Week 12 - Chapter 12 - Paul's Letter to the Galatians

Paul . . . Paul . . . such an intriguing personality!

Paul’s authorship of this letter is generally accepted. The uncertainty arises from the questions of the churches it was addressed to and exactly when it was penned during Paul’s career. De Silva concludes that it’s most likely that the letter was addressed to churches in South Galatia – the ones mentioned in Acts – because there is no mention in either Paul’s letters or in Acts of a mission to North Galatia. De Silva does note that the people of the South were not ethnically “Galatians,” but he notes that it was a correct designation for the geographic region, as that was the name of the Roman province. As to when the letter was penned, de Silva believes that it was probably written early in Paul’s career, before the Jerusalem council mentioned in Acts 15, because if it had been written later, the council’s decisions would have served as a trump card for Paul’s arguments that strict observance of Torah was not mandatory for Gentiles.

As to Paul’s message – it deals with a dispute regarding issues we have encountered throughout this course. Paul had converted the people he’s addressing in the letter. After he left them, “rival teachers” arrived, telling the new followers that mere faith in Jesus – and the visitation of the Holy Spirit – was not sufficient. They should also observe the Torah, the Law, and of course first and foremost this meant that the males should be circumcised.

Paul’s letter seeks to confirm the Galatians in their faith, his commission direct from God, the efficacy of the Spirit, and the fact that their trust and faith was sufficient to make them part of the people of God – erasing distinctions of Gentile and Jew, slave and free, and male and female.

Paul reminded the Galatians that he understood Torah better than the rival teachers, that he had persecuted the followers of Jesus in his zeal for the Torah (which was in the tradition of Phinehas and Mattathias), and he knew that it would be a grievous error – would result in the people being cursed – if they were to return to the observance of Torah, which had been obviated by Christ’s sacrifice on the cross.

Following Torah would also be wrong, because it was part of the means of rendering the Jews pure and segregating the Jews from the Gentiles, when with faith in Jesus and the visitations of the Spirit, the people would become one people of God.

Paul emphasized the efficacy of Divine grace in permitting the believers to be saved, rather than the “works” of Torah observance. In effect, he labeled the rivals hypocrites, because he said they attempted to pervert the faith, not out of belief or out of love for the Galatians, but because they feared the hostility of traditional Jews, the zealots who in effect were taking up where Paul had left off at the time of his conversion. He wrote that they wished to place the yoke of Torah observance on the Galatians, but they were not prepared to submit to such rigourous observance themselves.

Interestingly, I caught the last part of a program on the Omni Channel last week, called something like “What kind of Jew are you?” It featured a young Jewish man, married to a Gentile lady, and they had a boy who was about 8 or 9 years old. It seemed that they wanted to raise the boy observing the best part of both faiths, but the father was having trouble bringing the boy into the synagogue. The boy was not considered Jewish (which is passed through the matrilineal line in Judaism). Ergo, the boy was considered “unclean.” If the father wanted to bring him to synagogue, he would have to be purified in a Mikvah ritual bath. This did not please the father, and he basically said that there are some things he liked about his faith and some things he did not. But apparently not long after the program was filmed, he split up with his wife and started living with or married a Jewish lady.

This just shows that these issues – which to us seem like ancient history – are still alive today, at least in some sects of Judaism. It suggests to me that perhaps the insularity of some aspects of Judaism may have made the split between what one author called the “fraternal twins” of Christianity and Judaism was inevitable, once Christianity did become a majority Gentile faith.