Galatians by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

GALATIANS

COMMENTARIES FOR CHRISTIAN FORMATION

Stephen E. Fowl, Jennie Grillo, and Robert W. Wall Series editors 2020–present

The Commentaries for Christian Formation (CCF) series serves a central purpose of the Word of God for the people of God: faith formation. Some series focus on exegesis, some on preaching, some on teaching, and some on application. This new series integrates all these aims, serving the church by showing how sound theological exegesis can underwrite preaching and teaching, which in turn forms believers in the faith. Uniting these volumes is a shared conviction that interpreting Scripture is not an end in itself. Faithful belief, prayer, and practice, deeper love of God and neighbor: these are ends of scriptural interpretation for Christians. The volumes in Commentaries for Christian Formation interpret Scripture in ways aimed at ordering readers’ lives and worship in imitation of Christ, informing their understanding of God, and animating their participation in the church’s global mission with a deepened sense of calling.

GALATIANS

N. T. Wright

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company Grand Rapids, Michigan

Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. 4035 Park East Court SE, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49546 www.eerdmans.com © 2021 N. T. Wright All rights reserved Published 2021 Printed in the United States of America 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 ISBN 978-0-8028-2560-5 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Wright, N. T. (Nicholas Thomas), author. Title: Galatians / N. T. Wright. Description: Grand Rapids, Michigan : William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, [2021] | Series: Commentaries for Christian formation | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “A translation of, and a commentary on, the letter to the Galatians with a specific focus on Christian formation in today’s world”—Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2020051854 | ISBN 9780802825605 Subjects: LCSH: Bible. Galatians—Commentaries. Classification: LCC BS2685.53 .W745 2021 | DDC 227/.4077—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020051854

For Rob and Margie Forsyth

CONTENTS

Series Introduction

Preface

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List of Abbreviations

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Introduction The Situation in Galatia Paul’s Answer Commentaries and Christian Formation

21 31 41

Commentary Galatians 1:1–17 Translation Introduction Apostleship and the Gospel (1:1–5) Another Gospel? (1:6–9) The Story So Far (1:10–17) Conclusion

45 45 46 53 62 69 81

Galatians 1:18–2:10 Translation Introduction

83 83 84

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Contents First Jerusalem Visit: A Happy Relationship (1:18–24) The Second Visit: Standing Firm (2:1–10) Conclusion

87 91 105

Galatians 2:11–21 Translation Introduction Peter in Antioch (2:11–14) The Great Transformation (2:15–21) Conclusion

108 108 109 109 117 160

Galatians 3:1–14 Translation Introduction The Spirit and Faith (3:1–5) Abraham and the Covenant (3:6–9) The Curse of the Law (3:10–14) Conclusion

168 168 169 183 189 194 215

Galatians 3:15–29 Translation Introduction The Unbreakable Covenant (3:15–18) Why Then the Law? (3:19–22) Under the Paidagōgos (3:23–25) Abraham’s One Family (3:26–29) Conclusion

217 217 218 222 229 236 239 245

Galatians 4:1–11 Translation Introduction The New Exodus (4:1–7) Don’t Go Back to Slavery! (4:8–11) Conclusion

248 248 248 249 273 276

Galatians 4:12–5:1 Translation Introduction True Friends and False Friends (4:12–20)

279 279 280 283

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Contents Two Women, Two Families, Two Covenants, Two Mountains (4:21–5:1) Conclusion

290 307

Galatians 5:2–26 309 Translation 309 Introduction 310 The Warning and the Challenge (5:2–12) 315 Love and the Spirit (5:13–26) 328 Conclusion 347 Galatians 6:1–18 Translation Introduction Closing Exhortations (6:1–10) Final Warnings and Example (6:11–18) Conclusion

352 352 353 353 362 379

Bibliography

385

Index of Subjects

395

Index of Authors

404

Index of Scripture and Other Ancient Sources

407

SERIES INTRODUCTION

The Commentaries for Christian Formation series serves a central purpose of the Word of God for the people of God: faith formation. Some series focus on exegesis, some on preaching, some on teaching, and some on application. This new series integrates all these aims, serving the church by showing how sound theological exegesis can underwrite preaching and teaching, which in turn forms believers in the faith. Although we encourage all believers to pick up Scripture and read it, we do not assume that the work of Scripture happens easily or well without the guidance of others. The basis of this guidance is the Holy Spirit who leads believers into all truth (John 16:13) and calls to mind the words and deeds of Jesus (John 13:26). One way the Spirit accomplishes this work is through the work of dedicated commentators. Along with the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8, we recognize that it is often hard to understand Scripture without someone to teach us. Thus, these commentaries play the role of Philip in Acts, explaining texts in ways that make the church’s gospel manifest to expectant readers. Each volume aims to help its readers enter into conversation with the church’s canonical heritage, especially its two-testament Scripture and the ecumenical creeds. Further, a theological commentary must consider the various ways in which Scripture performs in worship, catechesis, mission, and devotion to cultivate theological understanding and holy living within and for readers’ cultural settings. If a commentary cannot help Christians negotiate a faithful path through life and deepen their love for God and all their neighbors, it is not clear that it is truly a theological commentary. Given these commitments, we take both parts of the term “theological commentary” seriously. The authors of these commentaries strive to keep

Series Introduction theological concerns and ecclesial practices, broadly conceived, in the forefront of their interpretive work, paying attention to the ways Scripture shapes and is shaped by theology. Many recent commentaries distinguish historically informed exegetical work from the theological, moral, and pastoral concerns that animate the imaginations of most commentary readers. This bifurcation reflects a pattern typically found in today’s seminaries, where Scripture is taught separately from the theological disciplines. We are eager to avoid the modern tendency to compartmentalize the tasks of exegesis and theological reflection. Theology is not the result of exegesis; nor is it one discrete element that is separable from exegesis carried on by other means. Rather, exegesis is itself a way of doing theology. Thinking this way does not limit the questions and concerns believers might bring to scriptural interpretation: we do not require or expect a specified interpretive method from the commentators in this series. What unites these volumes is a shared conviction that interpreting Scripture is not an end in itself. Faithful belief, prayer, and practice, deeper love of God and neighbor: these are ends of scriptural interpretation for Christians. The volumes in Commentaries for Christian Formation interpret Scripture in ways aimed at ordering readers’ lives and worship in imitation of Christ, informing their understanding of God, and animating their participation in the church’s global mission with a deepened sense of calling.

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PREFACE

The purpose of this commentary, and its role within something called “Christian formation,” is explained in the introduction. I am grateful to my colleagues at Eerdmans for their patience in waiting for this book, originally proposed over twenty years ago, and for their generosity in allowing it a place in their new series. Commentators normally engage in dialogue with other scholars, and I shall do a certain limited amount of that. However, this can here be considerably simplified, for two reasons. First, the survey of “who says what” on passage after passage has been done with great thoroughness in recent days by several commentators, most recently Craig Keener, particularly in his 2019 Baker commentary. There is no point in reinventing Craig’s many well-oiled wheels. Second, I have myself already disentangled, engaged with, and where necessary controverted several strands of recent Pauline scholarship.1 In one case (Paul and His Recent Interpreters), I have actually used Galatians as a template for displaying different schools of thought. Part 1 of that book explains the background to twentieth-century Pauline studies, particularly the work of F. C. Baur and its aftermath, and then analyzes the varieties of the “new perspective” on Paul and the reactions it has provoked. All this determines a good deal of the debate around Galatians. Part 2 of that book expounds and critiques the modern so-called apocalyptic reading of Paul that has become fashionable in parts of America, and whose flagship has been the Galatians commentary of 1. See Paul and His Recent Interpreters (London: SPCK; Minneapolis: Fortress) and The Paul Debate (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press; London: SPCK), both published in 2015; and see the bibliography of my relevant works, below.

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Preface J. L. Martyn. Since I have there discussed in detail both his work and that of his colleague M. de Boer, I shall not repeat those arguments here. Part 3 of Paul and His Recent Interpreters then examines the main lines of modern “sociological” readings of Paul. That book itself supplements the work I did in Paul and the Faithfulness of God. There, after the main exposition of Paul’s worldview and theology, I set out and added to the current wave of discussion on Paul’s relationship with the Roman Empire and its cults (ch. 12), his place within the first-century worlds of “religion” and philosophy (chs. 13 and 14, respectively), and his complex relationship with his own Jewish world (ch. 15). Debate over that last category, however, has developed in new ways since then, not least in what has styled itself the “radical new perspective” or “Paul within Judaism.” This really requires fuller treatment than I have yet provided, or than will be possible in a commentary, but I will note a few places where questions need to be raised. All these approaches impinge on a reading of Galatians, but a sequential commentary such as this (section by section, paragraph by paragraph, verse by verse) is hardly the best way of addressing them except in the broadest terms. Footnotes in a commentary ought really to explain tricky moments in the main text, not engage in running battles with disparate (and often mutually incompatible) debating partners, many of whose concerns will remain opaque to the ordinary reader. Galatians is, in any case, very dense, with tight-packed paragraphs and cryptic sentences. It was written, it seems, in both haste and heat, to meet an emergency whose details Paul assumes and so never spells out. The task is then—and this is the purpose of a commentary, as opposed to other genres of scholarship—to get inside those tight-packed paragraphs and see what makes them work as they do, or at least as Paul hopes they will. This requires, and is not always given in the more “topical” monographs and articles, sustained attention to the actual flow of thought, to the natural and rhetorical climaxes of the argument, and to the subtle interconnections within the document itself. For this, we are better served by constant reference, not primarily to the debates of our own day, but to Paul’s own historical context and indeed his own other letters (while of course allowing each to speak for itself: Paul was not writing successive editions of a “systematic theology”).2 2. On Paul and “systematic theology,” see my Interpreting Paul: Essays on the Apostle and His Letters (London: SPCK; Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2020), chs. 3, 7.

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Preface All this, as the reader will tell, is by way of apology, if such were needed, for the fact that I have not peppered the text with the kind of zealous footnoting that is now common. I have done plenty of that in the works just referred to, and in other articles still at the planning stage. Like a chess player able to see the potential moves of every piece on the board, an experienced biblical scholar can often see every phrase, every word in a Pauline letter trailing invisible clouds of footnotes on everything from text-critical issues, lexicography, and parallels in ancient literature, to the great syntheses of subsequent generations, and then into the hand-to-hand fighting, often a matter of jungle warfare in the dark, with many different schools of contemporary interpretation. Those who want to know all that kind of thing can find it easily enough in some of the very thorough recent commentaries, such as those of Moo, deSilva, and Keener,3 or indeed in the “Galatians” section of some of the recent major monographs, such as that of Barclay.4 Every reading of the letter proposes a hypothesis. It is a snapshot of where the exegete currently stands, within an implied hermeneutical spiral that, in my case, has been going on for over forty years.5 This means that I am here following through on the proposals about the theological issues I expounded in detail in part 3 of Paul and the Faithfulness of God, and on the analysis of the historical and political situation of the letter I sketched in chapter 12 of that same book and also in the relevant chapters (5 and 6) of Paul: A Biography. If the first main underlying question of the present book is therefore necessarily historical (“what did Paul mean?”), the second has to do with today’s task of “Christian formation” and the ways in which a reading of Galatians might contribute to that (“what might it mean today?”). Very few readers approach a 3. D. J. Moo, Galatians, Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2013); D. A. deSilva, The Letter to the Galatians (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2018); and C. S. Keener, Galatians: A Commentary (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2019). 4. J. M. G. Barclay, Paul and the Gift (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015). 5. See my Paul for Everyone: Galatians and Thessalonians (London: SPCK; Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2002); What St. Paul Really Said (Oxford: Lion; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997); Justification: God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision, 2nd ed. with new introduction (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity; London: SPCK, 2016; original 2009); and numerous articles, most of them now in one or another of The Climax of the Covenant: Christ and the Law in Pauline Theology (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992); Pauline Perspectives (London: SPCK; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2013); and Interpreting Paul.

Preface book like Galatians with a blank, “neutral” mind. Certainly I have never read the letter without the accompanying question, somewhere in my mind, “How might this apply to readers, myself included, in today’s world?” It is, however, too simplistic to imagine that we can first “do the history,” in a supposedly detached fashion, and only then inquire about “application.” History always involves the historian in the effort to think the thoughts of people in other times and cultures. That requires sympathetic imagination, not necessarily in the sense of “coming to agree with it” but in the sense of “learning to understand someone else’s point of view.”6 However, for those who are in any case committed to receiving Galatians as part of (in some sense) authoritative “holy scripture,” there is a particular challenge. We probably have at least a rough idea of what we would like Paul to say, and it may be all too easy to imagine that Paul is in fact saying just that, with only minor decorative adjustments. This is where hermeneutics needs rigorous history, to poke and prod and challenge a too-easy equation of what Paul was saying with what we think the church today should be discussing and proclaiming. Out of this double challenge, then, there emerges here a commentary in which, section by section, I shall do my best as a historian, thinking my way sympathetically into Paul’s world, to explain what his dense and cryptic sentences were about. Then, having worked through the text verse by verse, I shall conclude each section with reflections on what this might mean for “Christian formation” in our own day. I am grateful to the literally dozens of colleagues with whom I have discussed Galatians over the years. This obviously includes Richard Hays, whose own commentary in the New Interpreters Bible has been a constant companion, and many other colleagues who have become friends at the Society of Biblical Literature, Society for New Testament Studies, and elsewhere. My particular debts will be obvious, as will my blind spots, to those familiar with the subject. My thanks also go to those of my own doctoral students who have worked on Galatians either for dissertations or afterward, including Tony Cummins and Peter Oakes, from my earlier time in Oxford, and John Dunne, Ernest Clark, and Esau McCaulley, from my years in St. Andrews. I have not been able in the present volume to engage with them as much as I would have liked; they will no doubt prod me into doing so more in the future. One particularly 6. On the historian’s task, see my History and Eschatology: Jesus and the Promise of Natural Theology, Gifford Lectures, 2018 (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press; London: SPCK, 2019), ch. 3.

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Preface memorable occasion was the conference on Galatians and Christian theology in St. Andrews in the summer of 2012.7 After that, and having completed Paul: Fresh Perspectives, Paul and His Recent Interpreters, and The Paul Debate, I returned to Galatians gradually via a book on the Atonement (The Day the Revolution Began, 2016), the Paul biography (2018), and the 2018 Gifford Lectures (History and Eschatology), which, though not directly relating to Paul, have considerable bearing on the post-Enlightenment contexts in which he has been (mis)read. It was a treat to be able to share outline reflections on the letter, in the form of seminar papers, with colleagues and students at St. Mary’s College, St. Andrews, in the spring of 2019. I then gave a short version of the present book as lectures in Regent College, Vancouver, that same summer, where I was cheerfully entertained by the president, Jeffrey Greenman, and his delightful colleagues, especially the indefatigable Ben Nelson. I am grateful to them all, and also to the dedicatees of this book, my Australian friend Bishop Robert Forsyth and his wife, Margie. Rob (who preached at the 2012 St. Andrews conference) and Margie have been a great gift to Maggie and myself over many years. The continuing disagreements that I suspect we shall have over the present book will, if anything, simply add to my delight at our robust exchanges—about cricket and rugby, naturally, but also about Paul, his gospel, and his relevance for the church and world of our own day. It is wonderful when we agree, and exciting when we don’t. May it continue so. N. T. Wright Wycliffe Hall, Oxford Easter 2020

7. The essays from this conference were published in M. W. Elliott et al., Galatians and Christian Theology: Justification, the Gospel, and Ethics in Paul’s Letter (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2019).

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ABBREVIATIONS

BAGD

Bauer, Walter, William F. Arndt, F. Wilbur Gingrich, and Frederick W. Danker. Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979 BDAG Danker, Frederick W., Walter Bauer, William F. Arndt, and F. Wilbur Gingrich. Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature. 3rd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000 CEB Common English Bible GMT The Dead Sea Scrolls Study Edition. Edited by F. García Martínez and E. J. C. Tigchelaar. 2 vols. Leiden: Brill, 1994 JB Jerusalem Bible King The New Testament: Freshly Translated by Nicholas King. Stowmarket, UK: Kevin Mayhew, 2014 KJV King James Version LXX Septuagint MS(S) manuscript(s) MT Masoretic Text NEB New English Bible NETS A New English Translation of the Septuagint and the Other Greek Translations Traditionally Included under That Title. Edited by A. Piet ersma and B. C. Wright. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007 NTE/KNT The New Testament for Everyone (in USA, The Kingdom New Testament), by N. T. Wright. London: SPCK; San Francisco: HarperOne, 2011

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Abbreviations NJB PLond

Pss. Sol. REB NIV NRSV RSV

New Jerusalem Bible Greek Papyri in the British Museum. Vols. 1 and 2 ed. F. G. Kenyon, vol. 3 ed. F. G. Kenyon and H. I. Bell, vols. 4 and 5 ed. H. I. Bell. London: British Museum, 1893– Psalms of Solomon Revised English Bible New International Version New Revised Standard Bible Revised Standard Version

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Introduction

hat 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

Introduction 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 1. See Paul and His Recent Interpreters (London: SPCK; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2015), pt. 1. For a remarkably full and helpful survey of the historic Galatians commentaries by

Introduction 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 Chrysostom, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, and others, see J. K. Riches, Galatians through the Centuries (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013; original 2008). 2. See K. Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1956), 622–23, quoted in Wright, Paul and His Recent Interpreters, 86–87. 3. “Catholic,” of course, properly means “worldwide.”

Introduction 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.

Introduction 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 4. The verb sōzō is found ten times in Romans, nowhere in Galatians; the noun sōtēria five times in Romans, nowhere in Galatians. Likewise hamartia (sin) is found three times in Galatians, including the formulaic opening at 1:4, but forty-eight times in Romans; the verb

Introduction 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. hamartanō, not found in Galatians, occurs seven times in Romans; the noun hamartōlos occurs twice in Galatians, four times in Romans; the noun hamartēma, not found in Galatians, occurs once in Romans. This makes five uses of related terminology in Galatians and sixty in Romans. Statistics aren’t everything, but these ones are striking, especially when Galatians has several parallels to the Romans passages where the highest concentration of sin words occurs (chs. 5–8). M. de Boer, Galatians: A Commentary, New Testament Library (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2011), 44, 61, and elsewhere appears to confuse “salvation” with “justification”; they are of course closely correlated within Paul’s larger frame of thought, but when, as in Galatians, the latter is explicitly discussed and the former not at all, it is risky to assume identification.

Introduction 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 5. On purgatory, see, e.g., J. Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984; original 1981), and the dramatic account of S. Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).

Introduction 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 6. The Latin iustitia, “justice,” as the regular rendering of Paul’s Greek dikaiosynē, brought with it all kinds of other questions. On the history of the doctrine of justification, see especially A. E. McGrath, Iustitia Dei: A History of the Doctrine of Justification, 4th ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020; original 1986).

Introduction 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 7. From A. M. Toplady, “Rock of Ages, Cleft for Me,” in, e.g., Hymns Ancient and Modern New Standard (London: Hymns A&M, Ltd., 1983), no. 135. 8. The saying about the coin in the coffer is usually ascribed to John Tetzel, the one who was selling indulgencies. The answering hymn is “To God Be the Glory,” by Frances J. van Alstyne, 1870 (Anglican Hymn Book [London: Church Book Room Press, 1965], no. 280).

Introduction 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 9. I have set this out in more detail in Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (London: SPCK; San Francisco: HarperOne, 2007). 10. On the contexts, see History and Eschatology: Jesus and the Promise of Natural Theology, Gifford Lectures, 2018 (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press; London: SPCK, 2019), chs. 1 and 2. 11. See particularly Surprised by Hope.

Introduction 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 12. For what follows, see particularly The Resurrection of the Son of God (London: SPCK; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003), esp. chs. 3 and 4, and Paul and the Faithfulness of God, vol. 4 of Christian Origins and the Question of God (London: SPCK; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2013), chs. 2 and 11. 13. E.g., Isa 40:1–2; Jer 31:34; Lam 4:22. 14. Notably Philo; and see the (obviously Platonic) parallel in Plutarch, “On Exile” (Plutarch’s Moralia 7). 15. See the discussion in Resurrection of the Son of God, ch. 3: note particularly that Wis 3:1–10, which speaks of “the souls of the righteous” as being “in God’s hand,” is not thereby describing their final destiny but only their temporary safekeeping until the time when they will “shine forth and run like sparks through the stubble” (3:7) and govern nations and peoples

Introduction 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 presin the kingdom of God (3:8), occasioning dismay for “the wicked” who had killed the righteous and imagined that they were gone for good (4:20–5:23). 16. In contemporary Roman Catholic theology, large steps have been taken away from the medieval theory, though popular practice, as evidenced in, e.g., commemorations on All Souls’ Day, has not even begun to catch up. See For All the Saints: Remembering the Christian Departed (London: SPCK; Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse, 2003) and Surprised by Hope; and, for a contemporary Roman statement, P. J. Griffiths, “Purgatory,” in The Oxford Handbook of Eschatology, ed. J. L. Walls (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 427–46, including the startling proposal (443n20) that my own position is close to that of the Council of Trent. 17. See the one explicit statement in Qumran, in 4QMMT column C: see my article in Pauline Perspectives (London: SPCK; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2013), ch. 21.

Introduction ent 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”— 18. See below on 1:10. 19. Thus, e.g., Ps. 1, contrasting the present conduct and future destiny of hoi dikaioi with that of hoi asebeis (“the ungodly”) and hoi hamartōloi (“the sinners”).

Introduction 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. 20. On the temple and the future hope, see History and Eschatology, ch. 5.

Introduction 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 “justifica21. On the task, the problems, and the possibilities of historical work in this context, see esp. History and Eschatology, ch. 3.

Introduction tion 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 22. It is also hard for Jews to write about Jesus. A graphic depiction of this is in Amos Oz’s book Judas (London: Chatto & Windus, 2016), reflecting the concerns of Oz’s uncle, Joseph Klausner, whose famous treatment of Jesus was shocking in the Jewish world of its day.

Introduction 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 23. See Paul: Fresh Perspectives (London: SPCK; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005), ch. 12; Pauline Perspectives, chs. 12, 16, 27; Interpreting Paul: Essays on the Apostle and His Letters (London: SPCK; Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2020), chs. 3, 6.

Introduction 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 24. See Paul and His Recent Interpreters, chs. 3, 4, 5.

The Situation in Galatia 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 develop25. See S. Mitchell, Anatolia: Land, Men, and Gods in Asia Minor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); C. Breytenbach and C. Zimmerman, Early Christianity in Lycaonia and Adjacent Areas: From Paul to Amphilochius of Iconium (Leiden: Brill, 2018); and others; picked up by, e.g., S. K. Williams, Galatians, Abingdon New Testament Commentaries (Nashville: Abingdon, 1997), 19–21. The relevant arguments, which are strong (presence of Jewish population; good Roman road contrasted with absence of good roads in the north until 70s and 80s; Paul’s preference for referring to Roman provinces), are not taken into account by, e.g., Hays, de Boer, and others. 26. Paul: A Biography (San Francisco: HarperOne; London: SPCK, 2018). It is only fair to say that others who agree about “South Galatia” have in some cases (e.g., Keener) retained the later date, which I regard as far less likely.

Introduction ments 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 27. See Paul and His Recent Interpreters, chs. 1, 2. 28. See T. Witulski, Die Adressaten des Galaterbriefes: Untersuchungen zur Gemeinde von

The Situation in Galatia 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 Antiochia ad Pisidiam (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000); Witulski, Kaiserkult in Kleinasien: Die Entwicklung der kultisch-religiösen Kaiserverehrung in den Römischen Provinz Asia von Augustin bis Antonius Pius (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 2010; original 2007); B. W. Winter, “The Imperial Cult and Early Christians in Pisidian Antioch (Acts XIII 13–50 and Gal VI 11–18),” in Actes du 1er Congrès International sur Antioche de Pisidie, Collection Archéologique et Histoire de l’Antiquité, ed. T. Drew-Bear, M. Tashalan, and C. M. Thomas (Lyon: Université Lumière-Lyon, 2002), 67–75; J. K. Hardin, Galatians and the Imperial Cult (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008); B. Kahl, Galatians Re-Imagined: Reading with the Eyes of the Vanquished (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2010); see my discussion in Paul and the Faithfulness of God, ch. 12. It would be good to follow all these up in detail, particularly the striking proposals of Kahl, but this has not been possible in the present commentary. 29. See Paul and the Faithfulness of God, chs. 4, 13. 30. Paul and the Faithfulness of God, 277–78; and, further, The New Testament and the People of God (London: SPCK; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992), 154n19, with references there.

Introduction 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 31. See Paul and the Faithfulness of God, chs. 4, 13. 32. 2 Cor 5:14; see Gal 2:20, “he loved me and gave himself for me.” 33. As I was revising this introduction, I chanced to reread an essay by John Lucas, a great philosopher who died in April 2020. Writing about “grace,” he says that when, as a Christian, one is asked to explain one’s actions, the ultimate answer is “out of love for God,” and that behind that again there lies the simple belief that “we love God, because he first loved us . . . out of the overflowing goodness of his heart” (J. R. Lucas, Freedom and Grace [London: SPCK, 1976], 22). This central aspect of Lucas’s life was strangely absent from the official obituary in the London Times: today’s world, like Paul’s, doesn’t approve of people who worship divinities other than the recognized secular ones. As Lucas says in another essay (136), “I do not believe in Marx or Freud. Money and sex are important, but not all-important.”

The Situation in Galatia 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” has its own political context—over against those who, in the teeth of Daniel and Revelation, suppose that “apocalyptic” focuses attention on dark suprahuman powers rather than human authorities.37 Paul’s message, that when the Messiah “died for our sins” this had the effect of “rescuing us from the present evil age” and ushering in proleptically the long-awaited “age to come” (Gal 1:4), stands in parallel to the

34. On Antioch as the “new Rome,” see the spectacular production of E. K. Gazda and D. Y. Ng, Building a New Rome: The Imperial Colony of Pisidian Antioch (25 BC–AD 700) (Ann Arbor, MI: Kelsey Museum Publications, 2011). 35. T. Holland, Dominion: The Making of the Western World (London: Little, Brown, 2019), 63. 36. Holland, Dominion, 63. 37. See, e.g., J. M. G. Barclay, Pauline Churches and Diaspora Jews (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011), ch. 19, to which I respond in Paul and the Faithfulness of God, ch. 12.

Introduction imperial boast about the new day launched by Augustus.38 This is the more remarkable in that the Jewish expectation of “the age to come” and the Augustan theme of a “golden age” were independent. Neither derived from the other. But Paul’s announcement that “the time had fully come” with the sending of the true “Son of God” (4:4) thus simultaneously claimed to fulfill the Jewish hope and to confront the imperial boast. It was not simply that the Jesus- followers were hoping to claim the normal Jewish exemption from local civic religion, of which Roman cults happened to be one element. The specific claim advanced by the Pauline gospel was that Jesus was the reality of which Caesar was a large-scale, dangerous parody. This is how Paul’s “apocalyptic” gospel dovetails with the “fresh perspective” on his work, which itself is the necessary outworking of the “new perspective,” when properly anchored historically and exegetically. Anyway, the locals in southern Galatia, both the natives and their comparatively recently arrived Roman neighbors, found themselves obliged to pay honor to their divine patron, displaying on monuments the detailed description of what Augustus had achieved. Thus “to visit the cities of Galatia was constantly to be reminded of the sheer scale of Augustus’ achievements. His birth had set the order of things on a new course. War was over. The world stood as one. Here, so inscriptions proclaimed to a grateful people, was Euangelion—‘Good News.’ ” And so, “in Galatia, as the decades passed, so the cult of Augustus, and of the Caesars who succeeded him on the throne of the world, put down ever stronger roots. It served as the vital sap that sustained civic life . . . the honours due to Caesar hallowed the rhythms of the months, the seasons and the years.”39 Local civic leaders, right across the region, would know only too well what allegiance to Rome, including (what we would call) “religious” allegiance, would entail, and what might happen if that allegiance grew slack. They would be used to the fact that the Jewish people, though in other respects good citizens, stood aloof from all that. They could not afford to take a relaxed attitude to a new, diverse group who bore none of the normal marks of the Jewish people (circumcision, Sabbath keeping, kosher diet, 38. See Paul and the Faithfulness of God, chs. 5, 12; and my article on gospel narratives in Interpreting Jesus: Essays on the Gospels (London: SPCK; Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2020), ch. 11. 39. Holland, Dominion, 64–65; Holland here appears to be dependent on the analysis of Hardin, Galatians and the Imperial Cult, 122–27; Hardin here cites, among others, Witulski, Die Adressaten des Galaterbriefes, esp. 156–68.

The Situation in Galatia allegiance to the Jerusalem temple) and yet were claiming, for previously unimagined and seemingly incomprehensible reasons, the same civic status, the same religious exemptions. As for the local Jewish communities themselves—such as had not believed Paul’s message about Messiah Jesus—there would be confusion and fear. Their situation was already fragile. Official permission was one thing, local sentiment another. The sudden suggestion that a group of non-Jews might be trying to share their special status was (to put it mildly) never going to be greeted with enthusiasm. Having non-Jews trying to claim Jewish privileges might generate an anti-Jewish backlash. Again, there are glimpses of this in Acts. For the strict and prayerful Jews, there would be a gnawing anxiety: compromise with God’s ancient law might itself have devastating consequences. Many Jewish communities, including the strict one to which Saul of Tarsus had belonged, clung to the hope that one day soon their God would act to turn the world upside down, rescuing them from their subservience to pagan rulers and giving them the peace and freedom for which they had prayed for so long. Allowing non- Jews to pretend to be “Jews” while not keeping Torah (Sabbaths, food laws, and circumcision in particular) was exactly the kind of thing that could delay such an outcome or jeopardize it altogether. The people caught in the middle of this would be ethnic Jews who, like Paul, had accepted Jesus as Messiah. They would naturally see this as the fulfillment of their national hopes. But the same Paul who had announced the good news of Jesus had insisted that gentiles who believed it were equal members with them in the new family that resulted. It is easy to imagine the confusions and complications this new status would evoke. As in any society faced with a toxic political challenge—in recent Western history, America under Donald Trump or Britain worrying about Brexit—there would be multiple social pressures and awkward relationships with friends and neighbors. There would be endless puzzles and squabbles about the Scriptures: If Jesus really was Israel’s Messiah, how do you make sense of Genesis? Of the Psalms? Of Isaiah? It is possible, as well—though much harder to trace historically or to use exegetically—that there were other confusing categories. There might be local gentiles who had been long-term “God-fearers,” adherents of the synagogue who held back from full proselyte conversion. Some such might have embraced Paul’s message; some might not. Inserting such hypothetical characters into Paul’s argument has the superficial modern attraction of appearing to

Introduction soften Paul’s polemic against “the Jews”: perhaps he was simply being rude to muddled gentiles! This seems to me unnecessary, and unnecessarily confusing both historically and theologically. Paul, as we shall see, was not being “anti-Jewish.” That is an anachronistic misunderstanding. To declare someone to be Messiah, and to announce that the resurrection of the dead has begun, revealing the hidden depths of a biblically rooted creational and covenantal monotheism, sounded very Jewish in the first century, and it sounds very Jewish today. Further evidence on all this emerges when we consider the other challenge that both Paul and the Galatian converts were facing. The Jesus-believers in Jerusalem, led by Jesus’s own brother James, were themselves under pressure from the nonbelieving Judean majority. The high probability, not least when we read between the lines of the four Gospels, is that the Jesus-followers formed a kind of “peace party” in a beleaguered region where confrontation with Rome looked increasingly likely. But the Jesus-followers in Jerusalem were themselves “zealous for the law.” They were determined to show their neighbors that, even though they were indeed followers of the Jesus whom they believed to be Israel’s true Messiah, they were themselves genuine, loyal, law-observant Jews. But if the nonbelieving majority in Jerusalem got wind that out there in the diaspora the Jesus-people—part of the same movement, supposedly, as James and his friends—were making gentile converts and teaching them not to obey Israel’s ancient law, that could be disastrous. It would confirm the rumor that had been current since at least the time of Stephen, that Jesus of Nazareth had indeed been a false prophet, leading Israel astray, plotting against the temple itself (Acts 6:13–14; 7:44–53). It would solidify the suspicion that the whole movement was letting the side down, jeopardizing the coming moment when Israel’s God would do what he had promised and rescue his people at last. The more “zealous” the Jerusalem-based Jewish communities were, the more they were longing (we see it in Jewish texts of the time) for God to keep his promises, to unveil his covenant faithfulness in dramatic action, perhaps to send the Messiah who, as the Lion of Judah, would attack and destroy the Roman Eagle. . . . But how could that happen if his people were colluding with pagan wickedness? How could the living God return in glory to a polluted shrine, a disobedient people? This was the anxiety that drove “certain persons from James” to go to Antioch (Gal 2:12). Paul, as we shall see, appears to line up the pressure from

The Situation in Galatia the new teachers in Galatia with the pressure that Peter and Barnabas had experienced in that tense moment in Antioch. The easiest and best hypothesis is that these pressures were both felt by, and applied to others by, loyal and zealous Jews, not gentiles who had, in whatever way, attached themselves to synagogue communities. Anyway, all this amounted to a perfect storm for the small, and not as yet formed or mature, groups of Jesus-believers in southern Turkey. Their neighbors would be suspicious of, and perhaps alarmed by, these non-Jews forming a new kind of community and withdrawing from normal civic obligations. The civic authorities themselves would disapprove, and perhaps threaten force to bring them back into line. The local Jewish communities would worry that their own precarious status might be undermined. The Jesus-believers in Jerusalem, themselves under local suspicion and pressure, would want to encourage their diaspora compatriots (Jewish Jesus-believers in gentile territories) to put pressure on the gentile believers to Judaize. Among other things, they would want to issue a warning that the strange wandering teacher called Paul was propounding a distorted and abbreviated form of the true Jesus message, omitting the vital bits about ex-pagans needing to keep the Jewish law, with the men being circumcised and the communities adopting the distinctive Jewish practices. This would not only show Jews, both locally and in Jerusalem, that the new movement was genuinely Jewish, but would also show puzzled or suspicious pagan authorities that the claim to exemption from normal religious practices was genuine, however unexpected and unwelcome. Before we explore why Paul said an emphatic NO to all this, it is important to comment on how this analysis of the situation compares with the ways of reading Galatians that have been normal for many centuries. It would be easy to say that the sketch I have offered seems to be “political” or “sociological” rather than “theological” (about God) or “soteriological” (about salvation), but this would be a bad mistake. Everything I have said up to now is precisely both “theological” and “soteriological.” It is about God and about salvation. The fact that it is not focusing on the sixteenth-century question of how someone “gets saved,” in the sense of enabling someone’s “soul” to find its way to “heaven” without passing through purgatory, and the relative role of “faith” and “works” within that, is merely a sign that for many generations the Western world has colluded with a separation of “religion” or “faith” on the one hand and “real life,” “politics,” “society,” or whatever on

Introduction the other. But every so often, as the Protestant Reformers themselves insisted, the church needs to take a fresh, hard look at original scriptural contexts and meanings and assess more recent traditions in their light. This task is, in fact, central to “Christian formation.” It is vital to do regularly what we are trying to do in this commentary and series, which is to put all the historical pieces of the puzzle back on the table and, in wrestling with texts and meanings, to see what will emerge in terms of challenges for our own times. Within that, it is important to get the full picture, and the proper balance between the different elements. There are the larger eschatological horizon (“the age to come,” with resurrection as its key feature); the ecclesial corollary, namely, the single Abraham family, marked out in the present by what Paul describes here as “faith working through love”; the social and political pressures of a newly formed community of this kind within a society like that of southern Galatia, with its own local cults and now with its comparatively recent but powerful Roman political and religious allegiance. In and through it all, it is vital not to leave out the beating heart of it all. For Paul, what mattered above all else was a debt of love, which only love could repay. “Christian formation,” then, to be the genuine article, cannot remain content with the teaching of abstract dogmatics, the ethics of personal conduct, the challenge of a political witness, or the practice of a warmhearted piety. All these are vital as part of the larger whole, but the larger whole is what “formation” must aim at. Human maturity, and with that Christian maturity, is a whole-person, whole-being, whole-society thing. To pretend otherwise is, once more, to collude with the marginalization of “faith” within a “secular” world. Indeed, that very pressure—forced upon the churches by the latent Epicureanism of the modern Western world, often with the church’s ready collusion—might itself turn out to be an equivalent of the pressure brought to bear upon the early church by the civic authorities.40 Step into the neat, packaged little box we have assigned you (“permitted religion” in Paul’s world, “private religion” in ours): we will cause you no trouble because you will cause none to us. Step outside that, with dangerous talk of One God and particularly with the subversive talk of Jesus as the true kyrios, claiming that the time is fulfilled and that Jesus calls for worldwide whole-person allegiance, and we will be coming after you. So too in our own day. The societies formed by the 40. See History and Eschatology, esp. chs. 1, 2.

Paul’s Answer Western Enlightenment are quite happy for the churches to say their prayers and to debate the conditions for “going to heaven,” intending to escape the present world after death and thus largely ignoring it in the present. That is the implicit deal that has been struck. The church’s pact with the secular state (not least the media) forms the equivalent of Rome’s pact with the Jews. But what if people start taking seriously the Christian claim that Jesus is kyrios and Caesar is not?

Paul’s Answer Paul’s answer, when it comes, is therefore bound to deal with several interlocking issues at once. This is why the ideas come tumbling out on top of one another, producing rich rhetoric for Paul’s first hearers and considerable confusion for us two millennia later, particularly if we were expecting the apostle to be talking about rather different issues. But once we free the apostle from the strange obligation of having to address sixteenth-century issues and their contemporary spin-offs, and think our way into the genuine first-century context, the complexities remain but become comprehensible. And they spring to life in ways that become relevant, indeed urgent, for contemporary Christian formation. This is always the challenge for historical study of the Bible: to resist the lure of quick-and-easy “application” that reflects all too closely the thought patterns of an older theology, and to allow the relevance of the text for our own day—and its effects in “Christian formation”—to emerge more slowly and steadily as we look at its original meaning. The underlying mistake made by so many readers of Galatians down the years is to imagine that Paul is ranking two “religious” groups against one another: something called “Christianity” (or perhaps “Pauline Christianity”) against something called “Judaism” (or perhaps “Jewish Christianity”). These are modern constructs, rooted in the eighteenth-century cultural revolution through which “religion” shrank so as not to be directly related to the rest of real life.41 They gained traction from the two strong imperatives we noted earlier: first, the rejection of Roman Catholicism by Protestants in general and 41. See B. Nongbri, Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013); and Wright, History and Eschatology, chs. 1, 2.

Introduction post-Enlightenment “liberal Protestants” in particular; second, the antipathy to “Judaism,” already there in the Middle Ages but heightened by Lutheran polemic, and then by the idealism of Kant and Hegel in which the Jewish way of life was rejected as being too “unspiritual,” concerned with land, ethnicity, and, not least, “works of the law.” These darker hermeneutical pressures remain, often hidden behind the more “evangelical” retrievals in which Paul assures his congregations that God isn’t interested in their “good works,” which could never in any case succeed in earning his favor, because God only wants them to “believe,” to have “faith.” Paul is not, however, offering something called “Christianity” in opposition to something called “Judaism.” He is not proposing that “inward faith” is superior—because it is “inward”!—to “outward practice,” though he, like many Jews before and after his time, would have understood that point. He is offering—or rather, he insists that the gospel is announcing—what we can accurately and appropriately call messianic eschatology, resulting in personal and communal transformation. When we examine Galatians in terms of its own rhetorical climaxes, which presumably reflect where Paul himself wanted his main emphases to lie, a clear picture emerges that has not always been acknowledged. I do not think that we can first determine a “rhetorical genre” for the letter and only then decide what Paul was saying within his use of that genre.42 What matters is that we keep in mind the need for working hypotheses about a programmatic introduction and apposite conclusion, and about what may appear as obvious rhetorical centerpieces and climaxes. Such hypotheses are validated, not by their place in a framework derived from elsewhere, but by the coherent sense that they make of the whole letter. Thus my working hypotheses, to be demonstrated as we read carefully through, is that Galatians 1:3–5 forms Paul’s deliberate and programmatic introduction, and 6:14–16 his equally deliberate and summary conclusion; and that, with 4:1–7 in the center of the whole thing, the natural rhetorical climaxes will include 2:19–20, 3:28–29, and 4:21–5:1. The emphases that emerge can be laid out as follows. First comes a double truth: the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob has done what he always promised, and launched his new creation. God, so Paul 42. Against H.-D. Betz, Galatians: A Commentary on Paul’s Letter to the Churches in Galatia, Hermeneia (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1979); see the more nuanced treatment in B. Witherington III, Grace in Galatia: A Commentary on St. Paul’s Letter to the Galatians (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1998).

Paul’s Answer believed, has done what many Jews had longed for him to do but not in the way they had imagined. The “present evil age” has been dealt its deathblow; the “age to come” has been inaugurated. Neither the victory over the old nor the inauguration of the new looks like people had thought it would. Radical novelty in fulfillment of ancient promises: just as Paul’s contemporaries puzzled over that, so theologians still find it hard to get their heads around it, as thinkers both ancient and modern lurch toward either novelty or fulfillment but not both. Paul is here emphatically a both-and man. In Messiah Jesus something shocking, scandalous, unexpected, and dramatically different has happened, but when you grasp its inner core of meaning, you realize that this was the point of the ancient promises upon which Israel had lived for two millennia. God has acted shockingly, surprisingly, unexpectedly—as he always said he would.43 Both halves of this are vital for the situation Paul is addressing. The radical novelty of new creation means that those swept up into the fresh world inaugurated by Jesus and energized by his Spirit are not a variation on some old pattern of life, but are part of something never before seen or imagined. As often with Paul, this causes theological jet lag. Many Jews of Paul’s day, and for hundreds of years before and after him, divided world history into two periods, the “present age” (when evil continued to enslave the world, with Israel’s long exile as a key focal point) and the “age to come” (when it would be replaced by peace and justice). Some Jewish groups of the time, notably those at Qumran, had developed forms of “inaugurated eschatology,” believing that the new age had secretly been inaugurated with them. Paul had his own radical variation on this. He believed that, with God’s self-giving action in Messiah Jesus, this “age to come” had been launched—confusingly, because the “present age” still rumbled on alongside it. The world around appeared still dark, but the little groups of Jesus-followers were now daytime people, and with the daytime came a whole new world of meaning (1 Thess 5:4–10). A whole new community, never before imagined. As Paul says in a seminal passage elsewhere, “Old things have gone, and look—everything has become new!” (2 Cor 5:17). To get circumcised would therefore be to deny that the new thing had happened, that the new creation had really begun. It would be to 43. I owe this sharp formulation to my friend and colleague Dr. J. P. Davies: see, more generally, his Paul among the Apocalypses: An Evaluation of the “Apocalyptic Paul” in the Context of Jewish and Christian Apocalyptic Literature (London: T&T Clark, 2016).

Introduction suck the life out of the new creation, to pretend that whatever had happened in Jesus was simply a new variation within the old world. Christian formation in Galatians is rooted in the declaration of new creation, bursting in upon the old world with rescuing power. But the other half of the double truth is equally important. Faced with suspicion and hostility from local Jewish communities, from Jewish Messiah- believers, and not least from local officials wondering why these non-Jews were suddenly claiming the Jewish exemption from normal civic responsibilities, it was vital that Paul’s communities should know and understand that they were genuinely children of Abraham. This was the basis of their new life, their new way of life. If ethnic Jews were monotheists who should not compromise with pagan polytheism by joining in with local cultic ceremonies and the like, the same was true for the Jesus-followers. If the Jewish communities in the diaspora could claim the right to be different from their neighbors, the Messiah-believers must do so too. If anything, more so. They therefore needed to understand how the Abraham story worked and where they fitted within it. The lengthy and detailed exposition of God’s promises to Abraham, and Abraham’s answering faith, which forms the backbone of Galatians 3 and 4, thus provides the vital clue. The Messiah is the long-range fulfillment of what God promised Abraham, as the Psalms had always insisted. Therefore those who belong to the Messiah belong to Abraham—as they stand, without more ado. Without circumcision. That is the QED at the end of the argument of Galatians 3. The dynamic of Christian formation in Galatians is that believers should understand the Abraham story and where they stand within it. Identity is formed, and reinforced, by this nonnegotiable narrative. What is more, Paul’s whole “gentile mission” was based, not on a pragmatic decision to try to convert a few more people here and there, but on the deep structure of the ancient Jewish hope (based on creational and covenantal monotheism) that God’s people would inherit the world.44 The theme of “inheritance” is vital in Galatians, as it is in Romans, and with the same effect: God’s promise to Abraham was that his “seed” would inherit the world (Rom 4:13). That promise was given sharper focus in the Psalms, which assigned to David, as the royal “son of God,” the inheritance of the nations. For Paul, the fulfillment of the Abrahamic promises in the Davidic Messiah meant that 44. See, e.g., 4 Ezra 6:55–59.

Paul’s Answer the Messiah-people, from whatever background or ethnic origin they came, formed the people through whom the One God was even now inaugurating his sovereign rule over the world. Just as the means of this inauguration (the crucifixion of the Messiah) looked nothing at all like what anyone had imagined, so the instantiation of this sovereign “rule” in the form of a motley collection of multiethnic, cross-cultural, and socially diverse new believers was not at all like what Paul or anyone else had imagined. But the basis of Messiah faithfulness, and the power of the Spirit of the Messiah at work in this community, were the sure signs for Paul that this was the truth of the matter. If that is the first point (the double-edged outline of messianic eschatology and the inauguration of God’s kingdom), the second point goes to the heart, focusing on the Messiah himself. God’s Messiah, Jesus, has fulfilled the divine purpose for Israel in his death and resurrection, and has thereby accom plished the new Exodus, the great rescue operation from the ultimate slave masters, sin and death themselves. He “gave himself for our sins” (Gal 1:4a); the Son of God “loved me and gave himself for me” (2:20). At every point in the letter, as Luther saw rightly but interpreted within a different acoustic chamber, the Messiah’s cross drives the argument. Paul had not yet formulated this in the way he says it in 1 Corinthians 1:23 (“a scandal to Jews and folly to gentiles”), but the reality of that aphorism is there already in Galatians, visible at 5:11b but implicit throughout.45 The point is that Israel’s Messiah sums up God’s purposes for Israel in himself. What is true of him is true of them. This is what lies behind Paul’s shocking but climactic statement in Galatians 2:19–20: “Through the law I died to the law, so that I might live to God. I have been crucified with the Messiah. I am, however, alive—but it isn’t me any longer, it’s the Messiah who lives in me.” Paul is here embodying and exemplifying the archetypal ultra-zealous Jew faced with the fact that Israel’s Messiah was crucified—and that his resurrection, in addition to emphasizing that he really was Israel’s Messiah, also compels Paul to realize that his crucifixion was itself the fulfillment of the divine purpose. Paul’s point, summing up his challenge to Peter in Antioch but serving as the sharp edge also of his challenge to those who were troubling the Galatians, is that if the crucified and risen Jesus is the fulfillment of God’s purposes for Israel, then Israel itself must find its fulfillment through crucifixion and resurrection. How easy it would 45. See esp. 2:21; 3:1; 6:12, 14–16.

Introduction have been, as subsequent generations of misunderstanding have proved, to say either that the Messiah simply fulfilled the Jewish aspirations or that he simply abolished them. To say “fulfillment through crucifixion and resurrection” was something quite new—though, as with all other Christian novelty, it could look back and see the great patterns of Israel’s history, particularly in this case exile and restoration. This was how it had to be, as Jesus explained on the road to Emmaus. The point of all this is that the Law, the Jewish Torah—the Torah that insisted on circumcision, kosher laws, Sabbath observance, and (not least) the ban on Jews eating with gentiles—has done its job and is now set aside. Paul does not say that the Torah was a bad thing now happily abolished. He insists that it was and is God’s good gift to Israel, given for a specific purpose in a specific time. That purpose is accomplished. The time is complete. As he says in Romans 8:3–4, what the Torah intended but could not by itself achieve, God has now accomplished in Messiah and Spirit. This is a close parallel to what we find in Galatians 3:21, echoing the point of 2:21: “If a law had been given that could have given life, then covenant membership really would have been by the law.” Thus any attempt to make non-Jewish Messiah-people keep Torah for its own sake, to make them appear to be “good Jews” before the eyes of Roman magistrates or anxious Jerusalemites or indeed before God himself, must be firmly resisted. Once we recognize that nomos here as elsewhere in Paul refers specifically to the Mosaic Torah, not to a generalized moral law or a “categorical imperative,” the exegetical puzzles fall into place and the theological conundrums find a ready solution. (The hermeneutical puzzles, of what relevance the question of the Jewish law is to non-Jews two thousand years after Jesus, will be dealt with as we go along.) What is more, in Paul’s brief report of his (presumably much longer) answer to Peter in 2:14–21, he rules out absolutely any attempt by Jewish Jesus- followers to “keep Torah” in the sense of eating separately from gentile believers. Nor does Paul say, in effect, “Yes, of course you must keep Torah in all the other ways, but ignore it when it comes to table fellowship.” He says, “Through the law I died to the law, so that I might live to God.” Further, those who try to reerect the fence of Torah between a Jewish and a gentile community are appealing to a Torah that will then condemn them as lawbreakers (2:18). Torah itself, paradoxically, will then demand that anyone suggesting such a thing should be “anathema,” expelled from the community (1:8–9; 4:30). Back to the

Paul’s Answer first point above: the new creation has been launched, and since Torah was the God-given regulation designed for God’s people during the continuing “present evil age,” it must be resisted. It cannot be the regulator in God’s new world. That was not its purpose. The Torah, it seems, was part of God’s preparatory purpose for his ultimate project. Preparation has its proper place. The tuning fork will help you get the instrument ready for performance. But you cannot play the concerto on the tuning fork. All this makes the sense it makes precisely because the crucified and risen Jesus is Israel’s true Messiah. Paul knows nothing of the much later distinction, made by some Jewish writers in particular, between a “Jewish Messiah” and a “Christian Messiah.”46 He was and is Israel’s anointed king. Every Jew in Paul’s day knew that there were rival claimants to royalty. The Hasmoneans had given way to the Herodians. Several popular “messianic” or “prophetic” movements had come and gone, each offering a new candidate as God’s man for God’s moment. Every Jew (including many who were unsure whether messianic prophecies were simply arm-waving gestures toward a better time coming) knew that if one such candidate really did turn out to be the Messiah, then Israel’s God was redefining his purposes and his people around that one. Resisting God’s anointed would be tantamount to blasphemy. When, a century after Jesus, Rabbi Akiba hailed Simeon ben Kosiba as “son of the star” (Bar Kokhba), both Akiba and his opponents knew the stakes were high. If he was right, this was how God was fulfilling his ancient promises, and any who failed to sign up were ruling themselves out of the coming kingdom. If he was wrong—as the failure of the revolt subsequently indicated—then even Akiba, with all his devotion, his learning, and ultimately his martyrdom, was proved wrong. One could not say, “I think so-and-so is the Messiah,” while saying, “but if you disagree, that’s fine; this is just about my personal religious preference.” A messianic claim draws a line in the sand. That is how “messianic eschatology” works. It isn’t, then, a matter of comparing or contrasting two “religions.” It is about God sending his Messiah to do at last what had always been promised, even if the manner of fulfillment turns out to be totally unexpected. What has this to do with “Christian formation”—the purpose that Paul states explicitly in Galatians and to which this volume, and this series, are de46. See M. Novenson, The Grammar of Messianism: An Ancient Jewish Political Idiom and Its Uses (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), ch. 6.

Introduction voted? Everything. Christian formation is not about an abstract or “spiritual” devotion to a “heavenly” figure, except insofar as the risen and ascended Jesus, the focus of worship, love, and loyalty, is one and the same with the human being from Nazareth who launched God’s kingdom on earth and died to overcome the dark powers that were opposing it. There is no other Jesus. Christian formation means loyalty to him. That loyalty, that pistis, flows from the grateful love that answers his self-giving love. It means being shaped, personally and communally, by Jesus’s death and resurrection, seen not as abstract theological counters but as a personal act that demands a personal response. The third point is sometimes obscured behind the first two, but it is vital for Paul nevertheless: God has given his own Spirit to be the transformative energy for this new people, and therefore the advance gift from the promised inheritance. This is a little more complicated, and will be spelled out in the commentary. But for the moment we can say this. Unlike in Romans, where Paul does not make an explicit link between the Abraham story and the gift of the Spirit, in Galatians the two are tied tightly together: what God accomplishes uniquely in the Messiah, God then applies through the gospel and the Spirit to all the Messiah’s people, who are thereby marked out as Abraham’s true family (3:27–29). This is where, at last, the famous theme of “justification by faith” comes to the fore. The Messiah’s people are those who believe the gospel; the gospel itself “works” through the power of the Spirit. Where you see Messiah faith, you see a member of God’s promised people, one in whom the Spirit has been at work. And if that person happens to be a gentile, who would normally be beyond the pale for a Jew because gentiles were idolaters and therefore unclean, the point is that the Messiah’s death has conquered the dark powers to which gentiles were enslaved. Baptized and believing Messiah-people, whatever their ethnic origin and previous way of life, are in that sense gentile no longer.47 They are no longer unclean. God has proved that by giving them his Spirit, enabling them to cry out, “Abba, Father.” Thus, from this angle, too, gentile believers do not need to be circumcised to be full members of God’s new-creation people. 47. See, e.g., 1 Cor 12:2, “when you were gentiles,” hote ethnē ēte. This gives the lie to the claim of, e.g., P. Fredriksen, Paul: The Pagan’s Apostle (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 164, that Paul insisted on gentiles regarding their non-Jewishness as an essential part of their ongoing identity. Of course, Paul could still address them as “gentiles,” precisely when they were thinking of themselves that way (e.g., Rom 11:13); but it is the casual remarks like 1 Cor 12:2 (following as it does from, e.g., 1 Cor 10:32!) that reveal what he thought about their identity.

Paul’s Answer These three basic points (sudden arrival of the “age to come” and the inauguration of the kingdom; messianic eschatology; the Spirit’s work resulting in the faith-based identity of Abraham’s family) correspond to the main thrusts of Galatians, with one extra point undergirding them all, expressed at length in the first two chapters and alluded to thereafter. Paul insists right from the start that his own calling and gospel message were authentic and original, derived from the Messiah himself. He rebuffs the slur that he got his gospel secondhand, missing out some vital elements. As he makes this point, stressing the extraordinary and radical nature of both his call and his gospel, he alludes to Israel’s prophetic Scriptures, deliberately aligning himself with Isaiah’s “servant,” with Jeremiah, and with Elijah himself. People might say (and some have said this ever since) that Paul didn’t really know the Jewish world, that he was paganizing the Abrahamic tradition, or that he was a traitor, leading Israel astray to abandon the ancestral traditions and compromise with the deadly world of paganism. Not so, replies Paul, explicitly in his argument and implicitly in his subtle but powerful scriptural allusions. What had happened to him, as with the gospel itself, was the shocking and startling fulfillment of ancient promises. He was himself formed by the gospel, in fulfillment of the scriptural promises, so that he might be—in his whole life, and in the writing of this letter—one through whom God would form his people, the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic people of the Messiah. And with this claim to apostolic authenticity there went the claim to apostolic authority: Paul had been commissioned by Jesus himself to be an agent of the gospel. Writing this letter was part of that commission. Any contemporary formulation of a doctrine of “authority of Scripture” (vital for “Christian formation”) ought to have as one of its roots Paul’s awareness of his own vocation. That is one of many reasons why the first two chapters of Galatians, in which he defends his vocation and authority against attack, are so important. The immediate and formative result of all this is that all full members of God’s people, thus released from the power of sin and death, belong at the same table. This is central to Christian formation. Identity is formed and reinforced through the shared meal of the whole people of God. To repeat: all this has, of course, an “ultimate” reference. The Spirit’s work in producing “the fruit of the Spirit” as opposed to “the works of the flesh” is indeed an anticipation of the full and final “kingdom of God” (5:21). To that extent, “justification by faith” does point to the truth that the Protestant Re-

Introduction formers were so keen to stress: that all who believe the gospel (Paul ascribes this faith to the Spirit-filled power of that same gospel) are assured of the ultimate “inheritance,” which, in Scriptures both old and new, refers not to a Platonic “heaven” but to the renewed creation, the “new heaven and new earth,” and to the “rescue” from death that consists in resurrection to share in that new world. “Justification”—the verdict “righteous,” issued in the present over faith—thus does indeed point to ultimate salvation. But that is not what Paul is talking about, or emphasizing, in this dramatic letter. Here, his emphasis is that Messiah-believers, all of them, are the new-creation people in whom the ancient Abrahamic promises have come true, and who must therefore live as a single family, sharing table fellowship, and not allow themselves to be bullied into stepping back into the “present age” where Israel’s Torah would still hold sway. Their Jewish neighbors would not understand. Their Jewish Jesus-believing neighbors might well not understand. The Jerusalem church would certainly not understand. Nor would the person or persons who were (from Paul’s perspective) “troubling” the Galatian churches. The pagan civic authorities would be highly suspicious. But the formation of the Galatian church, by story and by the all-important symbolic shared meal, as well as by the ethical formation through the work of the Spirit—all these were vital. And if that “formation” meant discipline, expelling those who insisted on teaching something different, then Paul would not shrink from it. A little leaven will leaven the whole lump, as he says here (5:9) and in a similarly disciplinary context in 1 Corinthians (5:6). All the early Jesus-followers knew themselves to be Passover people; and at Passover time you do not compromise with leaven. You get rid of it. There remain several other aspects to Galatians, and to the way in which Paul is seeking to bring about something that we with hindsight (though following his lead) can call “Christian formation.” But in and through all this we see, looming up behind the specific arguments, the great themes of all Paul’s theology. God has unveiled his covenant faithfulness to the Abrahamic promises. “The inheritance”—the whole world!—now belongs to the Messiah and his people, though that “belonging” is not an ordinary kind of possession, just as their “kingdom” is a radically redrawn form of sovereignty. The future, however, is assured; God has established his messianic people, in whom the Abrahamic promises are fulfilled and will be fulfilled at last. The One God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob has now launched the new creation. The reason

Commentaries and Christian Formation his messianic people must not compromise with paganism (despite what their Jewish onlookers may think they are doing, and despite what the civic authorities would want them to be doing) is that they are indeed genuine monotheists. They know that the gods of the heathen are idols. They have come to believe in the One God, the God of Abraham, the God who sent his Son and has now sent the Spirit of his Son. Galatians 4:1–7 sketches the radical, newly revealed vision of monotheism. The choice is then stark. Either you go with this God or you lapse into some kind of paganism (4:7–11). Paul is claiming the high ground: the ground that Rome had grudgingly acknowledged in giving the Jews permission to avoid the normal civic religion; the ground that the nonmessianic Jews of his day believed was still their own. Christian formation is ultimately a matter of learning to know the true God; or, as Paul puts it, realizing that one is known by this true God. The rest is details.

Commentaries and Christian Formation The task of the commentator ought then to be clear. It is in some ways like the task of the sculptor. Here is a block of marble: Michelangelo’s job is to cut away all that is not David. The commentator’s task is to cut away any layers of misunderstanding that might prevent today’s reader from seeing clearly what Paul was actually saying in and for the complex world of his day. We too live in complex and challenging worlds. We do ourselves no favors by supposing that we can simplify Paul to fit the shrunken categories of either post-Renaissance or post-Enlightenment “religious” constructions. Perhaps that changes the force of the metaphor. Perhaps we are faced with a block of marble from which too much has already been cut away. We have to reassemble broken shards to re-create the intended original. History often has to do that kind of thing. But then, changing to a different art form, the commentator’s challenge is to take the great musical theme that Paul has already composed and to teach the different instrumentalists to play it. We need to accentuate this note; to bring out this theme in the cellos more clearly; to allow full weight to this climactic moment, not hurrying by to some other important but secondary passage. And so on. A biblical commentary is first and foremost a work of history. But history is a matter of learning not only the tune but also the rhythm and

Introduction the harmonies. As in all historical work, the sympathetic imagination required for the historian to enter into the mind-set of the original author and hearers is in constant dialogue with the sympathetic imagination required to think into one’s own contemporary situation.48 The Christian formation that may result from such labor is a matter of God’s Spirit going to work in the minds, hearts, teaching, and learning of the whole people of God.

48. See History and Eschatology, ch. 3.