile Christians was being argued at Jerusalem, Acts 15 mentions only Barnabas and Paul by name as delegates from Antioch, although ‘some of the others’ (15:2) are recorded as going with them. Would it not have made sense for this difficult and sensitive question to be argued at Jerusalem by circumcised Jewish Christians from Antioch, men like Paul and Barnabas, who could plead for their Gentile brothers and sisters without exacerbating the issue?
But instead of following this course, Paul came up to see the apostles in Jerusalem on this occasion, whenever it was, deliberately bringing with him the uncircumcised Titus who was ‘a Greek’ (2:3), that is ‘a Gentile’ and, at that, not even a Greek like Timothy, who, because he had a Jewish mother, would be counted by Hebrew law as a Jew (Acts 16:3), and was therefore circumcised by Paul. More, Paul actually flaunts the uncircumcision of Titus in the letter. The simplest reading of the text in 2:3 is that there had been some considerable pressure from the circumcision party to have Titus circumcised, but that Paul had steadfastly refused. To assume, with some commentators, that Titus had voluntarily accepted circumcision would be to adopt a very unnatural interpretation of the words ‘was not compelled to be circumcised’, and would destroy Paul’s position.
In contrast to this seeming intransigence on some occasions, it was the apparent readiness of Paul to compromise on other occasions which the Jerusalem party must have found hard to understand. He had already circumcised Timothy (Acts 16:3), but now he refused to circumcise Titus (2:3). At times he kept the Jewish ritual law (1 Cor. 9:20), at times he did not. He was prepared to appear before the Jerusalem Christians as a law observer (Acts 21:20–24), while obviously this was not always true overseas. Indeed, inconsistency was a charge often made against him, as we can see from the Corinthian correspondence (2 Cor. 1:17). Why then was he so stubborn in the case of the Galatian controversy? It can only be that, in their case, he regarded any such compromise as fatal to the gospel (5:3–4), for Paul would only compromise when ‘the truth of the gospel’ was not directly involved (2:5).
However, that Paul was perfectly ready to accept compromise in areas which he did not regard as essential can be seen clearly from Acts, if not from Galatians. In Galatians, the agreement at Jerusalem was merely that Paul and Barnabas would evangelize the Gentiles, while Peter, James and John evangelized the Jews (2:9). The gospel was thereby recognized as a unity: it was only the spheres of operation which were different, for it cannot be seriously argued that two different gospels were involved. The question of the need for circumcision would not enter into the case of evangelism of Jews. It looks as if the whole subject was delicately avoided, or even tacitly dropped, in the case of Gentile evangelism, although the ‘Jerusalem pillars’ must have known well what was Paul’s mind, and therefore what his attitude would be. But if this is so, then neither side can have viewed the issue as essential, and the position of Paul had therefore been vindicated. This in itself shows that any opposition to the reception of uncircumcised Gentiles as full believers and full brothers in Christ came not from the leaders of the Jerusalem church, but from a section (possibly a considerable section) of the rank and file.
There was therefore no compromise involved in any of the decisions recorded in Galatians, for even the agreement to ‘remember the poor’ (2:10) was something already dear to Paul’s heart, as he says, especially if, as probable, ‘the poor’ refers to ‘the poor among the saints at Jerusalem’ (Rom. 15:26), for whom he was to make his famous collection later. Likewise, there was certainly no compromise visible in the events at Antioch recorded in 2:11–14: outright confrontation is described there, with Paul utterly refusing to yield ground. We cannot therefore find evidence for Christian compromise on the part of Paul in this letter.
But in contrast to these two occasions described in Galatians, the decision of the Council of Jerusalem as recorded in Acts certainly was a Christian compromise on non-essentials, and one apparently accepted (one trusts, wholeheartedly) by Paul and Barnabas as well as by the Jerusalem church at the time. Without going into the exact meaning of the details (for which see the commentaries on Acts), circumcision was certainly not demanded of Gentile Christians, although certain ritual and moral requirements were specified (Acts 15:20, 28–29, with Acts 21:25). These are not said to be essential to salvation, as circumcision had apparently been claimed by the Judaizers to be (Acts 15:1), so perhaps this was the reason for their ready acceptance by Paul on this occasion. But they are nevertheless described as ‘necessary’ (Acts 15:28), so that they were obviously still considered by the Jerusalem Christians as of some considerable importance.
Whether these requirements were regarded as belonging to the covenant of Noah or to the covenant of Moses makes little difference: they seem in either case to be considered by Jerusalem as universally obligatory for Gentile Christians, not a mere matter of optional acceptance on occasions to avoid offending tender scruples. This compromise therefore goes much further than Paul’s advice to the Gentile Christians in 1 Corinthians 8, even if still not touching ‘essentials’. Perhaps this is why Paul tacitly dropped the whole arrangement later, but his is a question pertaining more to a commentary on Acts than one on Galatians.
Paul rightly and strenuously opposed any circumcision of Gentile believers; it was not that he regarded circumcision as wrong, but that it was totally irrelevant now, in the face of the new life in Christ (6:15), as irrelevant indeed as was the state of uncircumcision. The whole question was totally outmoded; to re-introduce it was to take a step backwards, to the old time of ‘preparation’ for the gospel (4:1–11). To accept circumcision meant to Paul to be bound to keep the whole law (5:3). This inevitably involved moving back into the sphere of thought where salvation was dependent on, and earned by, keeping that law (5:4). It is true that to earn salvation in this way was an impossibility, but that was what made the very attempt so wrong and indeed so ridiculous.
For a Jewish Christian, already circumcised, the position was completely different. Paul held that such a person was free to observe the law, as most if not all of the Jerusalem Christians apparently did (Acts 21:20), or to ignore the law, which Peter often did, in later days at least (2:12), or to keep it at times, and ignore it at times, as Paul himself obviously did (1 Cor. 9:20–21). This to him was not only a matter of Christian expediency, directed by the nature of his company at the time: it was also a matter of theology, since these things were now irrelevant.
If the Council of Jerusalem was Paul’s greatest compromise, what happened afterwards? Did Paul quietly drop the whole matter? Did he regard the compromise involved in the Jerusalem decree (at least in the ceremonial and ritual area) as being a mere temporary expedient, to avoid schism in the church, and to facilitate social and religious fellowship between Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians? It is striking that Paul never appeals to the Jerusalem decree in any extant letter (unless the opening chapters of the letter to the Galatians contains oblique references), even in situations where to quote it, and so to invoke the authority of the Jerusalem church, would have settled the argument at once. Acts 16:4 mentions the promulgation of the decree in the South Galatian churches, but that is all: why does Paul never mention it himself?
Of course, if the letter to Galatia was written either before the Council of Jerusalem, or in its early stages, there would be no problem, for the Jerusalem decree would have not yet been issued. If Galatians was written after the date of Acts 15, there certainly is a problem. But the Corinthian letters, not to mention the Roman letter, or a prison letter like that to the Philippians, were written long after the Council of Jerusalem, and Paul still makes no reference to the decree. Indeed, in the Corinthian correspondence at least, he seems to give advice which does not go nearly as far as the Jerusalem decision, if it does not actually run counter to it.
There can be only two possible answers. The first possibility is that Paul accepted the practical compromise of the Council of Jerusalem for the time being, but did not think it a final solution, and therefore dropped it quietly as soon as possible, particularly in the largely Gentile churches further away from Jerusalem, and therefore less subject to visits from Jewish church members, whether they were well disposed or trouble-makers (2:4). The second possibility is that he did not wish to settle any argument simply on the authority of Jerusalem and its apostles, however estimable they might be (2:6): that would run counter to his whole theology.
The first of these assumptions may possibly be correct; the second certainly is, as we can see from the opening chapters of Galatians (1:11 – 2:10). Paul wanted to settle this and other similar questions not by an appeal to an external earthly authority but by the law of love (Rom. 14:1–12), as interpreted by Scripture, not by a return to old legalism. That to him was the path of maturity. Nevertheless, Paul’s basic position remains clear: he was perfectly ready for compromise on non-essentials, but completely intransigent when the nature of the gospel was at stake.
One of the darkest stains on the history of the Christian church has been anti-Semitism, all the more inconceivable when practised by those who claimed to be followers of the Christ who was born a Jew and who wept over Jerusalem (Luke 19:41). No reader of the letter to the Romans (Rom. 9:3) could ever accuse Paul the Jew of antiSemitism: and yet sometimes commentators on Galatians or Romans have been accused of being tainted by it.
Now, it is true that some of the greatest of the classical commentators on Galatians may have been guilty of this bias at times (Martin Luther is one example): but, if so, they did not learn the attitude either from Galatians or from Paul himself. For such a grievous aberration, we must all express our sorrow and utter abhorrence. That should be the more easy for any commentator on Galatians, since Paul in this letter asserts that the division between Jew and Gentile has lost both meaning and relevance ‘in Christ Jesus’ (3:28).
But, like other such ‘natural’ distinctions overarched in Christ, although the difference has been transcended, it has not been abolished. The existence of ‘Gentile Christians’ and ‘Jewish Christians’, as two mutually distinct and distinguishable groups within the early church, proves this, as does the very possibility of the conflict that led to the Council of Jerusalem (Acts 15:1–2), and therefore to the letter to the Galatians. Had early Christianity been homogenous and monochrome, the question of Judaizing could not have arisen.
We have seen that it is probable that the Jerusalem Council did not settle the issue finally as far as Paul was concerned: it is certain from the later pages of the New Testament that it did not end the question as far as the Judaizers were concerned (Phil. 1:17). It is reasonable to suppose, in the absence of other evidence, that these ‘men … from James’ (2:12), the hard core of Pharisee ‘irreconcilables’ (no doubt with many orthodox sympathizers overseas), had accepted the council decree grudgingly as a temporary setback, but were still anxious to push the matter to its conclusion. This group, probably the same as those from Judea originally active at Antioch (Acts 15:1), and certainly those vociferous at the Jerusalem Council (Acts 15:5), continued to dog Paul to the end of his days (Phil. 3:2). Probably Paul’s words ‘let no man trouble me’ (6:17) are a reference to his ongoing harassment by the same group.
Small wonder, therefore, if Paul expressed himself very strongly on occasions concerning these ‘Judaizers’ (Phil. 3:2). Even when he does, there is not a trace of any wider anti-Semitism in his thoughts or words: he is concerned only with his theological opponents at the time. After all, these opponents were not even Jewish by religion, but Christian; that was what made their behaviour all the more inexplicable to Paul. As Cousar says, Paul’s polemic is not with the Jews, but with Jewish Christians. The irony is that it does not seem as if Paul himself held to the provisions of the Council of Jerusalem either, but for quite different reasons. Certainly there is no evidence for his use or publication of the decree in later years. Nevertheless, in spite of this, he seems to have enjoyed good relations to the last with the bulk of the Jerusalem Christians: schism in the church had been avoided, for the Judaizers had been isolated from the support of the main body of Jewish Christianity.
But, having said that, it is necessary in an ecumenical age devoted to religious dialogue to say bluntly that Paul did not regard the religion of Judaism as a continuing parallel alternative to Christianity, nor did he regard those who were Jewish by religion as already being in a state of grace and salvation. Otherwise, not only would his whole stance in Galatians on circumcision and law-keeping be inexplicable: his own conversion to Christianity and subsequent missionary work would be meaningless. It is not that Judaism was a false faith: but, to Paul, it was only a past step along the road that finally led to Christ (3:24). To go back to Judaism now would be unthinkable (3:3), while to remain in Judaism after Christ’s coming would be to refuse to accept Israel’s Messiah (Acts 18:5–6). Still more unthinkable would be a return to the old ways of paganism (4:9): so Galatians becomes a charter for the uniqueness of Christianity and the need for evangelism of all humanity, Jew and Gentile alike. Again, we may compare the letter to the Hebrews.
To Paul, preaching Christ to Jews, like preaching to Gentiles, was not therefore merely one possible option, but a divine necessity, and indeed always a priority in his own evangelistic work (Acts 13:46). Only in the fight of this knowledge can we understand the fervour with which in the letter to the Galatians he opposes what to him was a total rejection of the Christian gospel in favour of a virtual return to the old way.
Galatians gives us surprisingly little evidence as to this phenomenon in the life of the local church. With the exception of 3:5, there is no reference to the performance of any miracles in the local church, and it is theoretically possible (though most unlikely) that even this verse refers only to the initial evangelism of Lycaonia, where Paul’s miraculous healing of a lame man started what we would nowadays call a ‘people movement’ towards Christianity, even if it did not last for long (Acts 14:8–13). Nevertheless, the present tense of the two verbs epichorēgōn, ‘supplies’ (the Spirit), and energōn, ‘works’ (miracles), in 3:5 suggests a continuous ongoing process. We may therefore assume that the gifts of the Spirit were just as widespread among the Galatians as among the Corinthians, especially as Paul refers to the ‘miracles’ here so casually in passing, without any particular emphasis: it looks as if he is almost taking them for granted.
Why then is there no detailed discussion in this letter of the gifts of the Spirit, of their function and their control, even of their abuse, as there is in 1 Corinthians 12? One reason may be that, at the height of a theological controversy, Paul has no time to turn to a secondary issue, important though it might be. A second possible reason has already been suggested in this Introduction, in the section dealing with Paul’s argument from Christian experience. If the Galatian Christians, for any reason, were ‘disillusioned charismatics’, then this was the last doctrine in the world to discuss at the time. Instead, Paul concentrates on discussing with the Galatians the fruits of the Spirit (5:22–23), those other signs of the Spirit’s presence which, although unspectacular, guarantee holiness of life in a way that spiritual gifts do not necessarily do. It is possible, even in the New Testament, to be a false prophet (Matt. 7:15) and to perform ‘great signs and wonders’ to deceive (Matt. 24:24): it is not possible to produce the fruit of the Spirit without the transforming work of the Spirit within the heart (Matt. 7:15–18). In that sense, Galatians is a useful balance to Corinthians. Paul in Galatians affirms the existence and reality of dynameis, ‘miracles’, and appeals to them amongst other signs of the Spirit’s presence (3:5). But he does not concentrate on them, or see them out of this context: he carefully balances them (indeed, in this letter, some would say, he almost overbalances them) with the fruit of the Spirit. As mentioned above, there may well be a particular local reason for this, either in the controversy as to the very nature of the gospel, which was rocking the church to its foundations, or in the spiritual predicament of the Galatians at the time.
But it also corresponds to a deep spiritual principle of the New Testament that such manifestations, real and valuable though they are (Rom. 15:19; 2 Cor. 12:12), should not be given undue prominence, but should be seen as part of the whole Christian ‘packet’. Paul had realized very early that Satan too could work ‘pretended signs’ (2 Thess. 2:9), and Christ himself had warned that many who had prophesied, cast out demons, and done mighty works in his name, would yet be rejected at the last day (Matt. 7:23). In themselves, therefore, signs are not decisive.
Galatians is not a letter which provides us with abundant evidence on this issue of men and women in Christ, which is so interesting and relevant to modern Christians. This again is not surprising: Galatians is not primarily a pastoral letter like the Corinthian letters, dealing with the questions and problems of a struggling local church, but a theological refutation of a heresy that, if accepted, would have destroyed the whole church, men and women alike. One cannot and should not therefore expect a balanced theological presentation of every aspect of Christian truth here.
Yet, in spite of this, it is remarkable that one of the most farreaching statements on this subject in the whole of the New Testament is made in 3:28: ‘there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.’ Now admittedly the spanning of this particular gulf is not the sole point of Paul’s remark. Indeed, it could even be argued that it is not his primary or initial thought. In view of the general run of the letter (and especially of chapter 2), it is likely that, for his argument at the time, the opening clause ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek’ was his basic point, but that thereafter he extended the principle to the overarching by Christ of other equally deep divisions observable in the ‘natural’ world of his day.
That of course does not in any way lessen either the truth or the importance of the later clauses, including that dealing with male and female, but it is wise to realize that this is not the point at issue at the time: that is why there is no detailed discussion in this context of the practical implications of this sweeping statement. There is, for instance, no discussion of the married state, with its rights and duties, in Galatians, as in Ephesians 5:21–33: there is equally no discussion of sex in relation to church order, as there is, say, in 1 Corinthians 11:2–16 and 14:33–36, however we interpret the evidence there. It is therefore not fair to use Galatians in argument in this area, except in so far as it propounds a great basic principle, the application of which may well vary at different times and in different situations. Perhaps we might lay alongside 3:28, as an equally generally relevant principle, the dictum ‘through love be servants of one another’ (5:13), which suggests the voluntary mutual subordination of ‘clothe yourselves, all of you, with humility toward one another’ of 1 Peter 5:5.
However, having said this, several points should be noticed. First, Paul is clearly referring in this context to ‘as many of you as were baptised into Christ’ (3:27): it is therefore, to him, because we have ‘put on Christ’ that we ‘are all one in Christ Jesus’ (3:28). Paul is not talking of some radical re-understanding of gender achieved by ‘natural’ thought, but of a spiritual transformation produced by our new oneness in Christ. He is not denying an existing ‘natural’ distinction (like that between Jew and Gentile), but in a sense affirming it, and at the same time, affirming that it is now transcended in Christ. Further, he is not saying that men and women are now the same, but that they are ‘one in Christ’. Here the Greek heis could be translated as ‘one person’, not even as ‘a unity’, which would have required the neuter form hen. Man and woman together form a unity in the body of Christ, just as man and woman together in Genesis 1:27 are created ‘in the image of God’. Although Paul’s wording here is concise, this seems to be his meaning: man and woman are complementary in Christ.
It is also important to realize that for Paul the difference between men and women has not been obliterated, even in Christ, any more than the difference between Jew and Greek has been: it is their attitude to each other that has been completely altered, so that their relationship has also been radically altered. This can be seen very clearly for instance in Ephesians 6:5–9, where Paul has elaborated the implications of the new relationships for masters and slaves, but for the reasons mentioned above, there is no similar working out of any detailed relationships between the sexes in this letter. However, it should be noted, as mentioned elsewhere in the Introduction, that, although transcended in Christ, the difference between Jewish Christian and Gentile Christian still persisted within the church, not only in the case of the Judaizers where it seems to have taken a sinful turn, but also in the case of the ‘orthodox’ Jewish Christians of Jerusalem headed by James, where it was innocent. But this difference was now apparently characterized by a mutual acceptance of each other in love (5:13–14), fully acknowledging the difference that existed and yet conscious of their fundamental underlying unity in Christ. Perhaps this is a good parallel.
Further than this, Paul does not take us in Galatians. It would be grossly unfair to invest his great statement ‘there is neither male nor female’ in 3:28 with a literal significance which would have been far from his mind, although the later Gnostics carried it to this conclusion. Paul is making in this context a theological statement which is true at the deepest level, not a physiological or psychological pronouncement. He must not be misunderstood, here or elsewhere, in a crudely literalistic way. This is shown by his detailed discussion in other contexts both of the situation now obtaining within marriage (Eph. 5) and in church order (1 Cor. 11), in both of which he accepts sexual differentiation.
It would be beyond the province of a commentator on Galatians to enlarge on these discussions in other letters, and to give an opinion as to whether Paul’s applications of the new principles are to be regarded as universal rules or merely as temporary injunctions in the light of the local situation of the day. They may nevertheless be mentioned as examples of Paul’s consciousness of the continuation of a difference between the sexes, and the consequent need to work out the implications for Christians, whether men or women, of being at one and the same time in the ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’ orders. There are for instance some commentators who hold that, in such other or later letters, Paul fell below the high level of the principle enunciated by him in Galatians: but those who have a high view of Scripture and of the doctrine of inspiration will be loth to adopt this view. A more convincing view is to hold that, as in several other areas (e.g. that of spiritual gifts), Paul was led in later days to explain and qualify the theologically true generalizations of Galatians in the light of local cultural conditions, because of the abuses which had subsequently arisen in the local churches. This, after all, is what Galatians itself is doing in connection with the doctrine of Christian liberty, if our reconstruction of the circumstances of writing the letter is correct. But, in any case, Paul’s attitude is in sharp contrast to that of contemporary Judaism: the ‘Judaizers’ could offer little or nothing to women.