Galatian Problems - F. F. Brooks
Table of Contents
Galatian Problems
By Frederick Fyvie Bruce
Chapter 1 - Autobiographical Data
By “Galatian problems” I mean problems raised by the study of Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians.
Some forty years ago an American scholar, James Hardy Ropes, published a monograph entitled The Singular Problem of the Epistle to the Galatians.2 The” singular problem ” in this title may be defined as Paul’s problem: what was the problem with which the situation in the churches of Galatia confronted Paul? This problem is so central for the interpretation of the epistle that it may rightly be called its “singular” problem. But there are several other Galatian problems, and the solutions which have been offered for them are interconnected. It is therefore not altogether satisfactory to isolate one problem or one group of problems from the others and deal with it separately, but there is no other convenient way of approaching such a complex subject. Provisional solutions offered to the first group of problems tackled may have to be revised in the light of solutions proposed for others.
We may ask, for example: “Which are the’ churches of Galatia’ to which this letter is addressed?” Are they the churches of South Galatia whose foundation is recorded in Acts xiii.14-xiv. 23 (those in Pisidian Antioch, Iconium, Lystra and Derbe) or are they churches in Central or North Galatia, founded by Paul on some subsequent occasion?
We may ask, again, at what point in Paul’s apostolic career this letter was composed. Has it affinities with any other of his letters which might make it possible to bracket it chronologically with one or more of these?
Yet again, we may ask if it is possible to fit this letter into the narrative framework of the Acts of the Apostles: does it, for example, reflect the situation before or after the issue of the apostolic decree from Jerusalem, described in Acts xv? There are a number of scholars who almost deprecate this kind of question, because it tempts us to interpret our primary source of information about Paul’s ministry-his undoubted letters-in terms of what is at best a secondary source-the narrative of Acts-with the result that the direct evidence of the letters is distorted to fit the problematic evidence of Acts. To this let me say three things :
(i) Granted, the letters show us Paul from the inside, while Acts shows us Paul from the outside, as seen through another’s eyes-even if that other be, as tradition affirms, a sympathetic friend and fellow-raveller, not to say a hero-worshipper, of Paul. But since when has a man’s account of himself been regarded as so objective that it need not be checked by reference to someone else’s assessment of him?
(ii) It is begging the question to suppose that the letters, occasional as they are, and perhaps only a part of Paul’s original correspondence, can supply a consecutive and comprehensive picture of the course of his ministry to the Gentiles. They do enable us to write Chapters in a Life of Paul (to quote the title of Professor John Knox’s book),3 but they leave room for other chapters, some of which might be written on the basis provided by Acts.
(iii) As one whose initiation into New Testament scholarship took the form of a prolonged and detailed study of Acts against the background of a classical education, I stand convinced that in Luke-Acts we have a history of Christian origins compiled by an heir of the tradition of Greek historiography, based on the best sources of information that were available to him-written, oral or otherwise.4 The work of such a man must receive respect in any historical inquiry into persons or events falling within his scope. If he is described as ” the theologian of salvation history “,5 I do not quarrel with this description. I see no incompatibility between theology and history: in fact I am tempted, in face of a strong contemporary trend, to say that-within the Jewish and Christian tradition, at least-a man Cannot be a good theologian unless he is a good historian.
Historians of Greek and Roman antiquity do not despise Plutarch’s Parallel Lives as a source of information. They know that Plutarch was a moralist rather than a historiographer, and that the very parallelism of his biographical exercise frequently necessitated a proportion and emphasis which did not correspond entirely with historical reality. Yet, when all due allowances are made for Plutarch’s perspective and purpose, his Lives provide the historian with some of the material for (say) a life of Caesar, even when we have Caesar’s own account 9f an important phase of his career. Much more so does Luke, who wrote with historical intention, provide the historian of early Christianity with source material of very great value. Even if he does not enable us to see Paul from within, he certainly supplies us with a framework within which Paul’s career can be arranged-a framework :fixed in history by two or three fairly certainly datable events, such as the famine in Palestine under Claudius (c. A.D. 46),6 Gallio’s proconsulship of Achaia (c. A.D. 51-52),7 the replacement of Felix by Festus as procurator of Judaea, for which numismatic evidence points to A.D. 59.8 Luke gives us a framework such as Paul’s extant letters by their nature do not give us, and to plot Paul’s letters within the Lukan framework is not to stretch them on a Procrustean bed. In fact, they :fit the bed without pushing or pulling, when regard is had (a) to the fact that Paul mentions several phases or incidents of his career which Luke passes over in silence,9 and (b) to the wide difference in purpose and perspective between Luke’s writing and Paul’s.
Naturally, where the two authors give what can only be regarded as irreconcilable accounts of one and the same event in Paul’s career, we shall consider that Paul is more likely to be accurate on the point of fact, while we shall bear in mind his viewpoint and intention over against Luke’s. Examples of this are not lacking in a comparison of the autobiographical data in Galatians with the narrative of Acts.
II
From Galatians i. 12 to ii. 14 there is a sustained autobiographical section in which Paul surveys certain aspects of his career from the period preceding his conversion to his controversy with Peter at Syrian Antioch. We shall not be able to do justice to this section unless we pay attention to Paul’s purpose in dictating it. He is concerned in this part of the letter to make two assertions, both in reply to criticisms which his opponents had voiced against him among his converts in Galatia: (a) that he received his apostolic authority and commission direct from Christ, by a special revelation, not through any human intermediary, and least of all through the apostles or other leaders of the Jerusalem church; (b) that at no time from his conversion onwards did he preach, practise or countenance any deviation from the gospel of free grace, apart from the works of the law the gospel which he proclaimed to the Galatians at the first and is now defending in his letter. As part of his argument to establish the former of these assertions he enumerates the visits he had paid to Jerusalem after his conversion and undertakes to show that during none of these was there opportunity for the Jerusalem leaders to confer any authority on him. As for the latter assertion, he maintains that neither at Jerusalem nor anywhere else did he make the slightest concession, even temporarily, to anyone who tried to impose legal observance (especially circumcision) on Gentile Christians or to treat them as being on an inferior level to Jewish Christians.
It is these Jerusalem visits which particularly challenge comparative study of Galatians and Acts and have thus occasioned a long debate of which we have not yet heard the end. The apologetic thrust of Paul’s account here demands that he should include every visit he paid to Jerusalem between his conversion and the moment of writing: had he omitted any, for any reason, the omission would inevitably have aroused suspicion.
Since Paul is concerned to reply to critics who are tolerably well versed in the highlights of his career, especially his contacts with Jerusalem, it would be futile for him to make statements which could easily be exposed as false. Whether Paul was the kind of person whose evidence in his own behalf cannot be accepted without independent corroboration let readers of his letters and students of his character judge. One recent study. indeed, solves the problem of reconciling his statements in Galatians with the evidence of Acts by the over-simple expedient of not taking the former seriously.10 How seriously Paul himself took them. and intended them to be taken, is clear from his solemn assurance: “The things I am telling you, behold, before God I am telling no lie” (Gal. i. 20). The truth of the gospel as Paul understood it was at stake in the truth of his narrative, and the ease with which false or loaded statements could be refuted would have given pause to a much less scrupulous conscience than Paul’s and dictated a cautious adherence to facts.
This autobiographical section covers :
(i) His pre-conversion days (Gal. i. 13 f.)
(ii) His conversion, call and prompt obedience (Gal. i. 15-17)
(iii) His first Jerusalem visit (Gal. i. 18-20)
(iv) His sojourn in Syria-Cilicia (Gal. i. 21 -24)
(v) His second Jerusalem visit (Gal. ii. 1-1O)
(vi) His dispute with Peter at Antioch (Gal. ii. 11-14).
(i) His pre-conversion days (Gal. i. 13f.)
You have heard about my former career when I practised the Jewish religion. Beyond all measure I persecuted the church of God and laid it waste. I made more progress in the Jewish religion than many of my fellow-nationals who belonged to the same age-group, and was a more thorough-going zealot for my ancestral traditions. .
This agrees well enough with the picture in Acts of Saul the disciple of Gamaliel, at whose feet he was trained according to the strict letter of the ancestral law, a zealot for God (xxii. 3), engaged In deadly persecution of ” The Way” (xxii. 4), making havoc of the church (viii. 3), “breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord ” (ix. I). The objection that Galatians is silent about his doing this in Jerusalem is not to be taken seriously: where else than in Jerusalem was” the church of God “11 to be found at that early date, before Paul’s conversion? Besides, a few years later, when he began to carry out his apostolic work in Syria and Cilicia, it was the churches of Judaea that heard how ” our former persecutor is now proclaiming the faith which once he laid waste” (Gal. i. 23).12
(ii) His conversion, call and prompt obedience (Gal. i. 15-17)
In some quarters Paul’s former career as a persecutor was perhaps used to discredit him in the eyes of Christians’ he himself refers to it in order to magnify the grace of God which turned a persecutor into an apostle.13
When God, who had set me apart from my birth, was pleased to call me by his grace and reveal his Son In me, so that I might proclaim the good news about him among the Gentiles: this was the immediate sequel: I did not confer with any human being, nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were apostles before me, but I went off Into Arabia, and came back again to Damascus.
Paul’s concern, let us remember, is to emphasize his independence of Jerusalem, as regards both the gospel he preached and his commission to preach it. The part played by Ananias of Damascus in the Acts narrative (ix. 10-17, xxii. 12-16) does not conflict with this emphasis: a “private” Christian like Ananias could have been at best but the mouthpiece of the risen Lord to Paul-and that is what he is in the narrative of Acts. The revelation of God’s Son” in me “-or” to me “14 (Paul would have assented to either rendering or to both together)-is to be interpreted in the light of other statements of his (e.g. 1 Cor. ix. 1), as a reference to his seeing the risen Lord when he appeared to him” last of all, as to one untimely born” (1 Cor. xv. 8). That this revelation came to him at Damascus is indicated by his statement that, after going off to Arabia, he ” came back again to Damascus “. Of Arabia the Acts narrative has nothing to say, but it agrees with Galatians (a) in locating Paul’s conversion and call near and in Damascus (ix. 3-19, xxii. 6-16, xxvi. 12-18) and (b) in making him pay his first post-conversion visit to Jerusalem from Damascus (ix. 23-27, xxii. 17, xxvi. 20).
Revelation of Jesus Christ and call to proclaim his good news among the Gentiles coincided in time, and the Paul who in Acts ” was not disobedient to the heavenly vision ” (xxvi. 19) is the Paul who in Galatians did not stay to confer with flesh and blood, still less to receive ” orders ” (in any sense of the word) from flesh and blood, but went off into Arabia. Why did he go there? To proclaim the good news among the Gentiles of Arabia: this is the implication of the context. No need to spend months in retreat in Arabia, thinking through the new situation; three days in Damascus sufficed for his life and thought to be reorientated around a new centre-Christ now instead of Torah-and then, forthwith, the discharge of his commission. By” Arabia ” we are to understand the Nabataean kingdom, which stretched from the very walls of Damascus south to the Gulf of Akaba, with its capital at Petra. And that Paul’s time in the Nabataean kingdom was not devoted entirely to quiet contemplation is suggested by the hostile interest which the king’s representative manifested in him on his return to Damascus, according to his own testimony in 2 Corinthians xi. 32 f.
Before ever I visited Jerusalem as a Christian, he stresses, before I had my first contact with any apostle, I began my apostolic ministry among the Gentiles in response to the divine call, and I had been engaged thus for three years before I went up to Jerusalem.
(iii) His first Jerusalem visit (Gal. i. 18-20)
Then, after three years, I went up to Jerusalem to interview Cephas, and stayed with him for fifteen days. Of the other apostles I saw none, except James the brother of the Lord. Please note: in all that I am writing to you now. I am telling no lie; God is my witness.
What precisely is meant by the phrase which I have translated “to interview Cephas” (i`storh/sai KFa/n)?15 In RSV it is rendered” to visit Cephas” ; in NEB, ” to get to know Cephas “. But if we give the verb ivstore,w its normal force, it might well be rendered “to inquire of Cephas “. Paul recognized Peter as a primary informant on matters regarding which it was now important that he should be well informed-the details of Jesus’ ministry and the” tradition” of teaching which derived from him.16 Peter could impart to Paul much information of this kind (more than James could), but there was one thing, Paul insists, which Peter could not and did not impart to him, and that was apostolic authority. If he went to Jerusalem, he did so in order to establish bonds of fellowship with the mother church and its leaders and to obtain there information which could be obtained nowhere else.
Paul, we suppose, must have distinguished in his own mind between his receiving the gospel” through revelation of Jesus Christ” without human mediation (Gal. i. 11 f.) and his receiving it by tradition as others in due course received it from him (1 Cor. XV.3).17 The respective contexts make it fairly clear that what he received without mediation was the revelation of a person-Jesus Christ, the risen Lord-while what he received by tradition was factual information about that person.18 But the apologetic requirements of the moment might cause him at times to emphasize one side to the apparent exclusion of the other, and there is no doubt what the apologetic requirements of the moment were when the letter to the Galatians was being written. Yet even here the account of his staying with Peter and meeting James is closely linked with his account in 1 Corinthians xv. 1-11 of the message which he proclaimed in common with them, for it is more than a coincidence that the two individuals who are named in that passage as having seen the risen Lord by themselves are these very two-Peter and James.19
This Jerusalem visit, described in Galatians i. 18-20, may certainly be identified with that of Acts ix. 26-30, although the correlation of Paul’s description with the details of Luke’s account is beset by well-known difficulties. Barnabas’s using his good offices to introduce Paul to “the apostles” (Acts ix. 27) is entirely probable, but one would not have gathered from Luke’s generalizing reference to “the apostles” that Paul in fact met only Peter and James, and Luke’s picture of Paul’s” going in and out among them at Jerusalem, preaching boldly in the name of the Lord ” (Acts ix. 28) is not easy to square with Paul’s own solemn assertion that he remained unknown by face to the Judaean churches (Gal. i. 22). To define these Judaean churches as excluding the church of Jerusalem is an unsatisfactory and fruitless expedient: it is his independence of Jerusalem throughout this formative phase of his apostleship that Paul is at pains to emphasize. Luke’s account of this Jerusalem visit follows fairly closely the pattern of Paul’s experience in Damascus, as he relates it: in Damascus “the Jews” plotted to kill him and “his disciples” procured his escape; in Jerusalem” the Hellenists” sought to kill him and ” the brethren ” got him down to Caearea and shipped him off to Tarsus.
The most ingenious (I wish I could say the most convincing) attempt to reconcile the two accounts which I have come across is that of L. E. Browne (a former Professor of Comparative Religion in our University). In his volume on Acts in the Indian Church Commentaries series he extrudes” at Jerusalem ‘- from Acts ix. 28 (against all textual evidence); verses 28 and 29 in that case do not record what happened to Paul at Jerusalem but are the contination of Barnabas’s relation to the apostles of what had happened to him at Damascus.20
On the other hand, Professor Pierson Parker in a recent paper cuts the Gordian knot by reaching the drastic conclusion that the Jerusalem visit of Acts ix. 26-30 did not in fact occur that the visit of Galatians i. 18-20 is the famine-relief visit of Acts xi. 30.21 But the famine-relief visit cannot be dated within such a short space of time as the three years of Galatians i. 18, whether they are reckoned from Paul’s conversion or from his return from Arabia to Damascus. Besides, the famine-relief visit was paid from Syrian Antioch to Jerusalem, whereas the Jerusalem visit of Galatians i. 18 ff. preceded Paul’s departure for ” the regions of Syria and Cilicia “. Luke may have had very little information about Paul’s first post-conversion visit to Jerusalem, but the visit he records in Acts ix. 26-30 did take place, and is to be identified with that of Galatians i. 18-20; according to both accounts it was from Damascus that Paul came to Jerusalem on this occasion and according to both accounts it was to Syria-Cilicia (the province in which Tarsus was situated) that he departed when he left Jerusalem.
(iv) His sojourn in Syria-Cilicia (Gal. i. 21-24)
Then I went to the regions of Syria and Cilicia. I remained unknown by face to the Christian churches of Judaea. They simply kept on hearing people say, ” Our former persecutor is now proclaiming the faith which once he laid waste ” ; and they glorified God on my account.
The regions to which Paul went from Palestine belonged to an area which at that time was one Roman province. From about 38 B.C. to A.D. 72 Syria and Cilicia Pedias (eastern Cilicia) were administered as a single province under a legaius pro praeiore. Whether the time Paul spent in these regions amounted to eleven years or fourteen (depending on whether the fourteen years of Galatlans ii. 1 are reckoned from his conversion or from his Jerusalem visit of Galatians i. 18), he was busily engaged, he tells us, in preaching the gospel, for news of his activity percolated south to the churches of Judaea. Two cities in “the regions of Syria and Cilicia ” are mentioned in this part of the Acts narrative-his native Tarsus, to which he was sent-by sea from Caesarea (Acts ix. 30), and Syrian Antioch, to which, some years later, Barnabas fetched him from Tarsus to co-operate with him in the direction of the flourishing Gentile· mission and church of the provincial capital (Acts xi. 25 f.).
It was from Antioch, according to Acts xi. 30, that Paul paid his next visit to Jerusalem, in company with Barnabas. It was with Barnabas, according to Galatians ii. 1, that he went up to Jerusalem on the occasion of his second post-conversion to that city, and the context indicates that it was from” the regions of Syria and Cilicia ” (of which Antioch was the chief city) that he went up.
(v) His second Jerusalem visit (Gal. ii. 1-10)
Then after the lapse of fourteen years I went up to Jerusalem again, together with Barnabas, and took Titus along too. I went up in accordance with revelation, and I communicated to them the gospel which I preach among the Gentiles privately, I mean, to the” men of repute “, lest perchance I should prove to be running, or to have run, in vain. But not even Titus, who was with me, Greek though he was, was compelled to be circumcised. (It was because of the false brethren who had been smuggled in [that this question later arose]. They infiltrated into our company to spy out the freedom which we have in Christ, in order to bring us into bondage. But to them we never submitted for a moment; our purpose was that the truth of the gospel should remain steadfast with you,) As for the” men of high repute “-it makes no difference to me what sort of men they were, for God has no favourites-these” men of repute “, I say, conferred nothing on me in addition to what was already mine. On the contrary, they saw that I had been entrusted with the gospel for the uncircumcision as Peter had been entrusted with it for the circumcision; for the same Lord who had empowered Peter for his apostleship among the circumcised had also empowered me for my apostleship to the Gentiles. So then, James, Cephas and John, the men of repute as ” pillars” among them, recognized the grace that had been bestowed on me, and shook hands with Barnabas and me as a token of fellowship, agreeing that we should concentrate on the Gentiles and they themselves on the circumcision. ” Only”, they urged us, ” please continue to remember the poor”; and in fact I had made a special point of attending to this very matter.
Like the two previous sections of Paul’s autobiographical sketch, this is introduced by Epeita, ” next” ; he is leaving out no material phase of his relations with Jerusalem. The ” revelation ” in accordance with which this second visit was paid cannot be certainly identified; it has been equated with the prophecy of Agabus (Acts xi. 28) or (as by Professor Manson22) With the utterance of the Spirit at Antioch directing that Barnabas an- Saul be set apart for special service (Acts xiii. 2), but it may quite well have been a special revelation to Paul. On this occasion, Paul says, he set before the Jerusalem ” pillars”,23 James, Peter and John (and it is noteworthy that lames is named first of the three) the gospel which he preached among the Gentiles, and his stated reason for so doing gives us pause: it was” lest perchance I should prove to be running, or to have run, in vain”.
This appears to amount to a recognition that, in default of the approval or fellowship of the Jerusalem leaders, Paul’s apostolic ministry would be futile. But why, if he was called to that ministry by unmediated commission from the risen Lord? It is not the validity of his service, but its practicability, that Paul is concerned about here: while he did not receive his commission from Jerusalem, it could not be effectively discharged except in fellowship with Jerusalem. A cleavage between the Jerusalem church and the Gentile mission would be disastrous for the cause of the gospel: Christ would be divided, and all the devotion with which Paul had thus far prosecuted, and hoped to prosecute, his apostolate to the Gentiles would be frustrated.
As it was, everything apparently turned out well at these conversations held by Paul and Barnabas with the Jerusalem leaders. The demarcation of the two mission fields was agreed upon amicably. But the agreement may have concealed some ambiguities, which came to light later and caused some tension between Paul and Jerusalem. It would ‘be interesting if the Jerusalem leaders had kept minutes of the conversations and these had been preserved for Us along with Paul’s record; we should then see if their interpretation of the agreement was identical with his.
(a) Was the demarcation quite unambiguous? Was it to be interpreted geographically or communally? In either case, it must have been difficult to define the boundaries of the two mission fields. Jews and Gentiles were to be found in practically every city in the eastern Mediterranean world. Were the Jerusalem leaders debarred from evangelizing the Jews of Ephesus, of Corinth, of Rome? Almost certainly this was not envisaged. But since the churches founded in due course in these cities comprised Jewish and Gentile converts alike, some dovetailing of the two spheres of missionary action was inevitable. Again, was Paul debarred from visiting synagogues in Gentile cities? Probably not. According to the narrative of Acts, it was in synagogues that he regularly found the nucleus of his churches-mainly in the companies of God-fearing Gentiles who habitually attended the services there. But here was another fruitful source of misunderstanding, unless entire mutual confidence was maintained between the two sides to the agreement.
(b) On hearing Paul’s account of these conversations, some might have said to him, ” So you did receive the recognition of the Jerusalem leaders! ” To which his reply would probably have been: “I did not receive their recognition as though my commission was previously defective without it; they recognized that I had already been called to this ministry, but they did not in any sense confer. on me the right to exercise it.” Paul and Barnabas had been energetically engaged for several years in Gentile evangelization, but whereas Barnabas. (according to Acts xi. 22) undertook this work in Antioch as commissioner of the Jerusalem church, Paul had been engaged in it long before Barnabas brought him to Antioch as his colleague in the work there. The nature of the recognition which Paul received on his second post-conversion visit to Jerusalem could easily have been misunderstood or misrepresented by anyone who was unable or unwilling to distinguish between various forms of recognition. Perhaps the Jerusalem leaders themselves would not have given precisely the same account of the matter as Paul does. In our more sophisticated days we are familiar with the device of deliberate ambiguity in ecclesiastical as in other agreements: what, for example, is the exact significance of the imposition of hands in the proposed Anglican-Methodist Service of Reconciliation? Such ambiguity as inhered in the Jerusalem agreement was probably not deliberate but inadvertent; but a study of Paul’s Corinthian correspondence may show us the kind of misunderstanding to which it could lead.
(c) As for the one condition which was pressed on Barnabas and Paul by the Jerusalem leaders, the continued remembrance24 of ” the poor “25-i.e. the continued provision of charitable help by the Gentile Christians for the Jerusalem church-Paul says that this was something of which he had made a special point,26 and this remark of his is illuminated by the Acts account of the relief sent by the church in Antioch at the time of the famine in Palestine under Claudius, the relief which was brought to Jerusalem by Barnabas and himself (Acts xi. 30). Ho-seriously Paul continued to “remember the poor” is seen from the important part which “the collection for the saints ” played in his apostolic programme when the Aegean phase of his ministry was about to be completed.27. But it is perfectly conceivable that here, too, misunderstanding arose: what Paul regarded as a voluntary gesture of Christian charity and fellowship may well have been viewed by the Jerusalem church as a tribute due to them from the Gentiles. 28
The reference to the famine-relief visit of Acts xi. 30 prompts the question whether this may not have been the visit during which the conversations of Galatians ii. 1-10 took place.29 To this question an affirmative answer should probably be given. In fact. I do not see how such an answer can be avoided, except on the unconvincing hypothesis that the famine-relief visit of Acts is a duplicate of the later visit of Acts xv30 (Luke having presumably relied on two sources without realizing that the account of a Jerusalem visit by Barnabas and Paul which each contained referred to one and the same visit and not, as -he thought, to two distinct visits). For if the famine-relief visit took place when Luke says it did. Paul’s apologetic purpose would have forbidden its being passed over in his present narrative of events.
One major difficulty in the way of -identifying the visit of Galatians ii. 1-10 with the famine-relief visit is removed when we see verses 4 and 5, where the raising of the circumcision question is mentioned. as a parenthesis. referring to a later development. and introduced here because Paul is reminded of this subsequent occasion by his reference to Titus and circum. cision.31 So far was the circumcision question from presenting any difficulty in the conversation with the Jerusalem leaders, he says, that although Titus. a Greek, was in Jerusalem with Barnabas and himself. no compulsion was brought to bear to have him circumcised. This issue, he adds in a sentence (verse 4) which lacks a principal clause (I have begged the question by supplying one within square brackets in my paraphrase on p. 302). became acute when “false brethren who had been smuggled in “. infiltrated into our company to spy out the freedom which we have in Christ. in order to bring us into bondage”. This development is best related to the statement in Acts xv. 1 that ” some people came down from Judaea [to Antioch] and were teaching the brethren. ‘ Unless you are circumcised according to the Mosaic custom. you cannot be saved ‘.” ” To them “, says Paul, “we never submitted for a moment; our purpose was that the truth of the gospel should remain steadfast with you.”
The Western omission of the negative in this last sentence (Galatians ii. 5). so that it reads” we submitted for a moment”. is either accidental or else reflects the exegesis of verse 3 according to which Titus was circumcised, not by compulsion but by con. cession (on Paul’s part)-on the principle of reculer pour mieux saufer. How the circumcision of a Gentile convert could have been imagined by anyone. especially by Paul. to help towards establishing the truth of the gospel of free grace is something which passes all understanding. F. C. Burkitt might ask, “who can doubt that it was the knife which really did circumcise Titus that has cut the syntax of Galatians ii. 3-5 to pieces? “32 butt this question. as to many others beginning with the rhetorical gambit ” Who can doubt “. ? “. the best answer is ” I can “; and so, it is evident. can many exegetes who have dealt with this passage.
That the question of circumcising Titus was not raised on the occasion of the second visit is quite consistent with the testimony of Acts: when Cornelius and his household believed the gospel they were baptized. but no one seems to have suggested that they should also be circumcised33; and although Peter had to defend his conduct when he returned from Caesarea to Jerusalem. his associates there. when they accepted his defence. did not say. ” Well, it is all right so long as they receive circumcision “. In Acts, as in Galatians. the question of circumcising Gentile believers did not arise until later. When it did arise. those who pressed it were steadfastly resisted by Paul and those who thought as he did: they did not wish the truth of the gospel to be corn. promised by an infusion of legalism.
(vi) The dispute with Peter at Antioch (Gal. ii. 11.14)
But when Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face. because he was manifestly condemned. He sat at table and ate with the Gentiles before some people came from James; but when they came he proceeded to draw back and separate himself, through fear of the circumcision party. The rest of the Jews who were there joined in this play-acting; matters went so far that even Bamabas was carried away into joining their play-acting. But when I saw that they were deviating from the straight path of gospel truth, I said to Cephas in front of them all: ” If you, Jew as you are, live in the Gentile and not the Jewish way, how is it that you try to compel the Gentiles to live like Jews? “
It is difficult to decide at what point Paul’s quotation of his rebuke to Peter comes to an end and passes into his general reflection on the principle involved.
The occasion of this dispute probably belongs to the period following Bamabas and Paul’s return to Antioch after their missionary tour of Cyprus and South Galatia. The circumstances were so convincingly reconstructed by Professor Manson in his lecture on this epistle in the John Rylands Library in 1940 that I need add but little to his words. He preferred the singular reading of Galatians ii. 12, according to which not “some people” but “someone” came from James and did or said something which made Peter suspend his practice of table fellowship with the Gentile Christians of Antioch and eat with Jewish Christians only. What this messenger said, Professor Manson suggested, was something like this : News has come to Jerusalem that you are eating Gentile food at Gentile tables, and this is causing great scandal to many devout brethren besides laying us open to serious criticism from the Scribes and Pharisees. Pray discontinue this practice, which will surely do great harm to our work among our fellow-country-men.34
The messenger (or messengers) from James, on this showing, did not belong to the “false brethren ” who tried to impose circumcision on Gentile converts. But the effect of such a policy as Peter was persuaded to adopt was not so different in practice from the cruder efforts of the “false brethren “-and this is certainly how Paul saw it. What for Peter was a temporary concession for the sake of peace, and perhaps also for the sake of avoiding offence to scrupulous brethren, was in Paul’s eyes a compromise of the basic principle of the gospel. For Peter to act thus, he reckoned, was play-acting (u`po,krisij), because his withdrawal from table fellowship with Gentiles did not reflect his personal convictions. We do well to recall Kirsopp Lake’s words: “The figure of a Judaizing St. Peter is a figment of the Tiibingen critics with no basis in history. “35 True, on this occasion Paul had to say to Peter, ” How is that you try to compel the Gentiles to judaize (i`oudai,zein) ? “-but Paul was the more indignant because he knew that Peter was not a judaizer by conviction or custom: rather, Jew by birth though he was, he habitually lived evqvikw/j and not ivoudai]kw/j-in the Gentile way, not the Jewish way-at least when he was in Gentile company, as Paul himself did. The Peter who in Acts eats in the house of the Gentile Cornelius in Caesarea, and is criticized by the circumcision party for so doing (Acts xi. 2), and the Peter who in Galatians eats with Gentiles in Antioch, and is criticized by the circumcision party for so doing, are not two Peters, but one. Whatever Peter’s motives may have been on this occasion, the effect of his withdrawal from table-fellowship with Gentiles must have been to make Gentile Christians think that they were regarded as at best second-class citizens in the church-that they were regarded, in fact, much as Gentile God-fearers were regarded by the synagogue. If the Gentile mission was to make progress, this situation must be cleared up. Such a situation as Paul describes in Galatians ii. 11 ff. is presupposed by the deliberations and decisions of the Jerusalem Council of Acts xv; Paul’s autobiographical outline takes us to the eve of the Council.
1 A lecture delivered in the John Rylands Library on Wednesday, the 13th of November 1968.
2 Harvard Theological Studies, xiv (Cambridge, Mass., 1929).
3 New York. 1950.
4 Cf. A. N. Sherwin-White. Roman Society and Roman Law in the New Testament (Oxford. 1963). p. 189: ” For Acts the confirmation of historicity is overwhelming. Yet Acts is. in simple terms and judged externally. no less of a propaganda narrative than the Gospels. liable to similar distortions. But any attempt to reject its basic historicity even in matters of detail must now appear absurd. Roman historians have long taken it for granted.”
5 Cf. E. Lohse, “Lukas als Theologe der Heilsgeschichte”, Evangelische Theologie, xiv (1954-5), 254 ff.; H. Flender, St. Luke: Tlreologian of Redemtive History, E. T. (London, 1967).
6 Acts xi. 28; at the end of Cuspius Fadus’s procuratorship of Judaea and the beginning of Tiberius Alexander’s procuratorship (Josephus, Ant., xx. 100 f.),
7 Acts xviii. 12; Gallio was proconsul during the period of Claudius’s 26th acclamation as imperator (W. Dessau, Sylloge lnscriptionum Graecarum ii.3 801). which appears to have covered the first seven months of A.D. 52 (CIL. iii. 476, vi. 1256). See now the discussion in G. Ogg, The Chronology of the Life of Paul (London, 1968), pp. 104 ff.
8 Acts xxiv. 27; cf. F. W. Madden, History of Jewish Coins (London, 1864), p. 153, for a change of Judaean coinage in that year.
9 Cf. the summary of his hardships in 2 Cor. xi. 23 ff.
10 Cf. J. T. Sanders, “Paul’s ‘Autobiographical’ Statements in Galatians 1-2 “, JBL, lxxxv (1966), 335 ff. The subordination of historical fact to theological aims in this situation would have defeated Paul’s purpose in writing.
11 Cf. I Cor. xv. 9; Phil. iii. 6.
12 “Judaea” here must include Jerusalem; see p. 300 below.
13 Cf. I Cor. xv. 9 f.
14 Lit. “in me” (evn evmoi,).
15 Cf” among other discussions of this expression. G. D. Kilpatrick”. Galatians I: 18 ivstorh/sai KhFa/n “. in New Testament Essays “. in Memory of T. W. Manson, ed. A. J. B. Higgins (Manchester. 1959). pp. 144ff.; W. D. Davies, The Setting of the Sermon on the Mount (Cambridge. 1964). pp. 453 ff.
16 Cf. I Cor. xi. 23 ff.; xv. 3 ff.
17 His receiving it by revelation (Gal. 1. 12) and his receiving it by tradition (I Cor. xv. 3) are both expressed by paralamba,nw.
18 Cf. O. Cullmann, The Early Church (London. 1956). for another explanation.
19 Cf. BULLETIN, xlv (1962.63), 329 f.
20 L. E. Browne, The Acts of the Apostles (London, 1925), pp. 160 ff.
21 “Once More, Acts and Galatians “, JBL, lxxxvi (1967), 175 ff.
22 T. W. Manson, ” The Problem of the Epistle to the Galatians “, BULLETIN xxiv (1940), 68, reprinted in Studies in the Gospels and Epistles (Manchester, 1962), p. 177.
23 Cf. C. K. Barrett, ” Paul and the ‘Pillar’ Apostles “, in Studia Paulina in honorem J. de Zwaan, ed. J. N. Sevenster and W. C. van Unnik (Haarle-1953), pp. 1 ff. ‘
24 This I take to be the force of the present tense in i[na mnhmonevu,wmen
25 Probably reflecting Heb. ha’ebyonim. the name (Ebionites) by which a considerable body of Jewish Christians continued to be known for many generations.
26 The aorist evspou,dasa may have pluperfect force; cf. C. W. Emmet in The Beginnings of Christianity, ed. F. J. Foakes Jackson and K. Lake. ii (London, 1922).279.
27 Cf. I Cor. xvi. 1-4; 2 Cor. viii. l-ix. 15; Rom. xv. 25-28; also Acts xxiv. 17.
28 Cf. K. Holl. Cesammelte Aufsätze, ii (Tiibingen, 1928),44-67.
29 SO J. Calvin. Commentary on Galatians (1548). E. T. (Edinburgh, 1965), p. 24, and many commentators since. The majority opinion equates this visit with that of Acts xv. 2 ff.; an outstanding instance is j. B. Lightfoot. The Epistle to the Galatians (London, 1890). pp. 125 f. J. Knox (Chapters in a Life of Paul. pp. 64 ff.) equates it with the visit of Acts xviii. 22; T. W. Manson (BULLETIN, xxiv. 68; Studies, p. 177) thinks of a visit unrecorded in Acts. paid immediately after the call of Acts xiii. 2.
30 Cf. j. Wellhausen, “Noten zur Apostelgeschichte”, Nachrichten von der kgl. Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Giiitingen, phil.-hist. Kl. (1907), pp. 1 ff.; E. Schwartz”. Zur Chronologie des Paulus “. ib. pp. 263 if.; K. Lake in The Beginnings of Christianity, v (London, 1933). 199 if. (At an earlier date Lake had accepted the identification of the visit of Galatians ii. 1-10 with the famine-relief visit; cf. The Earlier Epistles of St. Paul (London, 1911), pp. 297 if.)
31 Cf. T. W. Manson, BULLETIN, xxiv. 66 f.; Studies, pp. 175 f. B. Orchard. ” A New Solution of the Galatians Problem “, BULLETIN, xxviii (1944), 154 ff adopts a similar interpretation, but includes verse 3 in the parenthesis.
32 Christian Beginnings (London. 1924), p. 118. ” If he was circumcised. the fact would be well advertised in Galatia by Paul’s opponents. and the involved and stumbling verbiage of these verses would be worse than useless as camouflage For that nasty fact” (T. W. Manson. BULLETIN, xxiv. 66 f. ; Studies. pp. 175 f.).
33 Acts x. 44-48.
34 BULLETIN, xxiv. 69-72; Studies, pp. 178-81.
35 The Earlier Epistles of St. Paul, p. 116.
Chapter 2 - North or South Galatians?
The Epistle to the Galatians is so called because it is explicitly addressed ” To the churches of Galatia ” (Gal. i. 2) ; moreover, the addressees are apostrophized in the course of the letter: ” O foolish Galatians!” (Gal. iii. 1). The question before us is: Where were these churches and who were these Galatians? Should we locate them in the territory of the former kingdom of Galatia or somewhere else in the more extensive Roman province of Galatia, which included the former kingdom and much additional territory? Were the recipients of the letter Galatians in the ethnic sense, or only in the political sense, as inhabitants of the Roman province of that name?
I
The Greek word Gala,tai is a variant form of Ke,ltai or Kevltoi, ” Celts” (Latin Calli). When we first meet the Celts, they are resident in Central Europe, in the Danube basin. Some place-names in that area retain Celtic elements to the present day; Vienna (Latin Vindobona)2 is a good example. From the Danube basin they migrated in a westerly direction into Switzerland, South Germany and North Italy, and then into Gaul and Britain; they also migrated in a south-easterly direction and settled in North-Central Asia Minor, giving their name to their new homeland as they also did to Gaul (Latin Callia, Greek Galati,a). 3
Those Celts who migrated towards the south-east ravaged Thrace, Macedonia and Thessaly, and invaded Greece itself, but they got no further than Delphi, from which they were repulsed in 279 B.C. The following year (278-277 B.C.), a large body of them crossed the Hellespont into Asia Minor at the invitation of Nicomedes, king of Bithynia, who thought he could use their services against his enemies. For a generation they menaced their neighbours in Asia Minor, until a series of defeats at the hands of Attalus I, king of Pergamum (c. 230 B.C.), confined them within fixed limits, in territory which had formerly belonged to Phrygia. This territory, a broad strip of land stretching over 200 miles from south-west to north-east, between the longitudes of 31° and 35° E. and the latitudes of 39° and 40° 30′ N., was occupied by the three tribes of which the invading force consisted-the Tolistobogii in the west, with their centre at Pessinus,4 the Trocmi in the east, with their centre at Tavium, and the Tectosages between them, around Ancyra, which in due course became the capital of the kingdom of Galatia (as today, under its modern name Ankara, it is the capital of the Turkish Republic).5 Each tribe comprised four tetrarchies. The Galatians settled as overlords, with a subject population of Phrygians. As time went on they adopted the Phrygians’ religion and culture, but not their language. The Phrygian language died out in Galatia, whereas it survived for some centuries in the neighbouring Phrygian territories. The Galatian speech also survived for several centuries, although the Galatians inevitably came to use Greek as the language of commerce and diplomacy. 6
In 190 B.C. a body of Galatian mercenaries fought on the side of the Seleucid king Antiochus III against the Romans at the battle of Magnesia. Their presence attracted Roman reprisals against the Galatians, who were subdued the following year by the consul Manlius but were allowed to retain their independence under their own rulers on giving a pledge of good behaviour for the future.7
Henceforth Roman influence was paramount in Asia Minor, apart from the period (88-65 B.C.) during which Mithridates VI of Pontus dominated the peninsula. The Galatians quickly appreciated the wisdom of keeping on good terms with Rome. With Roman permission or connivance they augmented their territory during the second century B.C. They suffered severely under Mithridates because of their friendship with Rome, but when he was finally defeated by Pompey in 64 B.C. their loyalty was rewarded by Galatia’s receiving the status of a client kingdom, and so she remained for nearly forty years. When her last king, Amyntas, fell in battle against the warlike Homonades, who raided Galatia and other neighbouring states from their home base in the northern Taurus, Augustus reorganized the kingdom as an imperial province, governed by a legatus pro praetore (25 B.C.).8
By this time the kingdom of Galatia had expanded considerably beyond its original limits. In 36 B.C., for example, Mark Antony presented Amyntas with Iconium, a city of Phrygia, together with part of Lycaonia and Pamphylia.9 Some time after taking over Amyntas’s kingdom, Augustus reduced its size by transferring Eastern Lycaonia and Cilicia Tracheia, which it had included, to the sovereignty of his ally Archelaus, king of Cappadocia. Even so, the province of Galatia comprised much territory to the south which had never been ethnically Galatian Pisidia and the adjacent region which Strabo calls “Phrygia towards Pisidia “,10 with Isaurica and Western Lycaonia. Rome inherited from Amyntas the task of crushing the Homonades, who were a constant menace to ” Phrygia towards Pisidia” in particular. They were ultimately subjugated by P. Sulpicius Quirinius, governor of Galatia, in the years following 12 B.C.11
In 6 B.C. inland Paphlagonia, on the north, was added to the province of Galatia, as three or four years later were some areas to the north-east which had formerly belonged to Pontus. These latter areas were henceforth known as Pontus Galaticus.12 By analogy with this it has been inferred that (for example) those parts of Phrygia and Lycaonia which were included In the province were known respectively as Phrygia Galatica anLyc-onia Galatica, to distinguish them from that part of Phrygla which lay within proconsular Asia (Phrygia Asiana) and from Eastern Lycaonia (Lycaonia Antiochiana)13 which, from A.D. 37 to 40, and again from A.D. 41 onwards, belonged to Rome’s ally Antiochus IV, king of Commagene. These terms are convement enough, but without proper attestation we cannot assume confidently that they were part of the official Roman nomenclature.
In our period then Provincia Galatia stretched from Pontus on the Black Sea to Pamphylia on the Mediterranean.14 Paul’s ” churches of Galatia ” might theoretically have been situated anywhere within these limits. The question is: Were they situated in the original Galatian territory (” North “Galatia “) or in Phrygia Galatica and Lycaonia Galatica (” South Galatia “)? The latter alternative identifies them with the churches planted by Paul and Barnabas during their so-called first missionary journey {Acts xiii. 4-xiv. 26)-in the Phrygian cities of Pisidian Antioch (modern Yelvac) and Iconium (modern Konya) and In the Lycaonian cities of Lystra {modern Zoldera, near Hatunsarai)15 and Derbe {modern Devri $ehri, near Kerti Hiiyiik).16
II
The “North Galatian” hypothesis held the field almost unchallenged until the eighteenth century. That it should have been taken for granted in the patristic age was natural.17 In the second century (c. A.D. 137) Lycaonia Galatica was detached and united with Cilicia and Isaurica to form an enlarged province, and towards the end of the third century (c. 297) the remainder of South Galatia with some adjoining territories became a new province of Pisidia, with Pisidian Antioch as its capital and Iconium as its second city.18 The province of Galatia was thus reduced to North Galatia, and when the church fathers, in their study of our epistle, read of ” the churches of Galatia “, they understood ” Galatia ” without more ado in the sense familiar in their day. The Marcionite prologue to the Epistle to the Galatians does indeed begin with the surprising statement” Galatians are Greeks”; but this may simply mean that the recipients of the letter were Greek speaking-which could ‘be inferred from the fact that Paul wrote to them in Greek, not to mention the continuing designation Gallograecia. Whether in actual fact the inhabitants of the reduced province of Galatia in the Marcionite author’s day spoke Greek or Celtic is probably not a question in which he would have been greatly interested. The linguistic question, however, did interest one Latin commentator on Galatians. In the preface to the second book of his commentary on this epistle Jerome tells how, in addition to Greek, the Galatians of his day (later fourth century A.D.) spoke a vernacular which he recognized as similar to that which he used to hear at Trier, where he had stayed for some time in his early twenties.19 Whether indeed the Celtic of North Central Asia Minor and that spoken on the banks of the Moselle were mutually intelligible in Jerome’s time, when their speakers had been so far separated for six and a half centuries or more, may be doubted; Jerome may have recognized a resemblance between some words for specific objects or actions.
In the same preface Jerome quotes the Christian writer Caecilius Firmianus Lactantius as saying that the Galatians were so called because of the whiteness of their skin, as though their name was derived from Greek ga,la (” milk “)20 More has been made of his quotation from a poem by Hilary of Poitiers, of Gallic origin himself, in which the Gauls were described as “unteachable” (Latin indociles); “no wonder, then tt, says Jerome, “that the Galatians were called’ foolish’ and slow of understanding “.21
John Calvin in his commentary on Galatians (1548) followed his predecessors in holding the North Galatian view, but curiously combined it with the view that the epistle was written before the Jerusalem council of Acts xv.22 (He identified Paul and Barnabas’s Jerusalem visit of Gal. ii. 1 ff. with the famine-relief visit of Acts xi. 30.) One wonders when he supposed the evangelization of North Galatia to have taken place.
The first scholar known to us who held that the recipients of the Epistle to the Galatians at least included the churches planted by Paul and Barnabas on their first missionary journey appears to have been J. J. Schmidt23 in 1748, followed in 1825 by J. P. Mynster, whose position might be described as “PanGalatian ” rather than either North or South Galatian.24 In the nineteenth century (apart from its last decade) the South Galatian view was championed mainly by French scholars, such as Georges Perrot, who argued for it in De Galatia Provincia Romana (1867),25 and Ernest Renan, who assumed it rather than argued for it in his Saint Paul (1869).26 The majority of others continued to propound the North Galatian view, and among these others J. B. Lightfoot stands out with special distinction.27
Lightfoot’s commentary on Galatians first appeared in 1865 ; it remains a standard work which no student of the letter can afford to overlook-and there are not many commentaries over a hundred years old of which this sort of thing can be said. He recognized the ambiguity in the phrase” churches of Galatia “, but rejected the view that they were the churches of Pisidian Antioch, Iconium, Lystra and Derbe in favour of locating them at Ancyra, Pessinus and perhaps Tavium (possibly also at Juliopolis, the ancient Gordion). His arguments against the South Galatian view are mainly to the effect that the churches planted during Paul and Bamabas’ s first missionary journey are not called Galatian churches in Acts-but Luke’s usage is not necessarily Paul’s.28
His positive arguments for the North Galatian29 view include the consideration that the ” Galatic region ” of Acts xvi. 6 and xviii. 23 is most probably ethnic Galatia, that Paul’s two visits to the region mentioned in these passages coincide with his two visits to Galatia implied in Galatians iv. 13, and especially that the temperament of the Galatian Christians reRected in the letter harmonizes (a) with the testimonies to the fickleness of the Gauls found in classical authors {especially Caesar)30 and (b) with the fact that the Gauls were (Caesar again being witness) ” a superstitious people given over to ritual observances”31 and that Deiotarus, king of Galatia in the mid-first century B.C., was characterized by an “extravagant devotion to augury”.32
The weight laid by a scholar of Lightfoot’s calibre upon these alleged affinities between the recipients of Paul’s letter and the Celts known to Caesar and his contemporaries is surprising. Caesar is not an entirely objective witness where the Gauls are concerned and, for the rest, the argument seems to reduce itself to a syllogism of this order:
The Gauls were fickle and superstitious. Paul’s Galatians were fickle and superstitious. Therefore: Paul’s Galatians were Gauls.
The undistributed middle is not hard to recognize; the argument would be valid only if fickleness and superstition were not characteristic of other nations than the Gauls (and Galatians). We have to look no farther than the Galatians’ Phrygian neighbours for another well-known example, while Luke’s account of Paul’s adventure at Lystra suggests that fickleness and superstitution were not wanting among the Lycaonians.
III
Nevertheless, Lightfoot’s dismissal of the South Galatian view in favour of the traditional one was natural; when he wrote, the South Galatian view had not yet been placed on a sufficiently sound basis. The scholar by whom this was achieved was W. M. Ramsay (1851-1939), whose statement of the case in The Church in the Roman Empire (1893)33and A Historical Commentary on St. Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians (1899) was founded on his systematic survey of Central Asia Minor on the spot, coupled with his comprehensive and detailed study of epigraphy and classical literature.
Ramsay’s reputation as a scholar of the first rank (which he certainly was) suffered somewhat in the course of the years, largely by his own doing.34 The Ramsay of the 1880’s and 1890’s was a very great man, but the reputation which he deservedly established for himself in those two decades was in danger of being buried under the reputation for popular apologetic which he acquired after 1900. He was persuaded to keep on writing articles and books for a large, enthusiastic and uncritical public, and on occasion to pontificate (the word is not too strong) on subjects which really lay outside his field, as in his reviews of G. A. Smith’s Historical Geography of the Holy Land35 and James Moffatt’s Introduction to the Literature of the New Testament. 36 People who knew Ramsay only by his later writings got the idea that he need not be taken too seriously-although even in them the persevering reader will be rewarded by nuggets of pure gold, especially where the historical geography of Asia Minor is concerned.37
It was the early Ramsay who laid the archaeological foundation for the South Galatian hypothesis, and laid it so firmly that to many of his disciples it is no longer a mere hypothesis.38 When he began his exploration of Asia Minor he accepted (mainly on Lightfoot’s terms) the North Galatian view, as he also accepted F. C. Baur’s reconstruction of the course of primitive Christian history. He abandoned the one view, as he abandoned the other, by the compelling evidence of facts as he faced them in situ. The whole organization of Asia Minor in the first-century Roman Empire, he held-its administration and communications -pointed inexorably to the South Galatian destination of our epistle. In the preface to the fourth edition of The Church in the Roman Empire (1896) he tells his readers that they will find all the evidence for the South Galatian view in the first volume of his Cities and Bishoprics of Phrygia (1895), although the view is neither mentioned nor discussed there. But the solid evidence for the South Galatian view is contained in such studies as his Cities and Bishoprics of Phrygia and his earlier Historical Geography of Asia Minor (l890)-studies conducted with no thought of the Epistle to the Galatians or of establishing or demolishing any theory about its destination.
In these earlier works Ramsay carefully avoided appealing to the usual series of ambiguous arguments in favour of the South Galatian view.39 Such arguments are:
Paul habitually uses Roman imperial nomenclature-but then any inhabitants of the province of Galatia, including the ethnic Galatians, would have been ” Galatians ” to him.
Paul addresses his Galatians in Greek-but Greek would have been familiar in Ancyra and Pessinus at least.
Paul mentions Barnabas (Gal. ii. 1 if.), who was personally known to the South Galatians but not (so far as we can tell) to the North Galatians-but he mentions him also in 1 Corinthians ix. 6, and there is no evidence that he was personally known to the Corinthians.
Paul’s travel-companions in Acts xx. 4, who presumably were carrying their churches’ contributions to the Jerusalem fund, include South Galatians (Gaius of Derbe and Timothy of Lystra) but not North Galatians-but such an argument from silence is precarious (no Corinthian representative is named).
The presence of Jewish emissaries is more probable in South Galatia than in North Galatia-but they might make it their business to visit any city where Paul had planted a church.
Paul’s Galatians received him “as an angel of God” (Gal. iv. 14), which is a remarkable coincidence with his identification with Hermes by the Lystrans (Acts xiv. II if.)-but the coincidence is somewhat spoiled by the Lystrans later murderous attack on him (Acts xiv. 19).
He based his case rather on the facts of historical geography, coupled with his interpretation of Paul’s policy as one of concentration on the main roads and centres of communication in “” the Roman provinces. The main line along which Christianity advanced in Asia Minor was the road from Syria through the Cilician Gates to Iconium and Ephesus, and so across the Aegean. There were two subsidiary lines: one following the land route by Philadelphia to Troas, and so across to Philippi and the Egnatian Way, and the other leading north from the Cilician Gates by Tyana and Cappadocian Caesarea to Amisos on the Black Sea. These are in fact the principal lines of penetration from the Cilician Gates into the peninsula, and none of them led through ethnic Galatia. The southern side of the Anatolian plateau was more important than the northern under the earlier Roman Empire; the full development of the northern side did not take place until Diocletian transferred the centre of imperial administration to Nicomedeia in A.D. 292. In Ramsay’s view, the South Galatian hypothesis was the one which agreed best with the facts of the historical geography of Asia Minor.40
The North Galatian case, however, has never lacked defenders, especially in Germany, but few of these have dealt adequately with Ramsay’s positive arguments. Among those who have dealt with them most seriously were P. W. Schmiedel, in the section which he contributed to the article ” Galatia” in the Encyclopaedia Biblica (1901),41 and J. Moffatt, in his Introduction to the Literature of the New Testament (1911).42 Moffatt’sarguments are about the weightiest ever presented for the North Galatian view after Ramsay’s presentation of the evidence for South Galatia.43 He appreciates the weakness of some traditional arguments for North Galatia-e.g. the appeal to the Galatians’ alleged fickleness-and points out some weaknesses in Ramsay’s case. Did Paul always follow the main roads and evangelize the principal centres of communication? Then what took him to Lystra and Derbe? In Ramsay’s own words: “How did the cosmopolitan Paul drift like a piece of timber borne by the current into this quiet backwater?’44 On the other hand, -, Ancyra in North Galatia, the provincial seat of administration, was, on Ramsay’s own showing, ” one of the greatest and most splendid cities of Asia Minor”.45
Even so, many of Moffatt’s arguments, like Schmiedel’s before him, and Lightfoot’s still earlier, concern the interpretation of Acts and not of our epistle, like the argument that Luke’s “Galatic region” is ethnic Galatia, as against Ramsay’s view that the” Phrygian and Galatic region ” of Acts xvi. 6 is Phrygia Galatica and the ” Galatic region ” of Acts xviii. 23 Lycaonia Galatica. Moffatt admits that this is so: “Luke’s usage, it may be retorted, is not decisive for Paul. This is perfectly true, but Paul’s use of Galati,a corresponds to the inferences from Acts.”46
To the evidence of Acts we must now turn.
IV
The issue of the destination of the Epistle to the Galatians is strictly independent of the references to Galatian territory in Acts. Granted that Paul usually adopts Roman provincial nomenclature-as when, for example, he repeatedly refers to Achaia in the Roman sense, as including Corinth, and not in the traditional Greek sense, of a territory in the North-Western Peloponnese, to which Corinth did not belong-it might be argued that Luke prefers the more popular geographical terms and so would use Galatia in the ethnic sense.47 But what are the facts?
There are two relevant passages in Acts. The first is in Acts xvi. 6, where Paul and Silas, having journeyed on their westward way from Syria and the Cilician Gates through Derbe and Lystra and co-opted Timothy as their travelling companion at the latter place, “went through the Phrygian and Galatic region (th.n Frugi,n kai. Galatikh.n cw,ran),48 having been forbidden by the Holy Spirit to speak the word in Asia.” Accordingly, instead of proceeding west to Ephesus, “they came opposite Mysia (katav thn Musivan)49 and attempted to go into Bithynia, but the Spirit of Jesus did not allow them, so, passing by Mysia, they came down to Troas “-and from there crossed over to Macedonia. Where, having regard to this fairly detailed itinerary, should we locate the” Phrygian and Galatic region “through which the missionary party passed after receiving the prohibition to evangelize Asia? Ramsay, as we have seen, identified it with Phrygia Galatica the part of Phrygia included within the province of Galatia, Strabo’s ” Phrygia towards Pisidia”. Lightfoot’s suggestion was that it denoted ethnic Galatia, because that area had once been Phrygian (before the second half of the third century B.C.) but had subsequently become Galatian.50 But such an antiquarianism is uncharacteristic of Luke. Kirsopp Lake, who in his Earlier Epistles of St. Paul (1911) had followed Ramsay’s interpretation,51 reviewed the evidence afresh for his note on ” Paul’s route in Asia Minor” in volume V of The Beginnings of Christianity, Part I (1933) and concluded that the most probable explanation was that Paul, instead of going west from Iconium along the Lycus and Maeander valleys,
went north through Phrygia and territory where Galatians were numerous. If this view be accepted ” Phrygian and Galatian country” means territory in which sometimes Phrygian and sometimes Gaelic52 was the language of the villagers. His route may have been through Laodicea, Amorion,. and Orkistos (surely a Gaelic place)53 to Nakoleia and perhaps to Dorylaeum. Either Nakolela or Dorylaeum might be said to be katav thvn Musivan. He was also on the direct road to Nicaea, and certainly from Nakoleia and probably from Dorylaeuthere was a straight road to Troas, ” skirting” Mysia-if that be the meaning of parelqwvn. In one or the other of these places he was once more prevented by revelation from working as he had intended-this time in Bithynia-and so he turned to the left and went through Mysia to Troas.54
This route, as Lake remarks, does not differ substantially from that postulated by Ramsay, apart from the interpretation of the” Phrygian and Galatic region “. But the aspect in which it does differ from Ramsay’s comes to grief on the hard facts. The frontier between Galatic Phrygia and ethnic Galatia has been delimited much more precisely than it was in Ramsay’s day55; it ran due west from a point near the northernmost part of Lake Tatta (Tuz Gölü) to Orkistos (where the Sangarius divided the province of Asia from the province of Galatia}-say from 32° 50′ E. and rather north of 39° N. Since Paul’s plan, according to Acts xv. 36, was to visit all the cities which he and Barnabas had evangelized in South Galatia a year or two earlier, he and his companions probably intended to travel west from Lystra through Iconium and Pisidian Antioch. The prohibition against preaching in Asia was probably communicated at Lystra56 : the Pastoral Epistles contain reminiscences of prophetic utterances given on the occasion when Timothy joined the apostolic company.57 Now they had to follow some other road than that which led to Ephesus, but it was necessary to go on to Iconium in any case. If by this time they thought of Bithynia they could cut out Pisidian Antioch and take the road to Phrygia Paroreios (the territory lying north and south of the range of Sultan Dag), or they could go on to Pisidian Antioch and reach Phrygia Paroreios from there by crossing Sultan Dag. In either case they would arrive at Philomelium. Leaving Philomelium by either of two possible routes for the north-west they passed at once into Phrygia Asiana: they would not touch ethnic Galatia or pass through any village where the Celtic language would be heard.
The ” Phrygian and Galatic region ” cannot be understood in the sense suggested by Lake: it can only mean the territory through which Paul and his friends passed after leaving Lystra. the territory in which Iconium and Pisidian Antioch were situated. Even if they by-passed both these cities and made straight for Mysia after receiving the divine monition at Lystra. they would still have crossed from Lycaonia Galatica into Phrygia Galatica and continued in the latter region until they reached the frontier of the province of Asia. To reach a road which would take them through territory where the Phrygian and Celtic tongues would both be heard. they would have had to go straight north from Lystra until they reached the latitude of 39° N. (without hearing a word of Celtic) and then turn west through a series of villages. remote from any contact with city life. There indeed they would have heard Phrygian on their left and Celtic on their right. But why should Paul make a detour to visit such a district ” unless he had a prophetic vision of what Lake was going to say in the fulness of time. and some interest in proving him right?”58
The narrative of Acts xv. 41-xvi. 8 is certainly more intelligible if the” Phrygian and Galatic region ” is that part of Phrygia included in the province of Galatia. Although there were naturally lines of communication linking the various regions of the province. the cities of North Galatia were not readily accessible from the road leading from the Cilician Gates through Lystra ; as the countryman told a perplexed motorist who asked his way to a certain place ” If I were going there, it’s not here I’d be starting from “. so we may say that anyone proposing to evangelize North Galatia would have been better advised to set out from some other place than Lystra.
The second passage in Acts which is relevant to our subject is xviii. 23. where Paul, having paid a hasty visit to Palestine after his Corinthian ministry (probably in the summer of A.D. 52). returned to the west to begin his evangelization of Ephesus and ” went from place to place through the Galatic region and Phrygia (thvn Galatikhvn xwvran kai. fruli.an). strengthening all the disciples “. It may be that by this geographical phrase Luke means much the same as the ” Phrygian and Galatic region ” of Acts xvi. 6. Ramsay thought the ” Galatic region ” of Acts xviii. 23 was Galatic Lycaonia. in distinction from that part of Lycaonia which belonged to the kingdom of Commagene (Lycaonia Antiochiana}.59 but this is uncertain. The” Galatic region ” might be Galatic Lycaonia and Galatic Phrygia while “Phrygia” on this occasion could include Asian Phrygia. The reference to Paul’s ” strengthening all the disciples” indicates that he was not pioneering but retracing his former footsteps. If the expression in Acts xvi. 6 could cover ethnic Galatia. so could the expression in Acts xviii. 23; if ethnic Galatia is excluded from the former passage. it is excluded here too. It is simplest to understand Acts xviii. 23 in the sense of Paul’s passing once more through Derbe. Lystra. Iconium and Pisidian Antioch. In Acts xix. 1 he is said to have passed through ” the upper country” (ta. avnwterika. me,rh) on his way to Ephesus. More or less any part of inland Asia Minor could have been called “the upper country” in relation to Ephesus: here the reference may be to the road leading due west from Pisidian Antioch. reaching Ephesus by the north side of Mount Messogis. instead of the main road farther south following the Lycus and Maeander valleys.
V
Other New Testament references to Galatia or the Galatians can be disposed of quickly. The” churches of Galatia ” which, according to 1 Corinthians xvi. 1, had received Paul’s instructions about the collection for Jerusalem, are no doubt identical with the” churches of Galatia” addressed in Gal. i. 2. If Paul’s companions on his last journey to Jerusalem (Acts xx. 4) were the delegates of the contributing churches. it may be relevant that they include two South Galatians. Gaius of Derbe60 and Timothy (of Lystra), but no North Galatians; as has been said above, however, the list of companions may not be exhaustive.61
The ” Galatia ” to which Crescens was sent by Paul (2 Tim. iv. 10) is not easily identified; its significance is the more complicated because of the variant (but improbable) reading” Gaul ” (Galli,an for Galati,an).62
As for ” Galatia ” in 1 Peter i. 1, that seems to denote the province in general, as it is named along with other Anatolian provinces-Pontus, Cappadocia, Asia and Bithynia-as an area in which “exiles of the dispersion” (i.e. Christians) lived. 63
VI
The debate on the location of Paul’s Galatians does not appear to be carried on today as seriously as it once was. R. M. Grant holds that in general ” Acts does not assist us in locating these churches”64 but suggests that the Spirit’s prohibition in Acts xvi. 6 ” may well be a theological expression of one aspect of Paul’s illness “65 which, according to Galatians iv. 13, occasioned Paul’s first visit to Galatia. We have been accustomed to hearing the argument pressed against the South Galatian view that there is no hint in Acts xiii. 13 ff. that Paul was ill when he first visited Pisidian Antioch and the other cities of Galatic Phrygia and Lycaonia, and the answer readily presented itself that equally there is no hint of illness in the record of his passing through the Phrygian and Galatic region of Acts xvi. 6. But the force of this answer (negative as it was) is now threatened. Even so, Dr. Grant’s interpretation of the Spirit’s prohibition is no more probable than Ramsay’s suggestion that Paul went up from the Pamphylian coast to the highlands of Pisidian Antioch (3,600 feet above sea level) because of an attack of malaria (which he identified with the ” thorn in the flesh” of 2 Cor. xii. 7).66 Dr. Grant’s understanding of the Spirit’s prohibition in the light of Gal. iv. 13, along with the unlikelihood that Paul would address as” Galatians ” (Gal. iii. I) people who spoke Lycaonian (Acts xiv. 11),67 leads him to conclude “that the letter was addressed to a group of communities near Ancyra “68-a conclusion which is sustained with difficulty when the journey of Acts xv. 41-xvi. 8 is plotted on the map.
It is disquieting to see how superficially the North Galatian hypothesis is defended by many of its champions nowadays, when we think of the careful arguments adduced by scholars of two and three generations ago-especially disquieting to see how little attention is paid to the relevant data of historical geography. Thus in Willi Marxsen’s Introduction to the New Testament we read: ” If Paul meant by ‘Galatia ‘ the Roman province, he could have been in the southern part of the province even on the first missionary journey-although not in the’ region of Galatia ” as Acts always calls it.”69 This implies that the Galatikh. cw,ra expression which occurs but twice in Acts (xvi. 6, xviii. 23)can refer only to ethnic Galatia; in fact the adjective Galatiko,j (Latin Galaticus) is well attested for those regions of the province which were not ethnically Galatian,70 and also for the province as a whole,71 but not at this period for ethnic Galatia.72
Dr. Marxsen continues: “The South Galatian hypothesis, however, is extremely improbable.” In support of this statement three arguments are adduced:
I. “The assertion that is often made, that Paul always uses the names of the Roman provinces, is incorrect.”73
If anyone said that Paul always uses the names of the Roman provinces, he would be imprudent; the fact is that Paul normally uses them. There may be deviations from this norm, but they will be recognizable deviations, and the burden of proof lies on those who understand Galati,a and Gala,tai in his writings in another than the provincial sense.
2. “Besides, Paul would hardly have been able to say in i. 21, Then I came into the regions of Syria and Cilicia ” for this is the Pauline parallel to the first missionary journey in Acts. According to the South Galatian hypothesis he must have founded the Galatian churches at that time but there is no mention of this.”
This argument seems to imply that Paul might have included the churches of Pisidian Antioch, Iconium, Lystra and Derbe in “the regions of Syria and Cilicia”74 (if Acts xiii-xiv rightly makes him evangelize these cities at this stage), but not those which he calls “the churches of Galatia “; the latter would therefore be different from the four churches of Acts xiii-xiv and be located in North Galatia. That Paul would have included the South Galatian churches in “the regions of Syria and Cilicia” is incredible; but it was argued in the preceding lecture in this series that Galatians i. 21 is parallel, not to the” first missionary journey” of Acts xiii-xiv but to the interval between Acts ix. 31 and xi. 30, when Paul was active first in Tarsus and then in Antioch-the two leading cities of the united province of Syria ” Cilicia.75
3. ” Finally it seems unlikely that Paul would address the inhabitants of Pisidia and Lycaonia as Galatians’ (iii. 1: 0 foolish Galatians ‘). This can only be a racial term and cannot refer to the inhabitants of a Roman administrative district.”
This argument, which is sometimes reinforced by the consideration that to address Christians who were not ethnic Galatians as “Galatians” would be psychologically disastrous,76 will hardly stand up to investigation. What comprehensive term could have been used (other than “Galatians “) to address Pisidians (or rather Phrygians) and Lycaonians together? We may reflect that the one comprehensive term which is acceptable when Englishmen, Welsh, Cornish and Scots are referred to or addressed together is ” British “, which “ethnically” is appropriate only to the Welsh and Cornish (and the Bretons, who are part of another political unit). The name Britain, or Great Britain, to denote our whole island, is a political expedient; yet Highland and Lowland Scots would much rather be called British (which they are not” ethnically”) than English (which is applicable to them only linguistically, and even so is unacceptable).
If Paul’s readers found anything objectionable in being called ” foolish Galatians”, the objection arose from the adjective ” foolish” rather than from the substantive ” Galatians “.
If they were South Galatians, some of them lived in Phrygia and some in Lycaonia, and in addition to Phrygians and Lycaonians they included Jews, Greeks and perhaps Romans (since Pisidian Antioch was a Roman colony). The one political feature which they shared in common was their residence within the frontiers of the province of Galatia; the only single political term that could be applied to them all was Galatians. Ramsay’s judgment may be quite soundly based: ” I can entertain no doubt that about A.D. SO the address by which an orator would most please the Iconians, in situations where the term Iconians ‘ was unsuitable, was a=ndrej Gala,tai gentlemen of the Galatic province’.”78 Even” Phrygians ” might not have been very acceptable to the Iconians, because of its currency in a sense practically synonymous with ” slaves” or ” cowards “79 (and it would have been in every way inapplicable to the people of Lystra and Derbe). As for the people of Pisidian Antioch, they might well have preferred the designation ” Galatians ” to either ” Phrygians ” or ” Pisidians “, for if ” Phrygians ” was tantamount to ” slaves ” or ” cowards “, ” Pisidians ” (which the people of Antioch were not in any case) would have been little better than” barbarians “.
W. G. Kiimmel’s Introduction to the New Testament, in which the North Galatian destination is upheld, similarly lays weight on the reference to ” the regions of Syria and Cilicia ” in Gal. i. 21 and the address” 0 foolish Galatians” in Gal. iii. 180 ; but the defence of the North Galatian hypothesis deserves weightier arguments than these.
In fact, more recent statements of the North Galatian case represent no advance on Lightfoot and fall short of the statements of Schmiedel and Moffatt. This may be due in some measure to the fashion of paying more attention to the style of Luke’s narrative than to the narrative itself81; besides, if the narrative is regarded as a partly fictitious and in any case idealized construction by a writer of a later generation, detailed study of its historical geography is not of the first relevance. Against this fashion it must be reiterated and underscored that Luke’s narrative is true to its dramatic date,82 and in this regard the study of its historical geography is of the utmost importance.
In recent years especially there has tended to be a correlation between acceptance of the South Galatian view and a high estimate of the historical reliability of Acts, on the one hand, and between acceptance of the North Galatian view and a more sceptical assessment of Acts on the other. This correlation may be little more than coincidental: it is neither necessary nor deliberate. An exception is provided by R. H. Fuller’s Critical Introduction to the New Testament in the Duckworth series. There, as in the identically entitled volume by A. S. Peake which Dr. Fuller’s work has replaced,83 the South Galatian view is adopted but (in contrast to Peake’s treatment) there is a lower estimate of the historical value of Acts. ” The motive, conscious or unconscious, behind the North Galatian theory”, says Dr. Fuller, ” seems to be the desire to avoid making Gal. the earliest Pauline letter”.84 This is doubtful, because by no means all South Galatianists make Galatians the earliest Pauline letter: those who infer from the reference to the ” former” or ” first ” visit (to. pro,teron) in Galatians iv. 13 that Paul had visited the South Galatian churches twice before he wrote to them must date his letter after Acts xvi. 6. Dr. Fuller undertakes to satisfy the North Galatianists’ difficulty by taking the first missionary journey of Acts as a duplicate of the second, so that Paul’s visit to South Galatia in Acts xvi. 1-6 was really his first (after the Council of Jerusalem), and the visit of Acts xviii. 23 was his second. Galatians is then dated during Paul’s Ephesian ministry.
But this dating of the epistle is independent of Or. Fuller’s view of the structure of Acts: it was held, for example, by T. W. Manson, who accepted Luke’s narrative of the first and second missionary journeys as it stands.85
VII
The question of the North or South Galatian destination of our epistle is not one in which it is proper to take up partisan attitudes or indulge in dogmatic assertions; and it ill becomes champions of either view to disparage the rival view of those who maintain it. The fact that so many competent scholars can be cited in support of either position suggests that the evidence for neither is absolutely conclusive. But the weight of the evidence, it seems to me, favours the South Galatian view. If the Epistle to the Galatians was indeed addressed to the churches of Pisidian Antioch, Iconium, Lystra and Oerbe, then we have important historical, geographical, literary and epigraphic data which will provide material for its better understanding.
1 A lecture delivered in the John Rylands Library on Wednesday, the 12th of November 1969.
2 The first element is Celtic *windos, ” white” (cf. Welsh gwyn, Gaelic fiann).
3 Livy (Hist., xxxviii. 12), Strabo (Geog., xii. 5. 1) and other writers give Ga1atia the alternative name Gallagraecia (i.e. the land of the Greek-speaking Gauls).
4 Pessinus was not occupied by the Galatians until after 205 B.C. When in that year the Romans, through the good offices of the Pergamene king Attalus I, sent to procure the image of the Magna Mater from Pessinus, it was still a Phrygian city (Livy, Hisi., xxix. 11, 14).
5 Polybius, Hisi., v. 77 f., I11 ; Livy, Hisi., xxxviii. 16; Strabo, Geog., xii. 5. 1-4.
6 Cf. W. M. Calder, Monumenia Asiae Minoris Antiqua, vii (Manchester, 1956), p. xv.
7 Polybius, Hisi., xxii. 16; Livy, Hisi., xxxviii. 12 if.
8 Dio Cassius, Hisi., liii. 26. 3.
9 Dio Cassius, Hisi., xlix. 32. About 400 B.C. Xenophon calls Iconium ” the last city of Phrygia ” (Anabasis, i. 2. 19). About A.D. 70 Pliny (Nai. Hisi., v. 41) lists it (under the name Conium) among the most famous towns of Phrygia, although elsewhere (ii. 25) he assigns it to Lycaonia, as do many writers from Cicero onwards. About A.D. 163 Hierax, one of Justin Martyr’s co-defendants, describes himself as a slave “tom away from Iconium in Phrygia ” (Acts 0f fusiin 3). W. M. Calder thought that Eivonion was a later form invented by etymologizing Greeks in place of an earlier Ko,nion, reflecting Phrygian Kawania (“Corpus Inscriptionum Neo-Phrygiarum”, fHS, xxxi (1911), 189, n.48).
10 Strabo, Geog., xii. 8. 13: h` pro,j Pisidi,an [Frugi,a]
11 Ibid. xii. 6.5; cf. R. Syme, ” Galatia and Pamphyha under Augustus , Klio, xxvii (1934), 122 ff. .
12 E.g. in CIL, iii. 6818 Pontus Galaticus (distinguished from Pontus Polemomanus) is specified in a list of the regions over which the legate of Galatia exercised command.
13 .CIL, v. 8660.
14 Cf. Pliny, Nat. Hist., v. 147: “Galatia touches on Caballa.Pamphyha.
15 Cf. M. H. Ballance, Monumenta Asiae Minoris Antiqua, Vlll (Manchester, 1962), pp. xi ff.
16 Cf. M. H. Ballance, “The Site of Derbe: A New Inscription “, Anatolian Studies, vii (1957), 147 ff.; “Derbe and Faustinopolis “, Anatolian Studies, xiv (1964), 139 ff.; G. Ogg, “Derbe”, New Testament Studies, ix (1962-3), 367 ff.
17 Asterius, bishop of Amaseia in Pontus (died A.D. 410), seems to understand ” the Galatic region and Phrygia ” of Acts xviii. 23 as meaning ” Lycaonia and the cities of Phrygia ” (Homilia VIII in SS Petrum et Paulum; Migne, Patrologia Graeca, xl. 293 D). W. M. Ramsay thought he represented a persisting although scantily attested South Galatian tradition (” The ‘Galatia’ of St. Paul and the ‘Galatic Territory’ of Acts “, Studia Biblica et Ecclesiastica, iv (Oxford, 1896), 16 ff.). See p. 259 below.
18 Cf. W. M. Calder, ” A Hellenistic Survival at Eucarpia “, Anatolian Studies, vi (1956), 49 ff. In New Testament times” Pisidian Antioch” (cf. Acts xiii. 14, ‘Antio,ceian th.n Pisidi,an) was so called not because it was in Pisidia but because it was, as Strabo calls it (Geog., xii. 6. 4), ” Antioch near Pisidia ” (th.n . . . `Anti,xeian . . . th.n proj Pisidi,a ). The later reading of Acts xiii. 14, “Antioch of Pisidia” (‘Antio,ceian th/j Pioidi,as , interpreted by A.V. as ” Antioch in Pisidia “), reflects the fourth-century situation.
19 In Gal. ii, praef. (Migne, Patrologia Latina, xxvi, 382 C).
20 Ibid. 379 B-C.
21 Ibid. 380 C.
22 The Epistles of Paul the Apostle to the Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians and Colossians, E. T. by T. H. L. Parker (Edinburgh and London, 1965), pp. 24 f.
23 Cf. W. G. Kiimmel, Introduction to the New Testament, E.T. (London, 1965), p. 192.
24 I.e. he propounded what Kiimmel (Ioc. cit.) prefers to call the Provinz hypothese as against the Landscha/tshypothese (Kleine Theologische Schri/ten, Copenhagen, 1825).
25 De Galatia Provincia Romana (paris, 1867), pp. 43 f.
26 E.T., Saint Paul (London, 1890), pp. 24 ff., 63 f., 169 f., 173.
27 Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians (London, 1865). See also his criticism of Renan in his Saint Paul’s Epistles to the Colossians and to Philemon (London, 1875), pp. 25 f., n. 2.
28 Lightfoot, Galatians]O (London, 1890), pp. 19 ff.
29 Ibid. pp. 20 ff.
30 Caesar, De Bello Gallico, ii. I, iv. S; cf. Hilary’s description of them as indociles (p. 248 above).
31 De Bello Gallico, vi. 16.
32 Lightfoot, Galatians10, p. 16, referring to Cicero, De Diuinatione, i. 5, ii. 36 f.
33 The Church in the Roman Empire5 (London, 1897), pp. xii f., 8 ff., 97 ff.
34 Cf. W. F. Howard, The Romance of New Testament Scholarship (London, 1949), pp. 138fi. ; W. W. Casque, Sir William M. Ramsay (Grand Rapids, 1966), pp. 7 f., 62 f.
35 In Luke the Physician and Other Studies in the History of Religion (London, 1908), pp. 267 ff., reprinted from The Expositor, Series S, i (l89S), pp. 55 ff. In this review Ramsay makes the acute point that different strata in an Old Testament document may reflect not different times but different places, thus anticipating an argument stated more fully and precisely fifty-five years later by A. R. Johnson, The Vitality of the Individual in Ancient Israel (Cardiff, 1949), p. 3.
36 W. M. Ramsay, The First Christian Century (London, 1911); see critique by 1. Denney, Letters to W. Robertson Nicoll (London, 1920), p. 182; Letters to his Family and Friends (London, 1922), p. 161.
37 Cf. his St. Paul the Traveller and the Roman Citizen (London, 1897 ; 141920) ; The Letters to the Seven Churches 0f Asia (London, 1904); The Cities of St. Paul (London, 1907); also The Thousand and One Churches, in collaboration with Gertrude Bell (London, 1909), of which J. Denney’s impression was that they had ” baked a huge cake with very little meal ” (Letters to W. Robertson). Nicoll, p. ISO). His last contribution to scholarly literature was the posthumously published The Social Basis of Roman Power in Asia Minor (Aberdeen, 1941).
38 Cf. J. A. Findlay, ” It is significant that all those who know the geography of Asia Minor well are •South Galatianists ‘ to a man ” (The Acts of the Apostles (London, 1934), p. 166).
39 He lists ten (including the six mentioned here) in The Church in the Roman Empire5, pp. 97 ff.
40 The Church in the Roman Empire5, pp. 10 f.; cf. Historical Geography of Asia Minor (London, 1890), pp. 197 ff.
41 Sections 8-13, following on W. J. Woodhouse’s defence of the South Galatian view in sections 5-7.
42 J. Moifatt, Introduction to the Literature of the New Testament3 (London, 1918), pp. 90 if. Moffatt commends, in addition to Schmiedel’s treatment, the defence of the North Galatian view in U A. Steinmann’s thoroughgoing essays on Die Abfassungszeit des Galaterbriefes (1906) and Der Leserkreis des Galaterbrie!es (1908) “.
43 One may justly take exception to Moifatt’s remark that the identification of the Jerusalem visits of Acts xi. 30 and Gal. ii. 1 if. has found favour with several South Galatian advocates in their manipulation of the Lucan narratives” (Introductions, p. 102)-the word ” manipulation” conveys an unworthy innuendo.
44 Ramsay, The Cities of St. Paul, p. 408 (in reference to Lystra).
45 Moifatt, Int10duction3, p. 97; cf. Ramsay’s words: U Ancyra was quite a Romanized city, civilized and rich” (Hastings’ Dictionary of the Bible, ii, Edinburgh, 1899, s.v. “Galatia “, p. 84). But the earliest clear reference to Christianity at Ancyra is dated A.D. 192 (Eusebius, Hist. Eccl., v. 16.3), although it had no doubt been planted there a century earlier. Indeed, Ramsay himself, interpreting an entry in the early Syriac Martyrology with the aid of a Byzantine milestone inscription at Barata in Lycaonia, argued (somewhat precariously) for a large-scale martyrdom of Christians at Ancyra at the end of the first century A.D. or the beginning of the second (U Two Notes on Rdigious Antiquities in Asia Minor: I. Gaianus, Martyr at Ancyra of Galatia”, Expository Times, xxi (1909-10),64 f.).
46 Introduction3, p. 94.
47 Paul was not reverting to Homeric usage, in which all the Greeks are Achaians. Luke uses Achaia” in Acts xviii. 12 where he reproduces Gallio’s official title, but “Greece” in Acts xx. 2.
48 The non-repetition of the article before Galatikh.n cw,pan (except in the Byzantine text) suggests that this, and not ” Phrygia and the Calatic region “, is the proper translation. fru.lioj appears as an adjective of both two and three terminations; for the construction cf”. the Ituraean and Trachonitid region ” of Luke iii. 1.
49 ” When they had reached such a point that a line drawn across the country at right angles to the general line of their route would touch Mysia” -say, Church in the Roman Empires, p. 75 n.); W. M. Calder suggests In the latitude of Mysia ” (letter dated 18 February 1953).
50 Galatians10, p. 22; he recognized that Frulivan and Galatikhvn were both adjectives qualifying cwvran (cf. his Colossians, p. 23).
51 The Earlier Epistles of St. Pau12 (London, 1914), pp. 255 H.
52 He means Gallic or Galatian; Gaelic is a -Celtic language, whereas Gallic was P-Celtic.
53 Presumably taking it as cognate with Latin porcus, with normal Celtic loss of Indo-European *P (?cf. Orcades, ” Orkneys “). But Orkistos was Phrygian-speaking (cf. Calder in Monumenta Asiae Minoris Antiqua, vii, p. x).
54 The Beginnings of Christianity, ed. F. J. Foakes Jackson and K. Lake, I, v (London, 1933), 236.
55 Cf. W. M. Calder, ” The Boundary of Galatic Phrygia “, Monumenta Asiae Minoris Antiqua, vii, pp. ix ff.
56 Ramsay unnecessarily followed Lightfoot (Biblical Essays, London, 1893, p. 237) in adopting the inferior Byzantine reading dielqovntej instead of dih/lqon, thus making the prohibition come after their passing through Derbe and Lystra (St. Paul the Traveller, pp. 195 E.). The prohibition was given in good time to enable the missionaries to change their plans without inconvenience.
57 Tim. i. 18, iv. 14 (cf. 2 Tim. i. 6).
58 W. M. Calder, letter, 18 February 1953.
59 Church in the Roman Empire, pp. 90 ff. Cf. p. 247, n. 2 .
60 The Westem text has ” Gaius of Doberus ” (in Macedonia), perhaps by way of harmonization with ” Gaius and Aristarchus, Macedonians who were Paul’s companions in travel” (Acts xix. 29, where Makedo,naj immediately followed by sunekdh,mouj may be a dittography for Makedo,na, which would then refer only to Aristarchus, called in Acts xxvii. 2 ” a Macedonian from Thessalomca ).
61 Cf. pp. 252 f. above.
62 So Codd. NC and a few other authorities; cf. Eusebius, Hist. Ecc/., iii. 4.8.
63 Lightfoot, Galatians10, p. 19, n. 5; cf. Ramsay, Church in tire Roman Empire5• pp. 110 f.; F. J. A. Hort, The First Epistle of St. Peter (London, 1898), pp. 157 ff.
64 A Historical Introduction to the New Testament (London, 1963), p. 185 (because the reference to ” the former” occasion-R.S.V “. at first “-in Gal. iv. 13 ” probably does not imply two visits “).
65 Ibid.
66 Church in the Roman Empire5, pp. 62 ff.; St. Paul tire Traveller, pp. 92 ff.
67 But the point is that (on the South Galatian view) Paul’s addressees included people who were not Lycaonians linguistically, but who were” Galatians ” politically (see p. 263 below).
68 Historical Introduction, p. 185.
69 Introduction to the New Testament, E. T. (Oxford, 1968), p. 46.
70 E.g. Pontus Galaticus (cf. p. 246, n. 3).
71 E.g. in CIG, 3991, where an official entrusted with the delimitation of boundaries c. A.D. 54 is called ” procurator of the Galatic province” (Galatikh/j evparcei,aj).
72 About A.D. 150 Arrian can describe Alexander the Great as setting out ” for Galatic Ancyra “, or ” for Ancyra of the Galatic territory” (evp~ ~Agku,raj th/j Galatikh/j ), meaning the land which was to become” Galatic “in the century after Alexander; by Arrian’s time the province of Galatia had begun to shrink back to its ethnic limits.
73 He refers to E. Haenchen’s note on Acts xvi. 6 (Die Apostelgeschichtel3 (Gottingen, 1961), p. 428, n. 2). Haenchen remarks that” the view that Paul always uses the Roman provincial names has, without warrant, almost become a dogma “; if this were so, it were a grievous fault in a situation which calls for evidence, not dogma. Heis right in pointing out that a number of terms occurring in Paul could be used either in the technical Roman sense or more generally and traditionally (e.g. Macedonia, Asia), but this argues neither for nor against the technical Roman sense in other instances.
74 Dr. Marxsen may mean, like H. H. Wendt, Die Apostelgeschichte9 (Gottingen, 1913), pp. 242 f. (an earlier edition of which is cited by Ramsay, Church in the Roman Empire5, pp. 106 if.), that Paul was inaccurate in Gal. i. 21, but that the North Galatians would not have noticed this, whereas the South Galatians would have done so since it concerned them. Even if Paul was inaccurate, does a man perpetrate inaccuracies only when he knows that his readers or hearers will not notice them? It might be argued further that Luke himself attaches the churches of the ” first missionary journey” to Syria and Cilicia when he represents Paul and Silas as delivering to them (Acts xvi. 4) the letter addressed to ” the brethren who are of the Gentiles in Antioch and Syria and Cilicia “(Acts xv. 23; cf. xv. 41). But see on this A. S. Geyser, ” Paul, the Apostolic Decree and the Liberals in Corinth “, in Studia Paulina in honorem]. de Zwaan, ed. J. N. Sevenster and W. C. van Unnik (Haarlem, 1953), pp. 124 if., where a case is argued for the deletion of Acts xvi. 4.
75 Syria and Cilicia were united to form one province in 27 D.C.; cf. J. G. C. Anderson, ” Provincia Cappadocia “, Classical Review, xlv (1931), 189 if., and in Cambridge Ancient History, x (1934), p. 279.
76 Cf. Lightfoot, Galatianro, p. 19.
78 Church in the Roman Empire5, p. 43; cf. Hastings’s Dictionary of the Bible ii, p. 92 (s.v. ” Galatia “).
79 Cf. Aristophanes, Wasps, 433, where a slave in Athens bears the name fru,x (” Phrygian “), and the proverb ” more timid than a Phrygian hare” quoted by Strabo, Geog., i. 2. 30.
80 W. G. KUmmel, Introduction to the New Testament, E.T., p. 193.
81 Cf. M. Dibelius, Studies in the Acts of the Apostles, E.T. (London, 1956), pp. 1ff.
82 Cf. H. J. Cadbury, The Book of Acts in History (New York, 1955); A. N. Sherwin-White, Roman Society and Roman Law in the New Testament (Oxford, 1963), pp. 48 ff., 144 ff., 189.
83 A. S. Peake, A Critical Introduction to the New Testament (London, 1909), pp. 17 ff. .
84 R. H. Fuller, A Critical Introduction to the New Testament (London, 1966),
85 “The Problem of the Epistle to the Galatians “, BULLETIN, xxiv (1940), 59 ff., reprinted in Studies in the Gospels and Epistles (Manchester, 1962), pp. 169 ff
Chapter 3 - The "Other" Gospel!
AFTER a brief introductory salutation, Paul begins his letter to the churches of Galatia, without any word of congratulation or thanksgiving such as we find in most of his letters,2 by declaring his astonishment that they are turning so quickly away “from him who called you by grace, and following a different gospel” (Gal. i. 6). Not that this different gospel is properly called a gospel, he says, although its proponents no doubt claimed this designation for it.3 In Paul’s eyes there was no gospel but one, and this was the gospel which the churches of Galatia had originally received, a gospel whose keynote, it is implied, was the grace of God. Any rival message, whatever it might be called, was a counterfeit gospel, and on its preacher-even if that preacher were Paul himself, even if he were an angel from heaven-an anathema is invoked.
I
Concerning the gospel which the Galatian churches had received we are relatively well informed. Our task is to identify the” other” gospel which they were now beginning to follow, and also to try to identify the people who brought this other gospel among them, those “agitators” (as Paul put it)4 who unsettled their minds by trying to distort the gospel of Christ.5 This task has been described as “the singular problem of the Epistle to the Galatians “.6
By why speak of a “singular problem”? To many readers of the letter, from the second century onwards, the nature of the “other” gospel has been self-evident, and the character of its proponents not greatly in doubt. The second-century Marcionite prologues to the letters of Paul began with the prologue to Galatians, which runs thus:7
The Galatians are Greeks.8 They at first received the word of truth from the apostle, but after his departure they were tempted by false apostles to turn to the law and circumcision. The apostle calls them back to the true faith,9 writing to them from Ephesus.
In this prologue the” law” to which the Galatians were being tempted to turn was the Jewish law; this is indicated by its collocation with “circumcision “, as well as by the plain meaning of the repeated references to law in the letter itself. 10
The same understanding of the argument of Galatians recurs throughout the patristic literature. For example, Marius Victorinus, the earliest Latin commentator on the letter, puts it thus:
The sum of the letter is as follows: the Galatians are going astray because they are adding Judaism to the gospel of faith in Christ, observing in a material sense the sabbath and circumcision, together with the other works which they received in accordance with the law. Disturbed by these tendencies Paul writes this letter, wishing to put them right and call them back from Judaism, in order that they may preserve faith in Christ alone. and receive from Christ the hope of salvation and of his promises, because no one is saved by the works of the law. So, in order to show that what they are adding is wrong, he wishes to confirm [the truth of] his gospel. 11
In the Reformation period we find no significant change, except that the Reformers pressed an analogy between the situation with which Paul dealt and that of their own day. Luther begins his preface to the epistle thus:
The Galatians had been brought by St. Paul to right Christian belief, from the law to the gospel. But after his departure there came the false apostles, who were disciples of the true apostles, and turned the Galatians back again to believe that they must attain blessedness through the work of the law, and that they were sinning if they did not hold the work of the law, as according to Acts xv certain highly-placed people in Jerusalem insisted.12
This is expanded as follows in his commentary on the epistle:
St. Paul goeth about to establish the doctrine of faith, grace, forgiveness of sins, or Christian righteousness, to the end that we may have a perfect knowledge and difference between Christian righteousness and all other kinds of righteousness. . “For if the article of justification be lost, then is all true Christian doctrine lost….
Christ [says Paul] hath mercifully called you in grace, that ye should be freemen under Christ, and not bondmen under Moses, whose disciples ye are now become again by the means of your false apostles, who by the law of Moses called you not unto grace, but unto wrath, to the hating of God, to sin and death ….
Hereby it may easily be gathered, that these false apostles had condemned the Gospel of Paul among the Galatians, saying: Paul indeed hath begun well, but to have begun well is not enough, for there remain yet many higher matters; like as they say in the fifteenth chapter of the Acts: It is not enough for you to believe in Christ, or to be baptized, but it behoveth also that ye be circumcised; “for except ye be circumcised after the manner of Moses, ye cannot be saved “. This is as much to say, as that Christ is a good workman, which hath indeed begun a building, but he hath not finished it; for this must Moses do.13
Luther goes on to draw a parallel with the “fantastical spirits, Anabaptists and others” of his day as well as with the” Papists “.14
According to John Calvin (1548), Paul
had faithfully instructed them [the Galatians] in the pure gospel, but false apostles had entered in his absence and corrupted the true seed by false and corrupt dogmas. For they taught that the observance of ceremonies was still necessary. This might seem trivial; but Paul fights for it as a fundamental article of the Christian faith. And rightly so, for it is no light evil to quench the brightness of the gospel, lay a snare for consciences and remove the distinction between the old and new covenants. He saw that these errors were also related to an ungodly and destructive opinion on the deserving of righteousness….
The false apostles, who had deceived the Galatians to advance their own claims, pretended that they had received a commission from the apostles. Their method of infiltration was to get it believed that they represented the apostles and delivered a message from them. But they took away from Paul the name and authority of apostle. . “In attacking Paul they were really attacking the truth of the gospel.15
In other words, the Galatian converts were being urged to observe ceremonies of the Old Testament law as integral to the gospel and to accept a doctrine of justification by personal merit. Since Paul’s preaching excluded all this, it must be undermined by an attempt to diminish his status in the eyes of his converts.
This understanding of the situation prevailed into the nineteenth century, when it was taken up by the Tübingen school of F. C. Baur and his associates, who integrated it into their account of primitive Christian history. “What led the Apostle to write this Epistle to the Galatian Churches”, wrote Baur, ” we learn very clearly from the Epistle itself”. The Galatians’ falling away from the gospel as Paul preached it
was due to the influence of strange teachers who .”represented to them that, as a first step to the Christian salvation, they must submit to circumcision (v. 2, 11). Here we first meet with those Judaising opponents with whom the Apostle had to maintain so severe a struggle in the churches which he founded, and they appear here quite in the harsh and uncompromising Judaistic character which marks them as opponents of Pauline Christianity. . “In one word, they were Jews or Jewish Christians of the genuine old stamp, who could so little understand the more liberal atmosphere of Pauline Christianity that they would have thought the very ground of their existence was cut from under them if Judaism were no longer to have its absolute power and importance.16
In principle, according to Baur, the declared opponents of Pauline Christianity were in agreement with the leaders of the Jerusalem church; indeed, those leaders” are themselves the opponents against whom the Apostle contends in refuting these principles “.17 But their reluctant recognition, at the Jerusalem conference, that Paul and Barnabas had been entrusted with the gospel for the Gentiles, tied their hands and compelled them to take the position of non-belligerents. Other members of the Jerusalem church, however, were not so bound, and they were the infiltrators or trouble-makers who endeavoured to subvert Paul’s teaching and apostolic authority among his Gentile converts, including the churches of Galatia.
Bishop Lightfoot sums the matter up concisely:
The Epistle to the Galatians is especially distinguished among St. Paul’s letters by its unity of purpose. The Galatian apostasy in its double aspect, as a denial of his own authority and a repudiation of the doctrine of grace is never lost sight of from beginning to end.18
This ” apostasy “, as he calls it,
was a Judaism of the sharp Pharisaic type, unclouded or unrelieved by any haze of Essene mysticism, such as prevailed a few years later in the neighbouring Colosslan Church.19 The necessity of circumcision was strongly insisted upon. Great stress was laid on the observance of “days and months and seasons and years “. In short, nothing less than submission to the whole ceremonial law see-s to have been contemplated by the innovators. At all events, this was the logical consequence of the adoption of the initiatory rite.20
But far from accepting the Tübingen interpretation, Lightfoot regards the Epistle to the Galatians as refuting it most conclusively, “for it shows the true relations existing between St. Paul and the Twelve “.21 Far from agreeing in principle with the Judaizing propagandists, the Jerusalem leaders agreed in principle with Paul; if Paul at Antioch charged Peter with ” play-acting”22 when he withdrew from table-fellowship with Gentile Christians, it was precisely because Peter on this occasion was acting in a manner at variance with his real principles.
Lightfoot’s account of the situation in the Galatian churches calls, in my judgment, for very little modification. But during the present century variant accounts of the situation have been put forward by highly reputable scholars, and these accounts merit serious assessment.
II
In 1919 Wilhelm Lütgert published a monograph with the title Law and Spirit23 in which he argued that in the Galatian situation Paul had to wage war on two fronts simultaneously. Not only had he to deal with the attempt to impose on his converts circumcision and other obligations of the Jewish law; he had also to deal with radicals of the opposite stripe to the Judaizers, with those who wished to sever the gospel from its Old Testament roots and who held that the new life in the Spirit gave them the entree into a realm of knowledge which dismissed the “things of the flesh ” as irrelevant and had little regard for those ethical distinctions on which Paul-inconsistently, to their way of thinking-insisted. It was against these people, said Lütgert, and not against the Judaizers, that Paul had to defend his claim to apostolic authority in independence of Jerusalem. By their standards, anyone who was dependent on Jerusalem was insufficiently emancipated from the old order of Judaism; hence Paul’s emphatic assertion that he had received his commission . and his message from no human source-least of all from the Jerusalem” pillars tt-but by direct revelation from the exalted Lord. These were the people, too, who needed the warning not to turn their Christian freedom into licence (v. 13); the Judaizers, on the contrary, had to be warned not to exchange their freedom for the” yoke of slavery” (v. 1).
Lütgert’s thesis was elaborated {with modifications} ten years later by James Hardy Ropes, in his monograph already mentioned, The Singular Problem of the Epistle to the Galatians.24 Ropes attempted, by means of a short commentary on Galatians included in his monograph, to show that this thesis illuminated each successive section of the epistle. In Galatians iii. 6-29, for example, the radicals who wished to forget the Old Testament antecedents of the gospel had to be reminded that, Gentiles as they were, they were children of Abraham by faith in Christ – children of Abraham in the sense that mattered most. Ropes also argued that the Galatian Judaizers need not have been influenced by intruding visitors from Judaea; “all that we need suppose is that certain gentile Christians had proved susceptible to the efforts of local synagogue Jews, and had tried to persuade the churches as a whole to accept Jewish rites, including circumcision “.25 Such Gentiles may have hoped to fare rather better than their uncircumcised fellow-Christians in any persecution originating with the Jews.26
Johannes Munck, Professor of New Testament in Aarhus, Denmark, propounded a novel line in the interpretation of our epistle when in 1954 he maintained that the Judaizers in the churches of Galatia were not Jewish Christians, not visitors from Judaea, not local synagogue Jews, but Gentile Christians, Paul’s own converts.27 All that they knew about Jewish Christianity and the Jerusalem church they knew from Paul. “His words about Jerusalem and the Judaean churches were full of sympathy and understanding”.28 Knowing that the Jerusalem Christians were circumcised and observed many of the ordinances observed by the Jews among whom they lived, some of Paul’s converts concluded that he had only half-evangelized them and that they should conform to Jerusalem practice. Moreover, Paul taught his converts to use the Greek version of the Hebrew scriptures as their Bible.29 While he was with them he showed them how those scriptures spoke of the salvation of the Gentiles, but when he had left them they read in those same scriptures much that spoke of Abraham and his posterity as the recipients of God’s blessing, much that spoke of the glory of Israel and the subjection of the Gentiles, much that spoke of the keeping of the law as a condition of enjoying divine approval. Was it strange, then, that they should draw those practical conclusions which so horrified Paul when he heard of them?
But there are several indications throughout the letter that the troublemakers in the Galatian churches were incomers, not some of Paul’s Gentile converts. He refers to them throughout in the third person, while he addresses his converts in the second person. In his letters to the Corinthians offenders within the church of Corinth are rebuked in the second person, while interlopers from elsewhere are denounced in the third person. So we may conclude that it is outsiders whom Paul has in view when he says to the Galatian Christians, ” The persons I have referred to are paying court to you, but not with an honest envy: what they really want is to bar the door to you so that you may pay court to them” (iv. 17, N.E.B. margin).
WaIter Schmith’als, in an article published in 1956,30 put forward a simpler account than that of Lütgert and Ropes: Paul was not waging a war on two fronts; the sole target of his attack was a body of Jewish Christian Gnostics such as Dr. Schmithals had already identified with the target of Paul’s attack in the Corinthian correspondence.31 But Gnosticism has really to be read into the teaching of these people as reflected in Paul’s attack on them before it can be read out of it.32 And it is begging the question to argue, as Professor Willi Marxsen does, that this is due to Paul’s own failure to understand properly what they were teaching33 (he heard that they were teaching circumcision and assumed too hastily that they were straightforward Judaizers, whereas they were in fact “introducing something new-a Christian-Jewish-Gnostic syncretism”):34 if we cannot determine the nature of their teaching from Paul’s refutation of it, we have no other evidence to guide us. ,
There is nothing improbable per se in Paul’s having to defend the gospel on two fronts at once; he certainly had to do so at Corinth.35 But there is no substantial evidence of his having to do so in the churches of Galatia. No doubt he realized the necessity of warning his converts there, as elsewhere, against misinterpreting his message of liberty in an antinomian sense: they must not turn their freedom into licence to indulge in the ” works of the flesh “, but rather live in mutual love, the first ” fruit of the Spirit” (v. 13 f., 22). But while he reminds them that those who manifest the works of the flesh” will never inherit the kingdom of God” (v. 21),36 this is not the main thrust of his letter. It is a priori likely that in the churches of Galatia, as in other Gentile churches, there were some people who took an ultra-libertarian line, and conflict between them and the legalists may be indicated in the warning of v. 15: “But if you go on fighting one another, tooth and nail, all you can expect is mutual destruction”. But in the Galatian churches ultra-libertarians were evidently an uninfluential minority. In any case, the course for them as for the legalists was to have a larger measure of that faith which is ” active in love” and in that love to ” be servants to one another” (v. 6, 13).
III
Paul’s insistence on his independence of Jerusalem is quite intelligible as part of his argument against Judaizers whose main appeal was to the Jerusalem leaders. These Judaizers argued: ” The Jerusalem leaders are the only persons with authority to say what the true gospel is, and this authority they received direct from Christ. Paul has no comparable authority: any commission he exercises was derived by him from the Jerusalem leaders, and if he differs from them on the content or implications of the gospel, he is wrong”. Paul replied: “At no time did I derive any commission from the Jerusalem leaders. My call to apostleship and the gospel I proclaim were alike received by me , through a revelation of Jesus Christ’ (i. 12). My apostleship was to be discharged among the Gentiles; the gospel which I received by revelation was to be preached among the Gentiles, and the Jerusalem leaders recognized this when they’ acknowledged that I had been entrusted with the gospel for Gentiles as surely as Peter had been entrusted with the gospel for Jews; for God, whose action made Peter an apostle to the Jews, also made me an apostle to the Gentiles’ (ii. 7 f.). If it is a question of defining the content or the implications of the gospel so far as it affects Gentiles, I speak with authority-not I indeed. but the Lord, who called and commissioned me”. Not that Paul differed from the Jerusalem leaders with regard to the essential content of the gospel: it was based on the facts of Christ’s death, burial and resurrection, and these were proclaimed equally by both sides (cf. 1 Cor. xv. 11}.But there might well be differences of opinion with regard to the practical implications of the gospel in the lives of Gentile believers, and in this sphere Paul, commissioned by Christ to be the Gentiles’ apostle, would brook no interference from those whose apostolate was to the Jews, and still less from people who claimed to speak in their name.
But what of his words in Galatians v. 11: “And I, my friends, if I am still advocating circumcision, why is it I am still persecuted “? What was the point of charging Paul with advocating circumcision, and what was meant by this charge? The point of the charge was probably this: “Don’t listen to Paul when he says you must not be circumcised; he preaches circumcision himself”. This was contrary to the Galatians’ experience of Paul’s preaching, but if (as was suggested) Paul was a trimmer, adapting his preaching to his environment, then plainly he need not be taken too seriously. That this sort of thing was actually suggested may be implied in Paul’s indignant words in i. 10: “Does my language now sound as if I were canvassing for men’s support? Whose support do I want but God’s alone? Do you think I am currying favour with men? If I still sought men’s favour, I should be no servant of Christ “.37
But what was meant by the charge that Paul himself advocated circumcision? Was there anything in his teaching or action that lent it colour? We can well imagine how readily such an action as his circumcision of Timothy38 could be appealed to in this way; but perhaps all that was meant was that, true to his policy of living like a Jew among Jews, he did not discountenance the practice of circumcision among Jewish Christians. There is a relevant passage in Acts xxi. 21, where Paul, on his last visit to Jerusalem, is told by the elders of the mother church that rumours have reached Jerusalem” that you teach all the Jews in the gentile world to turn their backs on Moses, telling them to give up circumcising their children and following our way of life”. The elders make it plain that they know these rumours to be unfounded, and the narrative goes on to represent Paul as acquiescing in their suggestion that he should give a public demonstration that they were unfounded. There is no need to regard this as an example of Luke’s policy of making, the gulf between Paul and the Jerusalem church less unbridgeable than, according to the Tübingen tradition, it actually was; there is nothing in Paul’s letters which contradicts the picture given of him in Acts xxi. Even in Galatians, his most uncompromising deliverance on this subject, his concern is solely with the imposing of circumcision on Gentile Christians; whether Jewish Christians continued to circumcise their children or not was probably a matter of small importance in his eyes, on a par with their continued observance or non-observance of the sabbath and the Levitical food-laws.
IV The most certain feature of the false gospel was its insistence on circumcision. In itself circumcision was neither here nor there so far as Paul was concerned: he says so twice in this very letter (v. 6, vi. 15). What disturbed him was the enforcement or acceptance of circumcision as a legal obligation, as though it were essential to salvation or to membership in the community of the people of God. There is nothing inconsistent with Paul’s principles in his circumcision of Timothy, as a matter of expediency, according to the record of Acts xvi. 339-although it is easy to appreciate how this action could have been misrepresented or misunderstood. But in the situation which obtained in the churches of Galatia it was a very different matter: “Mark my words: I, Paul, say to you that if you receive circumcision Christ will do you no good at all. Once again, you can take it from me that every man who receives circumcision is under obligation to keep the entire law” (Gal. v. 2. f.). If circumcision was accepted because it was required by the law of Israel, it was impossible to stop there: every part of that law was of equal obligation. But none of those who were disposed to accept circumcision as a legal obligation, nor any of those who pressed them to do SO,40 contemplated keeping the whole law: as for the latter, says Paul, ” they only want you to be circumcised in order to boast of your having submitted to that outward rite” (vi. 13). Anyone who admitted the principle of salvation by keeping the law and did not take seriously the consequent obligation to keep it in its entirety would incur the doom invoked by the law itself: “A curse is on all who do not persevere in doing everything that is written in the Book of the Law” (iii. 10, quoting Deut. xxvii. 26). When that curse had been incurred, the only way to be delivered from it was through the redemptive death of Christ: “Christ bought us freedom from the curse of the law by becoming for our sake an accursed thing; for Scripture says, ‘ A curse is on everyone who is hanged on a gibbet’. And the purpose of it all was that the blessing of Abraham should in Christ Jesus be extended to the Gentiles, so that we might receive the promised Spirit through faith” (iii. 13 f., quoting Deut. xxi. 23). It was preposterous for those who had experienced this deliverance to expose themselves to the sanctions of the law all over again by acknowledging a token obligation to keep it-just as preposterous as it would be for people set free from the yoke of slavery to place their necks voluntarily and deliberately under that yoke anew. The gospel of salvation by grace and the doctrine of salvation by law-keeping were mutually exclusive: to accept the latter was to renounce the former. “When you seek to be justified by way of law, your relation with Christ is completely severed: you have fallen out of the dominion of God’s grace” (v. 4).
It is not certain that in all schools of Jewish thought at this time circumcision was insisted on as a sine qua non for admission into the commonwealth of Israel. Philo seems to know of those who argued that, provided the spiritual significance of circumcision was maintained, it was permissible to dispense with the external rite; and he opposes them: “let us not abolish the law of circumcision on the ground that circumcision signifies the cutting away of pleasure and passions of every sort and the destruction of ungodly conceit “.41 About A.D. 40 Ananias, the Jewish instructor of King Izates of Adiabene, assured him that he could worship God according to the Jewish law without being circumcised; but later, when Izates was persuaded by another Jew, Eleazar by name, that he could not hope to be a true proselyte and win divine approval without circumcision, he submitted to the rite.42 In debates with the school of Shammai, some members of the school of Hillel maintained that, for Gentiles to become proselytes to Judaism, the initiatory baptism was sufficient apart from circumcision43-but this is more likely to have been a position defended in debate than a matter of practice. Those Gentiles who went all the way in the direction of Judaism but stopped short of circumcision were treated as God-fearers, still outside the Jewish fellowship, and not admitted as proselytes to membership within it.44
Disciple of the school of Hillel though he was by education, Paul’s line was not that of those Hillelites who argued that circumcision was not essential to a Gentile’s becoming a Jew, if he underwent proselyte baptism. He was not concerned to make Gentiles into Jews, but to introduce Jews and Gentiles alike into a new community through faith in Jesus as Lord. In this new community circumcision was irrelevant, and any attempt to treat it as essential was inadmissible. Circumcision, with many other features of the law of Israel-food-restrictions, sacred seasons, and the like-had traditionally kept Jews and Gentiles apart; such things had no place in the” new creation ” (vi. 15) where there was” no such thing as Jew and Greek ” (iii. 28). Any attempt to impose them was to put the clock bade to the time before the coming of Christ.
V
Together with circumcision, the Galatians were observing “special days and months and seasons and years” (iv. 10).45 And what was wrong with that? In itself, nothing. To Paul, the observance or non-observance of a sacred calendar was religiously indifferent, just as circumcision was. “This man regards one day more highly than another, while that man regards all days alike. On such a point everyone should have reached conviction in his own mind” (Rom. xiv. 5). According to the record of Acts, Paul regulated his own movements in some measure according to the Jewish calendar, especially in arranging his visits to Jerusalem,46 and this was in complete accord with his settled policy, as set out in 1Corinthians ix. 19 ff., to conform to Jewish ways in Jewish company and to Gentile ways in Gentile
company, so as to commend the gospel to Jews and Gentiles alike. But to observe sacred occasions as a matter of religious obligation, as though this were of the essence of gospel faith and church membership, was a retrograde step, back from liberty to bondage; it was, in fact, a token of submission to the” elemental spirits of the universe “, to reproduce the rendering of Galatians iv. 3 in both R.S.V. and N.E.B.
The Greek word translated ” elemental spirits ” is stoicheia, a word which by derivation means ” things arranged in rows “.47 It is not easy to determine its precise meaning in its two occurrences in this letter (iv. 3, 9). It is most commonly found in the sense of “elements “or “basic principles “-with reference, for example, to the sounds of which speech is made up or the letters of the alphabet of which written words and sentences are made up (so in Heb. v. 12, where the readers are told that they need to be taught the ABC of the gospel all over again), or to the elements of which the material universe is composed (so perhaps in 2 Peter iii. 10, of the elements which will ” disintegrate in flames “on the day of the Lord).48 But the sense of the word in Galatians iv. 3, 9 must fit the context of its two appearances.
One interpretation of the stoicheia, which is very much in line with Paul’s general teaching, thinks of them as the law and the flesh (unregenerate human nature), two elemental forces inherent in the world, operating before Christ and apart from Christ.49 The law is good, because it is God’s law, but the human material on which it operates is vitiated; the result is that law stimulates in this material the very sin that it forbids, and sin produces death. The law, which in itself is ” holy and just and good “(Rom. vii. 12), thus becomes in effect” the law of sin and death “(Rom. viii. 2).
So, in Galatians, the observance of the Jewish law is interpreted as submission to the stoicheia. “During our minority”, says Paul, “we were slaves to the stoicheia of the universe ” (iv. 3). If the Galatians accept the Jewish law as a religious obligation, they will be subject to this slavery, but curiously, although the Galatians are Gentiles, Paul says they will revert to this slavery. “Formerly, when you did not acknowledge God, you were the slaves of beings which in their nature are no gods.50 But now that you do acknowledge God-or rather, now that he has acknowledged you-how can you turn back to the mean and beggarly stoicheia? Why do you propose to enter their service all over again”? (iv. 8 f.). Is Paul equating his own former Judaism and their former paganism as both alike consisting in the service of the stoicheia?
It is immediately after these words that he reproaches them for keeping “special days and months and seasons and years ” (iv. 10). Three of these four words appear in Genesis i. 14, where the heavenly luminaries are appointed “for signs and for seasons and for days and for years”.51 To observe sacred days and seasons as matters of religious obligation, then, and not in a spirit of Christian liberty, could be interpreted as subservience to the heavenly luminaries by which the calendar was regulated and there is ample attestation, at least from the second century A.D. onwards, for the use of stoicheia in the sense of stars, constellations or planets. But to the mind of antiquity the seven planets-sun, moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn -were not merely inanimate spheres moving in their orbits; they were associated with supernatural forces which profoundly influenced the lives of men. To the believer in Christ, according to Paul, all such forces were robbed of their potency (we might almost say demythologized), and what could be more insensate than for those who had experienced liberation from their dominance to submit to that dominance afresh?
But, apart from the sacred calendar, was there any reason to associate the Jewish law in general with such forces? Perhaps there was: in a passage in this epistle where Paul emphasizes the inferiority of the law to the gospel he says that the law was “promulgated through angels” (iii. 19). This piece of information, absent from the Pentateuchal account of the law-giving, appears in three places in the New Testament;52 but Paul reproduces it in order to underline the inferiority of the law to God’s unmediated promise to Abraham, which was fulfilled in the gospel of Christ. Some connection between these angels and the stoicheia is rendered the more probable by the suggestion in iv. 8 f. (quoted above) that the stoicheia are to be identified with the previous objects of the Galatian Christians’ worship.
Among the objects of pagan worship the deities who shared their names with the planets were particularly prominent. In the faith of Israel such deities were included among the bene ‘elohlm, members of the heavenly court of God Most High.53 The Jews did not worship those beings as the Gentiles did. If, in the age before Christ, they regulated their religious life by ordinances imposed through the agency of these beings, that was in keeping with the stage of spiritual infancy through which they were then passing. But for believers who had been emancipated by Christ and attained their spiritual majority through faith in him to revert to such ordinances was little short of apostasy and scarcely to be distinguished from relapsing into pagan worship.
It was in the light of the gospel that these stoicheia were “mean and beggarly”: Christ had exposed their bankruptcy. For those who did not live in the good of Christian freedom the stoicheia were” principalities and powers”, keeping the souls of men in bondage.54 Their overthrow by Christ on the cross is depicted in the Epistle to the Colossians, the only other writing in the Pauline corpus where the stoicheia figure-and figure in much the same way as they do in Galatians (although the ” heresy” which Paul combats in Colossians is apparently a more complex form of syncretism than the “other” gospel which he denounces in Galatians).55
According to Paul, pagan worship was always culpable because it involved idolatry and the vices which followed from idolatry;56 Jewish worship in the pre-Christian stage of God’s dealings with men was far from being culpable-it was divinely instituted-but it had the character of infancy and immaturity as compared with the coming of age into which men were introduced by faith in Christ. Just as a minor required the direction of tutors, guardians or slave-attendants, so the people of God in the days of their minority were under the control of the stoicheia. But for believers in Christ to put themselves under the control of these stoicheia afresh was not just reverting to infancy; it was tantamount to a declaration that the death of Jesus had no re” demptive power: “I will not nullify the grace of God; if righteousness comes by law, then Christ died for nothing” (Gal. 2: 21). Paul could hardly have expressed himself with greater urgency or severity had his converts been on the point of relapsing into paganism. We may compare the attitude of the writer to the Hebrews towards another group that was in danger of giving up its distinctive Christian standing and merging in its former Jewish environment: this, he warns, would be downright apostasy, desertion from the living God.57
VI
The simplest interpretation of Galatians, on the basis of its internal evidence, agrees remarkably with the statement in Acts xv. 1 that, some time after the extension of the gospel to Asia Minor, “fierce dissension and controversy” arose in the church of Syrian Antioch because” certain persons who had come down from Judaea began to teach the brotherhood that those who were not circumcised in accordance with Mosaic practice could not be saved”. If such persons also visited Antioch’s daughter” churches in Galatia with this same teaching, and found some acceptance for it there, the stage would be set for the Epistle to the Galatians-whether such a visit was paid about the same time or later. We have been warned so often in recent years to forget the Acts of the Apostles when trying to understand Paul’s letters that there is some reluctance to relate the two bodies of literature even where the evidence of the one corroborates that of the other without any distortion. But this is an extreme reaction from the older custom of forcing the contents of the epistles into the frame” work of Acts. That visitors of this kind did come down to Antioch from Judaea is confirmed by the reference in Galatians ii. 12 to the person or persons who came from James and persuaded Peter to discontinue his table fellowship with Gentile Christians during his stay in Antioch some time before the writing of Galatians.58 The simplest account of the “other” gospel is that persons of this outlook also visited the churches of Galatia and tried to persuade Paul’s Gentile converts there that unless they received circumcision and other customs of Jewish religion they could not hope to win the acceptance of the church of Jerusalem and other fellow-believers of Jewish birth-that in their eyes they would have at most the status which Gentile “God-fearers ” had in the eyes of the synagogue. The” full ” gospel included circumcision and the observance of the Jewish food-laws and calendar; the gospel which they had received from Paul was a truncated gospel. To which Paul replied that “such a “full ” gospel, denying as it did the all-sufficiency of Christ, was no gospel at all, and in so far as it involved a reversion to legal bondage it undercut the message of justification by faith, disallowed the claim that Jesus by his death and resurrection had inaugurated the messianic age which superseded the age of law and thus in effect disallowed his title to be the Messiah.59 Far from being a gospel in any sense, such teaching was plain apostasy from Christ. Hence, no matter who its propagator might be, anathema esto.60
1 A lecture delivered in the John Rylands Library on Wednesday, the 18th of November 1970.
2 See Rom. i. 8 ff.; I Cor. i. 4 ff.; 2 Cor. i. 3 ff.; Eph. i. 15 f.; Phi!. i. 3 ff. ; Col. i. 3 ff.; I Thess. i. 2 ff.; 2 Thess. i. 3 f.; Philem. 4 ff.
3 Gal. i. 8f. See F. F. Bruce, “When is a gospel not a gospel?” BULLETIN, xlv (I962-3). 319 ff.
4 Gal. v. 12 (N.E.B.), Gk. avnastatoufntej.
5 Gal. i. 7.
6 By J. H. Ropes, The Singular Problem of the Epistle to the Galatians, Harvard Theological Studies xiv (Cambridge, Mass., 1929).
7 The original Greek text of the Marcionite prologues has been lost, but Latin translations survive in most Vulgate manuscripts (their heretical source having been forgotten). In order to be understood, they have to be read in the sequence in which Marcion arranged the Pauline letters, See D. de Bruyne, “Prologues Bibliques d’ Origine Marcionite “, Revue Benedictine, xxiv (1907), 1 ff.; A. von Hamack, “Der marcionitische Ursprung der altesten Vulgata-Prologe zu den Paulusbriefen “, ZNW, xxiv (1925), 205 ff.
8 See BULLETIN, lii (1969-70),247.
9 LiteralIy “to the faith of the truth” (or” belief in the truth “).
10 Gal. ii. 16 ff., iii. 2, 5, IQ ff., v. 3 f., etc.
11 C. Marius Victorinus Afer, In Gal., introd. (Migne, Patroiogia Latina viii, 1145 D-1147 A).
12 Luthers Werke, Weimarer Ausgabe: Die deutsche Bibel, 7, pp. 172 f.
13 M. Luther, A Commentary on St. Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians: A revised and completed translation [by P. S. Watson] based on the” Middleton “edition of the English version of 1575 (London, 1953), pp. 21, 26, 62, 63.
14 Ibid. pp. 63 ff.
15 J. Calvin. The Epistles of Paul the Apostle to the Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians and Colossians, E. T. by T. H. L. Parker (Edinburgh and London. 1965), pp. 4 f.
16 F. C. Baur, Paul: his Life and Works, E.T. i (London, 1876),251-3; d. his Church History of the First Three Centuries, E. T., i (London, 1878),49-60.
17 Baur, Paul, i. 121.
18 J. B. Lightfoot, Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians (London, 1865), p. 63.
19 Cf. J. B. Lightfoot, Saint Paul’s Epistles to the Colossians and to Philemon (London,1875), pp. 73 ff., 349 ff.
20 Lightfoot, Galatians, p. 27.
21 Ibid. p. 68.
22 Gal. ii. 13; see BULLETIN, li (1968-9), 308 f.
23 W. Lütgert, Gesetz und Geist: eine Untersuchung zur Vorgeschichte des Galaterbriefes (Gütersloh, 1919).
24 See p. 253, n. 6.
25 Ropes, Singular Problem, p. 45.
26 An inference from Gal. vi. 12.
27 J. Munck, Paulus und die Heilsgeschichte (Copenhagen, 1954), pp. 79 if. ; E. T., Paul and the Salvation of Mankind (London, 1959), pp. 87 if.
28 Munck, Paul and the Salvation of Mankind, p. 131.
29 Ibid. p. 132.
30 W. Schmithals, “Die Häretiker in Galatien “, ZNW, xlvii (1956), 25 ff., reprinted (in revised form) in his Paulus und die Gnostiker (Hamburg-Bergstedt, 1965), pp. 9 ff.
31 Schmithals, Die Gnosis in Korinth (Göttingen, 11956, 21965).
32 Cf. R. McL. Wilson, “Gnostics-in Galatia? “, Studia Evangelica, iv, ed. F. L. Cross (=TU 102, Berlin, 1968),358 ff.
33 W. Marxsen, Introduction to the New Testament, E. T. (Oxford, 1968), pp. 55,58.
34 Ibid. p. 56.
35 Cf. H. Chadwick, “All Things to all Men “, NTS, i (1954-55), 261 ff.
36 Cf. 1 Cor. vi. 9 f.; Eph. v. 5.
37 Cf. H. Chadwick, NTS, i (1954-55), 261 f.
38 Or of Titus, if this is indeed implied in Gal. ii. 3-but see BULLETIN, li (1968-9),307.
39 Timothy’s circumcision is recorded quite incidentally; there is no further reference to it, and it betrays no “tendency” on Luke’s part. As the son of a Jewish mother, who had been brought up by her in the Jewish faith, he was a Jew in everything but circumcision, which had not been performed because his (late) father was a Greek, as the local Jews knew. Presumably Paul judged it advisable to make him a thorough-going Jewish Christian, but the precise point of the phrase “out of consideration for the Jews who lived in those parts” is somewhat obscure. See A. E. Harvey, The New English Bible: Companion to the New Testament (Oxford and Cambridge, 1970), p. 459.
40 Those who press circumcision on the Galatian Christians are called oiv peritemno,menoi (” those who receive circumcision ‘-‘) in Gal. vi. 13, but it is unnecessary to understand this passive participle of Gentile Christians who were accepting circumcision themselves and trying to persuade their brethren to follow their example; so j. Munck, Paul and the Salvation of Mankind, pp. 87-89, following E. Hirsch, “Zwei Fragen zu Galater 6 n, ZNW, xxix (1930), 192 ff.
41 Philo, Migration of Abraham, 92.
42 Josephus, Antiquities, xx. 34 ff.
43 TB Yebamot 46a (baraita).
44 Like Cornelius of Caesarea, who, despite his piety (Acts x. 2 ff., 22), was still classed as an uncircumcised Gentile, with whom no observant Jew could have table-fellowship (Acts x. 28, xi. 3).
45 W. M. Ramsay hazarded the guess that news came to Paul that his Galatian converts were observing the sabbatical year A.D. 48 (St. Paul the Traveller and the Roman Citizen (London, 141920), p. xxxi).
46 Cf. Acts xviii. 21 (Western text), xx. 16 (cf. xxvii. 9); also I Cor. xvi. 8.
47 Cf. G. Delling, s.v. stoicei/on, in Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, ed. G. Kittel and G. Friedrich, E. T., vii (Grand Rapids, 1971),670 if.
48 Alternatively, the stoixei/a in 2 Peter iii. 10 may be the planets, doomed to dissolution on the last day as they were created in the beginning.
49 Cf. A. j. Bandstra, The Law and the Elements of the World (Kampen, 1964); also E. D. Burton, The Epistle to the Calatians (Edinburgh, 1921), pp. 510 if. ; E Percy, Die Probleme der Kolosser. und Epheserbriefe (Lund, 1946), pp. 156 if. ; B. Reicke, “The Law and this World according to Paul”, JBL, lxx (1951), 259 if.; H. N. Ridderbos, “Vrijheid en Wet volgens Paulus’ Brief aan de Galaten n, in Arcana Revelata .”aangeboden aan F. W. Grosheide (Kampen, 1951), pp. 89 if.; The Epistle of Paul to the Churches of Cafatia (Grand Rapids, 1953), pp. 152 if.
50 An echo of Deut. xxxii. 17 (cf. I Cor. x. 20).
51 With Gal. iv. 10 (h`me,raj ) ) ) kai. mh/naj kai. kairo.j kai. evniautou,j) compare Gen. i. 14 (eivj shmei/a kai. eivj kairou.j kai. hvme,raj kai. eivj eviautou,j).
52 The other two are Acts vii. 53 and Heb. ii. 2. The earliest known allusion to this angelic mediation is Jubilees i. 29; it is mentioned later in a number of midrashim (Sifre Nwn. 102 on Num. xii. 5; Mekhilta, tractate Babōdeš 5, on Exod. xx. 18; Pesiqta Rabbati 21).
53 Cf. Deut. xxxii. 8 (reading “sons of God” rather than MT “sons of Israel “); Psalm Ixxxii. I ff.
54 Cf. G. B. Caird, Principalities and Powers (Oxford, 1956); H. Schlier, Principalities and Powers in the New Testament, E. T. (Freiburg, 1961).
55 See BULLETIN, xlviii (1965-66), 268 ff.
56 Cf. Rom. i. 18 ff.
57 Heb. iii. 12.
58 See BULLETIN,li (1968-9), 308.
59 Cf. A. Schweitzer, The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle E. T. (London, 1931), p. 186; L. Baeck, “The Faith of Paul”, Journal of Jewish Studies iii (1952), 93 if.; H. j. Schoeps, Paul, E. T. (London, 1961), pp. 42, 168 if.; W. D. Davies, The Setting of the Sermon on the Mount (Cambridge, 1964), pp. 180 ff., 446 ff.
60 Since this lecture was delivered, an important contribution to the subject has been made by R. Jewett, “The Agitators and the Galatian Congregation”, NTS., xvii (1970-71), 198 ff.
Chapter 4 - The Date of the Epistle
OF all the letters in the Pauline corpus, there is none which by general consensus, is more certainly Paul’s authentic composition than the Epistle to the Galatians. It may seem strange, therefore, that it is one of the most difficult of his letters to date precisely-more difficult than any of the other “capital letters” (not excluding 2 Cor. x-xiii). But so it is. The date of the epistle most certainly ranks as a “Galatian problem “, if indeed it does not contribute to what one scholar has called ” the anomaly of Galatians “.2
The question is where and when, in the course of Paul’s apostolic career, this letter was written. The traditional way of handling this question is to ask at what point in the record of Acts it should be placed. More important, however, is to try to establish where it stands, chronologically and otherwise, in relation to Paul’s other letters.
I
We shall consider the traditional approach first because, while it is of relatively secondary importance, it is by no means to be dismissed as irrelevant. Our estimate of its relevance, indeed, will depend on our estimate of the historical accuracy of the record of Acts. In the first lecture of the present series on “Galatian Problems” some reasons were briefly given for treating the evidence of Acts seriously and using it critically,3 and they need not be repeated here. It is plain, however, that this is a subject which may one day have to be taken up more systematically all over again. The recent publication of the English translation of Ernst Haenchen’s magnificent commentary on Acts,4 which builds on the work of Martin Dibelius5 and Hans Conzelmann,6 has underscored afresh the need to re-state the strong case for the essential trustworthiness of Luke’s narrative.
Some people concluded from my first lecture, in which I argued that Paul’s autobiographical outline in Galatians i. 13-ii. 14 brings us to the eve of the Jerusalem Council of Acts xv. 6 if., that I implied that Galatians was itself written on the eve of the Council. That may have been logically involved in my exposition, but I preferred to suspend judgement and state no such conclusion then, if only because any such conclusion must depend on further considerations-not least the question whether the recipients of the letter were North or South Galatians (the question discussed in the second lecture of this series).7 If they were South Galatians, then the letter could conceivably have been written any time after the end of the missionary expedition related in Acts xiii. 4-xiv. 26; if, on the other hand, they were North Galatians, it must have been written after the journey summarized in Acts xvi. 6, when Paul “went through the Phrygian and Galatic region” (i.e. between the Jerusalem Council and the evangelization of Macedonia) and probably after the journey summarized in Acts xviii. 23, when he traversed ” the Galatic region and Phrygia ” (i.e. between the end of his eighteen months in Corinth and the beginning of his lengthy stay in Ephesus)-that is to say, not earlier than Paul’s Ephesian ministry, and probably during that ministry.8
One remark in the letter which could have a bearing on this problem is Paul’s incidental reminder to his readers that “it was because of a bodily ailment that I preached the gospel to you at first” (Gal. iv. 13). The phrase” at first” (to. pro,teron) probably, though not necessarily, implies that by the time he wrote he had paid them at least two visits. Not necessarily, I say, because the words may simply mean” it was bodily illness that originally led to my bringing you the Gospel”. That is how the N .E. B. text has it, although a footnote offers in place of “originally” the alternative renderings “formerly” or “on the first of my two visits “. If Paul’s words imply two visits (and this is the more natural way to construe them), when were they paid? Proponents of the North Galatian view can point to the two occasions mentioned by Luke when Paul passed through Galatia (Acts xvi. 6; xviii. 23).9 On the South Galatian view Paul’s first visit was that of Acts xiii. 14 ff., and the implied second one could be his visit to Derbe, Lystra, Iconium and the Phrygian and Galatic region” (Phrygia Galatica?) recorded in Acts xvi. 1-6,10 but it could also be taken to refer to Paul and Barnabas’s retracing of their steps from Derbe through Lystra and Iconium to Pisidian Antioch at the end of the former visit (Acts xiv. 21-23).11 In that case it might be possible to date Galatians before the Jerusalem Council of Acts xv. 6 ff.-i.e. soon after the last event mentioned in the autobiographical outline of Galatians i. 13-ii. 14. One advantage in this dating is that it would explain why Paul in Galatians does not cut the ground entirely from under the Judaizers’ feet by appealing to the Council’s ruling that circumcision and all that went with it should not be imposed on Gentile converts.12
It is difficult to decide what weight can be given to the phrase “so quickly “13 in Galatians i. 6: “I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in Christ and turning to a different gospel.” The point of reference is the Galatians’ conversion, and the implication is that no very long time had elapsed since it took place. Naturally those who date Galatians rather early among the epistles of Paul feel that they are doing due justice to the phrase” so quickly “-if the addressees were the South Galatians evangelized by Paul and Barnabas (Acts xiii. 14 ff.) and the letter was written on the eve of the Council of Jerusalem (Acts xv), then a bare year had elapsed. But if they were North Galatians a date (preferably early) in Paul’s Ephesian residence is indicated, and in any case those who maintain a later date point out quite rightly that “so quickly” is a relative expression. “I cannot think it strange”, wrote Bishop Lightfoot, “that the Apostle, speaking of truths destined to outlive the life of kingdoms and of nations, should complain that his converts had so soon deserted from the faith, even though a whole decade of years might have passed since they were first brought to the knowledge of Christ” -although he adds that “so long a period . “is not required on any probable hypothesis as to the date of the epistle”.14 Plainly we cannot use “so quickly” as one of our foundation-stones.
II
But we must turn now to consider the place of Galatians among the letters of Paul.
Since Galatians goes traditionally along with 1 and 2 Corinthians and Romans as one of Paul’s four” capital ” epistles, it is natural that it should have been grouped rather closely with them in date. F. C. Baur, for example, thought that the appearance of these four. in the sequence Galatians, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Romans, at the beginning of Marcion’s Apostolikon, was inexplicable unless a chronological order was being followed, and he himself accepted this as the chronological order of the four.15
Bishop Lightfoot acknowledged that in his day this chronological order was ” the generally received opinion “,16 but gave his reasons for departing from it so as to place Galatians after 2 Corinthians and immediately before Romans. This had the advantage of placing Galatians next in date to the two epistles with which he believed it to exhibit the greatest degree of affinity. Of its affinity to Romans, of course, there can be no doubt. In Lightfoot’s words, it “stands in relation to the Roman letter, as the rough model to the finished statue; or rather, if I may press the metaphor without misapprehension, it is the first study of a single figure, which is worked into a group in the latter writing”. 17
This close relationship between Galatians and Romans has led many scholars, like Lightfoot, to prefer a date for Galatians not far removed from that of Romans, which can be fixed fairly precisely during the winter preceding Paul’s last visit to Jerusalem (cf. Rom. xv. 25 ff.; Acts xx. 2 ff.). The insistence on justification by faith, not by legal works, with the citation of Habakkuk ii. 4 in the sense ” He who through faith is righteous shall live” (Gal. iii. 11 ; Rom. i. 17) and the appeal to the precedent of Abraham, who “believed God, and it was reckoned to him for righteousness” (Gen. xv. 6, quoted in Gal. iii. 6; Rom. iv. 3), figures prominently in the argument of both letters. So does the interpretation of the promise made to Abraham as fulfilled in the Gentile mission, although the testimonia adduced are different in the two letters-in Galatians iii. 8, ” In you shall all the nations be blessed” (Gen. xii. 3, xviii. 18); in Romans iv. 17, “I have made you the father of many nations” (Gen. xvii. 5). The statement in Galatians v. 17, that” the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh; for these are opposed to each other, to prevent you from doing what you would “, is amplified in the picture of inner tension drawn in Romans. vii. 14-25, while the admonition ” Walk by the Spirit, and do not gratify the desires of the flesh” (Gal. v. 16) might be regarded as a summary of Romans viii. 1-17. Both letters bring out the close relation between the Christian’s freedom from slavery to sin or from legal bondage and his being led by the Spirit (Gal. v. 18; Rom. viii. 14), at whose prompting he acknowledges his new status as a son of God and joint-heir with Christ in the invocation “Abba, Father”18 (Gal. iv. 6; Rom. viii. 15 f.). In both letters the law of God is summed up in the single commandment: “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself”19 (Gal. v. 14; Rom. xiii. 9).
All this comes to expression in Galatians in a situation of anxiety, indignation and conflict; in Romans it is expounded more dispassionately and in a more logical sequence. Yet we need not suppose that the understanding and presentation of the gospel which we find in Galatians first took shape in Paul’s mind under the exigencies of the Judaizing controversy which called forth that letter. It is true that in certain areas of Paul’s thinking a progression can be traced as we move from his earlier letters to his later ones.20 But on such a fundamental matter as the way of salvation it would be surprising to find a progression sufficiently marked to affect the centre of his thinking. If the evidence clearly demanded this, we should accept it, but the evidence makes no such demand. To this we shall return.21
But at present we must bear in mind the relatively brief interval of time between Paul’s earliest letters and those of the Roman captivity-not much, if at all, more than twelve years. (If some or all of the letters traditionally assigned to his Roman captivity were written during an earlier captivity, then the interval is further reduced.) If we leave the letters of the Roman captivity out of our reckoning, and think only of the “capital letters” and the Thessalonian correspondence, they were written within nine years at the outside. Most of the letters would have been written when Paul was in his fifties. He had experienced one revolutionary conversion in (probably) his early thirties; from then on the main features of his belief were sufficiently stable to make it no surprising thing to find him repeating them at an interval of several years when an appropriate occasion arose.
Johannes Weiss is probably right in pointing to Paul’s ” hidden years “, before he joined Barnabas at Antioch, as the most formative in the development of his Christian thought, whereas ” in the letters we have to do with the fully matured man “. He is too sweeping in his judgement when he goes on to say that ” the development’ which some think they can discern in the period of his letters-ten years, at the most-is not worth considering at all “;22 but his words provide a salutary corrective to excessive speculation about Paul’s inner development. A mind like Paul’s does not stop growing at the mid-century point, but it tends to advance along lines whose general direction has been determined during the preceding years. Paul may equally well have reproduced in Romans some of the distinctive positions of Galatians whether Galatians was written one year or ten years before. The affinity between Galatians and 2 Corinthians, Lightfoot held, was of a different order; it consisted “not so much in words and arguments as in tone and feeling”.23 He quoted Benjamin Jowett to this effect: in both Galatians and 2 Corinthians, said Jowett, ” there is a greater display of his own feelings than in any other portion of his writings, a deeper contrast of inward exaltation and outward suffering, more of personal entreaty, a greater readiness to impart himself “.24 This is indeed true, although I think the resemblance thus described is due to the fact that Paul’s emotions were deeply stirred on both occasions rather than to the chronological contiguity of the two letters. Lightfoot himself, however, added further considerations: e.g. the parallel between Christ’s being” made a curse for us” in Galatians iii. 13 and his being” made sin for us” in 2 Corinthians v. 21 ; the repetition of the sowing-and-reaping sequence as an ethical figure in Galatians vi. 7 and 2 Corinthians ix. 6; such common phrases as ” a different gospel” (Gal. i. 6; 2 Cor. xi. 4), ” a new creation” (Gal. vi. 15; 2 Cor. v. 17), to be “zealously concerned for” people (Gal. iv. 17; 2 Cor. xi. 2), to “persuade men” (Gal. i. 10; 2 Cor. v. 11). In the lists of vices in 2 Corinthians xii. 20 f., Galatians v. 19-21 and Romans i. 29 f. and xiii. 13 he was disposed to find the middle term in the Galatians passage.25 More important, however, in his eyes was the progression which he traced from the Corinthian correspondence through Galatians to Romans in respect of Paul’s personal history (the “marks of Jesus” in Gal. vi. 17 being perhaps the result of the experiences of 1 Cor. xv. 30-32; 2 Cor. i. 8-10),26 the development of the Judaic opposition and the increasingly full exposition of the truth of the gospel. The admonition with regard to the restoration of offenders in Galatians vi. 1 might have as its background the restoration of the Corinthian offender in 2 Corinthians ii. 5-1 1 (cf. vii. 11 f.); the warning that “God is not mocked” coupled with the admonition to persevere in well-doing (Gal. vi. 7-1O) might reflect the Galatian churches’ slowness in contributing to the Jerusalem fund regarding which they had received instructions from Paul before he wrote 1 Corinthians xvi. I. Lightfoot’s argument is cumulative, but when its several parts are allowed to make their combined impression, then, he says, if the Corinthian correspondence is interposed between Galatians and Romans, ” the dislocation is felt at once “.27
To Lightfoot, 2 Corinthians formed one continuous letter, whereas the majority opinion today is that it is composite in particular, that chapters i-ix and x-xiii did not originally belong to the same letter.28 In adducing evidence from 2 Corinthians suggesting that it was written before Galatians, he adduces it from both parts of the letter as we have it, but especially from chapters x-xiii.· And the resemblance in tone between chapters x-xiii and the whole of Galatians is sufficiently obvious to call for no elaboration.
III
A fresh investigation of the relation borne by Galatians to 2 Corinthians on the one hand and to Romans on the other was published in 1951 by C. H. Buck Jr. in an important article contributed to the Journal of Biblical Literature.29 Ignoring the last four chapters of 2 Corinthians because of uncertainty regarding their date, Dr. Buck concentrated on chapters i-ix. He presented a synoptic arrangement of 2 Corinthians iii. 17, iv. 10-v. 5 with Galatians iv. 1-7, v. 13-25 and Romans viii. 2-25 so as to show that the last passage “reproduces with remarkable fidelity the logical outlines of arguments which also occur in 11 Corinthians 1-9 and Galatians “,30 drawing words and arguments from the two earlier letters, conflating ideas which originally were formally separate in such a way as to reveal that they shared the same underlying thought and application. For example, when Paul speaks in Romans viii. 23 of believers “who have the first fruits of the Spirit”, groaning inwardly as they wait for” adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies ” he combines the idea of ” adoption as sons” (ui`oqesi,a), which is treated at some length in Galatians, with that of “the redemption of our bodies “, which is the subject of 2 Corinthians iv. 16-v. 10. (It may be observed, in passing, that the treatment in Romans reflects a further development: in Romans what believers have received here and now is ” the spirit of adoption or sonship”, enabling them to anticipate the full “adoption as sons” which will be manifested at the parousia, whereas in Galatians they have received their adoption as sons already, thanks to God’s sending his Son to redeem them, and because they are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into their hearts.)
This, however, would simply confirm that Romans was later than both 2 Corinthians i-ix and Galatians; Dr. Buck believes it possible to go farther in the confirmation of Lightfoot’s thesis and show that Galatians, while earlier than Romans, was later than 2 Corinthians i-ix. He points out that the antithesis spirit-flesh occurs in 2 Corinthians i-ix, Galatians and Romans whereas the antithesis faith-works, which is intimately associated with the former antithesis in Galatians, is absent from 2 Corinthians, even in a “discussion of the identical problem “-the question of Christian freedom. “If Paul had already written Galatians “, he asks, “is it conceivable that he could, at some later time, have written II Corinthians 1-9, with its vehement anti-legal position, without once employing the antithesis, faith-works?”31 The only way to give an affirmative answer to this question, he concludes, would be to assume that, having used the faith-works antithesis in Galatians, Paul “then decided to abandon this line of argument and therefore consciously avoided it in 11 Corinthians 1-9” and “that shortly after the writing of II Corinthians 1-9 Paul again changed his mind and in Romans revived the abandoned argument”. The improbability of this twofold assumption forces him “to the conclusion that Galatians was written not only before Romans but also after II Corinthians 1-9”,32 and this conclusion, in the light of his arguments, has commended itself as inescapable to others.33
But 2 Corinthians i-ix is not concerned with the ” identical problem” tackled in Galatians, nor does it take up such a “vehement anti-legal position” as Galatians does. In 2 Corinthians i-ix Paul displays for the most part a relaxed, almost euphoric, frame of mind, in his relief at the good news brought to him by Titus from Corinth; there is none of the intense agitation which marks Galatians. The only passage in 2 Corinthians i-ix which could properly be called “anti-legal” is chapter iii, and there Paul is not, as in Galatians, warning his readers against seeking salvation in works of the law but emphasizing the glory of the new covenant, to the ministry of which he has been called, by contrasting it with the evanescent glory of the old covenant. And the antithesis which he employs in this connection is spirit-letter (verses 6, 7), not spirit-flesh; the substantive” flesh” (sa,rx) does not appear in this chapter, and when the adjective” fleshy” (sa,rkinoj) is used, it relates to the new covenant, not to the old: the terms of the new covenant are inscribed not (like those of the old) “on stone tablets ” but “on fleshy tablets, i.e. on hearts” (evn plaxi,n lardi,aij sarki,naij). This, of course, is the literal usage of the word, not Paul’s distinctive theological usage, but the theological usage occurs in 2 Corinthians i-ix only in the phrase “after the flesh” (kata. sa,rka, i. 17, v. 16 bis), and if” after the flesh” is in antithesis to ‘-after the spirit” (kata. pneufma), the antithesis is implied, not expressed. The antithesis spirit-letter of 2 Corinthians iii. 6 f. is taken up again in Romans (ii. 29, vii. 6), although it is absent from Galatians. One could imagine Dr. Buck’s rhetorical question being reworded thus: “If Paul had already written 2 Corinthians i-ix, is it conceivable that he could, at some later time, have written Galatians, with its vehement anti-legal position, without once employing the antithesis, spirit-letter?” If Dr. Buck is right, it must be conceivable, because this is what he believes to have happened; but if that is conceivable, it is equally conceivable that Paul, having used· the faith-works antithesis in Galatians, because it was so apposite to the Galatian crisis, did not use it in 2 Corinthians i-ix, because it was not apposite to the Corinthian situation, but used it again in Romans, together with the antitheses spirit-flesh (as in Galatians) and spirit-letter (as in 2 Corinthians), because in Romans he was concerned to give a more comprehensive and systematic exposition of the gospel. Conclusions about relative dating based on considerations like these are not so compelling as Dr. Buck suggests.
Much the same might be said about the arguments of C. E. Faw who, writing ten years later, 34 dotted the i’ s and crossed the t’s of the case made by Bishop Lightfoot and Dr. Buck for dating Galatians between 2 Corinthians and Romans. and added some emphases of his own regarding the development of Paul’s acceptance of death, his employment of death and resurrection in a symbolic sense, and his special use of “crucifixion” to denote symbolic death.35
IV
Dr. Buck combines his dating of Galatians between 2 Corinthians i-ix and Romans with the view, alluded to above, that the doctrine of justification by faith, “while not necessarily incompatible with Paul’s earlier doctrine, was actually formulated and expressed by him for the first time when he found it necessary to answer the arguments of the Judaizers in Galatia “.36 This view. which is not essential to Dr. Buck’s dating of Galatians, was in some degree anticipated by William Wrede. according to whom justification by faith is Paul’s “polemical doctrine” and “is only made intelligible by the struggle of his life, his controversy with Judaism and Jewish Christianity. and is only intended for this “.37 Dr. Buck’s statement of this view is indeed much more moderate than Wrede’s. For Wrede. “the whole Pauline religion can be expounded without a word being said about this doctrine “38-an odd assertion, when we reflect that in Paul’s own’ exposition of his gospel, the letter to the Romans, written in a non-polemical situation, he gives justification by faith a cardinal place.39
It is true that several of Paul’s positions took the form they did in response to lines of argument and teaching which he found it necessary to oppose.40 But the essence of justification by faith was more probably implicit in the logic of his conversion. If the former Pharisee no longer hoped for acceptance with God on the ground of his devotion to the Torah, on what ground did his assurance of such acceptance thenceforth rest? It may have been late in his career that Paul wrote of his ambition to ” gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own, based on law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith” (Phil. iii. 8 f.); but there was never a time, from his conversion onward, when he could not have used the same words. When, in Galatians ii. 20′, he says that ” the life which I now live in the flesh41 I live by faith42 in the Son of God”, there is no hint that he is using a new form of words which had just taken shape under the exigency of confuting the Judaizers in Galatia. And the argument of Galatians iii. 10-14, where Christ, by dying the death which incurred the divine curse, transferred to himself the curse which his people had incurred by breaking the law,43 must have commended itself to Paul sooner rather than later in his Christian career as the solution to the intolerably scandalous problem which he had previously found in the Christian claim-that the Messiah, upon whom, practically by definition, the blessing of God rested uniquely, should nevertheless have suffered the death upon which, according to the law, the curse of God rested explicitly.
The centrality of Paul’s doctrine of justification to his whole conception of the gospel, not only in polemical situations, is given proper emphasis in two German works recently published in English translation. Giinther Bornkamm, in his monograph on Paul, shows that” Paul’s doctrine of justification is to be regarded not as theological theorizing on the primitive gospel, but as its proper development and exposition “.44 Paul’s soteriology is the interpretation of his Christology: “to set out the gospel concerning Christ as a gospel of justification, and vice versa, is a decisive concern of his whole theology.”45 And Ernst Kasemann, in his Perspectives on Paul, affirms that” the Pauline doctrine of justification is entirely and solely Christology, a Christology, indeed, won from Jesus’ cross and hence an offensive Christology”.46 It is a polemical or “fighting doctrine”47 indeed, but not on that account a subordinate element in Paul’s gospel, for the attitudes and presuppositions against which it fights are not simply those of first-century Judaism but attitudes and presuppositions which equally require to be opposed in the twentieth century and cannot be effectively opposed except by this ” fighting doctrine”, which alone is ” the breakthrough to the new creation”.48 Professor Kasemann is no mean fighter himself, and speaks from personal experience as well as from exegetical insight.
V
It would be proper to make some reference here to C. H. Dodd’s correlation of what he regarded as the probable sequence of Paul’s letters with the evidence of development in Paul’s thought-not least because his thesis was first propounded in lectures given in this Library.49 He believed that the” affliction in Asia ” mentioned in 2 Corinthians i. 8-10 marked a psychological watershed, if not “a sort of second conversion”, in Paul’s experience, after which “the traces of fanaticism and intolerance [found in some of his earlier letters] disappear, almost if not quite completely, along with all that insistence on his own dignity “.50 In Professor Dodd’s view, such letters as Galatians and 2 Corinthians x-xiii, in which these features are discernible, were written before this psychological watershed, whereas 2 Corinthians i-ix, from which they have practically disappeared, should {at least for the most part)51 self-evidently be dated after it. There is much to be said for Professor Dodd’s exposition of ” the mind of Paul “, but I cannot go all the way with him, for, while I too recognize in 2 Corinthians x-xiii a separate letter from chapters i-ix, I am disposed to date it later, not earlier, than chapters i-ix.52 I am unable therefore to appeal to Professor Dodd’s thesis in support of a date for Galatians earlier than that of 2 Corinthians i-ix since, if 2 Corinthians xxiii could have been written after 2 Corinthians i-ix, so (theoretically) could Galatians.
Another of my predecessors has also dealt with the date of Galatians in a Rylands Library lecture. T. W. Manson, in the course of his series of lectures on “St. Paul in Ephesus”, dated Galatians to Paul’s Ephesian period {although to him the recipients were the South Galatians).53 Pointing out that Paul devotes two-fifths of the letter to defending his apostolic status against a violent attack, and a further two-fifths to a counter-attack against the position of the circumcision party, he observed that ” the only time when Paul appears to have had to face an attack of this kind and of this gravity is in the Ephesian period; and the situation revealed in the Philippian and Corinthian letters is, I think, substantially that presupposed by Galatians “.54 I am not so sure, however, that Paul’s apostolic status was seriously called in question during one phase only of his apostolic career; those who challenged it were liable to do so whenever an opportunity arose. And the judaizing propaganda of the Corinthian correspondence seems to me to belong to a later stage than that of Galatians. In the Galatian crisis pressure was put upon Paul’s Gentile converts to accept circumcision in particular (with other features of Judaism like the sacred calendar); in the Corinthian crisis circumcision does not appear to have figured (it is mentioned incidentally and uncontroversially in 1 Cor. vii. 18 f.). The reason, I believe, is that after the publication of the apostolic decree of Acts xv. 20, 29, it would have been difficult for judaizing preachers invoking the authority of the leaders of the Jerusalem church to impose circumcision on Gentile Christians.55 What they did try to impose on the Corinthian church was the literal force of the food-regulations annexed to the decree, regarding which Paul took a more liberal and enlightened line.56 {The syncretism at Colossae, in which circumcision played a part, was a local Phrygian development, not something imposed by Judaean emissaries,57 and it is not clear whether the” mutilation party ” against which the Philippians are put on their guard comprised Jews or judaizing Christians.)58
VI
The conclusion to which I come is this: a comparative study of Galatians alongside those Pauline letters which can be more certainly dated is not decisive for the dating of this letter. In particular, nothing in such a comparative study prohibits our giving Galatians a place quite early among the Pauline letters, if an early place appears probable on other grounds, as I believe it does. In the third lecture of this series the disputation caused in the church of Syrian Antioch by those Judaean visitors who “began to teach the brotherhood that those who were not circumcised in accordance with Mosaic practice could not be saved” (Acts xv. I) was related to Paul’s account in Galatians ii. 12 of the emissary or emissaries “from James ” who came to Antioch and persuaded Peter to discontinue his table fellowship with Gentiles.59 It was further suggested that persons of this outlook also visited the churches of Galatia (the assumption being that these churches were in South Galatia) and tried to persuade Paul’s Gentile converts there that it was necessary for them to accept circumcision and other features of the Jewish law. If these people visited the Galatian daughter-churches of Syrian Antioch about the same time as their fellows visited Antioch itself, or shortly afterwards, then the letter to the Galatians must have been written as soon as Paul got news of what was afoot. In that case Galatians may well have been written on the eve of the Jerusalem meeting described in Acts xv. 6 ff. which would, I think, yield the most satisfactory correlation of the data of Acts and Galatians. It must be conceded that, if this is so, Galatians is the earliest among the extant epistles of Paul.60 I know of no evidence to make this conclusion impossible, or even improbable. Even on this early dating, Paul has been a Christian for at least fifteen years, and the main outlines of his understanding of the gospel would have been as well defined by then as ever they were likely to be. Now Galatians, whatever its date, is a most important document of primitive Christianity, but if it is as early as I am suggesting, its importance is enhanced. Some aspects of its importance in this regard would be a suitable topic for a future lecture in this series.
1 A lecture delivered in the John Rylands Library on Wednesday, the 10th of November, 1971.
2 C. E. Faw, “The Anomaly of Galatians “, Biblical Research, iv (1960), 25 If.
3 BULLETIN. li (1968-69). 292 If.
4 E. Haenchen. The Acts of the Apostles. E. T. (Blackwell. Oxford. 1971).
5 M. Dibelius. Studies in the Acts of the Apostles. E. T. (London. 1956).
6 H. Conzeimann, The Theology of St. Luke. E. T. (London, 1960); cf. Die Apostelgeschichte (Handbuch zum Neuen Testament, Tübingen, 1963).
7 BULLETIN.lii (1969-70). 243 If.
8 This is the majority opinion on the date of Galatians. For a careful presentation of the case for an Ephesian provenance cf. E. de W. Burton. The Epistle to the Galatians (lCC. Edinburgh, 1921), pp. xlvii If.
9 Cf. 1. B. Lightfoot. Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Calatians (London. 1865). pp. 24 f . 41. 174 f.
10 This was W. M. Ramsay’s earlier view; cf. his St. Paul the Traveller and the Roman Citizen (London. 1895). pp. 182 ff., and A Historical Commentary on St. Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians (London, 1899), pp. 405 ff. He thought then that it was sent from Antioch (cf. Acts xviii. 22 f.). On this dating Gal. v. 11 can be illuminated by Paul’s circumcision of Timothy, which took place during the visit of Acts xvi. I ~6.
11 This was Ramsay’s later view; cf. The Teaching of Paul in Tenns of the Present Day (London, 1913), p. 391; St. Paul the Traveller and the Roman Citizen14 (London, 1920), pp. xxx, xxxi.
12 Recently. in an Australian paper, I came across the argument that, if Galatians was written before the Jerusalem Council of Acts xv. 6 ff. that Council was a farce. since the question which it debated would have been settled already by an “inspired epistle”. This argument betrays a naive exaggeration of the importance which the Jerusalem Christians would have attached to any letter of Paul’s “inspired” or otherwise-even had they known of it.
13 Gk. ou[tw tace,wj.
14 Lightfoot. Galatians. p. 42.
15 F. C. Baur, Paul: his Life and Works, E. T., i (London, 1876), 247 f. For the sequence of Pauline letters in Marcion’s canon he depends on Epiphanius (Haer., 42. 9). That Galatians came first in his list is implied by Tertullian (Adu. Marc., v. 2 if.) and by the Marcionite prologues to the epistles, which make sense only” in the order in which they would appear in a Marcionite copy of the Apostle” (A. Souter, Text and Canon of the NP (London, 1954), p. 188). But. the position of Galatians at the head of Marcion’s Apostolikon is due to considerations not so much of chronology (in which Marcion had but little interest) as of dogmatic fitness: it was, as T ertullian agreed, principalis aduersus iudaismwn epistula (Adu. Marc., v. 2).
16 Lightfoot, Galatians, p. 40.
17 Lightfoot, Galatians, p. 49.
18 Jesus’ own word for God (Mark xiv. 36) was carried over into the usage of Hellenistic Christians; their repetition of his language was proof, according to Paul, that God has sent “the Spirit of his Son” into their hearts (Gal. iv. 6). Cf. J. Jeremias, Abba: Studien zur neutestamentlichen Theologie und Geschichte (Gottingen, 1966), pp. 15 ff.
19 From Lev. xix. 18; cf. Mark xii. 31 and Luke x. 27 for its firm place in the gospel tradition.
20 E.g. on the nature of the resurrection body; cf. F. F. Bruce, “Paul on Immortality “, Scottish Journal of Theology, xxiv (1971), 457 ff.
21 See pp. 261 if.
22 J. Weiss, Earliest Christianity, E. T., i (New York, 1959),206.
23 Lightfoot, Galatians, p. 44. In a footnote he mentions that Theodore of Mopsuestia observed a resemblance between these two epistles, citing J. B. Pitra (ed.), Spicilegium Solesmense i (Paris, 1855),50.
24 B. Jowett, The Epistles of St. Paul to the Thessalonians, Galatians, Romans, i (London, 1855), 196.
25 Lightfoot, Galatians, p. 45, n. 3.
26 They were much more probably the result of his being stoned at Lystra (Acts xiv. 19; cf. 2 Cor. xi. 25), as some at least of his readers had good reason to know.
27 Lightfoot, Galatians, p. 50.
28 Cf. T. W. Manson, Studies in the Gospels and Epistles (Manchester, 1962), pp. 210 ff.
29 C. H. Buck, Jr., “The Date of Galatians “, JBL, lxx (1951), 113 ff.
30 Ibid. p. “6.
31 C. H. Buck, Jr., “The Date of Galatians”, JBL, lxx (1951), p. 120.
32 Ibid. pp. 120 f.
33 Cf. J. C. O’Neill, The Theology of Acts in its Historical Setting (London, 1961), pp. 96 f., where Buck’s argument is described as” objectively convincing “.
34 C. E. Faw, “The Anomaly of Galatians “, Biblical Research, iv (1960). 25 H.
35 Cf. C. E. Faw, “Death and Resurrection in Paul’s Letters “, Journal of Bible and Religion, xxvii (1959), 291 ff.
36 C. H. Buck, JBL .lxx (1951), pp. 121 f.
37 W. Wrede, Paul. E. T. (London. 1907). p. 123.
38 W. Wrede, Paul, E. T. (London, 1907), p. 123. Cf. W. Heitmiiller, Luthers Stellung in der Religionsgeschichte des Christentums (Marburg, 1917), pp. 19 f., and the discussion in K. Holl, Gesammelte Aujsiitze, ii (Tübingen, 1928), 18 f.
39 It is the presupposition also of Paul’s language in 1 Corinthians i. 30 (” Christ Jesus, whom God made .”our righteousness “) and 2 Corinthians v. 21 (” that in him we might become the righteousness of God “). One might argue that in Galatians ii. 14 ff. Paul assumes that Peter agrees with him” that a man is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ” (cf. Acts xv. 7-11), but for the difficulty of deciding where Paul’s rebuke to Peter ends and his general reflections on the principle involved begin. Cf. C. von Weizsacker, The Apostolic Age, E. T. i (London, 1907).74 f.
40 His exposition of the cosmic significance of the work of Christ in reaction against the Colossian heresy is a good example; cf. BULLETIN, xlviii (1965-6), 268 ff.
41 Gk. evn sark,, an instance of the non-theological use of ” flesh ” (=mortal body) even in Galatians.
42 The saving or justifying principle of faith, insisted on in Galatians and Romans, is present in the Corinthian letters even more frequently than pi,stij in the sense of a special spiritual gift (as in 1 Cor. xii. 9; Rom. xii. 6); cf. 1 Cor. ii. 5, xv. 14. 17; 2 Cor. i. 24 (pi,stij). 1 Cor. i. 21, iii. 5, xiv. 22. xv. 2. 11 (pisteu,w).
43 An instance of the rabbinical exegetical device of gezerah shawah (” equal category “), relating Deut. xxi. 23 and xxvii. 26 in respect of their common term “cursed “.
44 G. Bomkamm, Paul. E. T. (London, 1971). p. 116.
45 Ibid. p. 117.
46 E. Kasemann, Perspectives on Paul. E. T. (London, 1971), p. 73.
47 Ibid. p. 70.
48 Ibid. p. 73.
49 C. H. Dodd, “The Mind of Paul”, BULLETIN, xvii (1933), 91 If., xviii (1934),69 If., reprinted in New Testament Studies (Manchester, 1953), pp. 67 If., 83 If.
50 BULLETIN, xvii (1933), 104; New Testament Studies, p. 81.
51 2 Cor. vi. 14-vii. I, frequently considered to be an interpolation, might be an exception.
52 Cf. F. F. Bruce. 1 and 2 Corinthians (New Century Bible, London, 1971), pp. 166 If. Again. if Philip. iii. 2 should be dated after 2 Cor., as Professor Dodd held its fierce invective would be another exception to his rule. Cf. T. W. Manson: “if Philippians is to be dated after the spiritual crisis. Chapter iii can only be regarded as either a relapse or a misplaced survival from an earlier stage in Paul’s career” (Studies in the Gospels and Epistles, p. 164).
53 T. W. Manson, “The Problem of the Epistle to the Galatians “, BULLETIN, xxiv (1940), 59 If., reprinted in Studies in the Gospels and Epistles, pp. 168 If.
54 T. W. Manson, BULLETIN, xxiv (1940), 60; Studies, p. 169.
55 But see Studies, p. 186, n. 1, where Professor Manson points out “that circumcision is not even mentioned in the Apostolic letter”. Perhaps its omission was more eloquent than any specific statement ruling that Gentile converts were exempt from it.
56 Cf. C. K. Barrett, “Things Offered to Idols “, NTS, xi (1964-65), 138 If.
57 Cf. BULLETIN, xlviii (1965-66), 268 if.
58 That they were Jews has been held, inter alios, by J. G. Machen, The Origin of Paul’s Religion (London, 1921), p. 104, and F. W. Beare, A Commentary Of! the Epistle to the Philippians (London, 1959), p. 104. For the view that they were Judaizers, cf. T. W. Manson, Studies, p. 163.
59 Cf. BULLETIN, liii (1970-1), 270 f.
60 Among those who have maintained this dating are J. Calvin, Commentary on Galatians (Geneva, 1548); E. T. by T. H. L. Parker, (Edinburgh, 1965), p. 24; V. Weber, Die Abfassrmg des Galaterbriefs vor Jem Apostelkonzil (Ravensburg, 1900); D. Round, The Date of St. Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians (Cambridge, 1906); K. Lake, The Earlier Epistles of Paul (London, 1911), pp. 297 ff. (he later abandoned this view for one which involved an identification of the Jerusalem visits of Acts xi. 30 and xv. 2); C. W. Emmet, St. Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians (Reader’s Commentary, London, 1912), pp. xiv ff., and The Beginnings of Christianity, ed. F. J. F. Jackson and K. Lake, ii (London, 1922), pp. 269 if. ; W. M. Ramsay, The Teaching of Paul, pp. 372 ff., and St. Paul the Traveller4, pp. xxii, xxxi; D. Plooij, De chronologie Van het leven van Paulus (Leiden, 1918), pp. I11 ff.; A. W. F. Blunt, The Acts of the Apostles (Clarendon Bible, Oxford, 1922), pp. 182 ff., and The Epistle to the Galatians (Clarendon Bible, Oxford, 1925), pp. 22 if.; F. C. Burkitt, Christian Beginnings (London, 1924), pp. 116 if. ; H. N. Bate, A Guide to the Epistles of St. Paul (London, 1926), pp. 45 ff.; G. S. Duncan, The Epistle to the Galatians (Moffatt Commentary, London, 1934), pp. xxii if.; F. Amiot, S. Paul: Epitre aux Galates (Paris, 1946), p. 32; W. L. Knox, The Acts of the Apostles (Cambridge, 1948), pp. 40 ff.; R. Heard, Introduction to the NT (London, 1950), p. 183; H. F. D. Sparks, The Formation of the NT (London, 1952), pp. 60 f.; C. S. C. WiIliams, The Acts of the Apostles (London, 1957), p. 30 (tentatively) ; F. R. Coad, in A New Testament Commentary, ed. G. C. D. Howley (London, 1969), p. 444. It is difficult to know what significance to attach to the frequent observation that most of the proponents of this dating are British. For judicious surnmings up cf. J. G. Machen, The Origin of Paul’s Religion, pp. 80 ff.; G. B. Caird, The Apostolic Age (London, 1955), pp. 200 if.; D. Guthrie, NT Introduction: The Pauline Epistles (London, 1961), pp. 79 if.
Chapter 5 - Galatians and Christian Origins
AFTER our four previous studies in ” Galatian problems”, we cannot claim to have reached many agreed solutions. That the trouble-makers whom Paul attacks were judaizers and not gnosticizers is, I think, certain. It is equally certain, in my judgement, that they were Jewish. Christians, not Gentiles.2 But while I have argued that the letter was sent to South Galatia, not North Galatia, and that it may well be the earliest of Paul’s extant writings, I know that the arguments fall far short of demonstration. They may have reassured those who were already disposed to maintain these positions, but they will hardly have. persuaded others to change their minds. Perhaps I should be satisfied if the South Galatian hypothesis and the early date, minority positions as they are, continue to he treated with respect as reasonable options.
In a dissertation recently submitted to the University of Manchester3 one of my research students, Or. J. W. Orane, has developed an interesting argument involving the relation of Galatians to Paul’s other ” capital” epistles. Briefly, he suggests that the anti-judaizing polemic of Galatians opened the door to a gnostic type of antinomianism, summed up in such a slogan as ” Everything is permissible”. Paul found it necessary to counteract this tendency in 1 Corinthians by laying down limits and regulations which some of his converts might have had difficulty in distinguishing from a new legality. In 2 Corinthians and Romans it is possible to recognize a synthesis of the two extremes which find expression in the two earlier letters. It might be thought that Dr. Drane has imposed a Hegelian pattern on the Pauline correspondence, but that is not so; the pattern emerged from his unprejudiced reading of the documents. He did indeed hold already, for what appeared to him (and to me) to be sound reasons, that Galatians was the earliest of the four letters. The thesis-antithesis-synthesis pattern which consequently emerged, on his reading of the evidence, cannot therefore be used as an argument for the early date of Galatians ; the early date was presupposed. But when the· -epistles are read in terms of this pattern, several of their features are seen in a new light. For example, the emphasis on the gospel as ” tradition :’ in I Corinthians could be regarded as a corrective to the emphasis on the gospel as ” revelation ” in Galatians. The rather detailed ethical guidelines and caveats in 1 Corinthians (” Everything is permissible, but “.”)4 could be regarded as correctives to false inferences drawn from the insistence on freedom from the law in Galatians. Even the exhortations to women in 1 Corinthians about public decorum in dress and utterance5 could be regarded as correctives to an ultra-libertarian interpretation of the principle laid down in Galatians iii. 28 that in Christ ” there is neither male nor female”. Having supervised Dr. Drane’s research for three years and having recently taken part in the examination of his thesis, I am hardly in a position to offer an objective assessment of his conclusions, but it will. be interesting to see how they are appraised by the world of Pauline scholarship when they are published. But even if they win general approval, the most that could be said about their bearing on the date of the letter is that the early dating is consistent with them. Without discussing the date further, then, we shall consider some .of !he implications of the letter for Christian origins and the beginning of the gospel.
II
The letter includes in its opening salutation words which are commonly recognized as drawn from an early Christian confession of faith, which Paul did not formulate although he subscribed to it. The Pauline greeting, ” Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ” is followed by a construction with article and participle (equivalent to an adjective clause) in which Christ is described as the one ” who gave himself for our sins, that he might deliver us from the present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father, to whom be the glory for ever and ever. Amen” (Gal. i. 4 f.). Two pieces of common and primitive Christian belief find expression here: (i) that Christ” gave himself for our sins”-with which we may compare 1 Corinthians xv. 3, ” Christ died for our sins “, or Romans iv. 25, ” who was delivered up for our trespasses “-and (ii) that the purpose of his so doing was our deliverance” from the present evil age”. This presents the Christian reinterpretation of the current Jewish doctrine of the two ages, the transition between the present age, the epoch of wickedness (as it is called in the Qumran texts), and the age to come, the age of new life and righteousness, being marked by the Christ-event-historically in his death and resurrection and existentially in the experience of his people when by faith they enter into union with him. 6 To these two items should be added one that appears earlier in the salutation, where” God the Father” is qualified by the participial phrase” who raised him (i.e. Jesus) from the dead ” (Gal. i. 1),. a phrase recurring throughout the New Testament epistles, as m Romans iv. 24, viii. 11, x. 9; 2 Corinthians iv. 14; 1 Peter i. 21.
Further extracts from the common stock of primitive Christianity appear in Galatians iv. 4, ” When the time had fully come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman “-possibly with the further phrase” born under law”, but the following words, ” to redeem those that were under law, that we might receive adoption as sons” (Gal. iv. 5), are characteristically Pauline. Yet when Paul goes on to link this adoption of believers into the family of God with their receiving from God “the Spirit of his Son “, he adduces as a demonstration of this their invocation of God as ” Abba! Father! ” (Gal. iv. 6). From the earliest times, it appears, Greek-speaking Christians took over from the Aramaic-speaking church the word Abba which Jesus had used in addressing God or speaking about him (cf. Mark xiv. 36), adding to it the Greek equivalent o` path,r (cf. Rom. viii. 15).7 Thus Paul weaves his distinctive teaching around a core of primitive usage.
The same is true of the death of Christ, which-evidently played a central part in the message first brought to the Galatians, “before whose eyes Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified” (Gal. iii. 1. Paul’s elaboration of the doctrine of Christ’s passion is seen in his argument in Galatians iii. 10-14 that, by enduring the form of death upon which the divine curse had been pronounced in the law (Deut. xxi. 23), Christ had redeemed his people from the curse which the law pronounced on those who failed to keep it perfectly (Deut. xxvii. 26).8 A further Pauline insight into the significance of the cross of Christ appears in Galatians vi. 14 where, playing on a double meaning of the verb stauro,w, he says that it constitutes a fence separating him from the kosmos. Baptism was the common sign of initiation into the Christian fellowship; in addition to its primitive association with repentance, cleansing and the remission of sins, Paul views it as the token of incorporation into Christ: ” as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ ” (Gal. iii. 27).9 Through membership in Christ, who is Abraham’s offspring, they too even Gentiles-become Abraham’s offspring and heirs of the promises made to the patriarch by God (Gal. iii. 29). The reception of the Spirit in the Galatian churches, as elsewhere in the early apostolic age,10 was attended by mighty works (Gal. iii. 5), but Paul elaborates the doctrine of the Spirit along lines of his own, contrasting life under the Spirit’ s leadership with life under law in terms of freedom as opposed to bondage (Gal. v. 1, 18).
Most of the Old Testament testimonia quoted in Galatians are characteristically Pauline, and some are peculiar to this letter. We shall be cautious, therefore, in assigning them to the common stock of primitive Christian testimonia. Professor Dodd suggests that two of them may be so assigned: (a) the conflation of Genesis xii. 3 and xxii. 18 in Galatians iii. 8, ” in you shall all the nations be blessed” (cf. Acts iii. 25 for a different conflation of the same two texts),11 and (b) the statement of Habakkuk ii. 4, quoted in Galatians iii. 11 (as in Rom. i. 17) in the sense, ” he who is righteous justified) by faith will come to life “, which (in the light of Its different usage in Heb. x. 38) he thinks may have been a testimonium to the coming of Christ even before Galatians was written.12 I should mention two more.
In Galatians iii. 13 Paul, as we have seen,13 quotes Deuteronomy xxi. 23 (LXX), “cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree” (krema,menij evpi. zu,lon) and expounds it along with Deuteronomy xxvii. 26 by means of the rabbinical device of gezerah shawah.14 But it appears that Deuteronomy xxi. 23 had already been applied to the crucifixion of Christ, if we consider the use of the phrase ” hanging him on a tree” (krema,santen evpi. zu,lou) in two speeches in Acts (v. 30, x. 39) which there is no reason to regard as free Lukan compositions, since each is a summary of primitive kerygmatic motifs.15 Quite early Jesus’ followers came to terms with the fact that their Master died the death on which the law pronounced a curse, although Paul, more suo, relates the fact to Jesus’ satisfaction and abrogation of the Torah.
Again, the application of Isaiah liv. I in Galatians iv. 27, where the” barren one” is interpreted of the Gentile church by contrast with the married woman, here understood as “the present Jerusalem “, might well be regarded as original to Paul16 But at least it is taken from one of the most fertile fields of testimonia, Isaiah xl-lxvi, which appears to have been given an extensive Christian interpretation at an early date. If Isaiah liv. 1 had already received a Christian interpretation, Paul certainly adapts it to his current argument; I wonder if this text may not have suggested to him his allegorical exegesis of the Genesis story of Hagar and Sarah, with their respective sons, rather than vice versa.
Be that as it may. If we try to summarize the primitive Christian message, proclaimed by Paul and his predecessors alike, as it is presupposed in the letter to the Galatians, the result might be somewhat as follows :
Jesus our Lord, the Son of God, was sent into the world by his Father when the due time came. As befitted Israel’s promised Messiah, he was born into the family of Abraham and lived under the Jewish law. he was crucified by his enemies but in his death he gave himself for his people’s sins. God raised him from the dead to be the Saviour of all who believe in him; he has sent his Spirit into their hearts, enabling them to call God” Father” as Jesus did, to exhibit his love in their lives and to look forward confidently to the realization of their hope.
III
When Paul charges his Galatian converts with turning away so quickly to follow “a different gospel” which could not properly be called a gospel at all, and anathematizes all who pr-ach any other gospel than that which those converts had received from him (Gal. i. 6-9), was there (we may ask) any objective standard by which judgement could be pronounced between his gospel and the ” different gospel”? Can we be as sure as he was that his version was genuine and the other spurious? Certainly, with the benefit of hindsight we can agree that if Christianity was to become a universal faith, a version like Paul’s was more likely to achieve this end than that of his opponents; but how did the situation look when the letter to the Galatians was written? Was there any general consensus regarding the ” authentic” gospel in reference to which other self-styled ” gospels” might be exposed as false? We can appreciate how slender Paul’s case for the gospel he preached must have appeared if he was the only one who preached it. Paul was a latecomer to the Christian faith, as everyone knew. He had not been a companion of Jesus on earth as the original apostles had been; and when he first made contact with the followers of Jesus it was as a persecutor, not as a champion. What reason was there to accept such a man’s interpretation of the message of Jesus in preference to that of others?
Paul finds it necessary to answer this question, and the necessity of doing so places him in a delicate situation. He wants to maintain that the leaders of the Jerusalem church recognize the authenticity of the gospel which he preaches; he wants (perhaps even more) to maintain his personal independence of the authority of the Jerusalem leaders. Accordingly, he asserts his independence of their authority before he (after a fashion) appeals to their authority. “In my early zeal for the ancestral traditions of Judaism “, he says (if his words may be summarized), ” I devastated17 the church, until God (who had designated me from birth for my apostolic service) revealed his Son in me so that I might be his herald among the Gentiles.18 I embarked on this ministry at once, without consulting either the Jerusalem apostles or anyone else. Not until three years had elapsed did I go to Jerusalem to visit Cephas; the only other apostle I met was James, the Lord’s brother. That was all the the contact I had with Jerusalem in my early Christian days; after two weeks there I went off into Syria· and Cilicia to preach the faith I had once endeavoured to overthrow. Not until fourteen years had elapsed did I go up to Jerusalem again ” (Gal. i. l3-ii. 1 a). This narrative is designed to support his claim that he derived the gospel which he preached from no human intermediary but by the revelation of Jesus Christ granted him at Damascus.
Then comes the account of the conference held in Jerusalem between Paul and Barnabas on the one hand and the Jerusalem leaders on the other (Gal. ii. 1-10). Paul is still careful to maintain his independence-” those men of repute”, he says, ” added nothing to me “19 (Gal. ii. 6), whether in relation to the content of the gospel or the authority to preach it; but they acknowledged the genuineness of the gospel which I was already preaching. This acknowledgement on their part is implied in his statement that he “laid before them” the gospel which he preached among the Gentiles (ii. 2). Far from criticizing it or finding it defective, they agreed that, as they themselves had been commissioned to carry the gospel to the Jews, Paul and Barnabas had been commissioned to carry it to· the Gentiles.20 Two separate constituencies are distinguished, but there is no suggestion that there were two distinct versions of the gospel for the respective constituencies. In the light of Paul’s solemn imprecations in Galatians i. 8 f., it is evident that he would have dismissed the possibility of such a thing as preposterous.21 No doubt the approach and emphasis would differ: a considerable body of background knowledge could be assumed in Jewish audiences which pagan audiences lacked. Without prejudging the nature of the sermons in Acts, we can see that Luke takes this for granted : Paul’s address in the synagogue of Pisidian Antioch (Acts xiii. 16-41) presupposes familiarity with a long stretch of sacred history which would have been unintelligible had it been introduced into his Areopagitica at Athens (xvii. 22-31). Again, the circumcision issue did not arise in the mission to Jews, who were circumcised already. It has already been suggested22 that, when Paul and Barnabas shook hands with the Jerusalem leaders on the demarcation of their respective spheres of activity, too much was taken for granted on both sides, and trouble arose when those unventilated questions· came into the open. Paul assumed that Cephas saw eye to eye with him on the status of Gentiles in the church, and indeed his assumption was not unfounded if Cephas, on his first coming to Antioch, practised table-fellowship with Gentiles as Paul assures us he did. All the greater was Paul’s sense of disillusionment when Cephas withdrew from this table-fellowship at the instance of one or more23 who “came from James” (Gal. ii. 12) and when subsequent attempts were made by people claiming authorization from Jerusalem to intervene in Paul’s mission-field. But worse still in his eyes was the urging of circumcision on his Gentile converts as a religious obligation apart from which they could not become genuine children of Abraham and be admitted into the true covenant-community.
Those who urged circumcision on the churches of Galatia no doubt felt quite sincerely that if this practice went by default, even for Gentile believers, the continuity of the history of salvation was interrupted. If the Jerusalem leaders were disposed to waive the circumcision requirement, that simply stamped them as compromisers. As for Paul, who refused to have his Gentile converts circumcised, it was he who was the heretic and they themselves who were orthodox, for they remained faithful to the terms of the unchangeable covenant, which Paul repudiated. One may say, with Otto Kuss, that” faithfulness in matters of factual detail need not amount to faithfulness in regard to the genuine content of the message “; but this simply brings us back to the question of how the genuine content of the message was to be ascertained.24 That salvation was to be found in Jesus Christ was a proposition to which Paul and his judaizing opponents would equally have subscribed. They might even have agreed that salvation was to be found in him alone. But on what conditions was the salvation found in Christ alone to be secured? This was the crucial question. No doubt Jesus did sit very loose to the traditions of the elders,25 but when it was a question of the admission of Gentiles to the fellowship of his disciples, could Paul or anyone else adduce a single utterance of his which suggested that circumcision could be dispensed with? (Indeed, when we consider the important part played by the circumcision question in the development of the early church, we may be impressed by the absence from our gospel tradition of any attempt to find a dominical ruling to which one side or the other could have appealed.) Paul might have appealed to the spirit of Jesus’ teaching, or (as he did) to the logical implication of the gospel,26 but people like his opponents would be satisfied with nothing less than verbatim chapter-and-verse authority; and this was not forthcoming.
IV
From the perspective of nineteen centuries’ distance, despite our ignorance of many elements in the situation that were well known to the protagonists, we can probably present an objective argument in defence of Paul’s claim that the message he preached was the authentic gospel of Christ. It is this: two things on which Paul pre-eminently insisted-that salvation was provided by God’s grace and that faith was the means by which men appropriated it-are repeatedly emphasized in the ministry of Jesus. and especially in his parables. regardless of the strata of gospel tradition to which appeal may be made. When we reflect on the complete lack of evidence in Paul’s letters that he knew the parables of Jesus. we may wonder how Paul managed to discern so unerringly the heart of his Master’s message. We may suspect that this discernment was implicit in the “revelation of Jesus Christ” which, according to him, was the essence of his conversion experience.
The response of faith regularly won the approval of Jesus, sometimes his surprised approval, as when it came from a Gentile.27 and was a sure means of securing his help and blessing; in face of unbelief, on the other hand, he was inhibited from performing works of mercy and power.28 “Faith as a grain of mustard seed “29 was what he desired to see, but too often looked for in vain, even in his own disciples.
As regards the teaching of the parables, the point we are making can be illustrated from two, belonging to two quite distinct lines of tradition-Luke’s special material and Matthew’s special material.
In the Lukan parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke xv. 11-32), the father might very well have adopted other means for the rehabilitation of his younger son than those described (with approval) by Jesus.’ When the black sheep of the family came home in disgrace, the father, having a father’s heart. might well have consented to give him a second chance. Listening to his carefully rehearsed speech, he might have said, ” That’s all very well, young man; we have heard fine phrases before. If you really mean what you say, you can buckle to and work as you have never worked before, and if you do so, we may let you work your passage. But first you must prove yourself; we can’t let by gones be by-gones as though nothing had happened.” Even that would have been generous; it might have done the young man a world of good, and even the elder brother might have been content to let him be put on probation. But for Jesus, and for Paul, divine grace does not operate like that. God does not put repentant sinners on probation to see how they will turn out· he gives them an unrestrained welcome and invests them as’ his true-bo-n sons. For Jesus, and for Paul, the initiative always rests with the grace of God. He bestows the reconciliation or redemption; men receive it. ” Treat me as one of your hired servants”, says the prodigal to his father; but the father speaks of him as “this’ my son “. So, says Paul, ” through God you are no longer a slave but a son, and if a son then an heir” (Gal. iv. 7).
In the Matthaean parable of the Labourers in the Vineyard (Matt. xx. J -J 6), the last-hired workmen did not bargain with their employer about their pay. If a denarius was the fair rate for a day’s work, those who worked for the last hour only might have expected a small fraction of that, but they accepted his undertaking to give them ” whatever is right” and in the event they received a denarius like the others who had worked all day. The grace of God is not to be parcelled out and adjusted to the varieties of individual merit. There was, as T. W. Manson pointed out, a coin worth one-twelfth of a denarius. “It was called a pondion. But there is no such thing as a twelfth part of the love of God.”30
This is completely in line with Paul’s understanding of the gospel. If law is the basis of men’s acceptance with God, then the details of personal merit and demerit are of the utmost relevance. But the great blessings of the gospel had come to the Galatian Christians, as they knew very well, not by the works of the law but by the response of faith-the faith which works by love.31 And when we speak in terms of love, we are on a plane where law is not at home.
A comparison of Paul’s doctrine of justification by faith with Jesus’ proclamation of the kingdom of God has been made by Eberhard Jüngel, in his book Paulus und Jesus.32 It is in the parables of Jesus especially, he insists, that the kingdom of God comes to expression, and the hearers’ response to the parables is their response to the kingdom of God. Jesus’ parabolic teaching is more than mere teaching; it is a ” language-event”, a Sprachereignis, in the terminology of Jüngel’s teacher Ernst Fuchs. That is to say, the parabolic teaching is itself an event confronting the hearer and challenging him to give a positive reply to the demand of the kingdom of God. With Fuchs, Jüngel sees in the parables Jesus’ christological testimony to himself, if only in veiled form. During the ministry, Jesus’ action and attitude supplied the parables with a living commentary sufficient to convey their meaning to those who responded in faith; later, the church felt it necessary to supply its own verbal commentary. The eschatological note which sounds in the parables is heard in Paul’s teaching about justification by faith. ” The law was our custodian until Christ came”, says Paul, ” that we might be justified by faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a custodian; for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith” (Gal. iii. 24-26). In other words, as he says to the Romans, ” Christ is the end of the law, that every one who has faith may be justified” (Rom. x. 4). Jüngel relates” the end (te,loj) of the law” to the fact that in Christ the eschaton has arrived. In the preaching of Jesus and the teaching of Paul he finds the same relation between eschatology and history, the same emphasis on the end of the law, the same demand for faith. The difference lies in the fact that the eschaton which for Jesus lay in the near future was present for Paul.
It would be more accurate to say that, for Paul, the period through which he was living was not yet the absolute eschalon or telos (cf. I Cor. xv. 24) but its threshold – that period” between the times ” during which the presence of the Spirit in the people of Christ confirmed to them their status and heritage as sons of God (Gal. iv. 6): “through the Spirit, by faith, we wait for the hope of righteousness” (Gal. v. 5). But already, with the coming of Christ and the completion of his redemptive work, the age of law had come to an end for the people of God.
When Paul calls Christ” the end of the law” he is expressing a theological insight. But this insight was based on sound historical fact: many of Paul’ s fellow-Pharisees who engaged in debate with Jesus during his ministry must have felt .that, on a practical level, his conduct and teaching involved ” the end of the law to-not only because of his rejection of their oral traditions but because of the sovereignty with which he treated such elements of the written law as the sabbath institution and food regulations. True as we have seen, he does not appear to have made any pronouncement on the circumcision question. But. when . we consider how he related the law as a whole to the basic requirements of love to God and love to one’s neighbour, and insisted on the paramountcy of heart-devotion, “truth in the inward parts”, righteousness, mercy and faith,33 the conclusion is inescapable that he would not have included circumcision among the weightier matters of the law. If no word of his on the subject has survived (apart from the incidental ad hominem argument m the course of a sabbath debate in John vii. 22 f.), it is simply because the issue did not arise in the situation of his ministry. When, later, it did arise in the situation of the Gentile mission, it is difficult to deny that Paul’s position was in keeping with Jesus’ general attitude to the externalities of religion.
Paul, like Jesus, shocked the guardians of Israel’s law by his insistence on treating the law as a means to an end and not as an end in itself, by his refusal to let pious people seek security before God in their own piety, by his breaking down of barriers in the name of the God who” justifies the ungodly” (Rom. iv. 5) and by his proclamation of a message of good news for the outsider. In all this Paul saw more clearly than most of his Christian contemporaries into the inwardness of Jesus’ teaching.
V
The autobiographical section of the Letter to the Galatians may provide us with some pointers to developments within the church of Jerusalem, from Paul’s visit to the city three years after his conversion to the time when the letter was written.
At the time of his conversion he knew that Jerusalem was the home of those who were apostles before him, although he did not go up to see them immediately . For Paul, ” apostles ” comprised a wider group than” the twelve “, but (whatever may be said to the contrary) the apostles included the twelve. When at last he did go up to Jerusalem, he went to visit Cephas-and in this section of our paper it is important to preserve Paul’ s nomenclature carefully, for reasons that will appear. That Cephas was an apostle is evident from the statement immediately following: ” I saw none of the other apostles except James the Lord’s brother” (Gal. i. 19). From this it follows (certainly) that Cephas was an apostle in the Pauline sense of the word (as in every other sense)34 and (most probably) that James was also an apostle in that sense. (We may compare how, in the summary of. the resurrection appearances in I Corinthians xv. 5-7, Cephas is linked with the narrower group of ” the twelve” and James with the wider group of ” all the apostles “.) It appears also from Paul’s account of this visit that Cephas was the more important figure of the two: it was to interview him that Paul went up to Jerusalem; his seeing James also was incidental.
By the time of his second visit (Gal. ii. 1-10) the situation had changed; the church of Jerusalem was now administered by a triumvirate, the ” men of repute”, the ” pillars “, as they were called. We may wonder if there had not until a short time before been four ” pillars”, the fourth being James the son of Zebedee, recently executed by Herod Agrippa the elder.35 If, as C. K. Barrett has suggested, the term “pillars” here implies pillars of the new temple,36 four might have seemed a more appropriate number-but this is highly speculative.
One point in Paul’s account of this second visit deserves more attention than it often receives: in verses 7 and 8 he speaks not of ” Cephas ” (as he normally does) but of ” Peter”. Speaking of the ” men of repute “, he says that, far from conferring on him anything that was not already his :
they saw that I had been entrusted with the gospel for the uncircumcision as Peter had been entrusted with it for the circumcision; for the same Lord who had empowered Peter for his apostleship among the circumcised had also empowered me for my apostleship to the Gentiles.
Why this change to” Peter” when” Cephas ” has been used in the preceding narrative and is used again in the following narrative? The most probable answer to this question is that suggested by O. Cullmann and E. Dinkler, that the passage containing the name ” Peter” is an extract from a more or less official record of the conference,37 the reference to Paul being changed to the first person singular so as to integrate the quotation into the contextual construction. This suggestion is not free from difficulties, but it is more free from them than any counter suggestion. If we accept it, then Paul repeats the gist of the quotation in his own words in verse 9 :
So then. James. Cephas and John. the men of repute as ” pillars” among them. recognized the grace that had been bestowed on me. and gave Barnabas and me their right hands as a token of fellowship, agreeing that we [should go] to the Gentiles and they themselves to the circumcision.
We observe that the leader of the twelve has become ” Cephas ” again, and we note Paul’s distinctive use of the word ” grace” in relation to his apostolic ministry.38 But in Paul’s rewording we see something more. On the one hand it is not Paul only, but Paul and Barnabas, whose call to evangelize the Gentiles is acknowledged; and on the other hand it is not ” Peter” only, but” James, Cephas and John” who are to discharge an apostleship to Jews. Here mention may be made of the suggestion of Günter Klein, that the quotation in verses 7 and 8 represents the situation at the time of the conference, while Paul’ s re-wording in verse 9, and indeed some of his language about the ” men of repute” earlier in the chapter, reflects the situation as it had developed in the interval between the conference and the writing of the letter.39 In the event not Peter in particular, but the triumvirate as a whole, undertook responsibility for directing and discharging the mission to the Jews, and when the names of the triumvirate are listed, it is James’s name that comes first. James has been moving towards first place not only since Paul’s first Jerusalem visit but even in the much shorter interval that has elapsed since his second visit. Certainly the pre-eminence of James, implied in the order of names in Galatians ii. 9, agrees With the picture of his position In the Jerusalem church given in Acts xv. 13 ff. and xxi. 18 ff., not to mention Cephas’s readiness to change his table practice at Antioch at the instance of the deputation which” came from James ” (Gal. ii. 12).
Klein links his suggestion with another linguistic problem in Paul’s record of the conference.40 In verse 6 Paul begins to say that he received nothing from the men of repute, when he breaks off with a parenthesis which makes him start the statement all over again with a different construction:
But from the men of repute-whatever sort of men they were.41 it makes no difference to me; God has no favourites!” “to me indeed the men of repute added nothing “.
The English suffix ” ever” attached as a suffix to “what” (” whatever sort of men “.”) is a particle which normally has temporal force. but when appended to a pronoun it serves simply to emphasize its indefiniteness. So too the corresponding Greek particle, pote, has primarily temporal force (” once upon a time” or ” formerly”), and could have it here, in which case we should translate: “what sort of men they once were makes no difference to me.” But it may simply serve to emphasize the preceding pronoun, and this is how it is taken in our best known English versions (cf. RV: “whatsoever they were “). If we allow it the full temporal force, we have to ask what former stage Paul has in mind. Does he refer to their association with the historical Jesus-James as his brother and Cephas and John as members of the twelve? Perhaps he does; the language is so general that this cannot be excluded. Klein, however, thinks that, even if pote has only emphatic force, the imperfect tense “were” is important; why does Paul not say” whatever sort of people they are”? Probably the imperfect tense is not all that difficult to explain: even if Paul does change his construction in mid-sentence, he intends to make a statement relating to the past, with the principal verb in the aorist tense, and thinks of the men of repute as they were on that occasion. Klein agrees, but adds that his choice of the imperfect tense shows that he thinks of them as they Were on that occasion, but as they no longer are at the time of writing. He sees confirmation here for his belief that a change had taken place in their relationship one to another since the conference. But this is probably pressing too much temporal significance out of a construction which perhaps has no temporal significance at all.
VI
After the relegation of law to the status of an outmoded order in the main body of the letter, it might strike the reader as something of a paradox towards the end of the letter when Paul speaks of ” the law of Christ”. “If you are led by the Spirit”, he has said, “you are not under law” (Gal. v. 18), but now: ” Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ” (Gal. vi. 2). Yet we have been prepared for this: the law in the form in which Paul served it in his pre-Christian days has been replaced by something better, but the law as interpreted in the teaching and example of Christ is still in force. The difference for Paul was that the law as he previously knew it was a yoke of bondage, whereas the law of Christ was the way of freedom. ” You were called to freedom, my brothers “, he writes; “only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh. but through love be servants one of another. For the whole law is fulfilled in one word: You shall love your neighbour as yourself’ ” (Gal. v. 13 f.).42 On the law as summarized in this ” one word” from Leviticus xix. 18. together with its twin commandment of love to God in Deuteronomy vi. 5, Jesus said the whole law and the prophets depended (Matt. xxii. 40).43 But the nature of law is radically transformed when it is interpreted in terms of love; and it is this transformation which is involved when, in Paul’s language, legal bondage gives way to the freedom of the Spirit.
Paul might have heard in the school of Gamaliel something to the effect that the whole law was comprehended in the commandment of love to one’s neighbour-we recall how Gamaliel’s master Hillel, summarized it in the injunction, ” Do not to another what is hateful to yourself “44-but since he speaks of “the law of Christ” it is a reasonable inference that he knew of the use which Christ had made of Leviticus xix. 18. “Bear one another’s burdens” seems to be a generalizing expansion of the particular instance mentioned in Paul’s preceding exhortation: ” if a man is overtaken in any trespass, you who are spiritual should restore him in a spirit of gentleness” (Gal. vi. 1. This is strangely reminiscent of a dominical injunction preserved only in Matthew’s special material45: “If your brother sins,46 go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone. If he listens to you you have gained your brother” (Matt. xviii. 15).
It is not so clear in Galatians as it is in some of the other letters of Paul that he fills out the details of ” the law of Christ” by drawing on a· body of ethical catechesis widely used throughout the churches of. his day. It has been pointed out that the recurring triad “faith, hope, love “, which seems to have been included in this catechesis, appears in Galatians v. 5 f.: ” For through the Spirit, by faith, we wait for the hope of righteousness. For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is of any avail, but faith working through love.”47 But the three members of the triad are so independently integrated into the context here that it is doubtful if the triad would be, or was intended to be, recognized as such. We may observe, however, that this passage contains the only reference to the parousia in Galatians (for” the hope of righteousness “48 is the hope to which the justification of believers points them forward) and the only reference to the rôle of the Spirit as the guarantee of this hope.49
As for” faith working through love”, Paul held that the faith by which men and women are justified before God finds practical expression in lives which exhibit the law of love. The law of love cannot be enforced by penal sanctions; the fruit of the Spirit, as Paul enumerates its nine-fold variety-love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control50-is not produced by legal enactments but simply because it is the nature of a life controlled by the Spirit to produce such fruit. As Paul says, curiously echoing an Aristotelian remark,51 ” There is no law dealing with such things as these” (Gal. v. 23). “The Spirit’s law of life in Christ Jesus Of, as he calls it elsewhere (Rom. viii. 2), has little more than the term ” law” in common with that from which the gospel has liberated him and (he trusts) his Galatian converts.52
VII
Galatians is the most” Pauline ” of all the Pauline letters-so much so, indeed, that those who derive their understanding of Paulinism exclusively, or even mainly, from this letter are apt to present a lopsided construction of the apostle’s teaching-to become ” more Pauline than Paul”,53 like Marcion in the second century. Against the danger of such a lop-sided construction Paul himself provides the necessary safeguards in other letters. But even in this most Pauline letter the careful student may discern how much of the essential gospel Paul had in common with those who were apostles before him and, above all, how much he had in common with Jesus himself.
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1 A lecture delivered in the John Rylands University Library of Manchester en Wednesday, the 15th of November, 1972.
2 In his important article, “The Agitators and the Galatian Congregation” (NTS, xvii (1970-71), 198 if.), R. Jewett argues persuasively that the judaizing missions to the church of Antioch and her daughter-churches were stimulated by the pressure, from the late forties onwards, of Palestinian Zealots. who treated as traitors these Jews who maintained social relations with the uncircumcised. These Zealots were the persecutors whose hostility the judaizers hoped to avoid (Gal. vi. 12). He assigns to the same setting the persecution of the Judean churches mentioned in I Thess. ii. 14-16.
3 J. W. Drane. Paul and the Gnostics: Some Aspects of Pauline Teaching and the Infiltration of Gnostic Ideas into’ the Early Church (Unpublished Ph.D. thesis. University of Manchester. 1972).
4 1 Cor. vi. 12. x. 23.
5 I Cor. xi. 2-16, xiv. 33b-36.
6 Cf. 2 Cor. v. 17.
7 Cf. A. M. Hunter, Paul and his Predecessors (London, 2nd edn. 1961), p. 50, where Paul’s acquaintance with the Lord’s Prayer is suggested; see also J. A. T. Robinson’s comments on Christian baptism, adoption and the reception of the Spirit as reflecting ” the association at the baptism of Jesus of the gift of the Spirit with the declaration of Sonship ” (” The One Baptism as a Category of New Testament Soteriology “, S.J.Th. vi (1953), 262).
8 See p. 268.
9 Cf. Rom. vi. 3ff.
10 Cf. Acts ii. 43 et passim; Heb. ii. 4.
11 C. H. Dodd, According to the Scriptures (London, 1952), pp. 43f.
12 According to the Scriptures, pp. 50 f.
13 See p. 267.
14 Gezerah shawah = ” equal category “. The common term” cursed” in Deut. xxi. 23 and xxvii. 26 provides a basis for interpreting the one text in the light of the other” In this instance the common term appears in the Greek version only; two different words are used in the Hebrew text.
15 Cf. Acts xiii. 29; I Pet. ii. 24. In the 1970 edition of N.E.B. zu,lon is translated ” gibbet” in all five of these New Testament passages.
16 The attempt by V Burch in J. R. Harris, Testimonies, ii (Cambridge, 1920), 32 H. to ascribe this u-e of Isa. liv. I to a pre-Pauline “testimony” collection, is based on too ready an assumption of the primitiveness of the Cyprianic Testimonia aduersus Iudaeos: Cyprian’s citation of Isa. liv. I in Testimonia, I. 20 is much more likely to be dependent on Gal. iv. 27.
17 This verb (porqe,w), occurring in Gal. i. 13,23, is found once elsewhere in the New Testament-in Acts ix. 21, also with reference to Paul’s persecuting activity. It is apparent that the story of this activity, with its sequel in Paul’s conversion and debut as a preacher of the gospel, was known in Judaea and Galatia alike. O. Linton has argued in an important article that the version of the story which Paul is at pains to correct in Galatians is the version reproduced in the narrative of Acts (” The Third Aspect: A Neglected Point of View”, Studia Theologica iii (1949), 79 ff.).
18 Paul. describes his conversion and call in terms reminiscent of Jer. i. 5 (” Before I formed you in the womb . ” I consecrated you: I appointed you a prophet to the nations “) and Isa. xlix. 5· (” Yahweh . . . formed me from the womb to be his servant “). Similar echoes are heard in the accounts of his conversion in Acts ix. 15, xxvi. 16-18. Paul’s experience is thus put” on the same plane as the experiences that made the great Old Testament figures connecting links in God’s plan of salvation” a. Munck, Paul and the Salvation of Mankind, E. T. [London, 1959], p. 33). Cf. B. Lindars. New Testament Apologetic (London, 1961), p. 223.
19 Ck. evmoi. . . . ouvde.n prosane,qento. N.E.B.: “did not prolong the consultation ” (margin: gave me no further instructions “).
20 Cf. Acts xiii. 47, where Paul and Barnabas describe their commission in Yahweh’s words to his Servant in Isa. xlix. 6. D. W. B. Robinson sees in the “two apostleships ” orCa!’ ii. 7-9 an agreement to divide the Servant’s commission in Isa. xlix. 6, the Jerusalem leaders undertaking” to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore the preserved of Israel” and Paul and Barnabas carrying the “light to the nations” (” The Circumcision of Titus and Paul’s’ Liberty’ “, Australian Biblical Review, xii (1964), 24 ff.).
21 Cf. Rom. iii. 30: “Cod is one; and he will justify the circumcised on the ground of their faith and the uncircumcised through their faith.”
22 BULLETIN, li (1968-9), 303 ff.
23 For the variant tina (“someone “) for tinaj (” some people “) see BULLETIN, li (1968-9), 308. The suggestion that tina may be neuter plural (” certain things “) and may refer to the terms of the apostolic decree of Acts xv. 28 f. (D. W. B. Robinson, art. cit., 40 f.) is improbable. See also the observations on the passage in R. McL. Wilson, ” Gnostics in Galatia?” Studia Evangelica, iv (1968), 360.
24 Auslegung und Verkiindigung, i (Regensburg, 1963), 30. Kuss adds immediately that it is from the standpoint of faith that the genuine content of the message is to be certainly determined. It is from such a standpoint that his pupil, J. Eckert, says at the end of his monograph Die urchristliche Verkiindigung im Streit zwischen Paulus und seinen Gegnern nach dem Galaterbrie/ (Regensburg, 1971): “As highly as the apostle’s striving for unity with the Jerusalem church and its men of repute is to be valued”. so little must his fight against the other gospel’ in Galatia-a fight which, in the last analysis. was concerned with the proclamation of the salvation to be found in Jesus Christ alone-lose its exemplary significance” (p. 238).
25 Cf. Mark vii. 1-23.
26 Cf. Gal. iii. 2-5, iv. 4-7. etc.
27 Cf. Matt. viii. 10 // Luke vii. 9.
28 Cf. Mark vi. 5 // Matt. xiii. 58.
29 Matt. xvii. 20; Luke xvii. 6.
30 T. W. Manson, The Sayings of Jesus (London, 2nd edn. 1949), p. 220. It should not be overlooked that a very different emphasis is found in some other parts of the material peculiar to Matthew, which indeed have lent themselves to a directly anti-Pauline interpretation, such as the criticism in Matt. v. 19 of the man who ” relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches men so ” (on this also see T. W. Manson, The Sayings of Jesus, pp. 25, 154).
31 Gal. iii. 2, 5, v. 6.
32 Tübingen, 1962.
33 Matt. xxiii. 23; cf. Luke xi. 42.
34 Cf. 1 Cor. ix. 5, where Cephas is mentioned by name not because he was distinct from ” the other apostles ” but because he was outstanding among them (against W. Schmithals, The Office of Apostle in the Early Church, E. T. (London. 1971). pp’. 80 ff.).
35 Acts xii. 2.
36 C. K. Barrett, ” Paul and the’ Pillar’ Apostles”, in Studia Paulina in honore in J. de Zwaan (Haarlem, 1953), pp. 1 ff.
37 O. Cullmann, Peter: Disciple-Apostle-Martyr, E. T. (London, 1953), p. 18; Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, E. T. vi (Grand Rapids, 1968), s.v. Pe,troj, p. 100,-n. 6; E. Dinkler, ” Der Brief an die Galater”, Verkündigung und Fotschung, 1953-5. pp. 182 f. J. Munck curiously inclined to the opposite view: ” Perhaps we should rather say that vv. 7 f. are Paul’s formulation, while v. 9 “. is a citation of the agreement” (Paul and the Salvation of Mankind, p. 62, n. 2).
38 Cf. Rom. i. 5; Eph. iii. 8.
39 G. Klein, ” Galater 2.6-9 und die Geschichte der Jerusalemer Urgemeinde ” Rekanstruktion und Interpretation (Müchen, 1969), pp. 107 if.
40 Op. Cit. pp. 99 if.
41 Gk. o,poi/oi, pote h[san.
42 Cf. Rom. xiii. 9.
43 Cf. Mark xii. 29 if.; Luke x. 27. .
44 “That is the whole law; everything else is commentary (pērūshā)”, Hillel added (TB Shabbath 31 a; cf. Aboth de R. Nathan. ii. 26).
45 Cf. C. H. Dodd “. Matthew and Paul “, New Testament Studies (Manchester. 1953). pp. 58 f. On the general subject see also his Gospel and Law (Cambridge, 1951). and Ennomoj Cristou/. in Studia Paulina in honorem J. de Zwaan. pp. 96 ff., reprinted in More New Testament Studies (Manchester. 1968), pp. 134 ff.
46 The added words” against you” (DWQ Earn. 13 etc.) are probably an early gloss, restricting the original intention.
47 Cf. A. M. Hunter, Paul and his Predecessors. pp. 33 ff..
48 Elsewhere called” the hope of salvation” (1 Thess. v. 8) and” the hope of glory” (Col. i. 27).
49 Expounded fully in Rom. viii. 9-25.
50 Gal. v. 22 f.
51 Aristotle. Politics, iii. 8. 2. 1284a: men of outstanding excellence are themselves a law. he says; it would be ridiculous to try to legislate for them.
52 The law belongs to the former aivw,n, from which the gospel has delivered believers (Gal. i. 4).
53 Cf. H. Küng, ” Der Frühkatholizismus im Neuen Testament als kontroverstheologisches Problem “, in Das Neue Testament als Karwn, ed. E. Kāsemann (Göttingen, 1970), p. 192.