Acknowledgments
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Ben Witherington for inviting me to write a brief commentary on Galatians for Cambridge University Press, and am indebted to both Ben and Cambridge for allowing me to produce a larger, more fully documented version of the commentary for Baker Academic when it became obvious that I was going to run too long for the concise version alone. Those who want more details and academic documentation will thus find it in the present Baker Academic version. My 2018 Cambridge commentary on Galatians condenses this larger one but was published earlier than this one. Had both been published in 2018, those who use author-date citations would have had to juggle 2018a and b. (Avoiding that exercise is one reason that I have always preferred to cite works by short titles instead, though in this case that presents a similar problem.)
I am also grateful to Jim Kinney and Baker Academic for welcoming this more detailed Galatians commentary, and to my editors who have worked so helpfully on it, Tim West and Robert Maccini. Special thanks to Asbury Theological Seminary for a sabbatical in the fall of 2016, during which I was able to complete a significant amount of the writing of this commentary.
I have dedicated this commentary to Dwight Baker and Jim Kinney in appreciation for their supportiveness. I am grateful for how highly and sacrificially they have valued my work, especially in taking a (happily successful) risk on my mammoth Acts commentary. (I promise to keep this Galatians commentary shorter, not least because Galatians is only about 15 percent the length of Acts.) I have also dedicated it to Tim West for how carefully, patiently, and cooperatively he edits my work (Acts; Mind of the Spirit; and much of this project as well); such support and skill are a precious gift.
In contrast to the Cambridge commentary, which uses the NRSV, this commentary for Baker Academic features my own translation, which I intend as a more colloquial, dynamic-equivalent rendering except where it would impair the connection between the translation and the notes. I have done this partly to supplement more conventional translations and to differentiate my translation from theirs, to avoid duplication. Nevertheless, I recognize the advantages and disadvantages of a range of translation strategies for varied objectives. I have particularly tried to prefer ordinary language to theological designations that have become too familiar and to maintain in translation what I see as the relationship between some verb and noun cognates, such as of πιστεύω (pisteuō) and πίστις (pistis).
Because most readers use commentaries as reference works (though some of us also read them for pleasure), some repetition of key ideas will be necessary in this commentary at various points, as in Paul’s Letter to the Galatians.
In the commentary I use nomenclature in conventional ways while recognizing its limitations. For example, normally when I speak of Greeks, Romans, and Jews, I refer to those in antiquity. Likewise, when I say “ancient,” I normally refer specifically to Mediterranean antiquity. By “Christian” I do not mean to import the entire subsequent history of Christian movements or to imply the exclusion of “Jewish,” an exclusion certainly inaccurate for Paul’s era. Because I am writing in English, however, I adopt many conventional usages widely accepted in the English language.
Works on Galatians continue to be published regularly. It is therefore possible only to engage select recent commentators here. Those wanting fuller surveys of earlier commentators will find them in the major commentators I am engaging.
. See, e.g., sources in Seifrid, “Bibliography”; Tolmie, “Research.”
. A practice noted by others—e.g., Soards and Pursiful, Galatians, xiv; Moo, Galatians, xii. Thus, regrettably, I have not been able to engage all commentators. I have tried to compensate by engaging patristic and later comments.