Galatians and Freedom

Paul had preached in Galatia, Gentiles had believed, congregations had formed, and Paul had moved on. Then other teachers arrived and told those converts that faith in Israel's Messiah was not enough on its own: to belong to the people of God they needed to be circumcised and to take on the observances that marked out a Jew. The Galatians were being persuaded. Galatians is what Paul wrote when he found out.

It is the only one of Paul's undisputed letters to a church that has no thanksgiving. Titus has none either, which is worth noting before anyone calls the omission unique. It moves straight from the greeting to 'I am amazed how quickly you are deserting the One who called you by the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel' (1:6), and then to a curse, repeated for emphasis, on anyone, including an angel from heaven, who preaches another. At 3:1 he calls them foolish and asks who has bewitched them. At 5:12 he says of the agitators that he wishes they would proceed to emasculate themselves. This is not measured prose and it is not meant to be.

Two background questions have no settled answer, and you should teach both as open. First, who were the Galatians? Galatia was both an ethnic region in central Anatolia settled by Celtic tribes and a much larger Roman province that included Pisidian Antioch, Iconium, Lystra and Derbe, where Acts 13 and 14 place Paul's first journey. The South Galatian theory identifies the readers with those southern cities, which permits a very early date, possibly around AD 48, before the Jerusalem council. The North Galatian theory identifies them with the ethnic Galatians further north, which puts the letter in the early to mid fifties. The date matters, because on the early view Galatians is Paul's first surviving letter and predates the council of Acts 15 entirely.

Second, how does the Jerusalem visit of Galatians 2:1-10 relate to Acts? It is either the famine relief visit of Acts 11:30 or the council of Acts 15. If it is the council, Paul's account and Luke's differ in emphasis in ways that need explaining. If it is the famine visit, the difficulty disappears but the letter has to be very early. Both reconstructions are held by careful people, and neither can be proved.

What is not in doubt is what Paul thought was at stake. Not a secondary matter of custom. He says that if the agitators are right, Christ died for nothing (2:21), and that anyone accepting circumcision on those terms is severed from Christ (5:4). Galatians is written as if the gospel itself were being lost, because in Paul's judgment it was.

Galatians 2:11-14 is one of the most remarkable passages in the New Testament, because it records an apostle publicly and permanently on the wrong side of an argument, and the man who wrote it down was the other party.

The facts as Paul gives them. At Antioch, Cephas, that is Peter, was eating with Gentile believers. Then certain men came from James, and Peter began to draw back and separate himself, for fear of those in the circumcision group. The other Jewish believers followed his lead, and even Barnabas, Paul's own partner, was carried along. Paul says, 'I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned', and then reports what he said in front of them all: 'If you, who are a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you compel the Gentiles to live like Jews?'

Notice what the issue was and was not. Nobody at that table had denied a doctrine. Peter had not preached a false gospel; he had changed where he sat. Paul's judgment is that a practice can contradict the gospel as effectively as a sentence can, and that in this case the withdrawal of the table said to Gentile believers that they were second-class members who could be made full members by circumcision. Paul calls this conduct not walking in line with the truth of the gospel. The Greek expression suggests walking crookedly rather than straight.

Be careful about what Peter's motive was. Paul says he feared those in the circumcision group, but he does not say Peter had changed his mind. The most sympathetic reconstruction, and it is a serious one, is that Peter was trying to protect the Jerusalem church, which lived among observant Jews in a politically inflamed city and whose mission to fellow Jews would be compromised by reports of apostles eating with uncircumcised Gentiles. That is a real pastoral concern and not mere cowardice. Paul's answer is that some concerns, however real, cannot be bought at that price.

The passage has carried a heavy load in the history of scholarship. In the nineteenth century F. C. Baur and the Tübingen school built an entire reconstruction of early Christianity on it, as a long conflict between a Jewish Petrine party and a Gentile Pauline party, later papered over. That framework in its strong form is no longer held, because the evidence shows more overlap and less tidy factionalism than Baur allowed. But the incident itself remains what it is: hard, public, and unresolved on the page.

Chapters 3 and 4 are a sustained scriptural argument, and Paul fights on the agitators' ground. They had presumably appealed to Genesis 17, where circumcision is the sign of the covenant with Abraham. Paul goes to Genesis 15, where Abraham believed God and it was credited to him as righteousness, and to Genesis 12, where God promised that in Abraham all the nations would be blessed. The blessing of Abraham was always aimed at the Gentiles, he argues, and it always came through faith.

He opens with an argument from their own experience: did you receive the Spirit by works of the law or by hearing with faith (3:2)? That question assumes something happened among them that they could not deny. Then the law is placed in its historical position: it came four hundred and thirty years after the promise and cannot annul it (3:17), it was added because of transgressions (3:19), and it functioned as a paidagogos, the household slave who escorted a boy to school and disciplined him on the way, until Christ came (3:24). Paul's point is chronological and functional rather than dismissive. The guardian was real, appointed and temporary.

The chapter closes at 3:28: 'There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.' The verse is doing specific work in the argument, which is that the three divisions that determined status in that world do not determine membership here. What further weight it carries beyond membership is one of the most contested questions in the New Testament, and lessons 5 and 6 of this module return to it from two directions.

Then, at 4:21-31, Paul does something that startles every attentive reader. He takes Hagar and Sarah, the slave woman and the free woman, and says these things are allegoroumena, the women represent two covenants. The BSB renders the word 'serve as illustrations', which softens it; Bible Hub's interlinear shows the Greek. What is startling is the assignment. You expect Hagar, the outsider, to stand for the Gentiles. Paul puts Hagar with Mount Sinai and with the present Jerusalem, in slavery with her children, and Sarah with the Jerusalem above, who is free and is our mother. A first-century Jewish reader would have found this close to unbearable, and Paul knows it.

Two honest observations about this passage. First, on method: Paul's word is allegoroumena, and interpreters have long argued whether he is doing allegory in the Alexandrian manner, associated with Philo, or typology, reading persons and events as patterned anticipations. Most now say typology with allegorical technique, and note that Paul is reading the Genesis narrative in its own shape, with the promise-child born against nature, rather than dissolving it into abstractions. Second, on use: this passage has been quoted through Christian history to argue that Jews are children of the slave woman, and that use has done real harm. Paul's target is not the Jewish people. It is a mission to Gentiles that would put them under Sinai, and his own anguish for his kinsmen in Romans 9 is the control on how far this argument may be pressed.

Chapter 5 opens with the sentence the letter has been building toward: 'It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not be encumbered once more by a yoke of slavery.' Then Paul states the practical consequence twice, negatively at 5:2-4 and positively at 5:6: 'For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision has any value. What matters is faith expressing itself through love.'

That last phrase is the pivot from which everything else in the letter hangs, and it is why the charge of antinomianism does not stick. Paul has spent four chapters demolishing one basis for standing before God, and he immediately supplies an account of how a freed person lives. It is not a shorter rule book. It is a different engine. Freedom is not an opportunity for the flesh; rather, serve one another in love, and the entire law is fulfilled in a single decree, 'Love your neighbor as yourself' (5:13-14). Paul has not discarded the law's substance; he has relocated where it is fulfilled.

5:16-25 sets flesh against Spirit. Flesh here is not the body and not physical appetite as such; it is human existence as it operates on its own resources and against God, which is why the list of its acts includes hatred, discord, jealousy, rage, rivalries, divisions and factions alongside the obvious sins (5:19-21). Half that list is about what people do to each other in a church. Against it stands not a list of duties but a harvest: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control, and the dry comment that against such things there is no law.

Chapter 6 grounds this in a congregation. If someone is caught in a trespass, restore him with a spirit of gentleness, and watch yourself. Carry one another's burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ (6:2). Then a hand-written ending in large letters, a final swipe at those who want to boast in Galatian flesh, and the summary: 'neither circumcision nor uncircumcision means anything. What counts is a new creation' (6:15). That phrase, new creation, is where the letter ends up, and it is larger than the question it started with.

Erga nomou, works of the law, appears six times in Galatians and twice in Romans and nowhere else in the Greek Bible. What it denotes decides a great deal, including much of what was left open in the last lesson.

The case that it means identity markers, stated at its strongest. Read the phrase where it first appears. Galatians 2:16 comes immediately out of 2:11-14, a dispute about who eats with whom. The concrete issues in this letter are circumcision, days and seasons, and table practice, and the concrete issue at the Jerusalem meeting of 2:1-10 was whether Titus, a Greek, had to be circumcised. On this reading Paul is not attacking people who try to earn God's favour by being good. He is attacking the use of the law as a fence, so that the marks separating Jew from Gentile become the conditions of belonging. James Dunn argued this from 1983 onward, and the reading gained support from a Qumran document published in full in 1994, 4QMMT, whose title phrase miqsat ma'ase ha-torah means roughly some of the works of the Torah. There, a sectarian group lists specific legal rulings that distinguish them from other Jews. Here, apparently, is the phrase in use, and it designates identity-defining halakhah rather than moral effort in general. Note too that on this reading Paul is consistent with his own biography: a man who describes his former standing under the law as faultless is unlikely to be arguing that nobody can keep the law well enough.

The case that it means obedience to the law as such, stated at its strongest. Galatians 3:10 grounds the curse in a quotation from Deuteronomy 27:26: 'Cursed is everyone who does not continue to do everything written in the Book of the Law.' That is a statement about the totality of obedience, not about ethnic markers. Galatians 5:3 warns that anyone who gets himself circumcised is obligated to obey the whole law, which only functions as a warning if keeping the whole law is a burden of performance. Galatians 6:13 says that even the circumcised do not themselves keep the law, which is an accusation of failure to obey, not of drawing boundaries. And Romans 3:20 completes the sentence about works of the law with 'the law merely brings awareness of sin' (the Greek has no word for merely), which is a moral observation. Defenders of this reading include Stephen Westerholm, Douglas Moo, Thomas Schreiner and Simon Gathercole, and they add that 4QMMT cuts against Dunn as much as for him, since the works it lists are largely purity and cultic rulings internal to Judaism rather than Jew-and-Gentile boundary markers, and since the document ends by saying that doing these works will be reckoned to you as righteousness.

A mediating position has gained ground and deserves its own hearing rather than being treated as a compromise. On this view the phrase means the law as a whole, which is the old reading, but in Galatians the parts of it in dispute are the identity-marking parts, which is the new reading's genuine contribution. Dunn himself moved in this direction in later work, conceding that the phrase denotes the law entire while maintaining that the observances in focus are those that mark Israel out. If that is right, the two readings are arguing about emphasis inside a phrase that can carry both, and the heat of the last forty years has been partly a quarrel about which half of Paul's concern is load-bearing.

Now the bearing on the previous lesson, which is the reason this section is here. If works of the law means boundary markers, then Romans 3:20 and 3:28 are primarily about the terms on which Gentiles enter Abraham's family, justification is chiefly a declaration about membership, and the Reformation's account, while not wrong about grace, was answering a question Paul was not asking. If works of the law means obedience in general, then Galatians and Romans are both about how a guilty person stands before God, the Reformers read Paul correctly on the central point, and the New Perspective has supplied a valuable correction about Judaism while misidentifying Paul's target. Everything turns on it, which is why it is fought over so hard.

What is settled: the phrase is Paul's own, it appears only in these two letters, both of which are dealing with Gentile inclusion, and in both letters Paul denies that justification comes by it. What is not settled: whether the phrase narrows to identity practices, widens to obedience as such, or does both at once. A student who can state each case in the words of its own defenders, as you should now be able to do, is in a better position than one who has been handed a verdict.