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WorkPaul the Apostle

Epistle to the Galatians

Paul answers rival teachers who told his Galatian converts to be circumcised, and tells how he stood up to Peter at Antioch.

by Paul the Apostle11 passages held

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Original title
Πρὸς Γαλάτας
First published
(aged 48)
Original language
Greek

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Overview

After Paul had founded congregations among the non-Jewish townspeople of Galatia, in the interior of Asia Minor, other Christian teachers arrived and told them that faith in Christ was not enough: to belong to God's people they must be circumcised and keep the Jewish law. Paul describes these men only as people who trouble the Galatians and pervert the gospel; scholars long called them "Judaizers", and most now see them as Jewish Christians who held that Gentile converts must keep some or all of the law. The letter he sent back opens without his usual words of thanks and goes straight to his astonishment that the Galatians have turned so quickly to a different gospel. Its argument is that a person is put right with God through pístis, trust in Christ, not through the works of the law, so that requiring circumcision of Gentiles undoes the message itself. To make the case, Paul tells his own story: his gospel came to him by revelation, not from the leaders in Jerusalem; those leaders agreed that he should go to the Gentiles; and at Antioch he opposed Peter to his face for withdrawing from meals with non-Jewish believers. Abraham trusted God before there was any law, and the law served as a guardian only until Christ came; in Christ the lines between Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female no longer divide. He closes in large letters written in his own hand. When he wrote is still argued. Scholars who place the churches in the south of the Roman province date the letter as early as 48–49, before the meeting in Jerusalem that Acts describes; those who place them among the Galatians of the north put it in the mid-50s. Luther lectured on the letter and published his commentary on it in 1535, and it became a founding text of the Reformation's teaching on faith. Since the late 1970s, scholars of the "new perspective" have argued that the works Paul rejects are the marks that set Jews apart, such as circumcision, food laws and the sabbath, rather than good deeds as such. The text given here is the King James Version (1611), translated from the Greek, with the verse numbers removed and the chapters kept.

Key concepts

Why does circumcision matter so much in Galatians?

Because it was the mark of belonging to Abraham's covenant people, and accepting it meant taking on the whole Jewish law. Paul says so outright: every man who is circumcised 'is a debtor to do the whole law'. For a non-Jewish believer to accept it as a requirement would mean that trust in Christ was not enough. That is why he can write that if they are circumcised, 'Christ shall profit you nothing'.

What is 'the curse of the law'?

The verdict the law itself pronounces on anyone who does not keep all of it: 'Cursed is every one that continueth not in all things' written there. Since no one keeps all of it, Paul argues, relying on the law brings a curse rather than a blessing. Christ, he says, took that curse on himself by dying on a cross, since scripture also calls cursed whoever hangs on a tree.

What is 'the promise' in Galatians?

God's promise to Abraham that all nations would be blessed through him and his offspring. Paul's argument turns on dates: the promise came four hundred and thirty years before the law of Moses, and a later law cannot cancel or add conditions to an earlier promise, any more than a later clause can undo a sealed will. Belonging to Abraham's family is therefore a matter of trusting, as he did.

What does Paul mean by 'a new creature'?

A person remade from within, which for Paul is the only thing that counts. He closes the letter: 'neither circumcision availeth any thing, nor uncircumcision, but a new creature'. The phrase sets aside the whole quarrel: what matters is not which group's mark a person bears but whether their life has been made new, which is why he can say the world is crucified to him and he to the world.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

No other gospel: the quarrel over circumcision

Must a non-Jew become a Jew, circumcised and law-keeping, to belong to God's people? Paul says that adding this one condition cancels the whole message.

Paul skips his usual thanks and opens in astonishment that his converts have turned to a different gospel. His defence is his own story: the message came to him by revelation, not from any man; the leaders in Jerusalem, the reputed pillars, added nothing to it and did not compel his Greek companion Titus to be circumcised; and at Antioch he opposed Peter to his face for withdrawing from meals with Gentile believers. Whoever accepts circumcision as a requirement, he warns, takes on the whole law and is fallen from grace.

  • religious authority
  • religious identity
  • ritual
  • religious law
  • conversion
  • testimony
  • revelation
  • integrity
  • truth
  • justification

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Heirs, not slaves: the freedom of the promise

If the law came from God, why should anyone be free of it? Paul argues that the law was a guardian for a season, and that the promise to Abraham was always the older and greater thing.

God's promise to Abraham and his seed came four hundred and thirty years before the law, and a later law cannot annul it. The law served meanwhile as a schoolmaster, the household slave who minds a child until he comes of age; an heir under such guardians differs nothing from a servant. Now the child is grown and calls God 'Abba, Father'. Paul reads Abraham's two sons, by the slave woman and the free, as two covenants, and concludes: stand fast in that liberty, where neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female divides.

  • freedom
  • religious freedom
  • promise
  • adoption
  • allegory
  • equality
  • faith
  • grace
  • redemption
  • divine action

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Walking by the Spirit

Without the law to hold them, what keeps the free from doing as they please? Paul's answer is a life led from within, whose marks are listed as fruit rather than rules.

Freedom, Paul warns, is not an opening for the flesh: a church that bites and devours its members will be consumed. Against the works of the flesh, from fornication and idolatry to envy and drunkenness, he sets the fruit of the Spirit, love, joy, peace, patience, gentleness and temperance, against which there is no law. The practical rules that close the letter are small and pointed: restore a fallen brother gently, bear one another's burdens, and remember that whatever a man sows, that he will also reap.

  • love
  • vice
  • virtue
  • self-control
  • self-discipline
  • moral change
  • transformation
  • spirituality
  • compassion
  • moral counsel

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Within this work

passages held
11
distinct concepts
35
by passages held, corpus-wide
#815

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “faith” and “religious law”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 2 concepts, joined by 1 pairing. 14 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
faithreligious law4

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 51 Epistles to the Thessalonians (Πρὸς Θεσσαλονικεῖς Α΄ · Πρὸς Θεσσαλονικεῖς Β΄)

    One of his earliest surviving letters, paired with a second in his name whose authorship is disputed. Between them they hold most of what the letters say about the Lord's return.

     EN
  2. 53 Epistle to the Galatians (Πρὸς Γαλάτας) you are here EN
  3. 55 Epistles to the Corinthians (Πρὸς Κορινθίους Α΄ · Πρὸς Κορινθίους Β΄)

    Not one letter but a correspondence: two of at least four letters Paul wrote to Corinth, the second possibly several joined together. They record his longest struggle with a single congregation he had founded.

     EN
  4. 57 Epistle to the Romans (Πρὸς Ῥωμαίους)

    The longest and most systematic of his letters, and the one later theology was built on: for a church he had not founded, it works out at length the argument about faith and the law that Galatians had made in anger.

     EN
  5. 62 Epistles to the Ephesians and the Colossians (Πρὸς Ἐφεσίους · Πρὸς Κολοσσαεῖς)

    The two letters on this shelf closest to each other in wording, and with Second Thessalonians the three whose authorship is disputed. They carry Paul's thought toward a teaching about the universal church.

     EN
  6. 62 Epistles to the Philippians and to Philemon (Πρὸς Φιλιππησίους · Πρὸς Φιλήμονα)

    Prison letters, one to the congregation that supported him with money and one to a single household. Philemon is the only one of Paul's undisputed letters written chiefly to one person.

     EN
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