The Letter to the Galatians

Press,1953.

Introduction

I. AUTHORSHIP

While the authorship of several letters attributed to Paul (particularly 2 Thessalonians, Ephesians, Colossians, and the Pastoral Epistles) continues to be disputed, no one seriously challenges Paul’s authorship of this letter to the Galatian Christians.¹ It has all the hallmarks of being shaped by a specific and unrepeatable situation in the ministry of Paul and in the life of his congregations and offers a response thoroughly conditioned by that situation. It does not have the appearance of trying to reclaim an apostle’s voice and authority to address later problems in the church or to provide generally useful theological or practical guidance. The author’s personality and passion shine through to a degree that is unmatched among Paul’s letters, save perhaps for 2 Corinthians, but not in a way that could ever be the result of a pious fiction. Galatians shows us Paul under fire, long before he became so widely a revered figure that any early Christian would find it useful or advantageous to write fictitiously under Paul’s name.

This widespread affirmation of Pauline authorship makes Galatians an especially important source both for the biographical study of Paul and his ministry and, to a slightly lesser extent, for the study of the history of the early church, particularly as this history took shape around the question of how to incorporate gentile believers into the predominantly Jewish Jesus movement. Because Galatians is written firsthand by one of the major players in that history, it tends (rightly) to be privileged as a historical source over Acts of the Apostles when it comes to reconstructing the complexities of that history. Nevertheless, as the commentary proper will emphasize, we cannot lose sight of the fact that Paul selectively shares and shapes the episodes he tells of his own story and the church’s story with a view to achieving certain goals in the Galatian situation. That is to say, the purpose behind every autobiographical statement in Galatians, every narrative of an earlier event in Galatians, is not to provide material for later historians and biographers of Paul, but to win the debate in Galatia and bring these congregations back around to looking to Paul for the way toward the truth of the gospel (2:5, 14).²

The title To the Galatians was added only after Paul’s letters began to be collected and the need arose to distinguish between different letters in a single codex or scroll. Scribes tended to assign short titles on the basis of the named recipients.³ Scribes could not resist the temptation to expand these titles with more information than they actually possessed. Thus several manuscripts and families entitle this book To the Galatians written from Rome.⁴ That Paul wrote this letter from Rome, however, is highly unlikely on any modern theory of the letter’s dating and the location of the addressees (whether in North or South Galatia).

Did Paul have the help of a secretary in the process of composing Galatians? It is possible to read Paul’s command to the readers See with what large-sized letters I wrote to you (6:11) as signaling a change in handwriting at that point, with the implication being that Gal 1:1–6:10 was dictated by Paul to a coworker or even to a hired scribe functioning as a secretary.⁵ This imperative is, however, not nearly as clear and unambiguous a signal of the practice of a secretary handing off the stylus to Paul to write a personal greeting or conclusion as we find in others of Paul’s letters (see esp. the explicit attention to Paul’s authenticating signature in 1 Cor 16:21; Col 4:18; 2 Thess 3:17; also the personal greetings from the Christian scribe Tertius in Rom 16:22).⁶ It is a mistake to assume too quickly that Paul always wrote through someone else’s hand, and Galatians may well have been written out by Paul in its entirety.⁷

1. Betz, 1. A brief review of the few attempts to challenge Pauline authorship can be found in Burton, lxix–lxxi.

2. Here and throughout this commentary, all translations from Galatians and other biblical texts are my own, unless otherwise noted (in which case, the source of the English version quoted appears after the reference).

3. The letter bears the simple subscription πρὸς Γαλάτας in א A B* C; πρὸς Γαλάτας ἐπληρώθη in D; ἐτελέσθη ἐπιστολὴ πρὸς Γαλάτας in F G.

4. Bc K P 𝔐; similarly L. See Metzger, Textual Commentary, 531.

5. So Longenecker, lix–lxi; Betz, Galatians, 1; Richards, Paul and First-Century Letter Writing, 81; Das, 67, 630–33. John Chrysostom (45–46), by contrast, understood Gal 6:11 to imply that Paul wrote the entire letter in his own hand.

6. Ironically, the authorship of two of the three letters in which an authenticating signature appears is disputed. See the evaluation of the arguments in deSilva, Introduction to the New Testament, 539–43, 696–701.

7. See commentary on 6:11.

II. PAUL’S MINISTRY IN GALATIA

The Roman province of Galatia covered a vast territory during Paul’s active ministry. It included the central portion of what is now Turkey, the principal cities being Ancyra, Pessinus, and Tavium, stretching north to the Paphlagonian mountains (abutting the provinces of Bithynia and Pontus). It also reached far to the south to include the regions often referred to as Lycaonia, Pisidia, and part of Phrygia, and thus the important cities of Pisidian Antioch, Iconium, Lystra, and Derbe. The northern region of Roman provincial Galatia was the historic home of the Celtic people who originally migrated to this area, while the southern region was joined to the northern region under the Roman Republic to form a single administrative unit. Which of these regions was home to the congregations to which Paul sent this letter remains a much-debated issue, to which we will return later.

Paul himself gives us no details about the precise geographic location of the addressees. It is only when Galatians is read within the framework of Paul’s mission work in Acts that this question can even be raised, let alone answered. What Paul does tell us about his founding visit to the congregations addressed by Galatians is quite different from anything we read in Acts. You know that I first proclaimed the message of good news to you on account of bodily illness, and you neither scorned nor rejected the trial you endured in my flesh, but rather you received me as an angel from God, even as Christ Jesus (Gal 4:13–14).

According to his own account, Paul appears to have evangelized in the city or cities to which he now writes because an illness prevented him from moving ahead to the destination he himself had in mind. Paul offers an example here of a truly positive and Spirit-led response to the frustrations of being hindered in one’s plans, seeking out God’s purposes in the midst of otherwise inopportune circumstances. The fact that he himself was afflicted by illness could have been expected to arouse scorn for his message. After all, how could a person who clearly was not experiencing the divine favor of good physical health proclaim the ready availability of divine favor in Christ? Those brought up in Greek culture, moreover, came to expect a good show from public speakers. Manner of presentation, physical grace, poise, and vocal quality were all as important as what was said. Those who lacked these qualities could provoke ridicule rather than gain an attentive hearing. Against all such expectations, however, the Galatians received Paul warmly and embraced both him and his message. Paul also recalls for them how they experienced the reality of God’s presence and power through the manifestations of God’s Holy Spirit in their midst—a power invading their own lives as well—in conjunction with Paul’s preaching (Gal 3:1–5).

What was Paul’s message in Galatia? Paul identifies the central feature of his gospel here, as in Corinth, as Christ crucified (Gal 3:1; 1 Cor 2:2). This formula would have required some unpacking, especially for the gentiles among his audience in Galatia. Jesus as the Christ, or Messiah, was a foreign concept, and crucifixion was a sign of utter degradation. Greek culture, however, could envision a divine being suffering excruciating torments, and doing so specifically on behalf of humanity. The myth of Prometheus, for example, typifies this pattern (see the well-developed version of this story in Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound). Zeus, the king of the gods, was angry at humankind and planned to destroy them. Prometheus, a Titan, sought to save humankind by equipping them with the starting point of all technology—fire, stolen from the gods. His reward was to be chained to a rocky peak and to be visited every day by an eagle, which tore into his abdomen to eat his liver. (Prometheus was immortal, so his liver grew back every night.)

Jews among Paul’s audience were also familiar with pious Jewish men and women suffering torture and death with the aim of restoring God’s favor toward the larger, disobedient people. Second Maccabees tells the story of the attempt to reshape Jerusalem after the fashion of a Greek city under Antiochus IV, which the author interprets as an act of apostasy from the covenant led by the very priestly elite charged with preserving the covenant. The reform devolves quickly into repression of Torah observance and enforced apostasy. At this point the author introduces an aged priest, seven brothers, and the mother of the seven who willingly—even willfully—refuse to eat a mouthful of pork (a sign of their acquiescence to forsaking the covenant), dying under the most grievous tortures (see 2 Macc 6:18–8:5) as a result. These martyrs are presented as offering their obedience unto death on behalf of the larger nation, asking God to spend the remainder of his wrath upon them and allow their obedience to restore his favor toward the nation. Thus the youngest brother declares: I, like my brothers, give up body and life for the laws of our ancestors, appealing to God to show mercy soon to our nation and by trials and plagues to make you confess that he alone is God, and through me and my brothers to bring to an end the wrath of the Almighty that has justly fallen on our whole nation (7:37–38 NRSV). According to the narrator, their obedience unto death is indeed effective. Immediately following, Judas Maccabaeus and his army experience their first victories, for the wrath of the Lord had turned to mercy (8:5 NRSV).⁸

The gospel of Christ crucified is the good news about the rescue that Jesus’s offering of himself brought to human beings and about the change it produced in their relationship with God. Throughout Galatians, Paul refers to Jesus as one who, in death, gave himself on behalf of our sins (Gal 1:4), who loved me and gave himself up for me (2:20), who rescues believers from the present, evil age (1:4). The condensed formulas that Paul uses here suggest that Paul had spoken of these topics at much greater length before and could assume the Galatians’ familiarity with these concepts from his earlier visit. Paul presented Christ’s crucifixion in terms of a benefactor who poured himself out completely in order to bring benefit to his clients. This terminology of giving oneself, or pouring oneself out, is attested in Greek and Latin inscriptions honoring benefactors as the apex of generosity.⁹ The shameful death of the cross was thus transformed into a noble act of supreme generosity and beneficence. Giving himself for our sins (1:4), Jesus presented his extreme and complete obedience to God as a representative act on behalf of the many who were disobedient and unmindful of God. In this way, his death—the outcome of his perfect obedience—removed the obstacles, the sins against and affronts to God, which stood in the way of humanity experiencing God’s favor rather than God’s sentence.

Paul’s claim that Jesus died in order to rescue us from this present evil age (1:4) recalls the apocalyptic framework of his earlier preaching in Galatia. According to this framework, this world and its history are a temporary phenomenon, one in which God’s justice and rewards for the righteous cannot fully be manifested. The death and resurrection of the Messiah signaled, for Paul, the beginning of the end of this current age and the imminence of the coming age, a better, eternal age in which God’s purposes are completely fulfilled and God’s people enjoy their full reward. The good news, then, was that Christ’s death brought rescue from this age and its fate at God’s judgment so that those who were rescued could enjoy the benefits of living with God in the age to come.

The way to share in the benefits of the Messiah’s self-giving death and resurrected life was by faith, trusting in the effectiveness of his death on behalf of others and in his ability to connect people with God. Those who are of faith trust that Jesus is a competent patron, able to procure the favor of the ultimate Patron, God. They trust that the provisions they receive by virtue of their association with Christ—most notably, the Holy Spirit—are sufficient to bring them where God wants them to be. Included within this faith are uncompromising loyalty to Jesus and obedience to him (faithfulness). The response of loyalty and gratitude toward Christ and the God he makes known would require a complementary turning away from every idol and all involvement in the worship of the no-gods that they represent. This step was fundamental to the gentiles’ response to the gospel (as in 1 Thess 1:9–10), and Paul would have had a wealth of anti-idolatry polemic at his disposal from the writings of the Jewish Scriptures (e.g., Ps 115:1–8; Isa 44:8–21; Jer 10:1–12) and Hellenistic-era Jews (e.g., the Epistle of Jeremiah and the Wisdom of Solomon). Moreover, Greek and Roman philosophers had long emphasized the essential oneness of God, who was worshiped imperfectly in the many partial guises and inadequate representations of traditional Greco-Roman religion. Paul could connect this philosophical view with his own understanding that the one God of the Jews was also the one God of the gentiles. His cosmopolitan approach would certainly have been more attractive than the traditional Jewish appeal, which stressed the ethnic particularity of the one God and the way of life by which one could please him.

Reception of the good news meant also a transformation of life. Paul writes in Galatians that "the works of the flesh are clearly evident: sexual immorality, impurity, shameless debauchery, idolatry, drug-induced spells, enmities, strife, jealousy, wrathful outbursts, rivalries, divisions, factions, envying, drunken bouts, gluttonous parties, and other things like these. Concerning these things I tell you in advance, just as I warned you before: Those practicing such things will not inherit the kingdom of God (5:19–21). Paul presents this moral teaching—the imperative of leaving behind a life impelled by self-centered impulses—as something the Galatians should recognize from Paul’s earlier communications, the most likely occasion being a visit with them in person (whether his initial evangelization visit or a second, follow-up visit). The moral imperative that accompanies the proclamation of what Christ has done to offer human beings a fresh start with God is a constant theme of Paul’s writing. Its prominence in Romans (see esp. Rom 6:1–7:6; 8:1–14; 12:1–13:14), which is essentially Paul’s presentation of the message that he preaches (shared at least in part in an attempt to gain the Roman Christian congregations’ support for his ongoing missionary endeavors), suggests that it was prominent as well in his missionary preaching prior to that point. Paul’s preaching in Thessalonica also included an explicit moral component, which he recalls in 1 Thess 4:1–7 (see esp. 4:2: For you know what directives we gave to you through the Lord Jesus").

The indisputable sign for Paul that Jesus’s work was sufficient and effective on the Galatians’ behalf is the Galatians’ reception of the Holy Spirit. When these Jews and gentiles responded with trust to the message Paul brought about Christ crucified, God manifested himself, pouring out the Holy Spirit upon them (Gal 3:1–5). This experience of the Holy Spirit is a common feature of the Pauline mission (see also 1 Cor 2:1–5 and Heb 2:1–4).¹⁰ Having experienced this divine power in their midst, the Galatians would have been quite aware that a decisive change had occurred in them and in their relationship with God, and that they had in fact received the Spirit of God. Paul reminds his converts of this experience, since he believes that it should have been enough to show them that God had made them part of God’s family. The gentile converts among them were no longer unclean, no longer outside the people of promise, since God himself had decisively accepted them into his household.

8. The self-offering of the martyrs to God on behalf of the nation is even more highly developed in 4 Maccabees, a Hellenistic Jewish text originating in the northeastern regions of the Mediterranean. Thus Eleazar prays as he stands on the threshold of death, God, you know that I could have saved myself; instead, I am being burned and tortured to death for the sake of your law. Have mercy on your people. Make our punishment sufficient for their sake. Purify them with my blood, and take my life in exchange for theirs (6:27–29 CEB); toward the close of his discourse, the author comments: The tyrant was punished, and the homeland purified—they having become, as it were, a ransom for the sin of our nation. And through the blood of those devout ones and their death as an atoning sacrifice, divine Providence preserved Israel that previously had been mistreated (17:21–22 NRSV). See further deSilva, 4 Maccabees: Introduction and Commentary, 137–41. On the importance of these martyrs as a potential background to Jesus’s understanding of his own death, see deSilva, Jewish Teachers, 158–74; on their importance as a background to Paul’s understanding of Jesus’s death, see Williams, Maccabean Martyr Traditions.

9. See the discussion in Danker, Benefactor, 321–23, 363–66, 417–35.

10. Although not written by Paul, Hebrews appears to have originated within the circle of Pauline churches, as the anonymous author works to coordinate his own travels with the movements of Timothy, a well-known figure from the Pauline team (Heb 13:23; see deSilva, Perseverance in Gratitude, 23–27). Hebrews 2:1–4 thus provides a witness from another member of Paul’s team to the clear experience of divine authentication that accompanied Paul’s preaching and the birth of the congregations that were a part of his mission.

III. THE PASTORAL CHALLENGE IN GALATIA

Paul’s undisguised shock at what he has learned about his converts in Galatia since leaving them (1:6) suggests that he parted from them under the conviction that his work there rested on a firm foundation. What happened to shake that foundation in the months that followed his visit? We have only Paul’s passionate response to the situation in Galatia as a witness to the situation itself, and we must exercise some caution as we attempt to see the situation through the mirror Paul holds up to the same.¹¹

New teachers have appeared on the scene, saying some new things about the good news of Christ. They would most likely have identified themselves as Christian teachers, something reflected also in Paul’s admission that they are proclaiming some variation on the gospel (1:6), which he quickly denies the status of being gospel at all (1:7).¹² The Galatian Christians, moreover, appear to be giving them a careful and attentive hearing, even standing on the verge of being persuaded by them (1:6; 5:1). Paul does not say much about the specific message of these rival teachers. He does indicate that persuading the gentile converts to receive circumcision was a notable feature of their message (explicitly in 5:2; 6:12–13; indirectly in 5:11–12), probably as a means of securing their place in the family of Abraham, the line of promise (3:6–29), and as a means of combating the power of the flesh (indirectly, 5:13–6:10) and thus experiencing freedom from its power over them so that they can make progress in their new life of godliness (3:3). Their influence coincides with the Galatians’ adoption of some of the calendrical observances prescribed in the Torah, the Jewish law (4:10).¹³ Paul’s language suggests that the Galatians’ attraction to these Torah-prescribed observances (alongside a much broader adoption of a Torah-observant practice) and to taking the final plunge of circumcision lay in the rival teachers’ promise that aligning oneself with the commandments of the Torah was the surest path to aligning oneself with God’s standards and thus being justified before God (being deemed to be righteous or brought into line with God’s righteous demands by means of the law, 5:4).¹⁴

Paul never names these rival teachers or suggests where they came from.¹⁵ He refers to them only as agitators or troublemakers (1:7; 5:10b, 12), clearly not welcoming their intrusion or their interpretation of the gospel. This does not mean that Paul lacks firsthand information about them and who they are.¹⁶ Rather, referring to one’s opponents only in vague ways was a standard feature of classical rhetoric, as if naming them specifically or taking too close or too detailed an interest in them would be to show them more respect than they merit. Paul likens their influence to the evil eye, the magical calling down of a curse upon someone out of envy (often translated as bewitching the Galatians, 3:1). He speaks of them as ill-mannered athletes who have cut in on the lane of the Galatian Christians, tripping them up as they ran (5:7). Paul suggests that the motives of these new teachers are far from pure. They pretend, he alleges, to have the Galatian Christians’ best interests at heart, but they are really trying to deprive the Galatians of their place in Christ so that the Galatians will instead become dependent upon the teachers (4:17). They are too cowardly to endure the opposition that preaching the truth of the gospel arouses. Instead, they are trying to escape persecution themselves (from their fellow Jews) by making the Galatian Christians adopt Jewish practices, hence making the Christian movement and its message more acceptable to non-Christian Jews (6:12). They are not even fully committed to all the practices of the Torah themselves but are trying to use the Galatian Christians as an opportunity to enhance their own reputation (6:13). The mercilessness of Paul’s assaults on these rival teachers’ credibility (4:17; 6:12–13) may well reflect the degree to which their message appealed to Paul’s converts. Paul’s goals for his communication are clear: he wants his converts to reject outright the course of action that the rival teachers have proposed (5:1) and to expel these rivals before they can do any more damage to his converts’ theology or practice (4:30; 5:8–9).

Despite Paul’s hostile presentation of these teachers, the fact that Paul needs to write Galatians at all testifies to the fact that these rival teachers had a persuasive message to which many among Paul’s converts were giving a ready hearing. Paul did not leave Galatia having anticipated and answered all the questions that would arise for the Galatians about their new life in Christ and their relationship to prominent aspects of God’s historic dealings with his people. While we can only speculate about what some of these questions were, there is a high probability that most if not all gentiles who had come to faith in this Jewish Messiah would have had to ask such questions as the following at some point in their faith journey: (1) If the Torah is a God-given law for God’s historic people, are we obliged to follow it or any part of it? It seems to dominate all of God’s dealings with God’s people from Moses to Malachi. Should we give it more attention, if we really want to be sure that we are right with God? (2) If we really have God’s Spirit, why do we still struggle so much with temptation and fall so often into sin? How do we even know what is sin versus what is legitimate pleasure or a just course of action? Not everyone following the Spirit agrees on the answers to such questions, so perhaps it is not enough just to have the Spirit, if we want to really know what God expects of us.¹⁷ These were precisely the sorts of questions that the rival teachers were poised to answer, and answer persuasively. If the Galatian converts were not already asking these questions, the rival teachers could certainly have introduced them and impressed upon the Galatian Christians the importance of finding reliable answers to them.

Who, then, are these rival teachers? Paul gives every indication that they are representatives of another Christian mission, led by Jewish Christians, presenting Torah observance as a necessary part of responding to God’s favor offered in Jesus Christ.¹⁸ These missionaries sought to keep the new Christian movement firmly anchored within the historic covenant between God and Israel. The activity of this kind of mission is reflected in Acts 15:1–4, which tells of Jewish Christians from Judea coming to Antioch, the home base of Paul and Barnabas’s mission, seeking to impose circumcision and Torah observance on the converts there.¹⁹ Galatians suggests that such missionaries were active beyond Antioch as well. Paul refers briefly to this rival mission again in Phil 3:2–21, presenting them as a foil for Paul’s own model of discipleship.²⁰

Despite Paul’s allegations about the rival teachers’ motives being self-serving and cowardly (4:17; 6:12–13), their primary motivation was probably theologically grounded. They sought to preserve the integrity of the covenant and to set the work of Jesus the Messiah within the context of this covenant, which was spelled out in the law of Moses. Jesus was indeed still the one who brought light to the gentiles, initiating the gathering in of the nations at the end of this age, but Jesus and his agents would accomplish this work by bringing the gentiles fully into the Jewish people through circumcising them and getting them to take upon themselves the yoke of Torah, at least to a certain extent.²¹ These rival teachers were also concerned about the unity of the church. Like Paul, they sought to enable Jew and gentile to come together in Christ in one worshiping body, the one body of the redeemed. Unlike Paul, they believed it was essential that the gentiles, and not the Jews, alter their behavior to make that fellowship possible. This particular issue appears to stand at the heart of the dispute in Antioch related by Paul in Gal 2:11–14.

The rival teachers acted out of their own zeal for the Torah and their commitment to keep God’s people distinct from all the other peoples of the earth, as required by the Holiness Code of Leviticus. Luke relates a particular rumor about Paul that was, he claims, running rampant in Jerusalem, to the effect that Paul was leading Jews to abandon the Torah and forsake the covenant (Acts 21:20–21). Such a rumor was not entirely inaccurate. Paul claims to have become a Jew to Jews and gentile to gentiles (1 Cor 9:19–23). He flouted deeply cherished taboos held by at least some Second Temple Jews concerning table fellowship with gentiles by eating at the same table with his uncircumcised gentile converts, perhaps even eating food improper for Jews (1 Cor 10:25–30). He encouraged his Jewish coworkers (such as Barnabas, before his course correction in Antioch; Gal 2:11–14) to do the same for the sake of the mission and the gospel, setting aside those restrictions within Torah designed to keep Jews from freely associating with gentiles, and hence being polluted by those contacts. Moreover, he encouraged his Jewish converts to do the same with regard to his gentile converts, to welcome one another as Christ welcomed you (Rom 15:7), and to regard the keeping of kosher laws or special observances of Sabbaths and other days as matters of personal choice (Rom 14:1–6).²² Paul might well have been seen to promote willful neglect of, if not apostasy from, the covenant in his demolition of the palisades that God erected to keep his holy people separate from the nations.²³

For Jewish Christians convinced of the eternal validity of the Torah and the covenant it sustained, Paul’s teaching and practice on this point would be unacceptable.²⁴ Indeed, Paul would be seen to be endangering the Jewish people as a whole by loosening Jewish Christians’ commitment to observe the boundary-maintaining laws of Torah faithfully and rigorously. After all, the God who enforced the covenant promised all the curses of Deut 27–28 upon the nation of Israel if they should neglect and transgress the covenant, walking in the ways of the non-Jewish nations, a promise that had proven all too reliable throughout Israel’s history.²⁵

For Jewish Christians who might themselves be disposed to agree with Paul in principle, there was also the very real danger posed by more zealous, non-Christian Jews, who often reacted vigorously and violently when their fellow Jews turned away from Torah for the sake of mingling more easily with the gentiles. Zeal for the Torah had led Paul himself to persecute Jewish Christians prior to his own conversion (Gal 1:13–14, 23; Phil 3:6) and had led other non-Christian Jews to continue to apply significant pressure on Christian Jews. This kind of activity is evident, for example, from 1 Thess 2:14–16, in which Paul speaks of his converts (certainly, in light of 1:9–10, including a strong gentile representation) in Thessalonica as imitators of the churches of God in Christ Jesus that are in Judea, for you suffered the same things from your own compatriots as they did from the Jews, who killed both the Lord Jesus and the prophets, and drove us out; they displease God and oppose everyone by hindering us from speaking to the gentiles so that they may be saved (NRSV). Paul reflects here two levels of pressure and violence perpetrated by Torah-observant Jews on other Jews who were less observant or less overtly committed to central pillars of Jewish identity: pressure exerted upon Christian Jews in Judea, and pressure exerted upon Christian Jewish missionaries like Paul on account of his approach to the question of gentile inclusion.²⁶ Such expressions of zeal for the Torah and the covenant were firmly rooted in the tradition of Phinehas, who struck down an Israelite man and his Moabite lover and so won for himself the promise of perpetual priesthood and saved Israel from being destroyed by a plague for its apostasy (Num 25:1–13). It was rooted in the tradition of Mattathias and his sons at the outset of the Maccabean Revolt, as they purged Israel of the apostate and lapsed Jews from its midst and thus turned away [God’s] wrath from Israel (1 Macc 2:15–28, 42–48; 3:6, 8). It is also evidenced in diaspora settings, as, for example, in the reaction of covenant-committed Jews to those Jews who were favorably disposed to accept a fictitious Ptolemy’s offer of citizenship and enfranchisement at the cost of leaving behind the socially isolating behaviors for which the Jewish population was known (see esp. 3 Macc 2:31–33; 7:10–15, which, though fictitious, reflects real tensions and pressures).²⁷

A significant movement within Jewish Christianity therefore wanted to make it clear to both non-Christian and Christian Jews that the Jesus movement was in no way a movement that promoted apostasy from the ancestral law. By reinforcing Jewish (Christian) adherence to the Torah, and all the more by bringing gentiles to the light of the law, the rival teachers could save themselves, the church in Judea, and the churches in the diaspora where non-Christian Jewish communities were strong from the intramural persecution that perceived apostasy could invite. Judaism could tolerate Messianic sects, but not the negation of its most central identity markers (like circumcision, Sabbath-obedience, and care regarding foods).

It is impossible to say, however, that the particular rival teachers Paul confronts in Galatia were primarily motivated by a desire to avoid persecution. It is equally likely that they chose their path based on their convictions concerning the eternal validity of the Torah as the way to live pleasingly before God, to have a part among God’s covenant people, and thus to enter into the community of the promise. If encouraging gentile obedience to the Torah provoked strong opposition from the Roman or local gentile authorities, they might well have embraced persecution for their devotion to the Torah, in the tradition of the martyrs of the Maccabean period, whose devotion to the Torah was tested and proven through their endurance of torture to the point of death, a devotion that Jews would prove again in many different contexts (e.g., in the pogroms in Alexandria, Egypt, during the reign of Caligula, in persecutions in various Greek cities during the First Jewish War and following the Diaspora Revolt, and of course in persecutions by Christians after the church merged with imperial power).²⁸

11. A helpful theoretical discussion of this process of careful historical reconstruction of a situation from one party’s response to the situation is Barclay, Mirror-Reading. Barclay identifies four common methodological missteps in attempts to reconstruct the situation behind a letter: (1) undue selectivity (basing a theory on a few choice statements but failing to make sense of the reconstruction in light of the whole text); (2) overinterpretation (proceeding as if every positive statement is a response to an opponent’s or the congregation’s denial, or every denial a rebuttal of an opponent’s claim; similarly treating every command as a sign that the hearers are doing something different and every prohibition as a sign that the hearers are engaged in the prohibited activity); (3) mishandling polemics (failing to account for the inevitable distortions that will occur when an author is trying to draw people away from heeding other voices, presenting these speakers in the worst possible light, ascribing to them the worst possible motives); and (4) latching onto particular words as if these automatically indicated the presence of opponents for whom these words were key terms (like taking the appearance of γνῶσις, knowledge, or πνευµατικός, spiritual, as indications of the presence of Gnostic teachers). Such methodological missteps can be minimized, Barclay argues, by weighing several criteria when sifting through a letter for indications of the situation behind it or the opposing positions addressed. These would include (1) the type of utterance (assertions, denials, commands, and prohibitions) and the degree to which it may be a reflection of the situation addressed; (2) tone (is the author’s tone urgent? emphatic? casual?); (3) frequency (does the author return frequently to this topic, or mention it only once in passing?); (4) clarity (do we really understand the passage we are reading, or is it too unclear or ambiguous to be of real help in getting behind the situation?); (5) unfamiliarity (the presence of atypical vocabulary or themes might signal a feature of the particular situation or position to which the author responds); (6) consistency (with a preference for a single front of opposition); and (7) historical plausibility (are the rival teachers reconstructed known or seen anywhere else in contemporaneous literature? Is the situation plausible?). See also the methodological refinements in Sumney, Identifying Paul’s Opponents, 75–120.

12. So also Betz, 7; Brinsmead, Galatians, 86.

13. This verse is sometimes taken to reflect reversion to a pagan religious calendar; see commentary on 4:8–11 for further discussion.

14. So also Betz, 6–7.

15. Indeed, it is not essential that the rival teachers have come from outside Galatia. They may themselves have been resident in its cities, belonging to a different group of Jewish Christ-followers, perhaps planted as a result of converted Jewish pilgrims returning home from Jerusalem prior to Paul’s mission, who then react against Paul’s mission to the area. This seems to me a less plausible scenario, however, than the scenario in which they come from Jewish Christian congregations closer to the epicenter of the movement.

16. Against the inference of Witherington, 23. Much depends also on how Paul was informed about the emerging situation in Galatia. Martyn, 14, highlights the importance of the catechetical instructors (6:6), local leaders appointed perhaps personally by Paul to continue the nurture of the congregations in the Pauline gospel, the Pauline interpretation of the Jewish Scriptures, and so forth. These leaders would have been the likeliest candidates for traveling to Paul with news of developments in Galatia, as well as returning from Paul to the congregations to read Paul’s response in the assemblies. The author of Acts also speaks of Paul appointing elders in the congregations that he had planted in southern Galatia on his return journey to Syrian Antioch as a means of consolidating and preserving his work in those cities (14:21–23), which corroborates Martyn’s