Summary: Bible - Book of Galatians

The GIST

Galatians is the angriest letter in the New Testament and among the most consequential. The apostle Paul had founded a group of churches in Galatia, in Asia Minor, made up mainly of non-Jews. After he left, other teachers arrived and told his converts that faith in Christ was not enough. To belong fully to God's people they must also be circumcised and take on the law of Moses. The Galatians were listening. Paul's reply, six short chapters, begins almost at once with astonishment: "I marvel that ye are so soon removed from him that called you into the grace of Christ unto another gospel."

No one doubts that Paul wrote it. Most scholars date it between the late 40s and the 50s of the first century, which places it at a very early stage of the church's history, when the question of how Gentiles could join a movement that began among Jews was still unsettled. Paul's answer, that a person is put right with God through faith and not by works of the law, has echoed through Christian history, most loudly in the Reformation.

What It Says

No other gospel (1:1 to 10). Even the greeting is combative. Paul is an apostle "not of men, neither by man, but by Jesus Christ." Then, with no word of praise for his readers, he delivers the charge. They are deserting the one who called them for a different message, which is really no gospel at all, only a distortion pushed by troublemakers. He pronounces a curse on anyone who preaches otherwise, himself included: "though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed."

Paul's own story (1:11 to 2:14). His opponents apparently said that Paul was a second-hand apostle who had trimmed the message to please people. So he tells his story, the fullest account of his past in any of his letters. His gospel did not come from any human teacher: "I neither received it of man, neither was I taught it, but by the revelation of Jesus Christ." He had been a zealous persecutor of the church, advancing in his ancestral religion beyond his peers. When God called him, he consulted no one. He went to Arabia and back to Damascus. Only after three years did he go to Jerusalem, where he spent fifteen days with Peter and met James, the Lord's brother.

Fourteen years later he went again, with Barnabas and with Titus, an uncircumcised Greek, and laid his message before the leaders. Titus was not compelled to be circumcised. The men reputed to be pillars, James, Cephas and John, added nothing to his gospel. They recognized that he had been entrusted with the mission to the Gentiles as Peter had with the mission to the Jews, and gave him the right hand of fellowship, asking only that he remember the poor.

Then comes the confrontation at Antioch. Peter had been eating freely with Gentile believers there. When certain people arrived from James he drew back and separated himself, out of fear, and the other Jewish believers followed, so that "Barnabas also was carried away with their dissimulation." Paul opposed him publicly. "I withstood him to the face, because he was to be blamed." The issue was not table manners. By withdrawing, Peter was in effect telling Gentiles that they had to live as Jews to be acceptable.

The thesis (2:15 to 21). Out of that scene Paul states his central conviction: "a man is not justified by the works of the law, but by the faith of Jesus Christ." He puts it in intensely personal terms. "I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me." And he draws the conclusion with brutal logic: "if righteousness come by the law, then Christ is dead in vain."

The argument (chapters 3 and 4). "O foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you?" Paul now makes his case from several directions. First, from their own experience: did they receive the Spirit by keeping the law or by believing what they heard? Having begun in the Spirit, are they now going to finish by the flesh?

Second, from Scripture. His opponents seem to have appealed to Abraham, the father of the circumcised. Paul claims him for the other side. "Abraham believed God, and it was accounted to him for righteousness." Those who believe are his true children, and the promise that all nations would be blessed in him is now being fulfilled. The law, by contrast, pronounces a curse on everyone who fails to keep all of it, and Christ has redeemed us from that curse by bearing it.

Third, from history. God's promise to Abraham came first. The law arrived four hundred and thirty years later and cannot cancel it. What, then, was the law for? It was a temporary measure, a guardian: "the law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith." Now that faith has come, the schoolmaster's charge is over. Believers are sons and daughters, not minors under supervision. Here Paul writes his most famous sentence: "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus." God sent his Son so that we might receive adoption, and has put his Spirit in our hearts crying, "Abba, Father." To go back to observing special days and seasons is to return to slavery.

In the middle of the argument Paul stops arguing and pleads. He reminds them how warmly they once received him when he first came to them in physical weakness; they would have torn out their own eyes for him. "Am I therefore become your enemy, because I tell you the truth?" He closes the section with an allegory about Abraham's two sons, one born to the bondwoman Agar and one to the free woman: the Galatians are children of the free.

Freedom and its use (5:1 to 6:10). The practical conclusion follows. "Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage." To accept circumcision as a requirement is to take on the whole law and to lose Christ. What counts is "faith which worketh by love." Paul's temper flares once more in a savage aside about those who are unsettling them.

But freedom, he insists, is not license. Believers are to serve one another by love, "For all the law is fulfilled in one word, even in this; Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." He sets two ways of living side by side. The works of the flesh are plain enough: adultery, idolatry, hatred, wrath, strife, envy, drunkenness and the like. "But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith," and the list runs on to meekness and self-control, with the comment that against such things there is no law. Those led by the Spirit do not need the law to restrain them.

The last instructions are about life together. Restore someone who stumbles gently, remembering your own weakness. "Bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ." Do not be deceived: "whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap." And do not grow tired of doing good.

In his own hand (6:11 to 18). Paul takes the pen from his scribe: "Ye see how large a letter I have written unto you with mine own hand." He sums up in a few blunt lines. Those pressing circumcision want to avoid persecution and to boast of their converts. He will boast only in the cross. Neither circumcision nor its absence counts for anything, "but a new creature." He wishes peace on "the Israel of God," asks to be troubled no more, since he bears the marks of Jesus on his body, and ends with grace.

Why It Matters

Galatians helped decide whether Christianity would remain a movement within Judaism or become a faith open to all peoples on equal terms. Paul's insistence that Gentiles need not become Jews first shaped the whole future of the church.

Its later influence has been just as large. Martin Luther's teaching on justification by faith, and his distinction between law and gospel, were formed largely through his reading of this letter, and his interpretation has colored most Protestant readings since. Modern scholars have questioned parts of that reading, especially its picture of the Judaism of Paul's day, and they debate what Paul means by works of the law and by the phrase the KJV renders the faith of Jesus Christ, which can also be translated faith in Jesus Christ.

The verse about there being neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female is among the most discussed in the Bible. Some hold that it speaks only of equal standing before God. Others hold that it must also change how people treat one another, pointing out that the letter itself grew out of a quarrel over who could eat with whom.

Scholars also disagree about exactly where the Galatian churches were and when the letter was written, in particular whether it comes before or after the meeting of apostles in Jerusalem described in Acts. And the identity of Paul's opponents is uncertain, since we know them only through his side of a fierce argument.

Who Should Read It

Read Galatians to hear Paul at full intensity and to understand a dispute that shaped Western religion. It is brief enough for one sitting. It will speak to anyone who has felt that acceptance must be earned, and its closing chapters on freedom, love and the fruit of the Spirit are among the most practical in the New Testament.