The Online Library of Liberty

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• Preface
• The First Epistle to the Thessalonians
• The Second Epistle to the Thessalonians
• The Epistle to the Galatians
• The Epistle to the Galatians
• The Epistle to the Romans
• Essay On the Abstract Ideas of the New Testament
• Essay On St. Paul and the Twelve
• Essay On St. Paul and Philo
• Religion and Theology.

THE EPISTLE to the GALATIANS

INTRODUCTION

Two questions, closely connected with each other, arise in the mind of every reader of the Epistles of St. Paul who is desirous of forming an idea of the state of the Churches to which they were addressed: first, whether the Church was founded by the Apostle himself; secondly, whether it was composed of Jewish or of Gentile Christians. For the answer to these questions, in the case of the Galatians, our chief attention must be directed to the intimations of the Epistle itself; to which a gleam of uncertain information may be added from other writings of the Apostle, and the analogy of other Churches mentioned in them. The Acts of the Apostles supply one or two facts of doubtful import. The latter of the two questions unavoidably runs up into a more general inquiry respecting the original relations of Jew and Gentile before they came together in the Christian Church, which will be more fully discussed in another place.

The indications of the Epistle may be summed up in a few words. On the one hand, the tone of authority which the Apostle adopts, as well as particular expressions, such as iii. 2, ‘This only would I learn of you, Received ye the Spirit by the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith?’; or iv. 9-19 in which the Apostle speaks of their having been converted, not to bondage, but to freedom, and of himself as again becoming their spiritual father (comp. 1 Cor. iv. 15; also Acts xvi. 6); as well as the manner in which he mentions the Apostles at Jerusalem in chap. ii would certainly lead us to suppose that the Galatians must have been converted by himself or by his followers. And that they were originally Gentiles, is implied in chap. iv. ver. 8—‘When ye knew not God, ye did service unto them which by nature are no gods.’ But if they were converts of the Apostle, and also Gentiles, how are we to account for their ready reception of Judaism, to the repulsive rites of which they seem to have been drawn almost by instinct? That would lead rather to the opposite supposition, that they were not Gentiles, but Jews. Naturally, it might be urged, when the Apostle’s personal influence was withdrawn from them, Judaism overlaid Christianity, the law prevailed over the Gospel. And this latter opinion is confirmed by the fact, that the Apostle argues with them out of the law and the prophets, and that in none of his Epistles has the cast of the reasoning a more Jewish character.

Thus on a first view we seem to arrive at opposite conclusions, an appearance of inconsistency which will present itself again to our notice in the Epistle to the Romans. One set of presumptions leads to the inference, that the Galatians were Gentiles; or rather the text quoted above (iv. 8) expressly says so. Another set of presumptions (from which we cannot exclude the almost equally explicit statement that they were Jews, chap. iv. 9, and desirous to return to ‘the beggarly elements’ around which their hearts still lingered) leads to the opposite inference. Out of this dilemma how are we to make our escape? (1) Can we suppose St. Paul himself to have been a teacher of the law (compare Introductory Essays on the Epistles to the Thessalonians and Romans), and to have once taught what he now denounced? Admitting that at no period of his life he wholly ceased to be a Jew (Acts xviii. 18; xxi. 26; xxiii. 6); that there were threads in his doctrine, which entangled him with the false teachers (Gal. v. 11); that there was a time in which he spoke of himself as ‘having known Christ according to the flesh,’ and that constant reference to the authority of the Old Testament is difficult to reconcile with his renunciation of the law; still the extreme antagonism in which he places himself to the Judaizers renders it impossible that he could ever have been one of them. The Galatians ‘had begun in the Spirit’; it is another Gospel to which they are ‘removed’; they had originally received with enthusiasm the same lesson which St. Paul is seeking to revive. (2) But if we cannot suppose St. Paul himself to have been a teacher of the law, whence did the infection of Judaism arise in the Churches of Galatia? It might be suggested that the Galatians were first converted by teachers of the circumcision, and afterwards reconverted by St. Paul. Yet, in Gal. iii. 2; iv. 19, the Apostle implies that they were converted by himself, and, as he expresses it in the passage just quoted, ‘began in the spirit.’ Or, (3) shall we conceive him to be describing, first, the Gentiles, then the Jews in successive verses? Granting that the Galatian Church, like most other Christian communities, may have contained Jewish as well as Gentile Christians, still the context shows that those who ‘served them which by nature are no gods,’ and those who were ready to relapse into the weak and beggarly elements of the law, were the same persons, iv. 8-10. Nor is there any trace in the Epistle that he distinguished the case of the Jew from that of the Gentile in reference to the obligation of circumcision; to all he says alike, ‘if ye be circumcised Christ shall profit you nothing.’ Would this have been his language had the Church been divided between Jews and Gentiles? Yet, (4) once more it might be argued, that Judaism and heathenism were regarded by St. Paul as a single prior dispensation, the two parts of which he is not careful to distinguish, which he seems alike to include elsewhere in the expression ‘elements of the world,’ Col. ii. 8, 20. But no such common point of view under which he may have regarded the former estate of Jew and Gentile, would have justified him in saying of the Jew: ‘Howbeit then, when ye knew not God, ye did service unto them which by nature are no gods.’

The most probable mode of escaping these difficulties is the following:—The Galatians we may suppose to have been a Gentile Church, which was first converted to Christianity by St. Paul, but previous to its conversion had gone through a phase of Judaism. There were three states out of which Gentile converts passed, or might have passed, into the acceptance of the Gospel as preached by St. Paul: first, heathenism; secondly, a more or less strict proselytism; thirdly, Jewish Christianity. The second of these was probably the state of the Galatian converts. Strange as it may seem, it is an undoubted fact that, before the appearance of Christianity the religion of the Jews exercised a great and mysterious influence over the Roman world. It had already bridged the chasm which separated the faith of Jehovah from the wisdom of the Greek philosopher. It was ‘a schoolmaster,’ bringing men to Christ, not in idea only but in fact. The natural and political force of Judaism, even in its most abject state, its simple faith in the unity of God, the proselytising spirit of the Jews themselves (Matt. xxiii. 15), their dispersion throughout the world, the diffusion of the Greek translation of the Old Testament Scriptures, the absorbing power of the Jewish Alexandrian philosophy, are sufficient to account for the hold which it acquired on the minds of men, standing, as it seemed, erect in the decline of the classical religions and the chaos of Eastern superstitions. The Roman poets in the age of Augustus were perfectly well acquainted with the belief and practices of the Jews, which extended to others as well as to their regular proselytes; a knowledge which is the more remarkable, when contrasted with the slender information about the Christians, which is displayed by every heathen writer, for the first century and a half after the Christian era1 .

Admitting the general fact of the diffusion of Judaism, no people were more likely to have fallen under its power than the inhabitants of Galatia. A half-civilized race of Western origin, in an Eastern land, were peculiarly liable to be influenced by the contagion of the Jewish settlers who dwelt among them (1 Pet. i. 1). Their national religion was already mingled with the gods of the nations among whom they settled. They did not altogether cease to be heathen by becoming Jews, any more than they wholly left their ancient Gallic rites for Greek and Phrygian customs. Nor can we tell how many elements of Christianity, as, for example, the doctrine of a Messiah, may have been included in their Judaizing tenets (compare Heb. vi. 1: 2 Cor. ii. 5, 16: John iv. 25). Marked as such distinctions appear in language, there could not have always been a definite line which separated heathenism from proselytism or proselytism from Jewish Christianity, any more than the Gospel of the circumcision from that of the uncircumcision. The more lax of either class must have insensibly faded into the other; and Judaism itself may have taken new forms when coming into contact with semi-barbarous races. Much that we look upon as a corruption of Christianity was, in fact, prior to Christianity, inherent in the magical or philosophical tendencies of the age, and clustering around the name of Christ as a new source of life and power. There was a spiritualized Judaism, as well as a Judaized heathenism. In the case of the Galatians, we can only infer from the language of the Epistle that they could not have been so completely Christians as to set aside St. Paul’s claim to have converted them; nor so completely Jews as to have lost all remembrance of that former state in which they did service ‘to them that are no gods.’

Supposing then the Galatians to have passed through the gate of Judaism to Christianity, there is no difficulty in explaining their relapse into Judaism. The Jewish teachers were there before St. Paul, and they remained there after his departure: and the language of the Old Testament itself, sanctioned by the authority of St. Paul, though read in a spirit unlike his, would seem to tell of the continued obligation of the law and of the necessity of circumcision. He himself, they insidiously said, had at one time preached that very circumcision which he now denounced (v. 11). By such arguments a half-wavering multitude, who had been once ready to die for the Apostle, now that he was absent, were shaken in their allegiance to his authority.

The slenderness of our materials will not allow us to complete the picture of the Galatian Church. There is not a single figure to fill up the vacant space. It is only a probability that, in ch. v. 10, the Apostle is alluding to an individual opponent. (‘He that troubleth you shall bear his judgement, whosoever he be.’) We see the levity and inconsistency of the converts; their confusion of the Gospel with the Law; the manner in which dislike of the doctrine of the Apostle degenerated into hatred of his person. Fainter traces are also discernible of Judaism mingling with heathenism in ch. iv. 9, as in Col. ii. 18; and perhaps in Rom. xiv.

GALATIA.

A notice of the inhabitants of Galatia will throw a remote light on the Epistle to the Galatians. Some have thought to identify them with the barbarous people of Lycaonia who first worshipped the Apostles and afterwards stoned them. But whatever similarity may be traced in the character of the people, Derbe and Lystra were not within the district termed Galatia (comp. Acts xiv. 1, 6), which lay to the north, separated by Paphlagonia and Bithynia from the Euxine Sea. It was bounded on the south by Phrygia and Cappadocia, on the east by Pontus and Cappadocia, on the west by Phrygia and Bithynia, and included in its domain several of the Phrygian cities most celebrated for the worship of the mother of the gods.

The inhabitants of this district were the Gauls of Asia. They were the remnant of the great Celtic and Germanic migrations, which overspread Greece and Asia Minor at the commencement of the third century before the Christian era. Like the Biscayans or Hungarians in Europe, they remained the isolated monument of the deluge which had passed away. At one time they had been the terror of the Greek cities of Asia Minor, and alternately the adversaries or the mercenaries of Alexander’s successors. They were reduced by the Roman Consul, C. Manlius Vulso, in the year 189, but retained their separate kings by favour of the Romans, until about eighty years before this time, a.c. 26, when Amyntas, their last king and the favourite successively of Augustus and Antony, was murdered, and the country finally placed under a Roman governor.

In character they are described as a free impetuous race, ever ready to bear arms for themselves or others. For a long time after their settlement in Asia, they retained their national and religious customs, the latter even including that of human sacrifices. St. Jerome (Gal. i. 2) describes them, even in his own day, as having a peculiar dialect, which he compares to the German spoken about Trèves. Their government in early times was a military aristocracy divided into twelve tetrarchies, the respective chiefs of which were not hereditary, but elected. The Gauls themselves were apportioned in three tribes, and two subject peoples existed side by side with them, the Greeks and Phrygians, to whom they stood in the same relation as the Spartans to the Laconians and Messenians. Gradually the language and religion of the conquered made an impression on the conquerors. That they must have understood Greek is proved by the Epistle itself; and their supreme Council of three hundred corresponding to the tetrarchies of which Strabo (xii. 567) speaks, was probably of Greek origin. And long before this time they had adopted or added to their own religion the rites of Cybele, and participated in the worship on Mount Dindymus and the gainful occupation of selling the oracles of the goddess to the rest of Asia.

From the use of the plural (ταɩ̂ς ἐκκλησίαις) we may gather that the Churches were scattered throughout the district, in more than one village or town. It is impossible to say what the names of these Churches were, or whether the Epistle is addressed to converts who were Gauls, Phrygians, or Greeks by origin. Only the tone of the Apostle and the fickleness of those who received him ‘as an angel of God, even as Christ Jesus’ (comp. Acts xiv. 16-19; xxviii. 6), ‘and afterwards became his enemies,’ may lead us to conjecture that he is addressing a people subject to violent religious impulses, a people such as might have been celebrated for their ancient Phrygian and Bacchic rites, amongst whom in heathen days extravagant superstition most readily found a home; and who, when converted to Christianity, gave birth to Phrygian heretics and to the Montanism of the second century1 .

SUBJECT OF THE EPISTLE.

It is to the second Epistle to the Corinthians that the Epistle to the Galatians offers the greatest resemblance. In both there is the same sensitiveness in the Apostle to the behaviour of his converts to himself, the same earnestness about the points of difference, the same remembrance of his own ‘infirmity’ while he was yet with them, the same consciousness of the precarious basis on which his own authority rested in the existing state of the two Churches. Abruptness of style is characteristic of both; the excitement of feeling seems to clog the current of ideas. Both Epistles display a greater emotion than is to be found in any other portion of his writings, a deeper contrast of inward exaltation and outward suffering, more of personal entreaty, a greater readiness to assert himself; all together seeming to tell us what he told the people of Derbe and Lystra, that he ‘was a man of like passions with ourselves,’ and working through the instrumentality of those passions, yet not the less approved of God in his high calling. In such passages as ‘Henceforth let no man trouble me, for I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus,’ at the end of the Galatians, or in the similar feeling of the verse of the Corinthians, ‘I think that God hath set forth us the Apostles last appointed unto death,’ we seem to trace a momentary reaction in the mind of him on whom came ‘the care of all the Churches.’

GENUINENESS OF THE EPISTLE.

No one has doubted the genuineness of the Epistle to the Galatians; it is not, therefore, necessary to recapitulate at length the evidence in its favour. That evidence consists of the testimonies of Patristic as well as of heretical writers, from the time of Irenaeus downwards, going back, that is, to within a century of the date of its composition. But here a doubt may be raised respecting the value of the testimonies themselves; for it may be truly urged, that evidence as ancient, and as nearly contemporary, can be quoted in favour of the Gospel of St. James, the Shepherd of Hermas, the Revelation of Peter, and other spurious writings. Why is it, then, that a short epistle like that to the Galatians has been universally acknowledged, even by critics of the most extreme school, as a genuine writing of St. Paul?

The reason of this universal agreement is the internal evidence of its genuineness. Considering the number of forgeries, which we know to have existed in the second century, and the absence either of the spirit or of the faculty of criticism in the early Church, we cannot set a high value on the testimony of the Fathers, except to events which were contemporary with themselves. What they really testify respecting the books of the New Testament is to their use and authority in their own day as the writings of the authors whose names they bear. But if the external testimony to the books of Scripture seems to be in this way weakened, the internal evidence of the genuineness of many of them may be regarded as greatly enhanced. What criticism has restored, though incapable of being put in a definite and tangible form, abundantly compensates for what it has destroyed. If it will not allow us to take our stand upon tradition, it supplies us with many new kinds of proof. It enables us to affirm that a particular writing, from the richness of its style, the mannerisms of thought and language, the minuteness of the detail, the consistency, and, sometimes, the very singularity of the events recorded in it, must be an original, and not a mere imitation. It analyses the character which is proper to an individual writer, and can be in no two writers the same. And it fortunately happens, that the age least capable of affording reliable external testimony, is the age also least capable of feigning the marks of a genuine writing.

CHAPTERS I, II.

The main object of the first portion of the Epistle is to assert the independent authority of the Apostle against the attacks of the Judaizers. The words, ‘Paul, an Apostle, not of man, neither by man, but by Jesus Christ,’ are the text of the two first chapters; and the narrative which follows is the commentary. He begins by denouncing the treason of the Galatians against himself. After the burst of his indignation has subsided, the Apostle proceeds to state facts illustrative of his Divine mission, and his relation to the Twelve. First, his independence was marked by the manner of his conversion; he did not receive the Gospel through any human instrument, but by immediate revelation. His previous education, and the well-known circumstance that he had been a persecutor of the Church, were a bad preparation for such a call. No one could have expected that the Pharisee or zealot for the law would have become the servant of Christ. Nevertheless, it pleased God to work this change in him. The independence of his mission was further marked by the fact that, after his conversion, he did not go up to Jerusalem to throw himself into the arms of the Apostles, but away from it, and only after long intervals went there at all, and then saw but one or two of them, and only for a few days; so entirely were his teaching and office his own, for so little was he indebted to them. He had never preached to the Jewish Churches; he was unknown to them by face, and only a report had reached them, which they received with joy and thankfulness, that the persecutor of the Gospel had now become its preacher.

In the second chapter, with a like object, he describes the freedom of his conduct at what is termed the Council of Jerusalem. He refused to yield (or, according to another interpretation, declares himself to have yielded only from motives of expediency and fear of treachery) the circumcision of Titus to the demands of the false brethren. He was not overawed by the greatness of the other Apostles, whom he met as their equal; and it was owing to himself rather than to them that a successful resistance was made to the Judaizing Christians. Yet they parted in love and fellowship; the heads of the Church at Jerusalem reminding him of the wants of their poor members, a labour of love in which he was very willing to join. They saw that he himself was among the Gentiles what Peter was to the circumcision, and they agreed to divide the field of labour. Afterwards Peter followed him to Antioch, where, if he did not violate the letter, he at any rate forgot the spirit, of their agreement. On this occasion he openly resisted him, and boldly reasoned with him, as ‘building up the things which he had pulled down.’ These are the proofs that he was an Apostle, not of men, nor by man, and had an authority at least equal to the other Apostles, to whom the Judaizers made their appeal.

CHAPTERS III, IV.

The Apostle has concluded his narrative, and the argument to which it gave birth. His thoughts return to the Galatians, whom he once more addresses with the same vehement emotion as at i. 6-10. He schools them like children; he appeals to their experience; he bids them remember the hour of their conversion. Did they mean to invert the order of grace?—beginning with what was inward, to end with what was outward; in the spirit once, and now in the flesh? Those influences of which they had been the subject; those great effects which they had witnessed—did they spring from works of the law, or from the hearing of faith? As elsewhere, the word ‘faith’ awakens a new strain of argument in the Apostle’s mind, which, dropping his previous emotion, he pursues to the end of the chapter. This argument is based on the words of Genesis: ‘Abraham had faith in God, and it was counted to him for righteousness.’ Like the parallel discourse on the same theme in the Epistle to the Romans (ch. iv), it may be divided into two parts: in the first of which (1) Abraham, the father of the faithful, is identified with his children, and the faith of both contrasted with the works of the law, as blessing is to cursing in the language of the law itself—from which curse of the law, Christ, by becoming a curse (as the law also taught, has made a way of escape, that the blessing of Abraham might reach the Gentiles; (2) the second division of the argument (which commences with verse 15), taking occasion from the words ‘unto thy seed,’ which the Apostle, in passing, refers to Christ, and dwelling specially on the time at which the promise was made (430 years before the law), thereby showing the mediate, subordinate, intercalary character of the latter.

The feeling which marked the opening of the Epistle, and the address to the Galatians, reappears again at the ninth verse of the fourth chapter. The bearing of the previous passage had been to show that the state of those under the law was a kind of pupilage or slavery, from which Christ had redeemed us by being Himself ‘born under the law,’ as, in a nearly similar way of speaking, it was said at verse 13 of the previous chapter, that He had ‘redeemed us from the curse of the law by being made a curse for us.’ Of this truth of redemption from the law, the Apostle proceeds to make a practical application to the Galatians themselves, contrasting their half heathen, half Jewish superstitions with the liberty of the sons of God. Then, for an instant, he pauses to speak of his personal relation to them. He was touched by the thought of their ancient love for him, especially when he remembered his own infirmities, which, instead of being an object of disgust to them, seemed almost to transfigure him into the likeness of Christ Jesus. But how had this passed away! He will not accuse them of a wrong to himself (though he can find no other reason for their change of feeling, but his own plain speaking); he will only beg of them to be at one with him again. He then briefly glances at the false teachers, their reception of whom he seems to attribute to a sort of ignorance of the world, and as if words out of the law must be better rhetoric to them than any that he could employ, once more harping on the instance of Abraham, he repeats the story of Isaac and Ishmael, the child of promise, and the child born after the flesh, and arguing in a manner more convincing and intelligible to his own age than to ours, as above from the letter of the text, so here from the connexion between Hagar and the land in which the law was given, he concludes, as he began, the chapter by associating the idea of bondage with the law.

CHAPTERS V, VI.

In the Third Section of the Epistle the Apostle proceeds to the application of the argument which has gone before: ‘Ye are not the children of the bondwoman, but of the free; with that freedom Christ has made you free; stand, therefore, and be not again entangled in the yoke of bondage to the law.’ This is enforced by a personal appeal, in which the Apostle sets forth with great earnestness the contrariety of the law and Christ. He who receives the seal of the law is involved in all its obligations. He is not half Jew and half believer in Christ, but wholly a Jew and no longer a believer. The law and Christ (like the law and the promise) are exclusive of each other. For the life of the Spirit, which is in Christ, has nothing to do with circumcision or uncircumcision; it is different in kind from either (1-6).

The latter portion of nearly all the Epistles of St. Paul is remarkable for abruptness of style. The Apostle passes from one subject to another, dropping the intervening links by which they are associated in his own mind. New thoughts are suddenly introduced; old ones unexpectedly came back again. His manner is that of a person speaking rather than writing; he is full of animation, saying what occurs to him without always expressing the point which he intends. In the verses that follow (7-13), contrary emotions draw him different ways; and he seems almost to lose the power of arranging his words. There was a time, he would say, when you promised well; who has persuaded you to rebel? This persuasion is not of God; it is a delusion of the enemy. The error of a few leavens the mass. Looking forward in faith, I perceive that ye will hereafter be of one mind, and that the troublers of the Church shall themselves be the sufferers. And yet, brethren, when I think of their strange and inconsistent charges against myself, I cannot but feel indignant. Is it likely that they would persecute me if I still preached circumcision? And then, with a momentary feeling of disgust at the whole subject, he adds in irony: Would that they would make themselves eunuchs who trouble you! That would indeed cut off the matter in dispute.

For the Divine call which you received is very different from the call which they teach. It was a calling unto liberty; I do not mean licentiousness, but that liberty which is a service of love to one another. For love is the single word which fulfils the law. How unlike are ye to the servants of that law! the end of whose bickerings and jealousies is mutual destruction (13-15).

All my precepts may be summed up in one: ‘Walk in the Spirit and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh.’ For there are two ways; the way of the flesh, and the way of the Spirit: and these are contrary the one to the other, and their fruits are like them (16-24). We who are spiritual should walk in the Spirit, humbling our hearts in consideration of others, forgiving their slips and bearing their burdens. It is mere self-deception to think ourselves above this. Every man who tries himself will find he has a burden of his own. A particular instance of this duty of mutual support is the duty of supporting teachers, in which, as in all other Christian duties, we must be single and indefatigable, ready to do good to all men, and especially to members of the Church (v. 24—vi. 10).

Look, says the Apostle, at the large and misshapen letters which I am tracing with mine own hand. A word more, and I have done. Those who would have you circumcised, act only on motives of expediency; their object is to keep well with the Jewish Christians; their own inconsistency in the observance of the law is a sufficient proof that they desire only to glory in you as their disciples. But God forbid that I should glory in you, or in anything but that which is at the same time the symbol of humiliation, the cross of Christ. The question of circumcision or uncircumcision I count as nothing in comparison with a change of heart. This is my rule. Peace be upon them who walk by it, and are ‘Israelites indeed.’

Reverence me henceforth; for I bear the person of Christ, and fill up the measure of His sufferings. The grace of Christ be with your spirit.

[1 ]See Introduction to Epistle to the Romans.

[1 ][For more recent information on this subject see Mr. W. M. Ramsay’s writings, especially the Article ‘Phrygia’ in Encyc. Brit. ed. ix.]