Galatians: The Angriest Letter

At a Glance

Who wrote it: Paul. He even calls attention to his own handwriting at the end: See with what large letters I write to you with my own hand (Galatians 6:11). No one seriously doubts it.

When: Somewhere between about 48 and 55. Scholars disagree about the date and about exactly which churches it went to.

Written for: The churches Paul founded among Gentiles in Galatia, in what is now Turkey. Other teachers were telling them they must be circumcised, and Paul wrote to stop them.

What it remembers of me: That I was born to a woman, born under the law (4:4), that I had a brother named James (1:19), and that I was crucified, which Paul says he made vivid before their eyes (3:1).

How close it stays to me: Close on the poor, the neighbor and equality. Far on enemies and in the Hagar allegory.

If you only read three chapters: Galatians 1, Galatians 2 and Galatians 5.

Words to Know

Galatia — a region in the middle of what is now Turkey, named for Celtic tribes who settled there, and a Roman province that stretched south of it.

Circumcision — the cutting of the foreskin, the sign of God’s covenant with Abraham, required of every Jewish male.

Works of the law — keeping the Law of Moses, especially circumcision, the food laws and the Sabbath.

Pillars — Paul’s word for the three leaders in Jerusalem: my brother James, Peter and John.

Fruit of the Spirit — the qualities Paul says the Spirit grows in a person.

The Book in Brief

Paul writes to the churches of Galatia. He skips the usual thanks. He is astonished that they are turning to a different message, and he says that anyone who preaches another good news, even an angel from heaven, should be cursed.

In chapters 1 and 2 Paul defends himself. He did not get his message from men but from a revelation of Jesus Christ. He tells how he once persecuted the church, how God called him, and how he went to Arabia and then back to Damascus. After three years he went to Jerusalem and met Peter and James. Fourteen years later he went up again with Barnabas and Titus. The leaders there agreed that Titus, a Greek, need not be circumcised, and asked only that Paul remember the poor. Later, at Antioch, Paul opposed Peter to his face, because Peter had pulled back from eating with Gentile believers.

Chapters 3 and 4 make Paul’s argument. The Galatians received the Spirit by trusting, not by keeping the Law. Abraham believed God, and the Law came four hundred thirty years after the promise. The Law was a tutor until Christ came. In Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female. Paul pleads with the Galatians, and he reads the story of Abraham’s two sons, one born to a slave woman and one to a free woman, as a picture of two covenants.

Chapters 5 and 6 turn to how to live. Stand firm in freedom, and do not take on circumcision. Serve one another through love, for the whole law is fulfilled in loving your neighbor. Paul sets the works of the flesh against the fruit of the Spirit. He tells them to bear one another’s burdens and to do good to everyone. He ends in his own large handwriting, with a blessing.

Romans begins, First, I thank my God through Jesus Christ for all of you (Romans 1:8). Philippians begins, I thank my God whenever I remember you (Philippians 1:3). Even the stormy letters to Corinth open with thanks or a blessing.

Galatians opens with a greeting, and then this: I marvel that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ to a different “good news” (Galatians 1:6).

No thanks. No warm words. Paul goes straight for the throat, and two verses later he is calling down a curse: even though we, or an angel from heaven, should preach to you any “good news” other than that which we preached to you, let him be cursed (Galatians 1:8).

What happened

Paul had founded these churches among Gentiles. He had told them they belonged to God’s people by trusting in me, without becoming Jews first.

After he left, other teachers came. They were followers of mine too, probably Jewish believers, and they told the Galatians that Paul had given them half the message. To belong fully to the people of Abraham, a man had to be circumcised, the way Abraham was. They had scripture on their side. God told Abraham that circumcision was an everlasting covenant (Genesis 17:13).

The Galatians were persuaded, or starting to be. Paul heard about it and wrote this letter in a fury.

Go deeperA king who faced the same choice

The fight in Galatians was not new in Paul’s day. A story told by the Jewish historian Josephus shows how it looked to a man who had to decide.

Izates was king of Adiabene, a small kingdom east of the Tigris river. A Jewish merchant named Ananias taught the royal household about the God of Israel, and Izates came to believe. He wanted to be circumcised. His mother, Queen Helena, who had also taken up the faith, begged him not to. His people, she said, would never accept a king who followed foreign customs. Ananias agreed with her. He told Izates that he could worship God without circumcision, and that God would forgive him, since fear of his people was the reason.

Then another Jewish teacher, Eleazar, came from Galilee. He found the king reading the Law and told him that he was wronging it by leaving its command undone. Izates did not wait. He was circumcised at once.¹

Here are two Jewish teachers, in the same generation, giving opposite answers to the same question about a Gentile who wanted to join God’s people. That is the argument Paul and his opponents were having. For the king it was a hard choice. Circumcision was a painful operation for a grown man, and it marked him out in a world where most men did not do it.¹

My gospel came from no man

Paul’s first move is to defend his own authority, because the newcomers had attacked it. They seem to have said that Paul got his message secondhand, from the real apostles in Jerusalem, and got it wrong.

Paul answers that he got it from nobody. For I didn’t receive it from man, nor was I taught it, but it came to me through revelation of Jesus Christ (Galatians 1:12).

Then he tells his own story, and it is the closest thing to an autobiography in your New Testament. He had persecuted the assembly of God and ravaged it (Galatians 1:13). After God revealed his Son to him, he did not go to Jerusalem. He went to Arabia, then back to Damascus. Only after three years did he go to Jerusalem, to visit Peter for fifteen days, and the only other leader he saw was James, the Lord’s brother (Galatians 1:18–19).

Fourteen years later he went up again, with Barnabas and a Greek co-worker named Titus, and laid his message before the leaders. But not even Titus, who was with me, being a Greek, was compelled to be circumcised (Galatians 2:3). The pillars, James and Cephas and John, gave him the right hand of fellowship. He would go to the Gentiles and they to the Jews (Galatians 2:9).

And there was one condition: They only asked us to remember the poor—which very thing I was also zealous to do (Galatians 2:10).

Hold on to that line. At the most important meeting in the first generation of my movement, the leaders who had walked with me settled the biggest dispute of their day, and the one thing they asked of the man going out to the world was not a doctrine. It was the poor.

Go deeperDo Galatians and Acts tell the same story?

Paul mentions two visits to Jerusalem before he wrote this letter (Galatians 1:18; 2:1). The book of Acts has him there more often, so scholars try to match the two accounts.

The meeting in Galatians 2 sounds like the council in Acts 15. In both, Paul and Barnabas go up to Jerusalem over whether Gentile believers must be circumcised, and the leaders side with Paul. But the details differ. In Galatians, Paul goes up by revelation (Galatians 2:2), takes Titus, and speaks privately with the leaders. In Acts 15, his church sends him, there is an open meeting, and the leaders send a letter asking Gentile believers to avoid food offered to idols, blood, strangled meat and sexual immorality (Acts 15:28–29). Paul never mentions that letter in Galatians, even though the quarrel at Antioch was over food.

So some scholars match Galatians 2 with a different visit, the one in Acts 11:30, when Paul and Barnabas carried relief for the poor to Jerusalem during a famine. That fits the leaders’ one request, to remember the poor. The prophecy of famine in Acts 11:28 could be the “revelation.” On this view Galatians was written before the council of Acts 15, which would explain why Paul never mentions its letter.

Others hold that Galatians 2 and Acts 15 describe the same meeting from two sides, and that the differences come from who is telling it. Neither view can be proved.²

The quarrel at Antioch

Then Paul tells a story that does not flatter anybody.

Antioch, in Syria, was one of the first places where Jewish and Gentile believers ate together as one community. Peter came to visit and ate with the Gentile believers too. For before some people came from James, he ate with the Gentiles. But when they came, he drew back and separated himself, fearing those who were of the circumcision. And the rest of the Jews joined him … so that even Barnabas was carried away (Galatians 2:12–13).

Paul confronted Peter in front of everyone. I resisted him to his face, because he stood condemned (Galatians 2:11).

Here is what Paul does not tell you: how it ended. He never says Peter backed down. He never says the church in Antioch took his side. Barnabas, his closest partner, had already gone with Peter. Many scholars think Paul lost that argument, and that after it he left Antioch and worked on his own.³

So this is my followers, less than twenty years after I died, fighting over a dinner table. Peter, whom I had called first. My brother James, who led them. Paul, who had never met me. All of them trying to decide whether a Jew who kept the Law could share a meal with a Gentile who did not. I had eaten with tax collectors and sinners. It turned out to be harder for them.

Faith, not the works of the law

From there Paul makes his great argument: a man is not justified by the works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ (Galatians 2:16).

For Paul, the works of the law in this fight meant one thing above all: circumcision, along with the food laws that kept Jews and Gentiles at separate tables. His point was that a Gentile does not need to become a Jew in order to belong to God. Trust is enough, for Jew and Gentile alike.

There is a puzzle in that verse that you should know about. The Greek words translated faith in Jesus Christ can also mean the faithfulness of Jesus Christ. One reading says we are made right by believing in me. The other says we are made right by my own faithfulness to God, all the way to the cross. Scholars have argued about it for decades, and translations differ.⁴

Neither Jew nor Greek

In the middle of the letter comes the sentence that may be the most radical thing Paul ever wrote.

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus (Galatians 3:28).

In Paul’s world, those three pairs were the deepest lines dividing human beings. A Jewish blessing recorded a century or so later thanked God for not making a man a Gentile, a woman or an ignorant man. Later prayer books say a slave.⁵ Greek men had a similar saying. Paul takes the three lines and says that in me they are gone.

Many scholars think the sentence is older than Paul, part of what was said over new believers at their baptism.⁵ If so, it tells you what my earliest followers said to every person who came up out of the water. You are not first a Jew, a free man, a man. You are one.

Whether they lived it is another question. A generation later, letters written in Paul’s name were telling slaves to obey their masters in everything and women to be silent. But this sentence came first.

Hagar

There is one passage in Galatians that is very hard to read kindly.

Paul turns the story of Abraham’s two wives into an allegory. Sarah, the free woman, stands for his gospel. Hagar, the enslaved Egyptian woman who bore Abraham’s first son, stands for Mount Sinai … in bondage with her children (Galatians 4:24–25), that is, for the Law. And Paul ends with Sarah’s words from Genesis: Throw out the servant and her son (Galatians 4:30).

In Genesis, those are the words of a jealous mistress demanding that a slave woman and her child be driven out, into a desert where they nearly died (Genesis 21:10–16). And Hagar, in Genesis, is the only person in all of scripture who gives God a name: You are a God who sees (Genesis 16:13). God saw her when Abraham did not.

Paul needed an argument, and he used her. Christians then spent centuries reading his allegory as a statement that the Jews were the children of the slave, to be cast out. Paul was angry when he wrote it. Anger makes poor theology.

The rudest line in the Bible

It is in this letter. Paul is so furious with the teachers who want the Galatians circumcised that he writes, I wish that those who disturb you would cut themselves off (Galatians 5:12).

The Greek means exactly what you suspect. If they are so eager to cut, let the knife slip. Galatia was home to the cult of the mother goddess Cybele, whose priests castrated themselves.⁶ Paul’s readers would not have missed the point.

For freedom

And yet the same letter has some of the most beautiful lines Paul wrote.

Stand firm therefore in the liberty by which Christ has made us free (Galatians 5:1).

For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision amounts to anything, nor uncircumcision, but faith working through love (Galatians 5:6). Faith working through love. Not faith instead of doing. Faith that does.

For you, brothers, were called for freedom. Only don’t use your freedom for gain to the flesh, but through love be servants to one another. For the whole law is fulfilled in one word, in this: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Galatians 5:13–14). Paul and I agreed on that. It is the commandment I put beside the love of God as the greatest in the Law.

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faith, gentleness, and self-control (Galatians 5:22–23).

Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ (Galatians 6:2).

Large letters

At the end, Paul takes the pen from his secretary. See with what large letters I write to you with my own hand (Galatians 6:11).

Perhaps his eyes were poor. Earlier in the letter he reminds the Galatians that he first came to them because of an illness, and that they would have plucked out your eyes and given them to me (Galatians 4:15). Perhaps he simply wanted them to see that he meant it. Either way, you can picture it: a sheet of papyrus covered in a professional scribe’s small, neat hand, and then, at the bottom, big uneven letters from a man who could not stop himself.

Fifteen centuries later, Martin Luther loved this letter more than any other. He called it my Katie von Bora, after his wife.⁷ It became the battle flag of the Reformation. It was written to a handful of small churches in the middle of Asia Minor, by a man who was afraid they were drifting away from him, and who did not stop to say thank you.

Go deeperWho the Galatians were

The word Galatians comes from the Greek name for the Gauls. In the 270s BC, Celtic tribes crossed from Europe into Asia Minor, raided widely, and then settled in the highlands around Ancyra, today’s Ankara. Their descendants kept a Celtic language for centuries. Jerome, who had once lived in Trier, in what is now Germany, wrote in the 380s that apart from Greek the Galatians spoke almost the same language as the people of Trier.⁸

In 25 BC the last king of Galatia died, and Rome turned his kingdom into a province. The province stretched far to the south of the Celtic homeland. It took in cities such as Pisidian Antioch, Iconium, Lystra and Derbe, where Acts says Paul preached on his first journey (Acts 13–14).⁸

That leaves a question. To whom did Paul write? The older answer, called the North Galatian view, is that he wrote to churches among the Celts of the north, which Paul may have reached on the journeys that Acts 16:6 and Acts 18:23 mention. The South Galatian view, argued by the scholar William Ramsay in the 1890s, is that Paul wrote to the churches he founded on his first journey, in the southern cities of the province.⁸

The choice matters for the date. If the letter went to the south, it could have been written as early as about 48, before the events of Acts 15. If it went to the north, it was written later, on a later journey. That is why the date of the letter is still disputed.

Check It Yourself

Look up: Galatians 2:1–14.

You will find: the leaders shaking hands and asking Paul to remember the poor, and then Peter and Paul in a public quarrel over who could eat together.

Then read Galatians 3:28 and ask which of its three pairs your own church has found hardest to live.

The Short Version

• Galatians is the only letter Paul certainly wrote that skips the thanks and opens in anger.
• Other teachers had told his Gentile converts they must be circumcised. Paul says trust is enough.
• He tells of the meeting where the leaders asked only that he remember the poor, and of his public quarrel with Peter at Antioch, which he may have lost.
• It holds Paul’s most radical sentence: neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female.
• It also holds his harshest: the Hagar allegory, and his wish that his opponents would castrate themselves.