Galatians

By N.T. Wright

The first major biblical commentary from the pen of N. T. Wright 

While full of theological import, Paul’s letter to the Galatians also captures and memorializes a significant moment in the early history of Christianity. This commentary from N. T. Wright—the inaugural volume of the CCF series—offers a theological interpretation of Galatians that never loses sight of the political concerns of its historical context. With these two elements of the letter in dialogue with each other, readers can understand both what Paul originally meant and how his writing might be faithfully used to respond to present questions. 

Each section of verse-by-verse commentary in this volume is followed by Wright’s reflections on what the text says about Christian formation today, making this an excellent resource for individual readers and those preparing to teach or preach on Galatians. The focus on formation is especially appropriate for this biblical letter, in which Paul wrote to his fellow early Christians, “My children—I seem to be in labor with you all over again, until the Messiah is fully formed in you!”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Release date: May 25, 2021
• ISBN: 9781467462174

N.T. Wright

N. T. Wright, formerly bishop of Durham in England, is professor of New Testament and early Christianity at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. He also taught New Testament studies for twenty years at Cambridge, McGill and Oxford Universities. He has written over thirty books, including Simply Christian, Surprised by Hope, Justification and Evil and the Justice of God. His magisterial work, Jesus and the Victory of God, is widely regarded as one of the most significant contributions to contemporary New Testament studies.

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Introduction

What is Christian formation? How does the Bible contribute to it? How, within that, does a book like Galatians form part of it? And—the particular challenge facing the commentator—how does a commentary on a book like Galatians form part of it?

I assume that Christian formation means the shaping of communities, and individuals within them, so that they reflect more fully and faithfully the fact that the Spirit of Messiah Jesus is dwelling in their midst (corporately) and within them bodily (individually). Over against any idea that being Christian involves nothing more than mental assent to a doctrine and a personal commitment to follow Jesus, both of which of course still matter enormously, the emphasis on formation acknowledges that Christian character, though sown like a seed in faith and baptism, needs nurturing like a young plant if it is to grow to maturity and produce the fruit that will exhibit God’s Jesus-shaped love to the world.

Today virtually all Christians would take it for granted that, in one way or another, the Bible is central for this kind of Christian formation. Personal reading, corporate study, expository sermons, Bible-based counseling—all these and more contribute. The Bible tells the story of God, the world, Israel, and above all, Jesus. It tells it in such a way, from many angles and in many genres, as to say to its readers: This is your story. This is your home. Learn what it means to live here. Of course, there are many other formative elements: prayer, the sacraments, fellowship, service to the poor, and so on. But the Bible is central to them all.

One might imagine that a letter like Galatians would be an exception. Written at white heat, it is a very specific, and very agitated, message to one particular group of congregations at one remarkable moment in the very early church. But few if any contemporary readers will face the precise challenges the Galatian churches were facing. Paul is writing to defend himself against accusations that his gospel was secondhand and muddled. He is arguing passionately that Abraham was promised one family, not two. He is urging the male Jesus-followers among his gentile converts not to submit to circumcision. He is warning against violent factional fighting. None of this sounds like the stuff of regular preaching, teaching, or discussion in today’s Western churches.

That’s why many generations of preachers, teachers, and ordinary Christian readers have drawn more general lessons from the book, creating an abstract, de-historicized world. In such a world, circumcision might stand for good works in general, or even religious ritual in general. Abraham might be simply an example of someone who was once justified by faith. And so on. Paul’s opponents—the people trying to compel the Galatians to Judaize—have often been recast in the form of much later groups, notoriously in the sixteenth century when Luther and others assumed that they were very like late medieval Roman Catholics, seeking (from Luther’s perspective) to add extra works of their own to boost their prospects of ultimate salvation. Martin Luther referred to Galatians as his Katie von Bora, in other words, his wife, and ever since then Protestant teachers have looked to Galatians as the quintessence of Paul’s gospel of justification by faith apart from works of the law. Faith alone was Luther’s great slogan. He, and countless others since, have read the letter as attacking anyone who would add works to that faith. It is humbling, too humbling for many, to suppose that we are after all totally helpless, utterly dependent on God’s grace. The great Protestant tradition has insisted, rightly, on that necessary humility.

Important though that remains, reading Galatians this way has proved to be quite a problem. Historical research into Paul’s wider world on the one hand, particularly his Jewish world, and into the actual meaning of his texts on the other—the meanings of the words and arguments in their first-century contexts—has advanced to the point of recognizing that his opponents were not at all like the medieval Catholics whom Luther was resisting. I have written about this extensively, and this is not the time to replay all the arguments.¹ Our task here is the positive one. Like Martin Luther and the other great sixteenth-century Reformers, I take as my starting point the working hypothesis that Scripture itself must adjudicate over all traditions, including not least our own. The aim here, then, is to explore what the text itself actually says. That will take quite enough time without us being drawn down into the apparently endless to-and-fro of scholarly debate.

Karl Barth himself, one of the greatest Protestant theologians of modern times, saw clearly in his later work that Luther had simply projected his battles back onto the first century, with all the dangers of distortion.² This kind of (mis)reading does with the New Testament what many Christians have done with the Old—in other words, it has treated it as a book of allegories or figures. I am not saying that allegories, types, foreshadowings, and figures are not to be found, or are always misleading. But, as the medieval theorists knew (and as Luther and his followers eagerly reminded them!), you must always be careful to ground such leaps of fancy in the literal sense. And that means history. Without that anchor, figural exegesis can be blown this way and that across a wide and pathless ocean. Enjoying the ride, it does not always realize how far it has drifted from the shore.

There is nothing wrong in and of itself with generalizing, extrapolating from historical context to wider issues. I shall do a certain amount of it myself in what follows. One could point out, for instance, that in Galatians 1 and 2 Paul insists that his gospel is the real apostolic message; that in Galatians 2, 3, and 4 he stresses the unity of the church across the Jew/gentile boundary, resulting in a single worldwide family of the Messiah’s people; and that in chapters 5 and 6 he sketches a way of holiness that upstages anything available to either Jew or gentile. Thus we could say that the letter teaches that there is one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church.³ Paul would agree. Yet we can never substitute that checklist (culled from later creeds) for the specificity of Paul’s own argument in his own situation. Shorthand summaries are useful but also dangerous. We must always circle back to the historical situation. Jesus himself, after all, is not an example of something else, any more than one should study the Mona Lisa as merely an example of a particular style of painting. It is what it is. The Galatian situation is what it is. Jesus himself is who he is. And Christians are formed and matured by having Jesus himself, Israel’s Messiah, shaping their lives.

Paul says exactly that in Galatians 4:19: like a mother having to give birth all over again, he finds himself in labor pains until the Messiah is formed within you. This is a fairly exact definition of Christian formation. The letter to the Galatians was written to form the community of Jesus-followers, and their individual members, into Messiah-people. That means—again in shorthand—that they should be formed into unity (particularly a worldwide unity across traditional social and ethnic boundaries) and holiness, rooted in the genuine apostolic gospel, and into the strange mixture of suffering and joy which all that will entail.

As we shall see, this reality is in fact already given in the complex meaning Paul assigns to the very word Messiah (Christos in Greek: the anointed one). The word denotes Jesus himself, obviously, but the long years in which (for various reasons) Christ has been treated as a proper name have done neither Paul nor us any favors. For Paul the word Christos also connotes a strange new entity: the messianic people, those who are incorporated into the Messiah in such a way that what is true of him is deemed to be true of them. Faced with disunity in Corinth, Paul asks whether the Messiah has been cut up into pieces and insists that as a body has many members, all with different functions, so also is the Messiah (1 Cor 1:13; 12:12). Believers are themselves anointed with his Spirit and become—to use a somewhat ugly modern expression—part of God’s Messiah project. When he says until the Messiah is formed in you in Galatians 4:19, then, Paul is not only referring to the inner spiritual or moral transformation of the individual believer. He is thinking of the way in which the whole community is to be a living embodiment, a visible sign, of the anointed one: the single seed, as in 3:16 and 3:29.

Christian formation, then, is more than the spiritual or theological equivalent of a team-building day at work, or a football coaching session. It is about discovering, sometimes in painful practice, what it means to be Messiah-people, the single anointed community. One, holy, catholic, and apostolic—yes; but with those abstractions filled out in vivid, risky flesh and blood. Paul wrote Galatians because of (what we would call) political as well as theological or spiritual concerns. And politics gets you into trouble. Indeed, theology only gets you into trouble when it comes with political strings attached—especially if people pretend that the political dimension doesn’t exist, and that they are only really talking about God, or atonement, or justification, or whatever.

The task of a commentary in a series like this is then to enable the individual reader, and those preparing to preach or teach from Galatians, to see how this all works out in detail and to apply it wisely and creatively to ecclesial and personal life. The aim is to address today’s task of Christian formation with the theological depth and sensitivity the text invites, fully integrated with the historical and textual grounding that prevents theology and praxis from floating free into the blue sky of speculative (and quite possibly distorting) fantasy. I believe, and will hope to show, that every part of Galatians can and should serve the purpose of Christian formation in our own day. But, as with Alice in Through the Looking-Glass, we will often come soonest to that goal by heading off in what might seem the opposite direction: concentrating on first-century historical contexts and meanings in order (in an appropriately unhurried fashion) to find fresh meaning for the twenty-first century.

This exercise requires much more than simply a rational analysis and exposition of what it meant at the time, though that must always be foundational. Nor should we imagine ourselves to be moving in a simple two-step fashion, as with the clunky older model, from what the text meant then to what it means now. History itself already involves sympathetic imagination. Rather, we are involved in a constant moving dialogue, in which, in the prayerful and pastorally sensitive work of teachers and preachers, the particular needs of individuals and communities are brought into the light shed by that original complex of meaning.

When we attempt this task, and do the history thoroughly, we find something startling—at least, it is likely to startle anyone who knows how Galatians has usually been read in the Western churches of the last four hundred years. Galatians is not about how to be saved from sin in order to go to heaven, and about the relationship of faith and works in that process. Actually, sin is hardly mentioned in the letter, and salvation not at all. Sin and salvation have been pressing questions in the Western churches, but we should not assume that they were the burning issue for Paul and his Galatian churches. Much of the letter to the Romans, by contrast, is indeed about sin and salvation (though not exactly as the Western tradition has commonly imagined them), but the many parallels between the two letters should not obscure the fact that these are not the explicit topics of Galatians.⁴

Before proceeding, we need to make it clear that this is not to say that the Paul of Galatians was unconcerned about sin and salvation. He takes it for granted that some will, and some will not, inherit the kingdom of God (5:21). He also takes it for granted that all properly formed Messiah-people will be among those inheritors (3:29; 4:7). That is not in question. But it is not what Galatians is about. Let me offer an illustration.

I am not a cook. But I have sometimes overheard discussions on the respective merits of cooking in, say, a cast-iron frying pan or one made from aluminum. Suspicious rumors have gone around about aluminum finding its way into the food, potentially causing diseases such as cancer. One can therefore imagine, at a family get-together, some people wanting to play safe and use the tried-and-tested older cookware while others are hoping to use the new pans. Perhaps the latter group have studied the evidence (which currently declares aluminum safe) and have themselves used the new pans, with no ill effects, and find them easier to handle, and overall more effective. The discussion might then involve metallurgy, gastronomy, medical research, and so on. But this would be quite a different discussion from the question of what the family is going to eat for dinner.

The two questions are obviously related. If we can’t agree which pans to use, we will all go hungry. Some might suggest that some dishes are best cooked in one or another type of pan. But the question of cast iron versus aluminum is not the same as the question of steak and chips versus spaghetti Bolognese. If persons in the next room, catching snatches of conversation, were to imagine that the discussion concerned the menu rather than the cookware, they might well be puzzled. They would be forced to misinterpret everything they heard. That does not mean that feeding the family has become irrelevant. It remains the ultimate goal. But it is not the particular subject under discussion.

No analogy is perfect. The point I am making is this: when we argue, as I shall be arguing, that Galatians is about who should be ‘reckoned’ as part of the single family of God, that is not to imply that the question of ultimate salvation no longer matters. If it wasn’t there in the background, the foreground discussion would be irrelevant. We wouldn’t be discussing types of cookware unless we were intending to make dinner. But if someone comes to Galatians expecting a discussion of ultimate salvation, that person will misinterpret the text at every point.

So, why did anyone suppose Galatians was about sin and salvation, if that is not what Paul was talking about?

The answer lies deep in the Middle Ages, not least in the pall that was cast over the fifteenth-century European church by the developed doctrine of purgatory.⁵ The Western Church had taught for a long time that, though the world was divided into those who would go to heaven and those who would go to hell, only the most completely sanctified saints would go straight to heaven immediately after their death. All other Christians, however much their ultimate heavenly destination was assured, would have to pass through a time of both punitive and purifying suffering. This was worked out in detail by Thomas Aquinas and then portrayed in vivid poetry by Dante. However much theologians might explain that the pains of purgatory were bearable because of the prospect of heaven to come, and that it was all done because of God’s love, the prospect remained fearful. It generated a major industry (the word is not too strong), devising and implementing strategies either for avoiding purgatory, if one could, or, much more likely, for shortening the time spent there. Thus communities were founded, and chantries built, to pray for the souls of the founders, insuring that their postmortem prospects would match their present well-to-do social position. However, there were other ways to play the system. Indulgences—special dispensations from the pope that would grant somebody remission, or even outright cancellation, of purgatorial torture—might be available. By the early sixteenth century, some had suggested that they could be bought for money. And then someone had the bright idea that such money could be used to help with major ecclesiastical projects…. And that was when a learned and devout young Augustinian monk in northeastern Germany decided that enough was enough. The church had to reform. He nailed his ninety-five theses, including his attack on the sale of indulgences, to the door of the church in Wittenberg. He was calling for serious debate. But his action went far beyond the seminar room.

Martin Luther was objecting, on good biblical grounds, to the whole structure of the church’s official teaching about what happened after death. He and his followers appealed to Paul. Two swift strokes of the Pauline sword were enough. Yes, dying Christians were still sinful, but death itself finished sin (Rom 6:7). Yes, sins had to be punished, but Jesus himself had taken that punishment (Gal 3:13; 2 Cor 5:21). So much for purgatory. There was nothing to stop the Christian from going straight to heaven.

To go against the received traditions of the church was dangerous. To claim to know better what Scripture taught than the Angelic Doctor himself was arrogant. But in a world where many were fed up with a self-aggrandized, worldly papacy, and where the newly invented printing presses could pour out both antipapal tracts and new vernacular translations of the Bible, Luther’s message caught on.

But if purgatory could be ruled out, leaving the straight alternative of heaven or hell, how could one be certain of the right destination? Like a petty criminal preferring a night in jail to freezing on the street, many preferred the idea of doing time in purgatory to the rather sharper prospect that, failing heaven, one might land in perpetual hell. The abolition of purgatory thus placed a sudden weight on the question of assurance: How could one be sure one was going straight to heaven? Since at least Augustine and Anselm (the story is far too complicated to tell here), it had been taught that for a person to be accepted before God, the person would require righteousness.⁶ Theories were developed as to how a sinful mortal might acquire this necessary iustitia. Was it infused, imparted, or what, and if so, how? Paul spoke in Romans of God’s own dikaiosynē: here then, thought Luther, was the solution. God would credit his own dikaiosynē, his own iustitia, to sinful humans. And he would do so, not because they were trying to obey his moral law, but simply because they believed the gospel. The just shall live by faith. Granted faith, assurance would follow: the ultimate future, rendered apparently more dangerous once purgatory was out of the question, could now be assured.

Thus (again, the story is more complicated, but this will serve our purposes) there was born the famous Protestant and supposedly Pauline doctrine of justification by faith. It has given comfort to millions, the present author included. It speaks of God’s sovereign mercy to the worthless penitent: Nothing in my hand I bring; simply to thy cross I cling.⁷ It speaks of the absolute assurance of forgiveness, available in the present and guaranteed for a future that awaited the believer immediately after death. The sale of indulgences promised that as soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs. The Protestant reply is that the vilest offender who truly believes, that moment from Jesus a pardon receives.⁸ If those are the two options—as they were for many in the early sixteenth century—there could be only one true answer. Certainly only one that Paul would endorse.

The great strength of this is that it is giving a biblical answer to the medieval question. The great weakness is that it is giving a biblical answer to the medieval question. And that question loomed so large at the time that it was assumed to be the only question that really mattered: How do I get to heaven? How can I be sure? How do I know I’ve done enough? How do I know I won’t go to hell, and won’t have to go to purgatory either? Life was often brutal and short; the question was urgent. It still appears urgent today, even for those who live long and comfortable lives, in a world where going to heaven is the ultimate goal. If that is the question, some version of the classic Protestant answer may seem a good place to begin.

But what if the rule of heaven has already begun on earth—as the New Testament insists has happened with Jesus’s death, resurrection, and exaltation? What if the New Testament’s vision of the ultimate future is not going to heaven and there enjoying a beatific vision, but rather of new heavens and new earth?⁹ Suddenly the questions of the community, the church, and the surrounding political challenges reemerge, all the more striking for having been marginalized in much post-Reformation Christianity. We should not be surprised that Galatians got there ahead of us.

The Reformation, in fact, was answering the wrong question. The medieval question drew the focus onto the individual and his or her ultimate going to heaven, with the traditionalists insisting that the way to go to heaven was by being an obedient member of the church and the Reformers insisting that the answer was by faith alone. They thereby placed that individual faith in a new kind of spotlight, insisting that it would include the individual awareness of God’s loving presence in Christ: It is not enough, wrote Luther’s colleague Melanchthon, "to believe that Christ is the savior; I must believe that he is the savior for me. By the nineteenth and twentieth century, helped on its way by the experience-oriented Methodist revivals and by the newer contexts of Deism, neo-Epicureanism, and atheism itself, this had fused together the notions of conversion, religious experience, coming to faith, belief, and much besides, linking it all to justification in terms of assurance of going to heaven."¹⁰

But that was the point at which the medieval church had slipped its moorings. The great drama of Scripture is not fundamentally about how we can leave ‘earth’ and go to live with God in ‘heaven,’ but how God gets to come and live with us. The final scene in Scripture is not (as in the medieval mystery plays) about saved souls going up to heaven, but about the new Jerusalem coming down from heaven to earth, so that the dwelling of God is with humans (Rev 21:3). The foretastes of that, in God’s dwelling in the wilderness tabernacle and the Jerusalem temple, look ahead in the biblical narrative to the moment when the Word became flesh and dwelt [literally tabernacled] in our midst (John 1:14). The majestic Pauline vision in Ephesians 1:10 is that God had always planned to sum up the whole cosmos in the Messiah, everything in heaven and on earth. That changes everything, as I have tried to explain elsewhere.¹¹

If we reorient ourselves around that ancient biblical vision, we soon find ourselves confronted with the first-century Jewish hope: that the One God of Israel, the world’s creator, would return in glory to rescue his people, to bring to an end the present evil age in which the wicked pagans ruled the world, and to usher in the age to come of peace, justice, and freedom.¹² At that point, so most Jews of Paul’s day believed, he would raise his people from the dead to share in the new creation that would thereby be launched. This was very much what we today might call a worldly hope: Paul’s contemporaries, especially the zealous ones, longed particularly for freedom for the Jewish people from their suffering at the hands of idolatrous pagans. That divine return and victory would unveil in action the righteousness of the One God in quite a different way to that conceived by Anselm or Luther. Here, righteousness, as in the Psalms and Isaiah, clearly referred to God’s faithfulness to the covenant with Israel, and through Israel for the whole world. As God had acted in the Exodus, in faithfulness to his promises to Abraham, so God would act again, releasing his people once and for all from the elongated exile they had suffered for centuries. As long as they were living under pagan oppression, the prophetic promises had yet to be fulfilled. Release from exile would then constitute the large-scale forgiveness of sins spoken of by the prophets.¹³

There were indeed some first-century Jews who adopted the Platonic viewpoint that what mattered was going to heaven.¹⁴ But for those like Saul of Tarsus who believed in the resurrection—and this Pharisaic viewpoint seems to have been taken by most Jews of the day, though with various dissenting opinions—the point was not to go to heaven as a one-step ultimate destiny. Yes, after death God would somehow look after his people, though what state that would be in was never really resolved.¹⁵ But then, in the end, when God would transform the world in a great act of new creation, all his people would be raised from the dead. Saul of Tarsus and his Pharisaic colleagues, and all those influenced by them, thus believed in a two-stage life after death: first, whatever nonbodily existence there might be in the in-between time; then at last, bodily resurrection to share the life of God’s new heaven-and-earth reality. That two-stage postmortem reality is the biblical truth of which the medieval doctrine of a two-stage life after death, with heaven preceded by purgatory, is an unpleasant parody.¹⁶

If you change your eschatology, you change everything else with it. If the ultimate goal is the new heavens and new earth of which Isaiah had written, and if the promise of that glorious future inheritance is made to the family of Abraham, then the question of who, really, are the people of God? is of ultimate importance. It still relates to final salvation: when God establishes his kingdom on earth as in heaven, then—in the Jewish eschatology that Saul of Tarsus would have embraced—that would constitute the ultimate rescue from the present evil age. If that were to come about (opinions differed on this, as one might expect), then, ideally, the Jewish people should live lives of purity and holiness, so that God would take delight in returning to dwell in their midst. The key question was then, What constituted the right sort of purity and holiness? How could you tell, in the present, who were the people who would be vindicated as the true Israelites in the age to come? Who exactly constitutes this family, this people who will at last inherit the Abrahamic promises? This, for Paul (as, interestingly, for some at Qumran), was the question of justification.¹⁷

The obvious answer to the question, for Saul of Tarsus and many like him, was that the One God would vindicate those who were marked out in the present time by their keeping of Torah. Hence the drive, in the Pharisaic world that transposed itself in the next two centuries into the rabbinic world, to define ever more precisely what counted as genuine Torah keeping. This mattered especially in the diaspora, when the other great symbol of Israel’s life and hope, the temple, was far away; and of course, it mattered all the more when, after AD 70, the temple was a smoldering and sorrowful ruin. Hence the increasingly sharp dividing line, in writings that Paul almost certainly knew, between the righteous and the sinners, the dikaioi and the hamartōloi.¹⁸ Gentiles were automatically hamartōloi, of course, because they worshiped idols and, in consequence, sinned. (That is what idols do to you: they distort your genuine humanity, make you miss the mark.) Being outside the world defined by Torah, the gentiles were sinners by definition. But many in Israel, so it seemed at least to the devout Pharisee, were sinners as well, because, though they possessed Torah, they were not keeping it, or not in the way their stricter contemporaries deemed necessary. The biblical Psalms had complained about this, again and again.¹⁹

Thus to be righteous, in that world, meant primarily to be part of the true people of God, who will be vindicated when God acts in the future. It was not a matter of possessing what a medieval theologian would have meant by iustitia. If one were to speak in that Jewish world of justification, it would therefore refer to God’s implicit declaration as to who was part of this community. God’s verdict would be visible in human reality, in the practice, not least the table fellowship, of the righteous.

Now, perhaps, we can see the main difference between Luther’s world and Paul’s. (I am using Luther here as the classic representative of a whole way of looking at the Christian faith. Of course, the debates about what Martin Luther really said, and what his followers said after him, continue.) In Luther’s world, the question was, Who will go to heaven, and how can you tell in the present? In Paul’s world, the question was, Who will inherit God’s coming kingdom on earth as in heaven, and how can you tell in the present? The questions, clearly, are not all that far apart. Both concern the ultimate future. But in one case the future is Platonic and heavenly; in the other case, it is Jewish and worldly—or rather, envisaging a new creation in which heaven and earth come together, as in the temple, which formed the prototype of that promised future.²⁰

So the great Reformers were not wrong in supposing that Paul believed in an ultimate salvation. They were wrong in how they saw that final future. They were not wrong to suppose that the key issue concerned how one could tell in the present who God’s true people were. They were wrong in supposing that when Paul referred to the law he was meaning the moral law in general, rather than Israel’s covenant document, the Torah. They were not wrong in recognizing that Paul was concerned with human sin and what God would do about it. They were wrong in ignoring the specifically covenantal and eschatological dimensions of that question. God had made a covenant with Abraham, and clarified that covenant and brought it into sharp focus through the royal promises to David. The Jewish people of Paul’s day knew themselves to be living in a time of waiting, a time of continuing exile, a time when what mattered was the community definition in which, already in the present, the righteous would be distinguished from the sinners.

These differences between Luther’s world and Paul’s world may appear subtle. But they were decisive. Luther and his successors, for all the right reasons (Scripture challenging the accretions of ecclesial tradition; heartfelt faith supplanting outward legalism; personal love for God in the place of blind obedience; and so on), nonetheless took some key steps away from what Paul had been saying.

I have often used, at this point, the musical illustration of overtones. If you push down the loud pedal on a piano, strike a bottom C, and listen very carefully, you should hear the next C up, then a G, then the next C, then an E, then a G … then a very flat B-flat (you mightn’t hear that one if the piano was well tuned), then another C, and so on. Those higher notes are part of the inner harmonic meaning of that bottom C. But if you were then to strike, say, the first of the Gs in the sequence—which really is part of the meaning of that original C—you would generate a very different set of overtones: another G, then a D, another G, then a B, a D, a flattened F, another G … some of which would overlap exactly with the harmonic meaning of the bottom C, and some of which certainly would not. The bottom note in any such sequence is known technically as the fundamental, generating those overtones. Ironically, it has been the fundamentalists who have, in this case, ignored Paul’s fundamental almost entirely.

Over the last fifty years, as I have wrestled simultaneously with Paul on the one hand and with the traditions of the Western Church on the other, I have become convinced that Luther and his colleagues (especially my heroes of the early English Reformation, such as Tyndale and Frith) really did hear vital Pauline overtones. The urgent controversies of the time demanded that they should. It was as though, in my sequence starting from bottom C, they had struck the first of the Gs. That really was a Pauline note. But it has generated a different harmonic sequence. Some parts of that new sequence go well with the harmonies Paul had in mind. Some do not. And some of the notes Paul badly wanted to be heard get drowned out.

You can see this whenever an interpreter runs into a passage—Galatians 3 has plenty of them—where Paul doesn’t play exactly the note that the second harmonic sequence would have led you to expect. That is when commentators say, again and again, that what Paul was really wanting to say here … was something slightly different from what he in fact said. Or, worse, the interpreter simply skips over the offending phrase or verse altogether.

The answer to this problem is history. The serious, relentless determination to think into Paul’s world, into the first-century Jewish world, and, in the case of Galatians, into the world of the first-century diaspora where Greek philosophy had soaked into the mind-set of many and where Roman colonies and temples were signaling a whole new religio-political world. Hold down that historical loud pedal; play the bottom C of the message of a crucified and risen Messiah, and listen to how the harmonic sequence, at last, matches up with Galatians. That is what this commentary is all about.

Of course, history has got a bad name with theologians, since some have said history, history where there was no real history, but only the back projection of a post-Enlightenment liberal Protestantism. Faced with that, I can understand why many have preferred to listen to Luther’s harmonies than to the truncated cacophony of speculative reconstruction that has often resulted. But history, real history, matters, and we can in principle work at it. My case in the present book is that when we do that, we find ourselves listening to all kinds of themes and harmonies that relate directly to the task of Christian formation in today’s and tomorrow’s world.²¹

In particular, concentrating on the sixteenth-century version of justification by faith has meant the loss of two things that were of central importance to Paul. Both matter vitally in the contemporary task of Christian formation.

First, if the law in Paul’s thought was understood simply as an overarching moral law that condemned everyone as sinners, that meant that the Jews were to be characterized not as seekers after genuine holiness but as legalists, all outward show. The Jews became the archetype of homo religiosus, human beings constructing a system with which to manipulate God. Augustine’s polemic against Pelagius and Luther’s polemic against medieval Catholicism (and also against Renaissance humanists such as Thomas More) were fused together as a caricature and transferred wholesale to the Jews. This, as is now widely recognized, was a major misstep that helped to refocus the long-standing European anti-Judaism into new forms, turning that prejudice into racial mode via a kind of social Darwinism and producing a horrific climax. That now makes it very difficult for any follower of Jesus of Nazareth to speak clearly and wisely about Jesus’s own relatives, the Jewish people.²² It was difficult for Paul when he wrote Romans 9–11. It is much harder for us now. The entire subject is toxic. Passions become roused. This is partly because of the sporadic continuance of a covert anti-Judaism and its ugly, sneaky cousin, anti-Semitism. It is also because what people think and say about the Jewish people often serves as, or can be seen as, a proxy for their views on other issues. But the question of the law and the Jews cannot be avoided, especially when reading Galatians.

Second, by making justification by faith the doctrine that caused the ultimate split with Rome—against Luther’s original intention, which was to reform from within—the Reformers opened the way for lasting divisions in the church. Of course, one could and perhaps should say that the divisions were caused by the medieval corruptions. But the irony, striking when we read Galatians 2, is that justification by faith for Paul is the doctrine that all believers in Jesus belong at the same table, no matter what their ethnic, moral, social, or cultural background. To divide the church over that doctrine is to do the very thing Paul was opposing. To plant, establish, develop, and grow churches with no relation to one another, seeing no need of any linkage with other Jesus-followers in the area or worldwide, would have baffled and dismayed the apostle.

Of course, Protestant rhetoric has always suggested, and sometimes insisted, that this or that newly established fellowship is the true church, because the parent body had ceased to be a church. That was argued explicitly by John Calvin in relation to the Roman Church of his day. Many Protestant sects have tried the same line, not least when separating from other Protestants with whom they continue to have much in common; though virtually all would now describe themselves as denominations. The rhetoric, however, rings hollow when one surveys today’s worldwide scene. And even the newest, shiniest, most pure, recently established church will soon find that there are worms in the apple.

Behind all this there was another feature of the post-Reformation world that seems, quite accidentally, to have accelerated division. One of the great imperatives of the Reformation was to have the Scriptures, and public worship, in the language of the ordinary people, as opposed to the often incomprehensible Latin. This then produced different national, regional, and ethnic churches, so that to this day in many cities around the world there are Polish churches, Greek churches, Chinese churches, and a hundred more at least. With the proper and urgent Reformation imperatives of personal, individual faith, nobody noticed that the creation of fellowships based on linguistic kinship meant the reinscription of church-defining ethnic identity. Nobody noticed, in other words, that one theme of Galatians (justification by faith) had led to the rejection of another theme (neither Jew nor Greek … you are all one in Messiah Jesus)—let alone that, for Paul, the former was the basis for the latter. Insofar as the so-called new perspective on Paul—in its various forms!—has brought this to light, it is perhaps not surprising that the reaction has been strong, not only from those who want to make Paul talk about going to heaven but also from those whose churches have long been ethnically monochrome.

This is the point at which the debate between the new perspective and the old perspective necessarily points to what I elsewhere called the fresh perspective: the interplay between Paul’s gospel and Caesar’s empire.²³ One main reason why the Galatians urgently needed to understand the true position, not so much about their ultimate future in God’s eventual kingdom but about their present membership in Abraham’s family, was because Caesar was breathing down their necks. To understand this, and the resultant pressures on all concerned, we need to consider the larger social and political situation of Paul’s converts on the one hand and the larger theological picture of his gospel on the other. We shall get to that in a minute.

But let me first lay to rest one major misunderstanding. In the flurry of discussions that have followed Sanders’s launching of the new perspective on Paul in 1977, several misunderstandings have crept in.²⁴ It has been easy for critics to suggest that Sanders and others, the present writer included, have replaced the living heart of the gospel (God so loved the world that he gave his Son …) with a combination of comparative religion (placing Judaism and Christianity side by side) and sociology (emphasizing Paul’s concern to bring Jews and gentiles together). It is true that the recent wave of historical research has challenged many of the old stereotypes of Jewish life and thought, and that will be important. It is also true that Galatians is vitally concerned with the coming together of Jewish and gentile believers in the single Messiah family. But all this remains within the great gospel message of the lavish though undeserved love of the creator God.

This is woven into the overall structure of Galatians. The climax of the first two chapters is 2:20 (the Son of God loved me and gave himself for me), which was already signaled in 1:4 (he gave himself for our sins). When, in that long opening, Paul speaks of God’s action in unveiling his Son in me (1:16), the Son who is thereby unveiled in Paul’s life, suffering, preaching, biblical teaching, and pastoral work is not some abstract theological construct but the same Son who loved me and gave himself for me. This emphasis lies at the heart of the next great climax in 4:1–7, where the sending of the Son (4:4) is followed by the outpouring of the Spirit, through whom believers call out, Abba, Father! This is where the outpoured love of God in the death of the Son, announced powerfully in the Spirit-driven gospel, generates the answering love of believers from whatever background. This in turn creates the context in which, as in 4:12–20, the apostle and the believers are bound together in close bonds of family ties. And this, after the difficult issue of necessary discipline is dealt with in 4:21–5:1, results in the love that must be the central characteristic of the church, as it is also the first sign of the fruit of the Spirit (5:6, 14, 22), to be worked out in practical life (6:1–10). Let no one say, then, that giving a proper historical account of Paul’s cultural context, and paying proper attention to his urgent plea for unity in the church, undercuts the gospel message of God’s love reaching out to sinners and transforming their lives, personal and corporate, to reflect that same love. On the contrary, it enhances it.

This love—freely given, gratefully returned, lavishly shared—is at the heart of Christian formation.

THE SITUATION IN GALATIA

This is the point, in many commentaries, when the question of date and place comes up for discussion. The old debates rumble on in some quarters, not noticing that the historians and archaeologists are mostly now quite clear that the Galatia to whose churches Paul is writing is the South Galatia he visited in his first missionary journey, as recounted in Acts 13 and 14.²⁵ This increases the probability, which was already high, that the letter is to be dated early, that is, after that missionary journey but before the Jerusalem Conference. As with many things in history, the best argument is the coherent narrative that results from the hypothesis, and I have set out that narrative in some detail elsewhere.²⁶

What’s more, the proposal of a late date for Galatians came from the (now widely discredited) nineteenth-century German theory of supposed developments in Paul’s thought, according to which the doctrine of justification by faith emerged comparatively late, finding expression first in Galatians and then in Romans. This theory was designed to go alongside a view of the relationship between Paul and the Jerusalem apostles, especially Peter, in which Galatians 2:1–11 was Paul’s version of the Jerusalem Conference of Acts 15, and the argument at Antioch of Galatians 2:12–14 constituted the split that, reflecting a major theological cleavage, resulted in a (Petrine) Jewish Christianity at loggerheads with a (Pauline) gentile Christianity. This typically nineteenth-century projection of a Hegelian dialectic onto the first-century historical scene (including a strong prejudice against Luke) has very little going for it.²⁷ Unfortunately, scholarship has often proceeded by fashion rather than argument, and the largely unexamined paradigm from earlier German writing has remained in play, not least in America.

This may not appear to have made much difference, since until recently many readings of Galatians saw the letter as an exposition of Paul’s soteriology, defended against a generalized proto-Pelagian opposition. Such sense as this possessed (hearing overtones, some of which might accidentally harmonize with Paul’s fundamental) could have fitted into a variety of times and places. But when we examine the situation in South Galatia, with its significant Jewish population on the one hand and its major Roman establishments on the other, all sorts of things come up in three dimensions. And when we look at the historical context for which I have argued elsewhere, the sequence of events works excellently. The Antioch incident comes not long after Paul’s first missionary journey, being followed closely by news arriving about the Galatian situation; whereupon Paul writes Galatians in a hurry before he and Barnabas set off south for Jerusalem.

These debates (south or north? early or late?) have often obscured the real contextualizing that needs to go on, without which several key aspects of the letter remain opaque. The real-life situation reflected in the letter is far more complex than in the normal reading, in which Paul’s theology of grace and faith is set against some who are trying to add works. We need to think more deeply, in the way sociocultural and political studies have taught us to do, into the far more intricate and indeed interesting real-life situation.²⁸

First, the challenge facing the converts. The biggest and most obvious problem facing any new Jesus-believers in the Greco-Roman world was the stark demand, posed directly in 1 Thessalonians 1:9, that they turn from idols to serve the living God. The point is that idols were everywhere, and worshiping them was compulsory. The situation was totally unlike, say, churchgoing in the modern Western world, where people choose to attend public worship or not, and except for some small traditional communities nobody takes much notice. In Paul’s world there was no escape: from the small, portable household gods to the massive temples—not least, in many of Paul’s cities, temples to Caesar or Rome—the gods were everywhere.²⁹ From daily acknowledgment of the divinities assumed to lie behind the carved statues to weekly, monthly, or annual processions, festivals, and sacrifices, everyone joined in, and any who suddenly opted out would be noticed and remarked upon. It was assumed throughout the ancient world that if anything bad happened to a city, such as famine, fire, flood, plague, or hostile attack, the gods were angry. What would most enrage them was neglect. Anyone who failed to perform the regular duties, and to take part in the regular festivals, was therefore assumed to be a danger to the city and the community. Like someone visibly flouting health-and-safety regulations at a time of deadly pandemic, anyone who ignored the gods was assumed to be not just irresponsible but a dangerous social liability.

Now comes the twist. The Jews were exempt from all this.³⁰ Jewish communities—a significant body in most cities in the Roman world—had been given explicit permission to abstain from worshiping the gods. The reasons were pragmatic: Rome had discovered that Jewish people believed that their god was the only god. They would rather die than worship any other so-called gods. So Rome struck a deal: the Jews would pray to their own one god for Rome, its empire and its emperor. Non-Jews might not like this arrangement. They might still blame the Jews if bad things happened. We get hints of this in Acts (16:20–21; 19:34). But the deal had been struck and was maintained.

This is why it was vital for Paul’s converts to understand, and to be able to articulate, the reasons for their own new and startling abstention from the worshiping habits of a lifetime, and to stand firm under social and perhaps physical pressure. To follow the crucified and risen Jesus was not to belong to some hitherto unimagined new religion. (The Jesus-followers both were and were not a religion as that world would understand the term.)³¹ It was to lay claim to being the true heirs of Israel’s ancestor, Abraham. It was to profess a new form of Jewish monotheism—the One God of Israel having now revealed himself in a fresh way, as the God who sent his Son and then sent the Spirit of the Son (Gal 4:1–7). To be a Jesus-follower was therefore to claim a new version of the standard Jewish exemption clause, and to do so in full awareness that this was bound to be risky and unpopular, both with the Jewish community and with the wider civic, not least Roman, society. Communities do not take such risks unless something powerful is pushing them in that direction. Paul would not have hesitated to name that powerful force: the Messiah’s love makes us press on.³² To pursue the political dimension of Paul’s message, and of his present argument, is not to exchange heartfelt spirituality for dry sociology. It is, as Paul insists in Galatians, to follow Jesus’s own command to take up the cross. And one only does that sort of thing out of love.³³

Remarkably enough, the claim that Jesus-followers could shelter under the normal Jewish exemption clause seems to have worked in southern Greece. In Acts 18 the local Jewish leaders accused Paul of teaching illegal forms of worship—presumably meaning that he was radically modifying Jewish-style monotheism. The proconsul, Gallio, brother of Seneca and uncle of the poet Lucan, and himself a great jurist, gave his judgment: this was an inner-Jewish dispute (Acts 18:14–16). In other words, so far as he was concerned, the Jesus-followers could indeed claim the normal Jewish exemption.

But it didn’t work in southern Turkey. The claim of Paul and his converts was bound to be misunderstood, bound to arouse anger and hostility. Towns and cities in Galatia were eager to show their loyalty to all things Roman. Pisidian Antioch, a proud colony, even styled itself as new Rome, but it was not the only such colony (like Philippi, it had been founded by military veterans after the civil wars of the first century BC).³⁴ As the historian Tom Holland describes the situation, there were colonies filled with retired soldiers planted across [Galatia’s] southern reaches, with the mighty Via Sebaste, the Roman equivalent of a multilane highway, serving the province as both guarantor and symbol of Roman might.³⁵ The name of the road gave its meaning: Sebastos, in Greek, was the equivalent of Augustus. Thus merely to travel by this road "was to pay homage to the Divi Filius: the Son of a God who, by his exertions and his wisdom, had ushered humanity into a golden age."³⁶

This shows, by the way, that Paul’s emphasis in Galatians on what is sometimes misleadingly called apocalyptic