Ii. No Other Gospel (1:6-10) 79

While there have been many series of commentaries on the English text of the New Testament in recent years, it is a long time since any attempt has been made to cater particularly to the needs of students of the Greek text. It is true that at the present time there is something of a decline in the study of Greek in many traditional theological institutions, but there has been a welcome growth in the study of the New Testament in its original language in the newer evangelical schools, especially in North America and the Third World. It is hoped that The New International Greek Testament Commentary will demonstrate the value of studying the Greek New Testament and help towards the revival of such study.

The purpose of the series is to cater to the needs of students who want something less technical than a full-scale critical commentary. At the same time, the commentaries are intended to interact with modern scholarship and to make their own scholarly contribution to the study of the New Testament. There has been a wealth of detailed study of the New Testament in articles and monographs in recent years, and the series is meant to harvest the results of this research in a more easily accessible form. The commentaries will thus include adequate, but not exhaustive, bibliographies. They will attempt to treat all important problems of history and exegesis and interpretation which may arise.

One of the gains of recent scholarship has been the recognition of the primarily theological character of the books of the New Testament. This series will, therefore, attempt to provide a theological understanding of the text, based on historical-critical-linguistic exegesis. It will not, however, attempt to apply and expound the text for modern readers, although it is hoped that the exegesis will give some indication of the way in which the text should be expounded.

Within the limits set by the use of the English language, the series aims to be international in character, the contributors, however, have been chosen not primarily in order to achieve a spread between different countries but above all because of their specialized qualifications for their particular tasks. This publication is a joint venture of The Paternoster Press, Exeter, England, and Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, Grand Rapids, USA.

The supreme aim of this series is to serve those who are engaged in the ministry of the Word of God and thus to glorify his name. Our prayer is that it may be found helpful in this task.

I. Howard Marshall

W. Ward Gasque

PREFACE

Paul's letter to the churches of Galatia has been to me for many years a document of special interest and study. Accordingly, when I was invited to contribute to The New International Greek Testament Commentary, it was with alacrity that I undertook to write the volume on Galatians.

In general studies and lectures on Galatians, it is possible to pass rather lightly over certain minor cruces of interpretation. When one writes a commentary, however, it is necessary to examine them with care and reach some kind of conclusion about them, after considering all the reasonable options. Now that I have fulfilled my undertaking, I am indeed glad that I gave it. The writing of the commentary has been a richly rewarding experience.

I am, of course, greatly indebted to many earlier commentators and others who have written on Galatians. Joseph Barber Lightfoot and Ernest DeWitt Burton call for specially honourable mention here; so, among our contemporaries, does Hans Dieter Betz, whose Hermeneia volume appeared when my work was well on its way to completion; it has already established its right to stand among the really great commentaries on this epistle.

The substance of most of my Introduction was originally delivered in the form of public lectures in the John Rylands University Library, Manchester, these were subsequently published in the Bulletin of the Library between 1969 and 1973 as a series entitled `Galatian Problems'. This material is reproduced here by kind permission.

The Greek text on which this commentary is based is that of the third edition of The Greek New Testament published by the United Bible Societies (1975); it is practically identical with that of the twenty-sixth edition of Nestle's Novum Testamentum Graece, edited by K. and B. Aland (1979).

F. F. B.

ABBREVIATIONS

Books denoted by author and short title may be readily identified by reference to the Select Bibliography (pp. 59-69).

Standard sigla are used in the textual notes.

INTRODUCTION

I

GALATIANS AMONG THE LETTERS OF PAUL

By common consent, Galatians is one of the four `capital' epistles of Paul (the others being 1 and 2 Corinthians and Romans) and one of the best authenticated.' When the claims of other letters to Pauline authorship is under consideration, the standard of assessment is this fourfold group, and pre-eminently Galatians. Denial of the genuineness of Galatians, such as was made in the Dutch school of W. C. van Manen,2 is recognized as a critical aberration in the history of NT study. From the first gathering together of the Pauline writings into a corpus, early in the second century AD, Galatians had a secure place among them.

The traditional criterion in the canonical arrangement of the Pauline letters, as far back as it can be traced, appears to have been descending order of length.3 But Marcion, who about AD 140 was the first person (so far as is known) to compile a `closed' canon of Christian writings, deviated from this principle of arrangement by taking Galatians out of its stichometric sequence and giving it pride of place at the head of his Apostolikon. Tertullian, our first witness for Marcion's order,4 agrees with him to this extent, that he too holds Galatians to be `the primary epistle against Judaism' (principalem aduersus iudaismum epistulam).5 Marcion's placing of the epistle has not prevailed, but its primacy of importance among the writings of Paul has been widely, though not universally,6 acknowledged from that day to this.

Among the writings of Paul it is with the letter to the Romans that Galatians has the closest affinity. 'The Epistle to the Galatians', wrote J. B. Lightfoot, `stands in relation to the Roman letter, as the rough model to the finished statue; or rather, if I may press the metaphor without misapprehension, it is the first study of a single figure, which is worked into a group in the latter writing? Two dominant themes in Galatians which are given equal emphasis in Romans are the insistence on justification before God by faith, apart from legal works, and the presentation of the Spirit as the principle of the new life in Christ which believers enjoy as freeborn children of God. If there are features in Romans which have no parallel in Galatians, Galatians has features which are unparalleled in Romans, such as the autobiographical section in Gal. 1:11-2:14, with its defence of Paul's apostolic liberty. Romans must not be made the standard for interpreting Galatians: Galatians must be read and understood in its own right.8

There is little or nothing of the urgent note of polemic in Romans that pervades Galatians; for a repetition of that note we turn rather to 2 Cor. 10-13 or to Phil. 3. The people attacked in 2 Cor. 10-13 and Phil. 3 are not necessarily identical with the `trouble-makers' against whom Paul polemicizes in Galatians, but he recognized their teaching and activity as similarly constituting a threat to the truth of the gospel, and used similar language in warning his converts against them.

II

THE GALATIAN CHURCHES

The Epistle to the Galatians is so called because it is explicitly addressed `to the churches of Galatia' (1:2); moreover, the addressees are apostrophized in the course of the letter: `0 foolish Galatians!' (3:1). The question before us is: Where were these churches and who were these Galatians? Should we locate them in the territory of the former kingdom of Galatia or somewhere else in the more extensive Roman province of Galatia, which included the former kingdom and much additional territory? Were the recipients of the letter Galatians in the ethnic sense, or only in the political sense, as inhabitants of the Roman province of that name?

1. From kingdom to province

The Greek word FUULTat is a variant form of KeXtat or KtXtot, `Celts' (Latin Galli). When we first meet the Celts, they are resident in Central Europe, in the Danube basin. Some place-names in that area retain Celtic elements to the present day; Vienna (Latin Vindobona)' is a good example. From the Danube basin they migrated in a westerly direction into Switzerland, South Germany and North Italy, and then into Gaul and Britain; they also migrated in a southeasterly direction and settled in North-Central Asia Minor, giving their name to their new homeland as they also did to Gaul (Latin Gallia, Greek Fa1,,at(a).z

Those Celts who migrated towards the south-east ravaged Thrace, Macedonia and Thessaly, and invaded Greece itself, but they got no further than Delphi, from which they were repulsed in 279 BC. The following year (278-277 BC), a large body of them crossed the Hellespont into Asia Minor at the invitation of Nicomedes, king of Bithynia, who thought he could use their services against his enemies. For a generation they menaced their neighbours in Asia Minor, until a series of defeats at the hands of Attalus I, king of Pergamum (c. 230 BC), confined them within fixed limits, in territory which had formerly belonged to Phrygia. This territory, a broad strip of land stretching over 200 miles from south-west to north-east, between the longitudes of 31° and 35° E. and the latitudes of 39° and 40° 30' N., was occupied by the three tribes of which the invading force consisted-the Tolistobogii in the west, with their centre at Pessinus,3 the Trocmi in the east, with their centre at Tavium, and the Tectosages between them, around Ancyra, which in due course became the capital of the kingdom of Galatia (as today, under its modern name Ankara, it is the capital of the Turkish Republic).4 Each tribe comprised four tetrarchies. The Galatians settled as overlords, with a subject population of Phrygians. As time went on they adopted the Phrygians' religion and culture, but not their language. The Phrygian language died out in Galatia, whereas it survived for some centuries in the neighbouring Phrygian territories. The Galatian speech also survived for several centuries, although the Galatians inevitably came to use Greek as the language of commerce and diplomacy.'

In 190 BC a body of Galatian mercenaries fought on the side of the Seleucid king Antiochus III against the Romans at the battle of Magnesia. Their presence attracted Roman reprisals against the Galatians, who were subdued the following year by the consul Manlius but were allowed to retain their independence under their own rulers on giving a pledge of good behaviour for the future.6

Henceforth Roman influence was paramount in Asia Minor, apart from the period (88-65 BC) during which Mithridates VI of Pontus dominated the peninsula. The Galatians quickly appreciated the wisdom of keeping on good terms with Rome. With Roman permission or connivance they augmented their territory during the second century BC. They suffered severely under Mithridates because of their friendship with Rome, but when he was finally defeated by Pompey in 64 BC their loyalty was rewarded by Galatia's receiving the status of a client kingdom, and so she remained for nearly forty years. When her last king, Amyntas, fell in battle against the warlike Homonades, who raided Galatia and other neighbouring states from their home base in the northern Taurus, Augustus reorganized the kingdom as an imperial province, governed by a legatus pro praetore (25 BC).'

By this time the kingdom of Galatia had expanded considerably beyond its original limits. In 36 BC, for example, Mark Antony presented Amyntas with Iconium, a city of Phrygia, together with part of Lycaonia and Pamphylia.8 Some time after taking over Amyntas's kingdom, Augustus reduced its size by transferring Eastern Lycaonia and Cilicia Tracheia, which it had included, to the sovereignty of his ally Archelaus, king of Cappadocia. Even so, the province of Galatia comprised much territory to the south which had never been ethnically Galatian-Pisidia and the adjacent region which Strabo calls 'Phrygia towards Pisidia',9 with Isaurica and Western Lycaonia. Rome inherited from Amyntas the task of crushing the Homonades, who were a constant menace to 'Phrygia towards Pisidia' in particular. They were ultimately subjugated by P. Sulpicius Quirinius, governor of Galatia, in the years following 12 BC.10

In 6 BC inland Paphlagonia, on the north, was added to the province of Galatia, as three or four years later were some areas to the north-east which had formerly belonged to Pontus. These latter areas were henceforth known as Pontus Galaticus." By analogy with this it has been inferred that (for example) those parts of Phrygia and Lycaonia which were included in the province were known respectively as Phrygia Galatica and Lycaonia Galatica, to distinguish them from that part of Phrygia which lay within proconsular Asia (Phrygia Asiana) and from Eastern Lycaonia (Lycaonia Antiochiana)12 which, from 37 AD to 40, and again from AD 41 onwards, belonged to Rome's ally Antiochus IV, king of Commagene. These terms are convenient enough, but without proper attestation we cannot assume confidently that they were part of the official Roman nomenclature.

In our period, then, Provincia Galatia stretched from Pontus on the Black Sea to Pamphylia on the Mediterranean.13 Paul's 'churches of Galatia' might theoretically have been situated anywhere within these limits. The question is: Were they situated in the original Galatian territory ('North Galatia') or in Phrygia Galatica and Lycaonia Galatica ('South Galatia')? The latter alternative identifies them with the churches planted by Paul and Barnabas during their socalled first missionary journey (Acts 13:14-14:26)-in the Phrygian cities of Pisidian Antioch (modern Yalvac) and Iconium (modern Konya) and in the Lycaonian cities of Lystra (modern Zostera, near Hatunsaray)14 and Derbe (modern Kerti Huyuk, c. 15 miles NNE of Karaman, the ancient Laranda, or Devri Sehri, 21h miles SSE of Kerti Huyuk). Derbe must have lain on the frontier between the Roman province of Galatia and the client kingdom of Commagene, if indeed it did not lie beyond the frontier (as Laranda did from AD 41 onwards).15

2. The `North Galatian' hypothesis

The 'North Galatian' hypothesis held the field almost unchallenged until the eighteenth century. That it should have been taken for granted in the patristic age was natural.16 In the second century (c. AD 137) Lycaonia Galatica was detached and united with Cilicia and Isaurica to form an enlarged province of Cilicia, and late in the third century (c. 297) the remainder of South Galatia with some adjoining territories became a new province of Pisidia, with Pisidian Antioch as its capital and Iconium as its second city." The province of Galatia was thus reduced to North Galatia, and when the church fathers, in their study of our epistle, read of 'the churches of Galatia', they understood `Galatia' without more ado in the sense familiar in their day.

The Marcionite prologue to the Epistle to the Galatians'8 does indeed begin with the surprising statement `Galatians are Greeks'; but this may simply mean that the recipients of the letter were Greek speaking-which could be inferred from the fact that Paul wrote to them in Greek, not to mention the continuing designation Gallograecia. Whether in actual fact the inhabitants of the reduced province of Galatia in the Marcionite author's day spoke Greek or Celtic is probably not a question in which he would have been greatly interested.

The linguistic question, however, did interest one Latin commentator on Galatians. In the preface to the second book of his commentary on this epistle Jerome tells how, in addition to Greek, the Galatians of his day (late fourth century AD) spoke a vernacular which he recognized as similar to that which he used to hear at Trier, where he had stayed for some time in his early twenties.19 Whether indeed the Celtic of North-Central Asia Minor and that spoken on the banks of the Moselle were mutually intelligible in Jerome's time, when their speakers had been so far separated for six and a half centuries or more, may be doubted; Jerome may have recognized a resemblance between some words for specific objects or actions.

In the same preface Jerome quotes the Christian writer Caecilius Firmianus Lactantius as saying that the Galatians were so called because of the whiteness of their skin, as though their name was derived from Greek y&Xa (`milk').20 More has been made of his quotation from a poem by Hilary of Poitiers, of Gallic origin himself, in which the Gauls were described as `unteachable' (Latin indociles); `no wonder, then,' says Jerome, `that the Galatians were called "foolish" and slow of understanding'.21

John Calvin in his commentary on Galatians (1548) followed his predecessors in holding the North Galatian view, but curiously combined it with the view that the epistle was written before the Jerusalem council of Acts15.22 (He identified Paul and Barnabas's Jerusalem visit of Gal. 2:lff. with the faminerelief visit of Acts 11:30.) One wonders when he supposed the evangelization of North Galatia to have taken place.

The first scholar known to us who held that the recipients of the Epistle to the Galatians at least included the churches planted by Paul and Barnabas on their first missionary journey appears to have been J. J. Schmidt23 in 1748, followed in 1825 by J. P. Mynster, whose position might be described as `PanGalatian' rather than either North or South Galatian.24 In the nineteenth century (apart from its last decade) the South Galatian view was championed mainly by French scholars, such as Georges Perrot, who argued for it in De Galatia Provincia Roman (1867)'25 and Ernest Renan, who assumed it rather than argued for it in his Saint Paul (1869).26 The majority of others continued to propound the North Galatian view, and among these others J. B. Lightfoot stands out with special distinction.27

Lightfoot's commentary on Galatians first appeared in 1865; it remains a standard work which no student of the letter can afford to overlook-and there are not many commentaries over a hundred years old of which this sort of thing can be said. He recognized the ambiguity in the phrase `churches of Galatia', but rejected the view that they were the churches of Pisidian Antioch, Iconium, Lystra and Derbe in favour of locating them at Ancyra, Pessinus and perhaps Tavium (possibly also at Juliopolis, the ancient Gordion). His arguments against the South Galatian view are mainly to the effect that the churches planted during Paul and Barnabas's first missionary journey are not called Galatian churches in Acts-but Luke's usage is not necessarily Paul's.

His positive arguments for the North Galatian view include the consideration that the `Galatic region' of Acts 16:6 and 18:23 is most probably ethnic Galatia, that Paul's two visits to the region mentioned in these passages coincide with his two visits to Galatia which he thought to be implied in Gal. 4:13, and especially that the temperament of the Galatian Christians reflected in the letter harmonizes (a) with the testimonies to the fickleness of the Gauls found in classical authors (especially Caesar)28 and (b) with the fact that the Gauls were (Caesar again being witness) `a superstitious people given over to ritual observances'29 and that Deiotarus, king of Galatia in the mid-first century BC, was characterized by an `extravagant devotion to augury'.30

The weight laid by a scholar of Lightfoot's calibre upon these alleged affinities between the recipients of Paul's letter and the Celts known to Caesar and his contemporaries is surprising. Caesar is not an entirely objective witness where the Gauls are concerned and, for the rest, the argument seems to reduce itself to a syllogism of this order:

The Gauls were fickle and superstitious.

Paul's Galatians were fickle and superstitious.

Therefore: Paul's Galatians were Gauls.

The undistributed middle is not hard to recognize; the argument would be valid only if fickleness and superstition were not characteristic of other nations than the Gauls (and Galatians). We have to look no farther than the Galatians' Phrygian neighbours for another reputed example, while Luke's account of Paul's adventure at Lystra suggests that fickleness and superstition were not wanting among the Lycaonians.

3. The `South Galatian' hypothesis

Nevertheless, Lightfoot's dismissal of the South Galatian view in favour of the traditional one was natural; when he wrote, the South Galatian view had not yet been placed on a sufficiently sound basis. The scholar by whom this was achieved was W. M. Ramsay (1851-1939), whose statement of the case in The Church in the Roman Empire (1893)31 and A Historical Commentary on St. Paul's Epistle to the Galatians (1899) was founded on his systematic survey of Central Asia Minor on the spot, coupled with his comprehensive and detailed study of epigraphy and classical literature.

Ramsay's greatest work was accomplished in the 1880s and 1890s. It was his researches in those years that laid the archaeological foundation for the South Galatian hypothesis, and laid it so firmly that to many of his disciples it is no longer a mere hypothesis.32 When he began his exploration of Asia Minor he accepted (mainly on Lightfoot's terms) the North Galatian view, as he also accepted F. C. Baur's reconstruction of the course of primitive Christian history. He abandoned the one view, as he abandoned the other, because of the compelling evidence of facts as he faced them in situ. The whole organization of Asia Minor in the first-century Roman Empire, he held-its administration and communications-pointed inexorably to the South Galatian destination of our epistle. In the preface to the fourth edition of The Church in the Roman Empire (1896) he tells his readers that they will find all the evidence for the South Galatian view in the first part of his Cities and Bishoprics of Phrygia (1895), although the view is neither mentioned nor discussed there. But the solid evidence for the South Galatian view is contained in such studies as his Cities and Bishoprics of Phrygia and his earlier Historical Geography of Asia Minor (1890)studies conducted with no thought of the Epistle to the Galatians or of establishing or demolishing any theory about its destination.

In these earlier works Ramsay carefully avoided appealing to the usual series of ambiguous arguments in favour of the South Galatian view.33 Such arguments are:

(1) Paul habitually uses Roman imperial nomenclature-but then any inhabitants of the province of Galatia, including the ethnic Galatians, would have been `Galatians' to him.

(2) Paul addresses his Galatians in Greek-but Greek would have been familiar in Ancyra and Pessinus at least.

(3) Paul mentions Barnabas (Gal. 2:lff.), who was personally known to the South Galatians but not (so far as we can tell) to the North Galatians-but he mentions him also in 1 Cor. 9:6, and there is no evidence that he was personally known to the Corinthians.

(4) Paul's travel-companions in Acts 20:4, who presumably were carrying their churches' contributions to the Jerusalem fund, include South Galatians (Gaius of Derbe and Timothy of Lystra) but not North Galatians-but such an argument from silence is precarious (no Corinthian representative is named).

(5) The presence of Jewish emissaries is more probable in South Galatia than in North Galatia-but they might make it their business to visit any city where Paul had planted a church.

(6) Paul's Galatians received him has an angel of God' (Gal. 4:14), which is a remarkable coincidence with his identification with Hermes by the Lystrans (Acts 14:11ff.)-but the coincidence is somewhat spoiled by the Lystrans' later murderous attack on him (Acts 14:19).

He based his case rather on the facts of historical geography, coupled with his interpretation of Paul's policy as one of concentration on the main roads and centres of communication in the Roman provinces. The main line along which Christianity advanced in Asia Minor was the road from Syria through the Cilician Gates to Iconium and Ephesus, and so across the Aegean. There were two subsidiary lines: one following the land route by Philadelphia to Troas, and so across to Philippi and the Egnatian Way, and the other leading north from the Cilician Gates by Tyana and Cappadocian Caesarea to Amisos on the Black Sea. These are in fact the principal lines of penetration from the Cilician Gates into the peninsula, and none of them led through ethnic Galatia. The southern side of the Anatolian plateau was more important than the northern under the earlier Roman Empire; the full development of the northern side did not take place until Diocletian transferred the centre of imperial administration to Nicomedeia in AD 292. In Ramsay's view, the South Galatian hypothesis was the one which agreed best with the facts of the historical geography of Asia Minor.34

The North Galatian case, however, has never lacked defenders, especially in Germany, but few of these have dealt adequately with Ramsay's positive arguments. Among those who have dealt with them most seriously were P. W. Schmiedel, in the section which he contributed to the article `Galatia' in the Encyclopaedia Biblica (1901),35 and J. Moffatt, in his Introduction to the Lit erature of the New Testament (1911)36 Moffatt's arguments are about the weightiest ever presented for the North Galatian view after Ramsay's presentation of the evidence for South Galatia.37 He appreciates the weakness of some traditional arguments for North Galatia-e.g. the appeal to the Galatians' alleged fickleness-and points out some weaknesses in Ramsay's case. Did Paul always follow the main roads and evangelize the principal centres of communication? Then what took him to Lystra and Derbe? In Ramsay's own words: `How did the cosmopolitan Paul drift like a piece of timber borne by the current into this quiet backwater?'38 On the other hand, Ancyra in North Galatia, the provincial seat of administration, was, on Ramsay's own showing, `one of the greatest and most splendid cities of Asia Minor'.39

Even so, many of Moffatt's arguments, like Schmiedel's before him, and Lightfoot's still earlier, concern the interpretation of Acts and not of our epistle, like the argument that Luke's 'Galatic region' is ethnic Galatia, as against Ramsay's view that the `Phrygian and Galatic region' of Acts 16:6 is Phrygia Galatica and the `Galatic region' of Acts 18:23 Lycaonia Galatica. Moffatt admits that this is so: `Luke's usage, it may be retorted, is not decisive for Paul. This is perfectly true, but Paul's use of FaXaiia corresponds to the inferences from Acts40

4. The evidence of Acts

The issue of the destination of the Epistle to the Galatians is strictly independent of the references to Galatian territory in Acts. Granted that Paul usually adopts Roman provincial nomenclature-as when, for example, he repeatedly refers to Achaia in the Roman sense, as including Corinth, and not in the traditional Greek sense, of a territory in the North-Western Peloponnese, to which Corinth did not belong-it might be argued that Luke prefers the more popular geographical terms and so would use Galatia in the ethnic sense.41 But what are the facts?

There are two relevant passages in Acts. The first is in Acts 16:6, where Paul and Silas, having journeyed on their westward way from Syria and the Cilician Gates through Derbe and Lystra and co-opted Timothy as their travelling companion at the latter place, `went through the Phrygian and Galatic region (trly (Devy(av xal FaXattxr)v Xtupav),42 having been forbidden by the Holy Spirit to speak the word in Asia.' Accordingly, instead of proceeding west to Ephesus, `they came opposite Mysia (xa't:a trly Mvo(av)43 and attempted to go into Bithynia, but the Spirit of Jesus did not allow them, so, passing by Mysia, they came down to Troas'-and from there crossed over to Macedonia. Where, having regard to this fairly detailed itinerary, should we locate the `Phrygian and Galatic region' through which the missionary party passed after receiving the prohibition to evangelize Asia? Ramsay, as we have seen, identified it with Phrygia Galatica-the part of Phrygia included within the province of Galatia, Strabo's `Phrygia towards Pisidia'. Lightfoot's suggestion was that it denoted ethnic Galatia, because that area had once been Phrygian (before the second half of the third century BC) but had subsequently become Galatian.44 But such an antiquarianism is uncharacteristic of Luke. Kirsopp Lake, who in his Earlier Epistles of St. Paul (1911) had followed Ramsay's interpretation,45 reviewed the evidence afresh for his note on `Paul's route in Asia Minor' in Volume V of The Beginnings of Christianity, Part I (1933), and concluded that the most probable explanation was that Paul, instead of going west from Iconium along the Lycus and Maeander valleys,

went north through Phrygia and territory where Galatians were numerous. If this view be accepted 'Phrygian and Galatian country' means territory in which sometimes Phrygian and sometimes Gaelic46 was the language of the villagers. His route may have been through Laodicea, Amorion, and Orkistos (surely a Gaelic place)47 to Nakoleia and perhaps to Dorylaeum. Either Nakoleia or Dorylaeum might be said to be xaia trly Mvolav. He was also on the direct road to Nicaea, and certainly from Nakoleia and probably from Dorylaeum there was a straight road to Troas, 'skirting' Mysia-if that be the meaning of naeEX&bv. In one or the other of these places he was once more prevented by revelation from working as he had intended-this time in Bithynia-and so he turned to the left and went through Mysia to Troas.48

This route, as Lake remarks, does not differ substantially from that postulated by Ramsay, apart from the interpretation of the 'Phrygian and Galatic region'. But the aspect in which it does differ from Ramsay's comes to grief on the hard facts. The frontier between Galatic Phrygia and ethnic Galatia has been delimited much more precisely than it was in Ramsay's day;49 it ran due west from a point near the northernmost part of Lake Tatta (Tuz G616) to Orkistos (where the Sangarius divided the province of Asia from the province of Galatia)-say from 32° 50' E. and rather north of 39° N. Since Paul's plan, according to Acts 15:36, was to visit all the cities which he and Barnabas had evangelized in South Galatia a year or two earlier, he and his companions probably intended to travel west from Lystra through Iconium and Pisidian Antioch. The prohibition against preaching in Asia was probably communicated at Lystra:50 the Pastoral Epistles contain reminiscences of prophetic utterances given on the occasion when Timothy joined the apostolic company.51 Now they had to follow some other road than that which led to Ephesus, but it was necessary to go on to Iconium in any case. If by this time they thought of Bithynia they could cut out Pisidian Antioch and take the road to Phrygia Paroreios (the territory lying north and south of the range of Sultan Dag), or they could go on to Pisidian Antioch and reach Phrygia Paroreios from there by crossing Sultan Dag. In either case they would arrive at Philomelium. Leaving Philomelium by either of two possible routes for the north-west, they passed at once into Phrygia Asiana: they would not touch ethnic Galatia or pass through any village where the Celtic language would be heard.

The `Phrygian and Galatic region' cannot be understood in the sense suggested by Lake: it can only mean the territory through which Paul and his friends passed after leaving Lystra, the territory in which Iconium and Pisidian Antioch were situated. Even if they by-passed both these cities and made straight for Mysia after receiving the divine monition at Lystra, they would still have crossed from Lycaonia Galatica into Phrygia Galatica and continued in the latter region until they reached the frontier of the province of Asia. To reach a road which would take them through territory where the Phrygian and Celtic tongues would both be heard, they would have had to go straight north from Lystra until they reached the latitude of 39° N. (without hearing a word of Celtic) and then turn west through a series of villages, remote from any contact with city life. There indeed they would have heard Phrygian on their left and Celtic on their right. But why should Paul make a detour to visit such a district `unless he had a prophetic vision of what Lake was going to say in the fulness of time, and some interest in proving him right?"'

The narrative of Acts 15:41-16:8 is certainly more intelligible if the 'Phrygian and Galatic region' is that part of Phrygia included in the province of Galatia. Although there were naturally lines of communication linking the various regions of the province, the cities of North Galatia were not readily accessible from the road leading from the Cilician Gates through Lystra. Any one proposing to evangelize North Galatia would have been better advised to set out from some other place than Lystra.

The second passage in Acts which is relevant to our subject is 18:23, where Paul, having paid a hasty visit to Palestine after his Corinthian ministry (probably in the summer of AD 52), returned to the west to begin his evangelization of Ephesus and `went from place to place through the Galatic region and Phrygia (r]v I'aXattxrly xtupav xai tpvy(av), strengthening all the disciples'. It may be that by this geographical phrase Luke means much the same as the `Phrygian and Galatic region' of Acts 16:6. Ramsay thought the `Galatic region' of Acts 18:23 was Galatic Lycaonia, in distinction from that part of Lycaonia which belonged to the kingdom of Commagene (Lycaonia Antiochiana),53 but this is uncertain. The `Galatic region' might be Galatic Lycaonia and Galatic Phrygia while `Phrygia' on this occasion could include Asian Phrygia. The reference to Paul's `strengthening all the disciples' indicates that he was not pioneering but retracing his former footsteps. If the expression in Acts 16:6 could cover ethnic Galatia, so could the expression in Acts 18:23; if ethnic Galatia is excluded from the former passage, it is excluded here too. It is simplest to understand Acts 18:23 in the sense of Paul's passing once more through Derbe, Lystra, Iconium and Pisidian Antioch. In Acts 19:1 he is said to have passed through `the upper country' (ta &vwte(Jtxa µi;prl) on his way to Ephesus. More or less any part of inland Asia Minor could have been called `the upper country' in relation to Ephesus: here the reference may be to the road leading due west from Pisidian Antioch, reaching Ephesus by the north side of Mount Messogis, instead of the main road farther south following the Lycus and Maeander valleys.54

5. Other references

Other NT references to Galatia or the Galatians can be disposed of quickly. The `churches of Galatia' which, according to 1 Corinthians 16:1, had received Paul's instructions about the collection for Jerusalem, are no doubt identical with the `churches of Galatia' addressed in Gal. 1:2. If Paul's companions on his last journey to Jerusalem (Acts 20:4) were the delegates of the contributing churches, it may be relevant that they include two South Galatians, Gaius of Derbess and Timothy (of Lystra), but no North Galatians; as has been said above, however, the list of companions may not be exhaustive.16

The 'Galatia' to which Crescens went (2 Tim. 4:10) is not easily identified; its significance is the more complicated because of the variant (but improbable) reading 'Gaul' (I'aWav for FaXat(av).57

As for `Galatia' in 1 Pet. 1:1, that seems to denote the province in general, as it is named along with other Anatolian provinces-Pontus, Cappadocia, Asia and Bithynia-as an area in which `exiles of the dispersion' (i.e. Christians) lived.58

6. The present state of the question

The debate on the location of Paul's Galatians does not appear to be carried on today as seriously as it once was. R. M. Grant holds that in general `Acts does not assist us in locating these churches' but suggests that the Spirit's prohibition in Acts 16:6 `may well be a theological expression of one aspect of Paul's illness'59 which, according to Gal. 4:13, occasioned Paul's first visit to Galatia. We have been accustomed to hearing the argument pressed against the South Galatian view that there is no hint in Acts 13:13ff. that Paul was ill when he first visited Pisidian Antioch and the other cities of Galatic Phrygia and Lycaonia, and the answer readily presented itself that equally there is no hint of illness in the record of his passing through the Phrygian and Galatic region of Acts 16:6. But the force of this answer (negative as it was) is now threatened. Even so, Grant's interpretation of the Spirit's prohibition is no more probable than Ramsay's suggestion that Paul went up from the Pamphylian coast to the highlands of Pisidian Antioch (3,600 feet above sea level) because of an attack of malaria (which he identified with the `splinter in the flesh' of 2 Cor. 12:7).60 Grant's understanding of the Spirit's prohibition in the light of Gal. 4:13, along with the unlikelihood that Paul would address as `Galatians' (Gal. 3:1) people who spoke Lycaonian (Acts 14:11),61 leads him to conclude `that the letter was addressed to a group of communities near Ancyra'62-a conclusion which is sustained with difficulty when the journey of Acts 15:41-16:8 is plotted on the map.

It is disquieting to see how superficially the North Galatian hypothesis is defended by many of its champions nowadays, when we think of the careful arguments adduced by scholars of two and three generations ago-especially disquieting to see how little attention is paid to the relevant data of historical geography. Thus in Willi Marxsen's Introduction to the New Testament we read: `If Paul meant by "Galatia" the Roman province, he could have been in the southern part of the province even on the first missionary journey-although not in the "region of Galatia", as Acts always calls it'63 This implies that the raXaitxilX6)()a-an expression which occurs but twice in Acts (16:6; 18:23)- can refer only to ethnic Galatia; in fact the adjective FaXaztx65 (Latin Galaticus) is well attested for those regions of the province which were not ethnically Galatian,64 and also for the province as a whole,65 but not at this period for ethnic Galatia.66

Marxsen continues: 'The South Galatian hypothesis, however, is extremely improbable' In support of this statement three arguments are adduced:

1. `The assertion that is often made, that Paul always uses the names of the Roman provinces, is incorrect'67

If anyone said that Paul always uses the names of the Roman provinces, he would be imprudent; the fact is that Paul normally uses them. There may be deviations from this norm, but they will be recognizable deviations, and the burden of proof lies on those who understand faXa'rla and raMTat in his writings in another than the provincial sense.

2. `Besides, Paul would hardly have been able to say in 1:21, "Then I came into the regions of Syria and Cilicia", for this is the Pauline parallel to the first missionary journey in Acts. According to the South Galatian hypothesis he must have founded the Galatian churches at that time but there is no mention of this'

This argument seems to imply that Paul might have included the churches of Pisidian Antioch, Iconium, Lystra and Derbe in `the regions of Syria and Cilicia'68 (if Acts 13-14 rightly makes him evangelize these cities at this stage), but not those which he calls `the churches of Galatia'; the latter would therefore be different from the four churches of Acts and be located in North Galatia. That Paul would have included the South Galatian churches in `the regions of Syria and Cilicia' is incredible; Gal. 1:21 is parallel, not to the `first missionary journey' of Acts 13-14 but to the interval between Acts 9:31 and 11:30, when Paul was active first in Tarsus and then in Antioch-the two leading cities of the united province of Syria-Cilicia.69

3. `Finally it seems unlikely that Paul would address the inhabitants of Pisidia and Lycaonia as "Galatians" (3:1: "0 foolish Galatians"). This can only be a racial term and cannot refer to the inhabitants of a Roman administrative district!

This argument, which is sometimes reinforced by the consideration that to address Christians who were not ethnic Galatians as `Galatians' would be psychologically disastrous,70 will hardly stand up to investigation. What comprehensive term could have been used (other than `Galatians') to address Pisidians (or rather Phrygians) and Lycaonians together? We may reflect that the one comprehensive term which is acceptable when Englishmen, Welsh, Cornish and Scots are referred to or addressed together is `British', which `ethnically' is appropriate only to the Welsh and Cornish (and the Bretons, who are part of another political unit). The name Britain, or Great Britain, to denote the whole island, is a political expedient; yet Highland and Lowland Scots would much rather be called British (which they are not `ethnically') than English (which is applicable to them only linguistically, and even so is unacceptable).71

If Paul's readers found anything objectionable in being called `foolish Galatians', the objection arose from the adjective `foolish' rather than from the substantive `Galatians'. If they were South Galatians, some of them lived in Phrygia and some in Lycaonia, and in addition to Phrygians and Lycaonians they included Jews, Greeks and perhaps Romans (since Pisidian Antioch was a Roman colony). The one political feature which they shared in common was their residence within the frontiers of the province of Galatia; the only political term that could be applied to them all was Galatians. Ramsay's judgment may be quite soundly based: `I can entertain no doubt that about AD 50 the address by which an orator would most please the Iconians, in situations where the term "Iconians" was unsuitable, was lvSprs FaXaiat, "gentlemen of the Galatic province."'72 Even `Phrygians' might not have been very acceptable to the Iconians, because of its currency in a sense practically synonymous with `slaves' or `cowards'73 (and it would have been in every way inapplicable to the people of Lystra and Derbe). As for the people of Pisidian Antioch, they might well have preferred the designation `Galatians' to either `Phrygians' or `Pisidians', for if `Phrygians' was tantamount to `slaves' or `cowards', `Pisidians' (which the people of Antioch were not in any case) would have been little better than `barbarians'.

W.G. Kummel's Introduction to the New Testament, in which the North Galatian destination is upheld, similarly lays weight on the reference to `the regions of Syria and Cilicia' in Gal. 1:21 and the address `0 foolish Galatians' in Gal.3:1;74 but the defence of the North Galatian hypothesis deserves weightier arguments than these.

In fact, more recent statements of the North Galatian case represent no advance on Lightfoot and fall short of the statements of Schmiedel and Moffatt. This may be due in some measure to the fashion of paying more attention to the style of Luke's narrative than to the narrative itself;75 besides, if the narrative is regarded as a partly fictitious and in any case idealized construction by a writer of a later generation, detailed study of its historical geography is not of the first relevance. Against this fashion it must be recognized that Luke's narrative is true to its dramatic date,76 and in this regard the study of its historical geography is of the utmost importance.

In recent years especially there has tended to be a correlation between acceptance of the South Galatian view and a high estimate of the historical reliability of Acts, on the one hand, and between acceptance of the North Galatian view and a more sceptical assessment of Acts on the other. This correlation may be little more than coincidental: it is neither necessary nor deliberate. An exception is provided by R. H. Fuller's Critical Introduction to the New Testament in the Duckworth series. There, as in the identically entitled volume by A. S. Peake which Fuller's work has replaced,77 the South Galatian view is adopted but (in contrast to Peake's treatment) there is a lower estimate of the historical value of Acts. `The motive, conscious or unconscious, behind the North Galatian theory', says Fuller, `seems to be the desire to avoid making Gal. the earliest Pauline letter'.78 This is doubtful, because by no means all South Galatianists make Galatians the earliest Pauline letter: those who infer from the reference to the `former' or `first' visit (to npbtepov) in Gal. 4:13 that Paul had visited the South Galatian churches twice before he wrote to them must date his letter after Acts 16:6. Fuller undertakes to satisfy the North Galatianists' difficulty by taking the first missionary journey of Acts as a duplicate of the second, so that Paul's visit to South Galatia in Acts 16:1-6 was really his first (after the Council of Jerusalem), and the visit of Acts 18:23 was his second. Galatians is then dated during Paul's Ephesian ministry. But this dating of the epistle is independent of Fuller's view of the structure of Acts: it was held, for example, by T. W. Manson, who accepted Luke's narrative of the first and second missionary journeys as it stands and favoured the `South Galatian' theory.79

The question of the North or South Galatian destination of our epistle is not one in which it is proper to take up partisan attitudes or indulge in dogmatic assertions; and it ill becomes champions of either view to disparage the rival view or those who maintain it. The fact that so many competent scholars can be cited in support of either position suggests that the evidence for neither is absolutely conclusive. But the weight of the evidence, it seems to me, favours the South Galatian view. If the Epistle to the Galatians was indeed addressed to the churches of Pisidian Antioch, Iconium, Lystra and Derbe, then we have important historical, geographical, literary and epigraphic data which will provide material for its better understanding.

III

THE GALATIAN PROBLEM

1. The occasion of the letter

The occasion of the letter was Paul's receiving news of people who had visited his Galatian mission-field and were persuading his converts there to accept a different form of teaching from that which he had given them. He refers to these people as `trouble-makers' (Tap&ooovtcs, 1:7; 5:10) or `agitators' (&vaoiaiovvTEs, 5:12). According to the information reaching Paul, they were trying to impose on the Galatian Christians some requirements of the Jewish law, preeminently circumcision; there is also some word of the observance of special days, presumably those of the Jewish sacred calendar (4:10). It might have been expected that Jewish food-restrictions would also have figured in the new teaching; if so, Paul makes no reference to their doing so, although insistence on those food-restrictions by some Christians is implied in his account of Peter's withdrawal from table-fellowship with Gentiles at Antioch (2:11-14).

The new teaching is denounced by Paul as a perversion of the true gospel of Christ (1:7), and the Galatian Christians who pay heed to it are warned that to submit to it is to turn away from God (1:6), to be severed from Christ, to fall from grace (5:4). The trouble-makers are incurring a curse because they substitute a spurious message for gospel truth (1:8f.); they are exposing themselves to the certainty of divine judgment (5:10). Even if they demand only a token measure of law-keeping from the Galatians, any such demand involves acceptance of the principle of justification by works of the law. This principle is clean contrary to the gospel of justification by faith-even if it were practicable, which it is not (3:11). Persuasive as the new teaching may be, it does not come from God (5:8), as did the original message which brought salvation to the members of the Galatian churches (1:6); the two are incompatible.

It is clearly implied, moreover, that the `trouble-makers' tried to gain credence for their teaching among Paul's converts by disparaging him and casting doubt on his apostolic credentials. In consequence, the Galatians who lent a ready ear to this teaching had a sense of estrangement from Paul, not to speak of hostility to him (4:16)-the fruit of an uneasy conscience.

Paul therefore judges it necessary in his letter to dwell at some length on the divine authority of his gospel and of his commission to preach it: he embarks on an autobiographical sketch of the first fourteen or seventeen years of his apostleship with the aim of establishing his independence in particular of the leaders of the Jerusalem church (1:11-2:10).

We do not know how precisely Paul learned of the trouble-makers' activity in Galatia-whether by letter, or by first-hand information brought by a visitor or visitors from there, or at second hand. Our only source of knowledge about their teaching is Paul's letter; if (as some have supposed, without any positive warrant) Paul himself was inadequately informed about it, we have no means of correcting or supplementing his information.'

What then can be said about this 'other gospel' which the Galatian Christians were disposed to embrace, or about the identity and motives of those who pressed it on them? These questions constitute what has been called 'the singular problem of the Epistle to the Galatians'.'

2. The early consensus

Why speak of a `singular problem'? To many readers of the letter, from the second century onwards, the nature of the 'other gospel' has been self-evident, and the character of its proponents not greatly in doubt. The second-century Marcionite prologues to the letters of Paula began with the prologue to Galatians, which runs thus:

The Galatians are Greeks.4 They at first received the word of truth from the apostle, but after his departure they were tempted by false apostles to turn to the law and circumcision. The apostle calls them back to the true faith,s writing to them from Ephesus.

In this prologue the 'law' to which the Galatians were being tempted to turn was the Jewish law; this is indicated by its collocation with 'circumcision', as well as by the plain meaning of the repeated references to law in the letter itself.

The same understanding of the argument of Galatians recurs throughout the patristic literature. For example, Marius Victorinus, the earliest Latin commentator on the letter, puts it thus:

The sum of the letter is as follows: the Galatians are going astray because they are adding Judaism to the gospel of faith in Christ, observing in a material sense the sabbath and circumcision, together with the other works which they received in accordance with the law. Disturbed by these tendencies Paul writes this letter, wishing to put them right and call them back from Judaism, in order that they may preserve faith in Christ alone, and receive from Christ the hope of salvation and of his promises, because no one is saved by the works of the law. So, in order to show that what they are adding is wrong, he wishes to confirm [the truth of] his gospel.6

In the Reformation period we find no significant change, except that the Reformers pressed an analogy between the situation with which Paul dealt and that of their own day. Luther begins his preface to the epistle thus:

The Galatians had been brought by St. Paul to right Christian belief, from the law to the gospel. But after his departure there came the false apostles, who were disciples of the true apostles, and turned the Galatians back again to believe that they must attain blessedness through the work of the law, and that they were sinning if they did not hold the work of the law, as according to Acts 15 certain highly-placed people in Jerusalem insisted.7

This is expanded as follows in his commentary on the epistle:

St. Paul goeth about to establish the doctrine of faith, grace, forgiveness of sins, or Christian righteousness, to the end that we may have a perfect knowledge and difference between Christian righteousness and all other kinds of righteousness. ... For if the article of justification be lost, then is all true Christian doctrine lost....

Christ [says Paul] hath mercifully called you in grace, that ye should be freemen under Christ, and not bondmen under Moses, whose disciples ye are now become again by the means of your false apostles, who by the law of Moses called you not unto grace, but unto wrath, to the hating of God, to sin and death. ...

Hereby it may easily be gathered, that these false apostles had condemned the Gospel of Paul among the Galatians, saying: Paul indeed hath begun well, but to have begun well is not enough, for there remain yet many higher matters; like as they say in the fifteenth chapter of the Acts: It is not enough for you to believe in Christ, or to be baptized, but it behoveth also that ye be circumcised; `for except ye be circumcised after the manner of Moses, ye cannot be saved'. This is as much to say, as that Christ is a good workman, which hath indeed begun a building, but he hath not finished it; for this must Moses do.8

Luther goes on to draw a parallel with the `fantastical spirits, Anabaptists and others' of his day as well as with the `Papists'.9

According to John Calvin (1548), Paul

had faithfully instructed them [the Galatians] in the pure gospel, but false apostles had entered in his absence and corrupted the true seed by false and corrupt dogmas. For they taught that the observance of ceremonies was still necessary. This might seem trivial; but Paul fights for it as a fundamental article of the Christian faith. And rightly so, for it is no light evil to quench the brightness of the gospel, lay a snare for consciences and remove the distinction between the old and new covenants. He saw that these errors were also related to an ungodly and destructive opinion on the deserving of righteousness....

The false apostles, who had deceived the Galatians to advance their own claims, pretended that they had received a commission from the apostles. Their method of infiltration was to get it believed that they represented the apostles and delivered a message from them. But they took away from Paul the name and authority of apostle. ... In attacking Paul they were really attacking the truth of the gospel.10

In other words, the Galatian converts were being urged to observe ceremonies of the OT law as integral to the gospel and to accept a doctrine of justification by personal merit. Since Paul's preaching excluded all this, it must be undermined by an attempt to diminish his status in the eyes of his converts.

This understanding of the situation prevailed into the nineteenth century, when it was taken up by the Tubingen school of F. C. Baur and his associates, who integrated it into their account of primitive Christian history. `What led the Apostle to write this Epistle to the Galatian Churches', wrote Baur, we learn very clearly from the Epistle itself'. The Galatians' falling away from the gospel as Paul preached it

was due to the influence of strange teachers who ... represented to them that, as a first step to the Christian salvation, they must submit to circumcision (v. 2, 11). Here we first meet with those Judaising opponents with whom the Apostle had to maintain so severe a struggle in the churches which he founded, and they appear here quite in the harsh and uncompromising Judaistic character which marks them as opponents of Pauline Christianity. ... In one word, they were Jews or Jewish Christians of the genuine old stamp, who could so little understand the more liberal atmosphere of Pauline Christianity that they would have thought the very ground of their existence was cut from under them if Judaism were no longer to have its absolute power and importance."

In principle, according to Baur, the declared opponents of Pauline Christianity were in agreement with the leaders of the Jerusalem church; indeed, those leaders `are themselves the opponents against whom the Apostle contends in refuting these principles'.12 But their reluctant recognition, at the Jerusalem conference, that Paul and Barnabas had been entrusted with the gospel for the Gentiles, tied their hands and compelled them to take the position of nonbelligerents. Other members of the Jerusalem church, however, were not so bound, and they were the infiltrators or trouble-makers who endeavoured to subvert Paul's teaching and apostolic authority among his Gentile converts, including the churches of Galatia.

Bishop Lightfoot sums the matter up concisely:

The Epistle to the Galatians is especially distinguished among St. Paul's letters by its unity of purpose. The Galatian apostasy in its double aspect, as a denial of his own authority and a repudiation of the doctrine of grace, is never lost sight of from beginning to end."

This `apostasy', as he calls it,

was a Judaism of the sharp Pharisaic type, unclouded or unrelieved by any haze of Essene mysticism, such as prevailed a few years later in the neighbouring Colossian Church.14 The necessity of circumcision was strongly insisted upon. Great stress was laid on the observance of 'days and months and seasons and years'. In short, nothing less than submission to the whole ceremonial law seems to have been contemplated by the innovators. At all events, this was the logical consequence of the adoption of the initiatory rite.I-'

But far from accepting the Tubingen interpretation, Lightfoot regards the Epistle to the Galatians as refuting it most conclusively, `for it shows the true relations existing between St. Paul and the Twelve'.16 Far from agreeing in principle with the judaizing propagandists, the Jerusalem leaders agreed in principle with Paul; if Paul at Antioch charged Peter with `play-acting'" when he withdrew from table-fellowship with Gentile Christians, it was precisely because Peter on this occasion was acting in a manner at variance with his real principles.

Lightfoot's account of the situation in the Galatian churches calls, in my judgment, for very little modification. But during the present century variant accounts of the situation have been put forward by highly reputable scholars, and these accounts merit serious assessment.

3. Other explanations

In 1919 Wilhelm Lutgert published a monograph with the title Law and Spirit18 in which he argued that in the Galatian situation Paul had to wage war on two fronts simultaneously. Not only had he to deal with the attempt to impose on his converts circumcision and other obligations of the Jewish law; he had also to deal with radicals of the opposite stripe to the Judaizers, with those who wished to sever the gospel from its OT roots and who held that the new life in the Spirit gave them the entree into a realm of knowledge which dismissed the `things of the flesh' as irrelevant and had little regard for those ethical distinctions on which Paul-inconsistently, to their way of thinking-insisted. It was against these people, said Lutgert, and not against the Judaizers, that Paul had to defend his claim to apostolic authority in independence of Jerusalem. By their standards, any one who was dependent on Jerusalem was insufficiently emancipated from the old order of Judaism; hence Paul's emphatic assertion that he had received his commission and his message from no human source-least of all from the Jerusalem `pillars'-but by direct revelation from the exalted Lord. These were the people, too, who needed the warning not to turn their Christian freedom into licence (5:13); the Judaizers, on the contrary, had to be warned not to exchange their freedom for the `yoke of slavery' (5:1).

Lutgert's thesis was elaborated (with modifications) ten years later by James Hardy Ropes, in his monograph entitled The Singular Problem of the Epistle to the Galatians.19 Ropes attempted, by means of a short commentary on Galatians included in his monograph, to show that this thesis illuminated each successive section of the epistle. In Gal. 3:6-29, for example, the radicals who wished to forget the OT antecedents of the gospel had to be reminded that, Gentiles as they were, they were children of Abraham by faith in Christ-children of Abraham in the sense that mattered most.

Ropes also argued that the Galatian Judaizers need not have been influenced by intruding visitors from Judaea; `all that we need suppose is that certain gentile Christians had proved susceptible to the efforts of local synagogue Jews, and had tried to persuade the churches as a whole to accept Jewish rites, including circumcision'.20

In an article published in 1945 F. R. Crownfield undertook to do justice both to the arguments of Lutgert and Ropes and to those pointing to the traditional identification of the trouble-makers as straightforward Judaizers by representing the trouble-makers as syncretistic Jews, for whom legalism was a means to the end of higher enlightenment.21

Johannes Munck, Professor of New Testament in Aarhus, Denmark, propounded a novel line in the interpretation of our epistle when in 1954 he maintained that the Judaizers in the churches of Galatia were not Jewish Christians, not visitors from Judaea, not local synagogue Jews, but Gentile Christians, Paul's own converts.22 All that they knew about Jewish Christianity and the Jerusalem church they knew from Paul. `His words about Jerusalem and the Judaean churches were full of sympathy and understanding'.23 Knowing that the Jerusalem Christians were circumcised and kept many of the ordinances observed by the Jews among whom they lived, some of Paul's converts concluded that he had only half-evangelized them and that they should conform to Jerusalem practice. Moreover, Paul taught his converts to use the Greek version of the Hebrew scriptures as their Bible.24 While he was with them he showed them how those scriptures spoke of the salvation of the Gentiles, but when he had left them they read in those same scriptures much that spoke of Abraham and his posterity as the recipients of God's blessing, much that spoke of the glory of Israel and the subjection of the Gentiles, much that spoke of the keeping of the law as a condition of enjoying divine approval. Was it strange, then, that they should draw those practical conclusions which so horrified Paul when he heard of them?

But there are several indications throughout the letter that the trouble-makers in the Galatian churches were incomers, not some of Paul's Gentile converts. He refers to them throughout in the third person, while he addresses his converts in the second person. In his letters to the Corinthians offenders within the church of Corinth are rebuked in the second person, while interlopers from elsewhere are denounced in the third person. So we may conclude that it is outsiders whom Paul has in view when he says to the Galatian Christians. `The persons I have referred to are paying court to you, but not with honest intentions: what they really want is to bar the door to you so that you may pay court to them' (4:17, NEB margin).

Walter Schmithals, in an article published in 1956,25 put forward a simpler account than that of Lutgert and Ropes: Paul was not waging a war on two fronts; the sole target of his attack was a body of Jewish Christian Gnostics such as Schmithals had already identified with the target of Paul's attack in the Corinthian correspondence.26 But Gnosticism has really to be read into the teaching of these people as reflected in Paul's attack on them before it can be read out of it.27 And it is begging the question to argue, as Willi Marxsen does, that this is due to Paul's own failure to understand properly what they were teaching28 (he heard that they were teaching circumcision and assumed too hastily that they were straightforward Judaizers, whereas they were in fact `introducing something new-a Christian-Jewish-Gnostic syncretism'):29 if we cannot determine the nature of their teaching from Paul's refutation of it, we have no other evidence to guide us.

There is nothing improbable perse in Paul's having to defend the gospel on two fronts at once; he certainly had to do so at Corinth.30 But there is no substantial evidence of his having to do so in the churches of Galatia. No doubt he realized the necessity of warning his converts there, as elsewhere, against misinterpreting his message of liberty in an antinomian sense: they must not turn their freedom into licence to indulge in the `works of the flesh', but rather live in mutual love, the first `fruit of the Spirit' (5:13f., 22). But while he reminds them that those who manifest the works of the flesh `will never inherit the kingdom of God' (5:21), this is not the main thrust of his letter. The `work of the flesh' which posed the most deadly threat in the churches of Galatia appears to have been a quarrelsome spirit; hence Paul's warning in 5:15: `But if you go on fighting one another tooth and nail, all you can expect is mutual annihilation'. The course which he recommends to them is a larger measure of that faith which is `active in love' and in that love to `be servants to one another' (5:6, 13).

4. Against whom does Paul defend himself?

Paul's insistence on his independence of Jerusalem is quite intelligible as part of his argument against Judaizers whose main appeal was to the Jerusalem leaders. These Judaizers argued: `The Jerusalem leaders are the only persons with authority to say what the true gospel is, and this authority they received direct from Christ. Paul has no comparable authority: any commission he exercises was derived by him from the Jerusalem leaders, and if he differs from them on the content or implications of the gospel, he is acting and teaching quite arbitrarily. In fact', they may have added, `Paul went up to Jerusalem shortly after his conversion and spent some time with the apostles there. They instructed him in the first principles of the gospel and, seeing that he was a man of uncommon intellect, magnanimously wiped out from their minds his record as a persecutor and authorized him to preach to others the gospel which he had learned from them. But when he left Jerusalem for Syria and Cilicia he began to adapt the gospel to make it palatable to Gentiles. The Jerusalem leaders practised circumcision and observed the law and the customs, but Paul struck out on a line of his own, omitting circumcision and other ancient observances from the message he preached, and thus he betrayed his ancestral heritage. This law-free gospel has no authority but his own; he certainly did not receive it from the apostles, who disapproved of his course of action. Their disapproval was publicly shown on one occasion at Antioch, when there was a direct confrontation between Peter and him on the necessity of maintaining the Jewish foodlaws.'

To this Paul replies: `At no time did I derive any commission from the Jerusalem leaders. My call to apostleship and the gospel I proclaim were alike received by me "through a revelation of Jesus Christ" (1:12). My apostleship was to be discharged among the Gentiles; the gospel which I received by revelation was to be preached among the Gentiles, and the Jerusalem leaders recognized this when they "acknowledged that I had been entrusted with the gospel for Gentiles as surely as Peter had been entrusted with the gospel for Jews; for God, whose action made Peter an apostle to the Jews, also made me an apostle to the Gentiles" (2:7f.). If it is a question of defining the content or the implications of the gospel so far as it affects Gentiles, I speak with authority-not I indeed, but the Lord, who called and commissioned me. As for the confrontation with Cephas (Peter) at Antioch, that came about because Peter, under pressure from visitors from Judaea, went back on his established practice of eating at the same table as uncircumcised Gentile Christians. This action of his was a virtual denial of the gospel which both he and I preached-the gospel which made no distinction between believers in Christ, whether they were Jews or Gentiles' (2:11-14).

Paul, indeed, did not differ from the Jerusalem leaders with regard to the essential content of the gospel: it was based on the facts of Christ's death, burial and resurrection, and these were proclaimed equally by both sides (cf. 1 Cor. 15:11). But there might well be differences of opinion with regard to the practical implications of the gospel in the lives of Gentile believers, and in this sphere Paul, commissioned by Christ to be the Gentiles' apostle, would brook no interference from those whose apostolate was to the Jews, and still less from people who claimed to speak in their name.

But what of his words in Gal. 5:11: `And I, my friends, if I am still advocating circumcision, why is it I am still persecuted'? What was the point of charging Paul with advocating circumcision, and what was meant by this charge? The point of the charge was probably this: `Don't listen to Paul when he says you must not be circumcised; he preaches circumcision himself'. This was contrary to the Galatians' experience of Paul's preaching, but if (as was suggested) Paul was a trimmer, adapting his preaching to his environment, then plainly he need not be taken too seriously. That this sort of thing was actually suggested may be implied in Paul's indignant words in 1:10: `Does my language now sound as if I were canvassing for men's support? ... Do you think I am currying favour with men? If I still sought men's favour, I should be no servant of Christ'.31

But what was meant by the charge that Paul himself advocated circumcision? Was there anything in his teaching or action that lent it colour? We can well imagine how readily such an action as his circumcision of Timothy32 could be appealed to in this way; but perhaps all that was meant was that, true to his policy of living like a Jew among Jews, he did not discountenance the practice of circumcision among Jewish Christians. There is a relevant passage in Acts 21:21, where Paul, on his last visit to Jerusalem, is told by the elders of the mother-church that rumours have reached Jerusalem `that you teach all the Jews in the gentile world to turn their backs on Moses, telling them to give up circumcising their children and following our way of life'. The elders make it plain that they know these rumours to be unfounded, and the narrative goes on to represent Paul as acquiescing in their suggestion that he should give a public demonstration that they were unfounded. There is no need to regard this as an example of Luke's policy of making the gulf between Paul and the Jerusalem church less unbridgeable than, according to the Tubingen tradition, it actually was; there is nothing in Paul's letters which contradicts the picture given of him in Acts 21. Even in Galatians, his most uncompromising deliverance on this subject, his concern is solely with the imposing of circumcision on Gentile Christians; whether Jewish Christians continued to circumcise their children or not was probably a matter of small importance in his eyes, on a par with their continued observance or non-observance of the sabbath and the levitical foodlaws, so long as it was not made a ground of justification before God.

5. The circumcision question

The most certain feature of the false gospel was its insistence on circumcision. In itself circumcision was neither here nor there so far as Paul was concerned: he says so twice in this very letter (5:6; 6:15). What disturbed him was the enforcement or acceptance of circumcision as a legal obligation, as though it were essential to salvation or to membership in the community of the people of God. There is nothing inconsistent with Paul's principles in his circumcision of Timothy, as a matter of expediency, according to the record of Acts 16:333-although it is easy to appreciate how this action could have been misrepresented or misunderstood. But in the situation which obtained in the churches of Galatia it was a very different matter: 'Mark my words: 1, Paul, say to you that if you receive circumcision Christ will do you no good at all. Once again, you can take it from me that every man who receives circumcision is under obligation to keep the entire law' (Gal. 5:2f.). If circumcision was accepted because it was required by the law of Israel, it was impossible to stop there: every part of that law was of equal obligation. But none of those who were disposed to accept circumcision as a legal obligation, nor any of those who pressed them to do so, contemplated keeping the whole law: as for the latter, says Paul, `they only want you to be circumcised in order to boast of your having submitted to that outward rite' (6:13). Any one who admitted the principle of salvation by keeping the law and did not take seriously the consequent obligation to keep it in its entirety would incur the doom invoked by the law itself: `A curse is on all who do not persevere in doing everything that is written in the book of the law' (3:10, quoting Dt. 27:26). When that curse had been incurred, the only way to be delivered from it was through the redemptive death of Christ: `Christ bought us freedom from the curse of the law by becoming for our sake an accursed thing; for Scripture says, "A curse is on everyone who is hanged on a gibbet". And the purpose of it all was that the blessing of Abraham should in Christ Jesus be extended to the Gentiles, so that we might receive the promised Spirit through faith' (3:13f., quoting Dt. 21:23). It was preposterous for those who had experienced this deliverance to expose themselves to the sanctions of the law all over again by acknowledging a token obligation to keep it-just as preposterous as it would be for people set free from the yoke of slavery to place their necks voluntarily and deliberately under that yoke anew. The gospel of salvation by grace and the doctrine of salvation by law-keeping were mutually exclusive: to accept the latter was to renounce the former. `When you seek to be justified by way of law, your relation with Christ is completely severed: you have fallen out of the dominion of God's grace' (5:4).

It is not certain that in all schools of Jewish thought at this time circumcision was insisted on as a sine qua non for admission into the commonwealth of Israel. Philo seems to know of those who argued that, provided the spiritual significance of circumcision was maintained, it was permissible to dispense with the external rite; and he opposes them: `let us not abolish the law of circumcision on the ground that circumcision signifies the cutting away of pleasure and passions of every sort and the destruction of ungodly conceit'.34 About AD 40 Ananias, the Jewish instructor of King Izates of Adiabene, assured him that he could worship God according to the Jewish law without being circumcised; but later, when Izates was persuaded by another Jew, Eleazar by name, that he could not hope to be a true proselyte and win divine approval without circumcision, he submitted to the rite.35 In debates with the school of Shammai, some members of the school of Hillel maintained that, for Gentiles to become proselytes of Judaism, the initiatory baptism was sufficient apart from circumcision36-but this is more likely to have been a position defended in debate than a matter of practice. Those Gentiles who went all the way in the direction of Judaism but stopped short of circumcision were treated as God-fearers, still outside the Jewish fellowship, and not admitted as proselytes to membership within it.37

Paul's line was not that of those Hillelites who argued that circumcision was not essential to a Gentile's becoming a Jew, if he underwent proselyte baptism. He was not concerned to make Gentiles into Jews, but to introduce Jews and Gentiles alike into a new community through faith in Jesus as Lord. In this new community circumcision was irrelevant, and any attempt to treat it as essential was inadmissible. Circumcision, with many other features of the law of Israel-food-restrictions, sacred seasons, and the like-had traditionally kept Jews and Gentiles apart; such things had no place in the `new creation' (6:15) where there was `no such thing as Jew and Greek' (3:28). Any attempt to impose them was to put the clock back to the time before the coming of Christ.

6. The `elements' of the world

Together with circumcision, the Galatians were observing special `days and months and seasons and years' (4:10). And what was wrong with that? In itself, nothing. To Paul, the observance or non-observance of a sacred calendar was religiously indifferent, just as circumcision was. `This man regards one day more highly than another, while that man regards all days alike. On such a point everyone should have reached conviction in his own mind' (Rom. 14:5). According to the record of Acts, Paul regulated his own movements in some measure according to the Jewish calendar, especially in arranging his visits to Jerusalem'38 and this was in complete accord with his settled policy, as set out in I Cor. 9:19ff., to conform to Jewish ways in Jewish company and to Gentile ways in Gentile company, so as to commend the gospel to Jews and Gentiles alike. But to observe sacred occasions as a matter of religious obligation, as though this were of the essence of gospel faith and church membership, was a retrograde step, back from liberty to bondage; it was, in fact, a token of submission to the `elements (or elemental forces) of the world' (Gal. 4:3, 9).

Whatever dictated Paul's choice of the word `elements' (6totxeia) in this context (see pp. 193f.), it is plain that the observance of the Jewish law is here interpreted as submission to them (pp. 203ff.). `During our minority', says Paul, `we were slaves to the stoicheia of the universe' (4:3). If the Galatians accept the Jewish law as a religious obligation, they will be subject to this slavery, but curiously, although the Galatians are Gentiles, Paul says they will revert to this slavery. `Formerly, when you did not acknowledge God, you were the slaves of beings which in their nature are no gods'.39 But now that you do acknowledge God-or rather, now that he has acknowledged you-how can you turn back to the mean and beggarly stoicheia? Why do you propose to enter their service all over again?' (4:8f.). Is Paul equating his own former Judaism and their former paganism as both alike consisting in the service of the stoicheia? Plainly he is.

It is immediately after these words that he reproaches them for keeping special `days and months and seasons and years'. Three of these four terms appear in the Greek version of Gn. 1:14, where it is recorded that the heavenly luminaries were appointed `for signs and for seasons and for days and years'.

Among the objects of pagan worship the deities who shared their names with the planets were particularly prominent. In the faith of Israel such deities were included among the b`'ne "15him, members of the heavenly court of God Most High.40 The Jews did not worship those beings as the Gentiles did. If, in the age before Christ, they regulated their religious life by ordinances imposed through the agency of these beings, that was in keeping with the stage of spiritual infancy through which they were then passing. But for believers who had been emancipated by Christ and attained their spiritual majority through faith in him to revert to such ordinances was little short of apostasy and scarcely to be distinguished from relapsing into pagan worship.

It was in the light of the gospel that these stoicheia were `mean and beggarly': Christ had exposed their bankruptcy. For those who did not live in the good of Christian freedom the stoicheia were `principalities and powers', keeping the souls of men in bondage.41 Their overthrow by Christ on the cross is depicted in the Epistle to the Colossians, the only other writing in the Pauline corpus where the stoicheia figure-and figure in much the same way as they do in Galatians (although the `heresy' which Paul combats in Colossians is apparently a more complex form of syncretism than the `other' gospel which he denounces in Galatians).42

According to Paul, pagan worship was always culpable because it involved idolatry and the vices which followed from idolatry;43 Jewish worship in the preChristian stage of God's dealings with men was far from being culpable-it was divinely instituted-but it had the character of infancy and immaturity as compared with the coming of age into which men were introduced by faith in Christ. Just as a minor required the direction of tutors, guardians or slave-attendants, so the people of God in the days of their minority were under the control of the stoicheia. But for believers in Christ to put themselves under the control of these stoicheia afresh was not just reverting to infancy; it was tantamount to a declaration that the death of Jesus had no redemptive power: `I will not nullify the grace of God; if righteousness comes by law, then Christ died for nothing' (Gal. 2:21). Paul could hardly have expressed himself with greater urgency or severity had his converts been on the point of relapsing into paganism. We may compare the attitude of the writer to the Hebrews towards another group that was in danger of giving up its distinctive Christian standing and merging in its former Jewish environment: this, he warns, would be downright apostasy, desertion from the living God (Heb. 3:12).

7. The preferred solution

The simplest interpretation of Galatians, on the basis of its internal evidence, agrees remarkably with the statement in Acts 15:1 that, some time after the extension of the gospel to Asia Minor, `fierce dissension and controversy' arose in the church of Syrian Antioch because 'certain persons who had come down from Judaea began to teach the brotherhood that those who were not circumcised in accordance with Mosaic practice could not be saved'. If such persons also visited Antioch's daughter-churches in Galatia with this same teaching, and found some acceptance for it there, the stage would be set for the Epistle to the Galatians-whether such a visit was paid about the same time or later.

While the `trouble-makers' were no doubt moved by religious zeal, there are hints of another kind of motivation. Paul charges them with the aim of avoiding persecution `for the cross of Christ' (6:12). Moreover, he implies that if he himself preached circumcision (as some alleged he still did), he would not be persecuted as he was. So far as Paul was concerned, his public proclamation of the law-free gospel must have given offence to Jewish communities wherever he went; but necessity was laid upon him-he had no option but to preach the gospel, the law-free gospel (1 Cor. 9:16). But why should the trouble-makers be so anxious to avoid persecution? Could they not have avoided it by staying at home and minding their own business?

An illuminating suggestion was made by Robert Jewett in an article published in 1971.44 There was a resurgence of `zealot' activity in Judaea under the governors Tiberius Julius Alexander (c.AD46-48), who crucified two insurgent leaders, sons of Judas the Galilaean (Jos., Ant. 20.102), and his successor Ventidius Cumanus (c. 48-52), during whose period of office disorders increased (Ant. 20.105-136; War 2.223-246). Zealot vengeance was liable to be visited on Jews who fraternized with Gentiles, and Jewish Christians who shared table-fellowship with their Gentile brethren were exposed to such reprisals. If Gentile Christians could be persuaded to accept circumcision, this (it was hoped) would protect Jewish Christians against zealot vengeance. The persuasion would be more effective if Gentile believers were assured that circumcision was a condition required by God from all men who wished to be accepted by him45

This, then, could have been a further motive for those people who visited the churches of Galatia and tried to persuade Paul's Gentile converts there that unless they received circumcision and other customs of Jewish religion they could not hope to win recognition from the church of Jerusalem and other fellowbelievers of Jewish birth-that in their eyes they would have at most the status which Gentile God-fearers had in the eyes of the synagogue. The `full' gospel included circumcision as an indispensable requirement; the gospel which they had received from Paul was a truncated gospel. To which Paul replied that such a `full' gospel, denying as it did the all-sufficiency of Christ, was no gospel at all, and in so far as it involved a reversion to legal bondage it undercut the message of justification by faith, disallowed the claim that Jesus by his death and resurrection had inaugurated the messianic age which superseded the age of law and thus in effect disallowed his title to be the Messiah. Far from being a gospel in any sense, such teaching was plain apostasy from Christ. Hence, no matter who its propagator might be, anathema esto.

N

THE TRUTH OF THE GOSPEL

1. Galatians and the primitive message

The letter includes in its opening salutation words which are commonly recognized as drawn from an early Christian confession of faith, which Paul did not formulate although he subscribed to it. The Pauline greeting, `Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ', is followed by a construction with article and participle (equivalent to an adjective clause) in which Christ is described as the one `who gave himself for our sins, that he might deliver us from the present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father, to whom be the glory for ever and ever. Amen' (Gal.1:4f.). Two pieces of common and primitive Christian belief find expression here: (a) that Christ `gave himself for our sins'-with which we may compare 1 Cor. 15:3, `Christ died for our sins', or Rom. 4:25, `who was delivered up for our trespasses'and (b) that the purpose of his so doing was our deliverance `from the present evil age'. This presents the Christian reinterpretation of the current Jewish doctrine of the two ages, the transition between the present age (the epoch of wickedness, as it is called in the Qumran texts) and the age to come (the age of new life and righteousness) being marked by the Christ-event-historically in his death and resurrection and existentially in the experience of his people when by faith they enter into union with him.' To these two items should be added one that appears earlier in the salutation, where `God the Father' is qualified by the participial phrase `who raised him [i.e. Jesus] from the dead' (Gal. 1:1), a phrase recurring throughout the NT epistles, as in Rom. 4:24; 8:11; 10:9; 2 Cor. 4:14; 1 Pet. 1:21.

Further extracts from the common stock of primitive Christianity appear in Gal. 4:4, 'When the time had fully come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman'-possibly with the further phrase 'born under law', but the following words, 'to redeem those that were under law, that we might receive adoption as sons' (Gal. 4:5), are characteristically Pauline. Yet when Paul goes on to link this adoption of believers into the family of God with their receiving from God 'the Spirit of his Son', he adduces as a demonstration of this their invocation of God as 'Abba! Father!' (Gal. 4:6). From the earliest times, it appears, Greekspeaking Christians took over from the Aramaic-speaking church the word Abba which Jesus had used in addressing God or speaking about him (cf. Mk. 14:36), adding to it the Greek equivalent o ztatrlp (cf. Rom. 8:15).2 Thus Paul weaves his distinctive teaching around a core of primitive usage.

The same is true of the death of Christ, which evidently played a central part in the message first brought to the Galatians, `before whose eyes Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified' (Gal. 3:1). Paul's elaboration of the doctrine of Christ's passion is seen in his argument in Gal. 3:10-14 that, by enduring the form of death upon which the divine curse had been pronounced in the law (Dt. 21:23), Christ had redeemed his people from the curse which the law pronounced on those who failed to keep it perfectly (Dt. 27:26).3 A further Pauline insight into the significance of the cross of Christ appears in Gal. 6:14 where, playing on a double meaning of the verb otavpbw, he says that it constitutes a fence separating him from the kosmos.

Baptism was the common sign of initiation into the Christian fellowship; in addition to its primitive association with repentance, cleansing and the remission of sins, Paul views it as the token of incorporation into Christ: 'as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ' (Gal. 3:27).4 Through membership in Christ, who is Abraham's offspring, they too-even Gentilesbecome Abraham's offspring and heirs of the promises made to the patriarch by God (Gal. 3:29).

The reception of the Spirit in the Galatian churches, as elsewhere in the early apostolic age,5 was attended by mighty works (Gal. 3:5), but Paul elaborates the doctrine of the Spirit along lines of his own, contrasting life under the Spirit's leadership with life under law in terms of freedom as opposed to bondage (Gal. 5:1, 18).

Most of the OT testimonia quoted in Galatians are characteristically Pauline, and some are peculiar to this letter. We shall be cautious, therefore, in assigning them to the common stock of primitive Christian testimonia. C. H. Dodd suggests that two of them may be so assigned: (a) the conflation of Gn. 12:3 and 22:18 in Gal. 3:8, 'in you shall all the nations be blessed' (cf. Acts 3:25 for a different conflation of the same two texts),6 and (b) the statement of Hab. 2:4, quoted in Gal. 3:11 (as in Rom. 1:17) in the sense, 'he who is righteous (justified) by faith will come to life', which (in the light of its different usage in Heb. 10:38) he thinks may have been a testimonium to the coming of Christ even before Galatians was written.? I should mention two more.

In Gal. 3:13 Paul, as we have seen,8 quotes Dt. 21:23 (LXX), `cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree' (xpeµaltevos £bti ~vkov) and expounds it along with Dt. 27:26 by means of the rabbinical device of gezerah shawah.9 But it appears that Dt. 21:23 had already been applied to the crucifixion of Christ, if we consider the use of the phrase `hanging him on a tree' (xpettoavzegEJr ~5Xov) in two speeches in Acts (5:30; 10:39) which there is no reason to regard as free Lukan compositions, since each is a summary of primitive kerygmatic motifs.1° Quite early Jesus' followers came to terms with the fact that their Master died the death on which the law pronounced a curse, although Paul, more suo, relates the fact to Jesus' satisfaction and abrogation of the Torah.

Again, the application of Is. 54:1 in Gal. 4:27, where the `barren one' is interpreted of the Gentile church by contrast with the married woman, here understood as `the present Jerusalem', might well be regarded as original to Paul." But at least it is taken from one of the most fertile fields of testimonia, Is. 40-66, which appears to have been given an extensive Christian interpretation at an early date. If Is. 54:1 had already received a Christian interpretation, Paul certainly adapts it to his current argument; one may wonder if this text suggested to him his allegorical exegesis of the Genesis story of Hagar and Sarah, with their respective sons, rather than viceversa.

Be that as it may. If we try to summarize the primitive Christian message, proclaimed by Paul and his predecessors alike, as it is presupposed in the letter to the Galatians, the result might be somewhat as follows:

Jesus our Lord, the Son of God, was sent into the world by his Father when the due time came. He was born into the family of Abraham12 and lived under the Jewish law. He was crucified by his enemies, but in his death he gave himself for his people's sins. God raised him from the dead, to be the Saviour of all who believe in him; he has sent his Spirit into their hearts, enabling them to call God `Father' as Jesus did, to exhibit his love in their lives and to look forward confidently to the realization of their hope.

2. The standard of judgment

When Paul charges his Galatian converts with turning away so quickly to follow `a different gospel' which could not properly be called a gospel at all, and anathematizes all who preach any other gospel than that which those converts had received from him (Gal. 1:6-9), was there (we may ask) any objective standard by which judgment could be pronounced between his gospel and the `different gospel'? Can we be as sure as he was that his version was genuine and the other spurious? Certainly, with the benefit of hindsight we can agree that, if Christianity was to become a universal faith, a version like Paul's was more likely to achieve this end than that of his opponents; but how did the situation look when the letter to the Galatians was written? Was there any general consensus regarding the `authentic' gospel in reference to which other self-styled `gospels' might be exposed as false?

We can appreciate how slender Paul's case for the gospel he preached must have appeared if he was the only one who preached it. Paul was a latecomer to the Christian faith, as every one knew. He had not been a companion of Jesus on earth as the original apostles had been; and when he first made contact with the followers of Jesus it was as a persecutor, not as a champion. What reason was there to accept such a man's interpretation of the message of Jesus in preference to that of others?

Paul finds it necessary to answer this question, and the necessity of doing so places him in a delicate situation. He wants to maintain that the leaders of the Jerusalem church recognize the authenticity of the gospel which he preaches; he wants (perhaps even more) to maintain his personal independence of the authority of the Jerusalem leaders. Accordingly, he asserts his independence of their authority before he (after a fashion) appeals to their authority. `In my early zeal for the ancestral traditions of Judaism', he says (if his words may be summarized), `I devastated13 the church, until God (who had designated me from birth for my apostolic service) revealed his Son in me so that I might be his herald among the Gentiles.14 I embarked on this ministry at once, without consulting either the Jerusalem apostles or anyone else. Not until three years had elapsed did I go to Jerusalem to visit Cephas; the only other apostle I met was James, the Lord's brother. That was all the contact I had with Jerusalem in my early Christian days; after two weeks there I went off into Syria and Cilicia to preach the faith I had once endeavoured to overthrow. Not until fourteen years had elapsed did I go up to Jerusalem again' (Gal. 1:13-2:la). This narrative is designed to support his claim that he derived the gospel which he preached from no human intermediary but by the revelation of Jesus Christ granted him at Damascus.

Then comes the account of the conference held in Jerusalem between Paul and Barnabas on the one hand and the Jerusalem leaders on the other (Gal. 2:1-10).15 Paul is still careful to maintain his independence-'those men of repute', he says, `added nothing to me (Gal. 2:6), whether in relation to the content of the gospel or the authority to preach it; but they acknowledged the genuineness of the gospel which I was already preaching.' This acknowledgement on their part is implied in his statement that he `laid before them' the gospel which he preached among the Gentiles (2:2). Far from criticizing it or finding it defective, they agreed that, as they themselves had been commissioned to carry the gospel to the Jews, Paul and Barnabas had been commissioned to carry it to the Gentiles.16 Two separate constituencies are distinguished, but there is no suggestion that there were two distinct versions of the gospel for the respective constituencies. In the light of Paul's solemn imprecations in Gal. 1:8f., it is evident that he would have dismissed the possibility of such a thing as preposterous.17 No doubt the approach and emphasis would differ: a considerable body of background knowledge could be assumed in Jewish audiences which pagan audiences lacked. Without prejudging the nature of the sermons in Acts, we can see that Luke takes this for granted: Paul's address in the synagogue of Pisidian Antioch (Acts 13:16-41) presupposes familiarity with a long stretch of sacred history which would have been unintelligible had it been introduced into his Areopagitica at Athens (17:22-31). Again, the circumcision issue did not arise in the mission to Jews, who were circumcised already. It is conceivable that, when Paul and Barnabas shook hands with the Jerusalem leaders on the demarcation of their respective spheres of activity, too much was taken for granted on both sides, and trouble arose when those unventilated questions came into the open. Paul assumed that Cephas saw eye to eye with him on the status of Gentiles in the church, and indeed his assumption was not unfounded if Cephas, on his first coming to Antioch, practised table-fellowship with Gentiles as Paul assures us he did. All the greater was Paul's sense of disillusionment when Cephas withdrew from this table-fellowship at the instance of one or more who `came from James' (Gal. 2:12) and when subsequent attempts were made by people claiming authorization from Jerusalem to intervene in Paul's missionfield. But worse still in his eyes was the urging of circumcision on his Gentile converts as a religious obligation apart from which they could not become genuine children of Abraham and be admitted into the true covenant-community.

Those who urged circumcision on the churches of Galatia no doubt felt quite sincerely that if this practice went by default, even for Gentile believers, the continuity of the history of salvation was interrupted. If the Jerusalem leaders were disposed to waive the circumcision requirement, that simply stamped them as compromisers. As for Paul, who refused to have his Gentile converts circumcised, it was he who was the heretic and they themselves who were orthodox, for they remained faithful to the terms of the unchangeable covenant, which Paul repudiated. One may say, with Otto Kuss, that `faithfulness in matters of factual detail need not amount to faithfulness in regard to the genuine content of the message'; but this simply brings us back to the question of how the genuine content of the message was to be ascertained.18

That salvation was to be found in Jesus Christ was a proposition to which Paul and his judaizing opponents would equally have subscribed. They might even have agreed that salvation was to be found in him alone. But on what conditions was the salvation found in Christ alone to be secured? This was the crucial question. No doubt Jesus did sit very loose to the traditions of the elders,19 but when it was a question of the admission of Gentiles to the fellowship of his disciples, could Paul or any one else adduce a single utterance of his which suggested that circumcision could be dispensed with? (Indeed, when we consider the important part played by the circumcision question in the development of the early church, we may be impressed by the absence from our gospel tradition of any attempt to find a dominical ruling to which one side or the other could have appealed.) Paul might have appealed to the spirit of Jesus' teaching, or (as he did) to the logical implication of the gospel,20 but people like his opponents would be satisfied with nothing less than verbatim chapter-and-verse authority; and this was not forthcoming.

3. Paul's gospel and the teaching of Jesus

From the perspective of nineteen centuries' distance, despite our ignorance of many elements in the situation that were well known to the protagonists, we can probably present an objective argument in defence of Paul's claim that the message he preached was the authentic gospel of Christ. It is this: two things on which Paul pre-eminently insisted-that salvation was provided by God's grace and that faith was the means by which men appropriated it-are repeatedly emphasized in the ministry of Jesus, and especially in his parables, regardless of the strata of gospel tradition to which appeal may be made. When we reflect on the complete lack of evidence in Paul's letters that he knew the parables of Jesus, we may wonder how Paul managed to discern so unerringly the heart of his Master's message. We may suspect that this discernment was implicit in the `revelation of Jesus Christ' which, according to him, was the essence of his conversion experience.

The response of faith regularly won the approval of Jesus, sometimes his surprised approval, as when it came from a Gentile,21 and was a sure means of securing his help and blessing; in face of unbelief, on the other hand, he was inhibited from performing works of mercy and power.22 `Faith as a grain of mustard seed'23 was what he desired to see, but too often looked for in vain, even in his own disciples.

As regards the teaching of the parables, the point we are making can be illustrated from two, belonging to two quite distinct lines of tradition-Luke's special material and Matthew's special material.

In the Lukan parable of the Prodigal Son (Lk. 15:11-32), the father might very well have adopted other means for the rehabilitation of his younger son than those described (with approval) by Jesus. When the black sheep of the family came home in disgrace, the father, having a father's heart, might well have consented to give him a second chance. Listening to his carefully rehearsed speech, he might have said, `That's all very well, young man; we have heard fine phrases before. If you really mean what you say, you can buckle to and work as you have never worked before, and if you do so, we may let you work your passage. But first you must prove yourself; we can't let by-gones be bygones as though nothing had happened' Even that would have been generous; it might have done the young man a world of good, and even the elder brother might have been content to let him be put on probation. But for Jesus, and for Paul, divine grace does not operate like that. God does not put repentant sinners on probation to see how they will turn out; he gives them an unrestrained welcome and invests them as his true-born sons. For Jesus, and for Paul, the initiative always rests with the grace of God. He bestows the reconciliation or redemption; men receive it. `Treat me as one of your hired servants', says the prodigal to his father; but the father speaks of him as `this my son'. So, says Paul, `through God you are no longer a slave but a son, and if a son then an heir' (Gal. 4:7).

In the Matthaean parable of the Labourers in the Vineyard (Mt. 20:1-16), the last-hired workmen did not bargain with their employer about their pay. If a denarius was the fair rate for a day's work, those who worked for the last hour only might have expected a small fraction of that, but they accepted his undertaking to give them `whatever is right' and in the event they received a denarius like the others who had worked all day. The grace of God is not to be parcelled out and adjusted to the varieties of individual merit. There was, as T. W. Manson pointed out, a coin worth one-twelfth of a denarius. `It was called a pondion. But there is no such thing as a twelfth part of the love of God'24

This is completely in line with Paul's understanding of the gospel. If law is the basis of men's acceptance with God, then the details of personal merit and demerit are of the utmost relevance. But the great blessings of the gospel had come to the Galatian Christians, as they knew very well, not by the works of the law but by the response of faith-the faith which works by love.25 And when we speak in terms of love, we are on a plane where law is not at home.

During the ministry, Jesus' action and attitude supplied the parables with a living commentary sufficient to convey their meaning to those who responded in faith; later, the church felt it necessary to supply its own verbal commentary. The eschatological note which sounds in the parables is heard in Paul's teaching about justification by faith.26 `The law was our custodian until Christ came', says Paul, `that we might be justified by faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a custodian; for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith' (Gal. 3:24-26). In other words, as he says to the Romans, `Christ is the end of the law, that every one who has faith may be justified' (Rom. 10:4).27 Already, with the coming of Christ and the completion of his redemptive work, the age of law had come to an end for the people of God. They had not reached the absolute end (the end of 1 Cor. 15:24), but they had reached its thresholdthat period `between the times' during which the presence of the Spirit in their lives confirmed to them their status and heritage as sons and daughters of God (Gal. 4:6): `through the Spirit, by faith, we wait for the hope of righteousness' (Gal. 5:5).

When Paul calls Christ `the end of the law' he is expressing a theological insight. But this insight was based on sound historical fact: many of Paul's fellow-Pharisees who engaged in debate with Jesus during his ministry must have felt that, on a practical level, his conduct and teaching involved `the end of the law'-not only because of his rejection of their oral traditions but because of the sovereignty with which he treated such elements of the written law as the sabbath institution and food regulations. True, as we have seen, he does not appear to have made any pronouncement on the circumcision question. But when we consider how he related the law as a whole to the basic requirements of love to God and love to one's neighbour, and insisted on the paramountcy of heartdevotion, `truth in the inward parts', righteousness, mercy and faith'28 the conclusion is inescapable that he would not have included circumcision among the weightier matters of the law. If no word of his on the subject has survived (apart from the incidental ad hominem argument in the course of a sabbath debate in Jn. 7:22f.), it is simply because the issue did not arise in the situation of his ministry. When, later, it did arise in the situation of the Gentile mission, it is difficult to deny that Paul's position was in keeping with Jesus' general attitude to the externalities of religion.

Paul, like Jesus, shocked the guardians of Israel's law by his insistence on treating the law as a means to an end and not as an end in itself, by his refusal to let pious people seek security before God in their own piety, by his breaking down of barriers in the name of the God who `justifies the ungodly' (Rom. 4:5) and by his proclamation of a message of good news for the outsider. In all this Paul saw more clearly than most of his Christian contemporaries into the inwardness of Jesus' teaching.

4. The law of Christ

After the relegation of law to the status of an outmoded order in the main body of the letter, it might strike one as something of a paradox towards the end of the letter when Paul speaks of `the law of Christ'. `If you are led by the Spirit', he has said, `you are not under law' (Gal. 5:18), but now: `Bear one another's burdens, and so you will fulfil the law of Christ' (Gal. 6:2). Yet we have been prepared for this: the law in the form in which Paul served it in his pre-Christian days has been replaced by something better, but the law as interpreted in the teaching and example of Christ is still in force. The difference for Paul was that the law as he previously knew it was a yoke of bondage, whereas the law of Christ was the way of freedom. `You were called to freedom, my brothers', he writes; `only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love be servants one of another. For the whole law is fulfilled in one word: "You shall love your neighbour as yourself" ' (Gal. 5:13f.).29 On the law as summarized in this `one word' from Lv. 19:18, together with its twin commandment of love to God in Dt. 6:5, Jesus said the whole law and the prophets depended (Mt. 22:40).30 But the nature of law is radically transformed when it is interpreted in terms of love; and it is this transformation which is involved when, in Paul's language, legal bondage gives way to the freedom of the Spirit.

Paul might have heard in the school of Gamaliel something to the effect that the whole law was comprehended in the commandment of love to one's neighbour-in an earlier generation Hillel had summarized it in the injunction, `Do not to another what is hateful to yourself'31-but since he speaks of `the law of Christ' it is a reasonable inference that he knew of the use which Christ had made of Lv. 19:18. `Bear one another's burdens' seems to be a generalizing expansion of the particular instance mentioned in Paul's preceding exhortation: `if a man is overtaken in any trespass, you who are spiritual should restore him in a spirit of gentleness' (Gal. 6:1). This is strangely reminiscent of a dominical injunction preserved only in Matthew's special material:32 `If your brother sins133 go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained your brother' (Mt. 18:15).

It is not so clear in Galatians as it is in some of the other letters of Paul that he fills out the details of `the law of Christ' by drawing on a body of ethical catechesis widely used throughout the churches of his day. It has been pointed out that the recurring triad `faith, hope, love', which seems to have been included in this catechesis, appears in Gal. 5:5f.: `For through the Spirit, by faith, we wait for the hope of righteousness. For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is of any avail, but faith working through love'34 But the three members of the triad are so independently integrated into the context here that it is doubtful if the triad would be, or was intended to be, recognized as such. We may observe, however, that this passage contains the only reference to the parousia in Galatians (for `the hope of righteousness'35 is the hope to which the justification of believers points them forward) and the only reference to the role of the Spirit as the guarantee of this hope.36

As for `faith working through love', Paul held that the faith by which men and women are justified before God finds practical expression in lives which exhibit the law of love. The law of love cannot be enforced by penal sanctions; the fruit of the Spirit, as Paul enumerates its ninefold variety-love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control37-is not produced by legal enactments but simply because it is the nature of a life controlled by the Spirit to produce such fruit. As Paul says, curiously echoing an Aristotelian remark'38 `There is no law dealing with such things as these' (Gal. 5:23). `The Spirit's law of life in Christ Jesus', as he calls it elsewhere (Rom. 8:2), has little more than the term `law' in common with that from which the gospel has liberated him and (he trusts) his Galatian converts.39

Galatians is the most `Pauline' of all the Pauline letters-so much so, indeed, that those who derive their understanding of Paulinism exclusively, or even mainly, from this letter are apt to present a lop-sided construction of the apostle's teaching-to become `more Pauline than Paul',40 like Marcion in the second century. Against the danger of such a lop-sided construction Paul himself provides the necessary safeguards in other letters. But even in this most Pauline letter the careful student may discern how much of the essential gospel Paul had in common with those who were apostles before him and, above all, how much he had in common with Jesus himself.

V

DATE AND

RELATED QUESTIONS

It is strange that, while Galatians is the most indubitably authentic of all the Pauline letters, it should be so difficult to attain certainty on the identity of the addressees and the time at which it was written. It is the most difficult of Paul's `capital letters' to date precisely-more difficult even than 2 Cor. 10-13.

Where and when, in the course of Paul's apostolic career, was this letter written? One traditional way of handling this question is to ask at what point in the record of Acts it should be placed. The better way, however, is to try to establish where it stands, chronologically and otherwise, in relation to his other letters.

1. Galatians and the record of Acts

The former approach is not to be dismissed as irrelevant. One's estimate of its relevance, indeed, will depend on the estimate made of the historical accuracy of the record of Acts. If it is a historical romance, or if the author so misunderstood his sources as to envisage two missionary journeys in Central Asia Minor (those of Acts 13:13-14:23 and 16:1-6) when there was only one, then it is pointless to try to locate Galatians with reference to its narrative. But the position adopted here is that the author of Acts wrote with a historical intention, and that his evidence deserves to be treated seriously and used critically.

The dating of the letter in the context of Acts will depend partly on whether the addressees are regarded as `South Galatians' or `North Galatians'. If they were South Galatians, then the letter could conceivably have been written any time after the end of the missionary expedition related in Acts 13:4-14:26; if, on the other hand, they were North Galatians, it must have been written after the journey summarized in Acts 16:6, when Paul `went through the Phrygian and Galatic region' (i.e. between the Jerusalem Council and the evangelization of Macedonia) and probably after the journey summarized in Acts 18:23, when he traversed `the Galatic region and Phrygia' (i.e. between the end of his eighteen months in Corinth and the beginning of his lengthy stay in Ephesus)-that is to say, not earlier than Paul's Ephesian ministry, and probably during that ministry.'

One remark in the letter which could have a bearing on this problem is Paul's incidental reminder to his readers that `it was because of a bodily ailment that I preached the gospel to you at first' (Gal. 4:13). The phrase `at first' (to npo'cpov) possibly, though not necessarily, implies that by the time he wrote he had paid them at least two visits. Not necessarily, I say, because the words may simply mean `it was bodily illness that originally led to my bringing you the Gospel'. That is how the NEB text has it, although a footnote offers in place of `originally' the alternative renderings `formerly' or `on the first of my two visits'. If Paul's words imply two visits, when were they paid? Proponents of the North Galatian view can point to the two occasions mentioned by Luke when Paul passed through Galatia (Acts 16:6; 18:23).2 On the South Galatian view Paul's first visit was that of Acts 13:14ff., and the implied second one could be his visit to Derbe, Lystra, Iconium and the `Phrygian and Galatic region' (Phrygia Galatica?) recorded in Acts 16:1-6,3 but it could also be taken to refer to Paul and Barnabas's retracing of their steps from Derbe through Lystra and Iconium to Pisidian Antioch at the end of the former visit (Acts 14:21-23).4 In that case it might be possible to date Galatians before the Jerusalem Council of Acts 15:6ff.-i.e. soon after the last event mentioned in the autobiographical outline of Gal. 1:13-2:14. One advantage in this dating is that it would explain why Paul in Galatians does not cut the ground entirely from under the Judaizers' feet by appealing to the Council's ruling that circumcision and all that went with it should not be imposed on Gentile converts.

It is difficult to decide what weight can be given to the phrase `so quickly' (ovt(Os taxEwg) in Gal. 1:6: `I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and turning to a different gospel.' The point of reference is the Galatians' conversion, and the implication is that no very long time had elapsed since it took place. Naturally those who date Galatians rather early among the epistles of Paul feel that they are doing due justice to the phrase `so quickly'-if the addressees were the South Galatians evangelized by Paul and Barnabas (Acts 13:14ff.) and the letter was written on the eve of the Council of Jerusalem (Acts 15), then a bare year had elapsed. But if they were North Galatians a date (preferably early) in Paul's Ephesian residence is indicated, and in any case those who maintain a later date point out quite rightly that `so quickly' is a relative expression. `I cannot think it strange', wrote Bishop Lightfoot, `that the Apostle, speaking of truths destined to outlive the life of kingdoms and of nations, should complain that his converts had so soon deserted from the faith, even though a whole decade of years might have passed since they were first brought to the knowledge of Christ'-although he adds that `so long a period... is not required on any probable hypothesis as to the date of the epistle'.5 Plainly we cannot use `so quickly' as one of our foundation-stones.

2. Galatians and other Pauline letters: Lightfoot's argument

But we must turn now to consider the place of Galatians among the letters of Paul.

Since Galatians goes traditionally along with 1 and 2 Corinthians and Romans as one of Paul's four `capital' epistles, it is natural that it should have been grouped rather closely with them in date. F. C. Baur, for example, thought that the appearance of these four, in the sequence Galatians, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Romans, at the beginning of Marcion's Apostolikon, was inexplicable unless a chronological order was being followed,6 and he himself accepted this as the chronological order of the four.7

Lightfoot acknowledged that in his day this chronological order was `the generally received opinion',8 but gave his reasons for departing from it so as to place Galatians after 2 Corinthians and immediately before Romans. This had the advantage of placing Galatians next in date to the two epistles with which he believed it to exhibit the greatest degree of affinity.

The close relationship between Galatians and Romans9 has led many scholars, like Lightfoot, to prefer a date for Galatians not far removed from that of Romans, which can be fixed fairly precisely during the winter preceding Paul's last visit to Jerusalem (cf. Rom. 15:25ff.; Acts 20:2ff.). The insistence on justification by faith, not by legal works, with the citation of Hab. 2:4 in the sense `He who through faith is righteous shall live' (Gal. 3:11; Rom. 1:17) and the appeal to the precedent of Abraham, who `believed God, and it was reckoned to him for righteousness' (Gn. 15:6, quoted in Gal. 3:6; Rom. 4:3), figures prominently in the argument of both letters. So does the interpretation of the promise made to Abraham as fulfilled in the Gentile mission, although the testimonia adduced are different in the two letters-in Gal. 3:8, `In you shall all the nations be blessed' (Gn. 12:3; 18:18); in Rom. 4:17, `I have made you the father of many nations' (Gn. 17:5). The statement in Gal. 5:17, that `the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh; for these are opposed to each other, to prevent you from doing what you would', has been thought to be amplified in the picture of inner tension drawn in Rom. 7:14-25,10 while the admonition `Walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh' (Gal. 5:16) might serve as a summary of Rom. 8:1-17. Both letters bring out the close relation between the Christian's freedom from slavery to sin or from legal bondage and his being led by the Spirit (Gal. 5:18; Rom. 8:14), at whose prompting he acknowledges his new status as a son of God and joint-heir with Christ in the invocation `Abba, Father"I (Gal. 4:6; Rom. 8:15f.). In both letters the law of God is summed up in the single commandment: `Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself'12 (Gal. 5:14; Rom. 13:9).

All this comes to expression in Galatians in a situation of anxiety, indignation and conflict; in Romans it is expounded more dispassionately and in a more logical sequence. Yet we need not suppose that the understanding and presentation of the gospel which we find in Galatians first took shape in Paul's mind under the exigencies of the judaizing controversy which called forth that letter. It is true that in certain areas of Paul's thinking a progression can be traced as we move from his earlier letters to his later ones.13 But on such a fundamental matter as the way of salvation it would be surprising to find a progression sufficiently marked to affect the centre of his thinking. If the evidence clearly demanded this, we should accept it, but the evidence makes no such demand.14

But at present we must bear in mind the relatively brief interval of time between Paul's earliest letters and those of the Roman captivity-not much, if at all, more than twelve years. (If some or all of the letters traditionally assigned to his Roman captivity were written during an earlier captivity, then the interval is further reduced.) If we leave the letters of the Roman captivity out of our reckoning, and think only of the `capital letters' and the Thessalonian correspondence, they were written within nine years at the outside. Most of the letters would have been written when Paul was in his fifties. He had experienced his revolutionary conversion in (probably) his early thirties; from then on the main features of his belief were sufficiently stable to make it no surprising thing to find him repeating them at an interval of several years when an appropriate occasion arose.

Johannes Weiss is probably right in pointing to Paul's `hidden years', before he joined Barnabas at Antioch, as the most formative in the development of his Christian thought, whereas `in the letters we have to do with the fully matured man'. He is too sweeping in his judgment when he goes on to say that `the "development" which some think they can discern in the period of his lettersten years, at the most-is not worth considering at all';15 but his words provide a salutary corrective to excessive speculation about Paul's inner development. A mind like Paul's does not stop growing at the mid-century point, but it tends to advance along lines whose general direction has been determined during the preceding years. Paul may equally well have reproduced in Romans some of the distinctive positions of Galatians whether Galatians was written one year or ten years before.

The affinity between Galatians and 2 Corinthians, Lightfoot held, was of a different order; it consisted `not so much in words and arguments as in tone and feeling'.16 He quoted Benjamin Jowett to this effect: in both Galatians and 2 Corinthians, said Jowett, `there is a greater display of his own feelings than in any other portion of his writings, a deeper contrast of inward exaltation and outward suffering, more of personal entreaty, a greater readiness to impart him- self'.17 This is indeed true, although I think the resemblance thus described is due to the fact that Paul's emotions were deeply stirred on both occasions rather than to the chronological contiguity of the two letters.

Lightfoot himself, however, added further considerations: e.g. the parallel between Christ's being `made a curse for us' in Gal. 3:13 and his being `made sin for us' in 2 Cor. 5:21; the repetition of the sowing-and-reaping sequence as an ethical figure in Gal. 6:7 and 2 Cor. 9:6; such common phrases as `a different gospel' (Gal. 1:6; 2 Cor. 11:4), `a new creation' (Gal. 6:15; 2 Cor. 5:17), to be `zealously concerned for' people (Gal. 4:17; 2 Cor. 11:2), to `persuade men' (Gal. 1:10; 2 Cor. 5:11). In the lists of vices in 2 Cor. 12:20f., Gal. 5:19-21 and Rom. 1:29f. and 13:13 he was disposed to find the middle term in the Galatians passage.18 More important, however, in his eyes was the progression which he traced from the Corinthian correspondence through Galatians to Romans in respect of Paul's personal history (the `marks of Jesus' in Gal. 6:17 being perhaps the result of the experiences of 1 Cor. 15:30-32; 2 Cor. 1:8-10),19 the development of the Judaic opposition and the increasingly full exposition of the truth of the gospel. The admonition with regard to the restoration of offenders in Gal. 6:1 might have as its background the restoration of the Corinthian offender in 2 Cor. 2:5-11 (cf. 7:1If.); the warning that `God is not mocked' coupled with the admonition to persevere in well-doing (Gal. 6:7-10) might reflect the Galatian churches' slowness in contributing to the Jerusalem fund regarding which they had received instructions from Paul before he wrote 1 Cor. 16:1. Lightfoot's argument is cumulative, but when its several parts are allowed to make their combined impression, then, he says, if the Corinthian correspondence is interposed between Galatians and Romans, `the dislocation is felt at once'.20

To Lightfoot, 2 Corinthians formed one continuous letter, whereas the majority opinion today is that it is composite-in particular, that chapters 1-9 and 10-13 did not originally belong to the same letter. In adducing evidence from 2 Corinthians suggesting that it was written before Galatians, he adduces it from both parts of the letter as we have it, but especially from chapters 10-13. And the resemblance in tone between 2 Cor. 10-13 and the whole of Galatians is sufficiently obvious to call for no elaboration.

3. Galatians and other Pauline letters: C. H. Buck's argument

A fresh investigation of the relation borne by Galatians to 2 Corinthians on the one hand and to Romans on the other was published in 1951 by C. H. Buck, Jr. in an important article contributed to the Journal of Biblical Literature.21 Ignoring the last four chapters of 2 Corinthians because of uncertainty regarding their date, Buck concentrated on chapters 1-9. He presented a synoptic arrangement of 2 Cor. 3:17; 4:10-5:5 with Gal. 4:1-7; 5:13-25 and Rom. 8:2-25 so as to show that the last passage `reproduces with remarkable fidelity the logical outlines of arguments which also occur in II Corinthians 1-9 and Galatians''22 drawing words and arguments from the two earlier letters, conflating ideas which originally were formally separate in such a way as to reveal that they shared the same underlying thought and application. For example, when Paul speaks in Rom. 8:23 of believers 'who have the first fruits of the Spirit', groaning inwardly as they wait for `adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies', he combines the idea of `adoption as sons' (vtoOeo(a), which is treated at some length in Galatians, with that of 'the redemption of our bodies', which is the subject of 2 Cor. 4:16-5: 10. (It may be observed, in passing, that the treatment in Romans reflects a further development: in Romans what believers have received here and now is `the spirit of adoption or sonship', enabling them to anticipate the full `adoption as sons' which will be manifested at the parousia, whereas in Galatians they have received their adoption as sons already, thanks to God's sending his Son to redeem them, and because they are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into their hearts.)

This, however, would simply confirm that Romans was later than both 2 Cor. 1-9 and Galatians; Buck believes it possible to go further in the confirmation of Lightfoot's thesis and show that Galatians, while earlier than Romans, was later than 2 Cor. 1-9. He points out that the antithesis Spirit-flesh occurs in 2 Cor. 1-9, Galatians and Romans whereas the antithesis faith-works, which is intimately associated with the former antithesis in Galatians, is absent from 2 Corinthians, even in a `discussion of the identical problem'-the question of Christian freedom. `If Paul had already written Galatians', he asks, `is it conceivable that he could, at some later time, have written II Corinthians 1-9, with its vehement anti-legal position, without once employing the antithesis, faith- works?'23 The only way to give an affirmative answer to this question, he concludes, would be to assume that, having used the faith-works antithesis in Galatians, Paul `then decided to abandon this line of argument and therefore consciously avoided it in II Corinthians 1-9' and `that shortly after the writing of II Corinthians 1-9 Paul again changed his mind and in Romans revived the abandoned argument'. The improbability of this twofold assumption forces him `to the conclusion that Galatians was written not only before Romans but also after II Corinthians 1-9',24 and this conclusion, in the light of his arguments, has commended itself to others as inescapable.25

But 2 Cor. 1-9 is not concerned with the `identical problem' tackled in Galatians, nor does it take up such a `vehement anti-legal position' as Galatians does. In 2 Cor. 1-9 Paul displays for the most part a relaxed, almost euphoric, frame of mind, in his relief at the good news brought to him by Titus from Corinth; there is none of the intense agitation which marks Galatians. The only passage in 2 Cor. 1-9 which could properly be called `anti-legal' is chapter 3, and there Paul is not, as in Galatians, warning his readers against seeking salvation in works of the law but emphasizing the glory of the new covenant, to the ministry of which he has been called, by contrasting it with the evanescent glory of the old covenant. And the antithesis which he employs in this connection is Spirit-letter (vv 6, 7), not Spirit-flesh; the substantive `flesh' (oOtp~) does not appear in this chapter, and when the adjective `fleshy' (a6extvos) is used, it relates to the new covenant, not to the old: the terms of the new covenant are inscribed not (like those of the old) `on stone tablets' but `on fleshy tablets, i.e. on hearts' (eV rrXa~1v xaQSiats oaexlvats). This, of course, is the literal usage of the word, not Paul's distinctive theological usage, but the theological usage occurs in 2 Cor. 1-9 only in the phrase `after the flesh' (xattx o6 Qx(x, 1:17; 5:16 bis), and if `after the flesh' is in antithesis to `after the Spirit' (xata ,nvsvµa), the antithesis is implied, not expressed. The antithesis Spirit-letter of 2 Cor. 3:6f. is taken up again in Romans (2:29; 7:6), although it is absent from Galatians. One could imagine Buck's rhetorical question being reworded thus: `If Paul had already written 2 Corinthians 1-9, is it conceivable that he could, at some later time, have written Galatians, with its vehement anti-legal position, without once employing the antithesis, Spirit-letter?' If Buck is right, it must be conceivable, because this is what he believes to have happened; but if that is conceivable, it is equally conceivable that Paul, having used the faith-works antithesis in Galatians, because it was so apposite to the Galatian crisis, did not use it in 2 Cor. 1-9, because it was not apposite to the Corinthian situation, but used it again in Romans, together with the antitheses Spirit-flesh (as in Galatians) and Spirit-letter (as in 2 Corinthians), because in Romans he was concerned to give a more comprehensive and systematic exposition of the gospel. Conclusions about relative dating based on considerations like these are not so compelling as Buck suggests.

Much the same might be said about the arguments of C. E. Faw who, writing ten years later,26 dotted the i's and crossed the is of the case made by Lightfoot and Buck for dating Galatians between 2 Corinthians and Romans, and added some emphases of his own regarding the development of Paul's acceptance of death, his employment of death and resurrection in a symbolic sense and his special use of "crucifixion" to denote symbolic death.27

4. Justification by faith and the date of Galatians

Buck combines his dating of Galatians between 2 Cor. 1-9 and Romans with the view, alluded to above, that the doctrine of justification by faith, `while not necessarily incompatible with Paul's earlier doctrine, was actually formulated and expressed by him for the first time when he found it necessary to answer the arguments of the Judaizers in Galatia'.2S This view, which is not essential to Buck's dating of Galatians, was in some degree anticipated by William Wrede, according to whom justification by faith is Paul's `polemical doctrine' and `is only made intelligible by the struggle of his life, his controversy with Judaism and Jewish Christianity, and is only intended for this'.29 Buck's statement of this view is indeed much more moderate than Wrede's. For Wrede, `the whole Pauline religion can be expounded without a word being said about this doc trine'30-an odd assertion, when we reflect that in Paul's own exposition of his gospel, the letter to the Romans, written in a non-polemical situation, he gives justification by faith a cardinal place.31

It is true that several of Paul's positions took the form they did in response to lines of argument and teaching which he found it necessary to oppose.12 But the essence of justification by faith was more probably implicit in the logic of his conversion. If the former Pharisee no longer hoped for acceptance with God on the ground of his devotion to the Torah, on what ground did his assurance of such acceptance thenceforth rest? It may have been late in his career that Paul wrote of his ambition to `gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own, based on law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith' (Phil. 3:8f.); but there was never a time, from his conversion onward, when he could not have used the same words. When, in Gal. 2:20, he says that `the life which I now live in the flesh33 I live by faith34 in the Son of God', there is no hint that he is using a new form of words which had just taken shape under the exigency of confuting the Judaizers in Galatia. And the argument of Gal. 3:10-14, where Christ, by dying the death which incurred the divine curse, transferred to himself the curse which his people had incurred by breaking the law,35 must have commended itself to Paul sooner rather than later in his Christian career as the solution to the intolerably scandalous problem which he had previously found in the Christian claimthat the Messiah, upon whom, practically by definition, the blessing of God rested uniquely, should nevertheless have suffered the death upon which, according to the law, the curse of God rested explicitly.

The centrality of Paul's doctrine of justification to his whole conception of the gospel, not only in polemical situations, is given proper emphasis by some contemporary German theologians. For example, Gunther Bornkamm, in his monograph on Paul, shows that `Paul's doctrine of justification is to be regarded not as theological theorizing on the primitive gospel, but as its proper development and exposition'.36 Paul's soteriology is the interpretation of his Christology: `to set out the gospel concerning Christ as a gospel of justification, and vice versa, is a decisive concern of his whole theology.'37 And Ernst Kasemann, in his Perspectives on Paul, affirms that `the Pauline doctrine of justification is entirely and solely Christology, a Christology, indeed, won from Jesus' cross and hence an offensive Christology'.38 It is a polemical or `fighting doctrine'39 indeed, but not on that account a subordinate element in Paul's gospel, for the attitudes and presuppositions against which it fights are not simply those of firstcentury Judaism but attitudes and presuppositions which equally require to be opposed in the twentieth century and cannot be effectively opposed except by this `fighting doctrine', which alone is `the break-through to the new creation'.40 Kasemann is no mean fighter himself, and speaks from personal experience as well as from exegetical insight.

5. Other arguments

Some reference should be made to C. H. Dodd's correlation of what he regarded as the probable sequence of Paul's letters with the evidence of development in Paul's thought.41 He believed that the `affliction in Asia' mentioned in 2 Cor. 1:8-10 marked a psychological watershed, if not `a sort of second conversion', in Paul's experience, after which `the traces of fanaticism and intolerance [found in some of his earlier letters] disappear, almost if not quite completely, along with all that insistence on his own dignity'.42 In Dodd's view, such letters as Galatians and 2 Cor. 10-13, in which these features are discernible, were written before this psychological watershed, whereas 2 Cor. 1-9, from which they have practically disappeared, should (at least for the most part)43 self-evidently be dated after it. There is much to be said for Dodd's exposition of 'the mind of Paul', but I cannot go all the way with him, for, while I too recognize in 2 Cor. 10-13 a separate letter from chapters 1-9, I am disposed to date it later, not earlier, than chapters 1-9.44 I am unable therefore to appeal to Dodd's thesis in support of a date for Galatians earlier than that of 2 Cor. 1-9 since, if 2 Cor. 10-13 could have been written after 2 Cor. 1-9, so (theoretically) could Galatians.

T. W. Manson dated Galatians to Paul's Ephesian period (although to him the recipients were the South Galatians).45 Pointing out that Paul devotes twofifths of the letter to defending his apostolic status against a violent attack, and a further two-fifths to a counter-attack against the position of the circumcision party, he observed that `the only time when Paul appears to have had to face an attack of this kind and of this gravity is in the Ephesian period; and the situation revealed in the Philippian and Corinthian letters is, I think, substantially that presupposed by Galatians'.46 I am not so sure, however, that Paul's apostolic status was seriously called in question during one phase only of his apostolic career; those who challenged it were liable to do so whenever an opportunity arose. And the judaizing propaganda of the Corinthian correspondence seems to me to belong to a later stage than that of Galatians. In the Galatian crisis pressure was put upon Paul's Gentile converts to accept circumcision in particular (with other features of Judaism like the sacred calendar); in the Corinthian crisis circumcision does not appear to have figured (it is mentioned incidentally and uncontroversially in 1 Cor. 7:18f.). The reason, I believe, is that after the publication of the apostolic decree of Acts 15:20, 29, it would have been difficult for judaizing preachers invoking the authority of the leaders of the Jerusalem church to impose circumcision on Gentile Christians.41 What they did try to impose on the Corinthian church was the literal force of the food-regulations annexed to the decree, regarding which Paul took a more liberal and enlightened line.48 (The syncretism at Colossae, in which circumcision played a part, was a local Phrygian development, not something imposed by Judaean emissaries, and it is not clear whether the `mutilation party' against which the Philippians are put on their guard comprised Jews or judaizing Christians.)49

An attractive account of the relation of Galatians to the three other `capital epistles' has been put forward by John Drane.50 The strong libertarian emphasis of Galatians (necessary in dealing with Christians who were being drawn into legalism) was apt to be misapplied by some converts from paganism. This is shown by the enthusiasts in the Corinthian church who (without necessarily having read Galatians) turned the liberty with which Christ had set them free into a gnosticizing type of antinomianism (the very thing against which Paul issues a warning in Gal. 5:13) and adopted the slogan `Everything is permissible' (1 Cor. 6:12; 10:23). In 1 Corinthians Paul counteracts this tendency by laying down limits and guiding-lines which some of his converts might have had difficulty in distinguishing from a new code of rules and regulations. In 2 Corinthians and Romans it is possible to recognize a synthesis of the extremes which find expression in the two earlier letters.

It might be thought that Drane has imposed a Hegelian pattern on the Pauline correspondence, but that is not so: the pattern emerged from his study of the documents. And it was not in the interests of this pattern that he dated Galatians earliest of the four letters; he had accepted that dating on independent grounds before embarking on this particular study.

When the epistles are read in the light of this thesis, several of their features appear in a fresh light. For example, the emphasis on the gospel as `tradition' in 1 Corinthians could be understood as balancing the emphasis on the gospel as `revelation' in Galatians. The rather detailed ethical directives and caveats given in 1 Corinthians ('Everything is permissible, but..:) could be regarded as correctives to false inferences drawn from Paul's insistence on Christian freedom. Even the exhortations to women in 1 Corinthians about public decorum in dress and utterance could be regarded as correctives to an irresponsible exploitation of his principle that in Christ there is `no male and female' (Gal. 3:28), although this is more doubtful.51 Even if Drane's thesis-antithesis-synthesis pattern be accepted, it could not be used as an argument for the early date of Galatians, since it presupposes the early date.

6. Galatians and Thessalonians

Thus far nothing has been said about the relation of Galatians to 1 and 2 Thessalonians, but the earlier Galatians is dated, the more necessary it becomes to consider this relation. Above all, if Galatians is to be dated before the promulgation of the Jerusalem decree of Acts 15:28f., then it is earlier than 1 and 2 Thessalonians. But both in evangelism and in eschatology the Thessalonian letters give the impression of being less developed than Galatians.

So far as evangelism is concerned, the words of 1 Thes. 1:9, `you turned to God from idols, to serve a living and true God', might have been applied to Jewish proselytes from paganism. But such proselytes would have been told that the next stage was an undertaking to keep the law of Moses; this would, among other things, safeguard them on the day of final judgment. The Thessalonian Christians were told, on the other hand, that the corollary to serving the living and true God was waiting for his Son from heaven, Jesus, whom he had raised from the dead; he would safeguard them on the day of final judgment, delivering them from the wrath to come' (1 Thes. 1:10). So far as turning to God from idols is concerned, the Galatians are reminded that they have done just that (Gal. 4:8f.) and are urged not to act in a manner inconsistent with their having done so. But in Galatians, as in the other capital epistles, the content of Christian salvation is expressed in richer terms-of being justified before God through faith in Christ and entering into the enjoyment of all the blessings which flow from justification. There is little enough about this in the Thessalonian correspondence.

So far as eschatology is concerned, Paul's teaching is as clear, though not as detailed, in Galatians as anywhere else in his letters. The coming of Christ has inaugurated a new phase in the history of God's dealings with his people: with his appearance the `fulness of the time' has come (Gal. 4:4); the age of law has been superseded by the age of the Spirit. Believers in Christ have been delivered by his death from `the present evil age' (1:4)-which implies that they have become heirs of the new, resurrection age, whose blessings they enjoy by anticipation through the Spirit. It is through the Spirit that, by faith, they `wait for the hope of righteousness' (Gal. 5:5)-the glory into which they will enter at the consummation. This is the nearest Paul comes in Galatians to speaking of the parousia.52 The contrast between this reticence and the apocalyptic note in 1 and 2 Thessalonians cannot be overlooked.53

Is it likely that the apostle, whose expectation of an early parousia finds such repeated and vivid expression in 1 and 2 Thessalonians, should refer to the subject so briefly and allusively in a letter written earlier than either of these? If Paul's thought be pictured as maturing from a more apocalyptic to a less apocalyptic conception of things to come, from the outlook of 1 and 2 Thessalonians to that of 2 Corinthians and Romans, then Galatians belongs to the later stage, not to the earlier. Against this it might be argued that it is hazardous to plot the development of Paul's thought on the basis of occasional letters each of which dealt with a situation as it arose, that the apocalyptic note of 1 and 2 Thessalonians represents Paul's reaction to the eschatological excitement in the church of Thessalonica, just as the quite different note of Galatians represents his reaction to the legalism which was infiltrating the churches of Galatia. If the main emphases of Galatians are given at best a secondary place in the Thessalonian correspondence, it might be asked, why should it be surprising that the main emphases of I and 2 Thessalonians receive barely secondary attention in Galatians?

It is apposite to recall F. C. Burkitt's treatment of this problem, as it is for any one who (like him) dates Galatians before the Jerusalem decree. He argued that I and 2 Thessalonians, `while full of genuinely Pauline ideas and expressions', should be taken to be, `as they profess to be, the Letters of Paul and Silvanus and Timothy, and that this means that whoever was the scribe they were drafted by Silvanus'.54 Silvanus, then, might be responsible for those aspects of the Thessalonian letters which present such a contrast to the tone of Galatiansand this, with modification, remains an acceptable thesis.ss

7. Conclusion

A comparative study of Galatians alongside those Pauline letters which can be more certainly dated is not decisive for the dating of this letter. But nothing in such a comparative study prohibits our giving Galatians a place quite early among the Pauline letters, if an early place appears probable on other grounds. When, as we are told in Acts 15:1, Judaean visitors came to Syrian Antioch and started to teach the Christians there that those who were not circumcised in accordance with the law of Moses could not be saved, it is antecedently probable that others who wished to press the same line visited the recently formed daughter-churches of Antioch, not only in Syria and Cilicia, as the apostolic letter indicates (Acts 15:23), but also in South Galatia. If so, then the letter to the Galatians was written as soon as Paul got news of what was afoot, on the eve of the Jerusalem meeting described in Acts 15:6ff. This, it is suggested, would yield the most satisfactory correlation of the data of Galatians and Acts and the most satisfactory dating of Galatians. It must be conceded that, if this is so, Galatians is the earliest among the extant letters of Paul.56 I know of no evidence to make this conclusion impossible, or even improbable. Even on this early dating, Paul had been a Christian for at least fifteen years, and the main outlines of his understanding of the gospel, which took shape from his Damascus-road experience, would have been as well defined by then as they were ever likely to be. Galatians, whatever its date, is a most important document of primitive Christianity, but if it is the earliest extant Christian document, its importance is enhanced.

VI

STRUCTURE

1. SALUTATION (1:1-5)

H. NO OTHER GOSPEL (1:6- 10)

(a) Paul's indignant astonishment (1:6-9)

(b) Paul is no men-pleaser (1:10)

III. AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH: PAUL'S INDEPENDENT GOSPEL (1:11-2:14)

(a) Paul's gospel received by revelation (1:11-12)

(b) Paul's earlier career (1:13-14)

(d) Paul meets the Jerusalem church leaders (1:18-20)

(e) Paul in Syria and Cilicia (1:21-24)

(f) Conference in Jerusalem (2:1-10)

(g) Conflict at Antioch (2:11-14)

IV. FAITH RECEIVES THE PROMISE (2:15-5:1)

(a) Both Jews and Gentiles are justified by faith (2:15-21)

(b) The primacy of faith over law (3:1-6)

(d) The curse of the law (3:10-14)

(e) The priority and permanence of the promise (3:15-18)

(f) The purpose of the law (3:19-22)

(g) Liberation from the law (3:23-25)

(h) Jews and Gentiles one in Christ (3:26-29)

(i) From slavery to sonship (4:1-7)

(j) No turning back! (4:8-11)

(k) Personal appeal (4:12-20)

(1) A lesson from scripture (4:21-5:1)

V. CHRISTIAN FREEDOM (5:2-12)

(a) The law demands total commitment (5:2-6)

(b) Stern words for the trouble-makers (5:7-12)

Vl. FLESH AND SPIRIT (5:13-26)

(a) The way of love (5:13-15)

(b) Walking by the Spirit (5:16-18)

(d) The fruit of the Spirit (5:22-26)

VII. MUTUAL HELP AND SERVICE (6:1-10)

VIII. CONCLUDING COMMENTS AND FINAL GREETING (6:11-18)

(a) The true ground of boasting (6:11-16)

(b) The marks of Jesus (6:17)

This analysis, on which the following commentary is based, may help the reader, as it has helped the commentator, to appreciate the flow of Paul's argument; it is not claimed that it corresponds to Paul's conscious strategy in constructing his argument.

Among suggestions about the structure of the epistle, special mention must be made of the case persuasively presented by Hans Dieter Betz, who recognizes in it an example of the `apologetic letter' genre, constructed according to contemporary rhetorical principles with the following main divisions: (i) epistolary prescript (1:1-5); (ii) exordium (1:6-11); (iii) narratio (1:12-2:14); (iv) propositio (2:15-21); (v) probatio (3:1-4:31); (vi) exhortatio (5:1-6:10); (vii) epistolary postscript or conclusio (6:11-18).' Betz's analysis corresponds well enough to the development of Paul's argument; one may wonder, however, if in the excitement and urgency of the crisis with which he was suddenly confronted Paul would have been consciously careful to construct his letter according to the canons of the rhetorical schools.

VII

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. COMMENTARIES AND MONOGRAPHS ON GALATIANS

(a) Early Church

Syriac

Ephrem: S. Ephraemi Syri commentarii in epistolas D. Pauli, nunc primum ex Armenio in Latinum sermonem a patribus Mekhitaristis translati (Venice, 1893).

Greek

Chrysostom: S. Joannis Chrysostomi interpretatio omnium epistolarum paulinarum per homilias facto, ed. F. Field (Oxford, 1852), ETr in NPNF, series 1. 13, 1-48.

Theodore of Mopsuestia: Theodori episcopi Mopsuesteni in epistolas B. Pauli commentarii I-11, ed. H. B. Swete (Cambridge, 1880-1882): I, 1-111.

Theodoret of Cyrus: B. Theodoreti episcopi Cyrensis interpretatio epistolae ad Galatas (PG 82.459-504).

See also: Staab, K., Pauluskommentare aus der griechischen Kirche aus Kate- nenhandschriften gesammelt and herausgegeben, NTAb 15 (Munster, 1933).

Latin

C. Marius Victorinus: Marii Victorini Afri commentarii in epistulas Pauli, ed. A. Locher, Bibliotheca Teubneriana (Leipzig, 1972): Ad Galatas.

Ambrosiaster: Ambrosiastri qui dicitur commentarius in epistulas paulinas, ed. H. J. Vogels, CSEL 81, I-III (Vienna, 1966-69): Ad Galatas, 111.3-68.

Jerome: S. Eusebii Hieronymi... commentariorum in epistolam ad Galatas libri tres (PL 26.331-468).

Augustine: S. Aurelii Augustini Hipponensis episcopi epistulae ad Galatas ex- positionis Tiber unus (PL 35.2105-2148).

Pelagius: Pelagius's exposition of thirteen epistles of St. Paul, ed. A. Souter, I-III, TS 9 (Cambridge, 1922-31): Ad Galatas, 11.306-343.

See also: Souter, A., The Earliest Latin Commentaries on the Epistles of St. Paul (Oxford, 1927).

(b) Reformation Period

Luther, M., Luthers Vorlesung uber den Galaterbrief, 1516/17, ed. H. von Schubert, AHAW, phil.-hist. Kl. (Heidelberg, 1918).

Luther, M., In epistolam Pauli ad Galatas M. Lutheri commentarius, 1518119. WA 2, 443-618.

Luther, M., In epistolam S. Pauli ad Galatas commentarius ex praelectione D. Martini Lutheri collectus, 1531/35. WA 40/1-2.

Luther, M., ETr. Lectures on Galatians, ed. J. Pelikan, Luther's Works, American edition, 26-27 (St. Louis, 1963-64)

Luther, M., ETr: A Commentary on St. Paul's Epistle to the Galatians. A revised and completed translation based on the `Middleton' edition of the English version of 1575, ed. P. S. Watson (London, 1953).

Calvin, J., Commentarius in Epistolam ad Galatas (Geneva, 1548).

Calvin, J., ETr: The Epistles of Paul the Apostle to the Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians and Colossians, trans. T. H. L. Parker (Edinburgh, 1965), 3-119.

(c) Modern Period

Alford, H., The Greek Testament, I-IV (London and Cambridge, 1874-80): III, 1-67.

Allan, J. A., The Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Galatians, Torch Commentaries (London, 1951).

Amiot, F., Saint Paul: Epitre aux Galates (Paris, 1946).

Askwith, E. H., The Epistle to the Galatians: An Essay on its Destination and Date (London, 1902).

Bentley, R., Critica Sacra, ed. A. A. Ellis (Cambridge, 1862): Epistola Beati Pauli Apostoli ad Galatas, 93-117.

Betz, H. D., Galatians: A Commentary on Paul's Letter to the Churches in Galatia, Hermeneia (Philadelphia, 1979).

Beyer, H. W., Der Brief an die Galater. Neu bearbeitet von P. Althaus, NTD (Gottingen, 81962).

Bligh, J., Galatians: A Discussion of St. Paul's Epistle (London, 1969).

Bligh, J., Galatians in Greek (Detroit, 1966).

Blunt, A. W. F., The Epistle to the Galatians, Clarendon Bible (Oxford, 1925).

Bonnard, E, L'Epitre de Saint Paul aux Galates, CNT (Neuchatel & Paris, 21972).

Bousset, W., `Der Brief an die Galater', Die Schriften des Neuen Testaments, II (Gottingen, 31917), 28-72.

Bring, R., Commentary on Galatians, ETr (Philadelphia, 1961).

Bruggen, J. van, 'Na Veertien Jaren': De datering van het in Galaten 2 genoemde overleg to Jerusalem (Kampen, 1973).

Burton, E. DeWitt, The Epistle to the Galatians, ICC (Edinburgh, 1921).

Cole, R. A., The Epistle of Paul to the Galatians, TNTC (London, 1965).

Duncan, G. S., The Epistle of Paul to the Galatians, MNTC (London, 1934).

Eckert, J., Die urchristliche Verkundigung im Streit zwischen Paulus and seinen Gegnern nach dem Galaterbrief, BU 6 (Regensburg, 1971).

Emmet, C. W., St. Paul's Epistle to the Galatians, Readers' Commentary (London, 1912).

Findlay, G. G., The Epistle to the Galatians, Expositor's Bible (London, 1888).

Grayston, K., The Epistles to the Galatians and to the Philippians, Epworth Commentaries (London, 1957).

Guthrie, D., Galatians, NCB (London, 1969).

Harvey, A. E., The New English Bible: Companion to the New Testament (Oxford/Cambridge, 1970), 598-616.

Hendriksen, W., Exposition of Galatians, New Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids, 1968).

Hogg, C. F., and Vine, W. E., The Epistle to the Galatians (London/Glasgow, 1922).

Howard, G., Paul: Crisis in Galatia, SNTSM 35 (Cambridge, 1979).

Huxtable, E., The Epistle to the Galatians, Pulpit Commentary (London, 1880).

Kelly, W., Lectures on the Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Galatians (London, 1865).

Lagrange, M.-J., Saint Paul, Epitre aux Galates (Paris, 21925).

Lietzmann, H., An die Galater, HNT (Tubingen, 21923).

Lightfoot, J. B., Saint Paul's Epistle to the Galatians (London, 1865). Loisy, A., L'Epitre aux Galates (Paris, 1916).

Luhrmann, D., Der Brief an die Galater, Zurcher Bibelkommentare (Zurich, 1978).

Liitgert, W., Gesetz and Geist: eine Untersuchung zur Vorgeschichte des Galaterbriefes, BFCT 22/6 (Giitersloh, 1919).

Machen, J. G., Notes on Galatians, ed. J. H. Skilton (Philadelphia, 1972).

Mussner, F., Der Galaterbrief, Herders TKNT (Freiburg, 31977).

Neil, W., The Letter of Paul to the Galatians, CBC (Cambridge, 1967).

Oepke, A., Der Brief des Paulus an die Galater, THK (Berlin, 21957).

O'Neill, J. C., The Recovery of Paul's Letter to the Galatians (London, 1972).

Quesnell, Q., The Gospel of Christian Freedom (New York, 1969).

Ramos, F. P., La Libertad en la Carta a los Galatas (Madrid, 1977).

Ramsay, W. M., A Historical Commentary on St. Paul's Epistle to the Galatians (London, 1899).

Rendall, F., `The Epistle of Paul to the Galatians,' Expositor's Greek Testament III (London, 1903), 121-200.

Ridderbos, H. N., The Epistle of Paul to the Churches of Galatia, NICNT (Grand Rapids, 1953).

Ropes, J. H., The Singular Problem of the Epistle to the Galatians, Harvard Theological Studies 14 (Cambridge, Mass., 1929).

Round, D., The Date of St. Paul's Epistle to the Galatians (Cambridge, 1906).

Schlier, H., Der Brief an die Galater, KEK (Gottingen, 51971).

Sieffert, F, Der Brief an die Galater, KEK (Gottingen, °1899).

Stamm, R. T., `The Epistle to the Galatians', lB X (Nashville, 1953), 427-593.

Steinmann, A., Die Abfassungszeit des Galaterbriefes (Munster, 1906).

Steinmann, A., Der Leserkreis des Galaterbriefes (Munster, 1908).

Tenney, M. C., Galatians: The Charter of Christian Liberty (Grand Rapids, 1950).

Weber, V., Die Abfassung des Galaterbriefes vor dem Apostelkonzil (Ravensburg, 1900).

Weber, V., Die Adressaten des Galaterbriefes: Beweis der rein siidgalatischen Theorie (Ravensburg, 1900).

Zahn, T., Der Brief des Paulus an die Galater, ZK (Leipzig, 31922).

2. COMMENTARIES AND MONOGRAPHS ON OTHER NEW TESTAMENT BOOKS

Acts

Blunt, A. W. F., The Acts of the Apostles, Clarendon Bible (Oxford, 1922).

Cadbury, H. J., The Book of Acts in History (New York, 1955).

Dibelius, M., Studies in the Acts of the Apostles, ETr (London, 1956).

Ehrhardt, A., The Acts of the Apostles: Ten Lectures (Manchester, 1969).

Findlay, J. A., The Acts of the Apostles (London, 1934).

Haenchen, E., The Acts of the Apostles, ETr (Oxford, 1971).

Harnack, A., The Acts of the Apostles, ETr (London, 1909).

Hengel, M., Acts and the History of Earliest Christianity, ETr (London, 1979).

Jackson, F. J. F., and Lake, K. (ed.), The Beginnings of Christianity I.1-5 (London, 1920-33).

Knox, W. L., The Acts of the Apostles (Cambridge, 1948).

Marshall, I. H. The Acts of the Apostles, TNTC (Leicester, 1980).

O'Neill, J. C., The Theology of Acts in its Historical Setting (London, 21970).

Wendt, H. H., Die Apostelgeschichte, KEK (Gottingen, 51913).

Williams, C. S. C., A Commentary on the Acts of the Apostles, BNTC (London, 1957).

Romans

Barrett, C. K., A Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, BNTC (London, 1957).

Barth, K., The Epistle to the Romans, ETr (Oxford, 1933).

Bruce, F. E, The Epistle of Paul to the Romans, TNTC (London, 1963).

Cranfield, C. E. B., The Epistle to the Romans, ICC, I-II (Edinburgh, 1975-79).

Kasemann, E., Commentary on Romans, ETr (Grand Rapids, 1980).

Kuss, 0., Der Romerbrief, I-III (Regensburg, 1957-78), unfinished.

Murray, J., The Epistle to the Romans, NICNT, I-II (Grand Rapids, 1959-65).

Wilckens, U., Der Brief an die Romer, EKKNT, I- (Koln/Neukirchen-Vluyn, 1978-).

1 and 2 Corinthians

Barrett, C. K., A Commentary on the First Epistle to the Corinthians, BNTC (London, 1968).

Barrett, C. K., A Commentary on the Second Epistle to the Corinthians, BNTC (London, 1973).

Schmithals, W., Gnosticism in Corinth, ETr (Nashville/New York, 1971).

Ephesians

Kirby, J. C. Ephesians, Baptism and Pentecost (London, 1968).

Robinson, J. X., St. Paul's Epistle to the Ephesians (London, 21904).

Philippians

Beare, F. W., A Commentary on the Epistle to the Philippians, BNTC (London, 1959).

Lightfoot, J. B., Saint Paul's Epistle to the Philippians (London, 61881).

Colossians

Lightfoot, J. B., Saint Paul's Epistles to the Colossians and to Philemon (London, 1879).

Percy, E., Die Probleme der Kolosser- and Epheserbriefe (Lund, 1964).

1 and 2 Thessalonians

Best, E., A Commentary on the First and Second Epistles to the Thessalonians, BNTC (London, 1972).

1 Peter

Hort, F. J. A., The First Epistle of St. Peter, I.1-11.17 (London, 1898).

3. NEW TESTAMENT INTRODUCTIONS (abbreviated INT)

Fuller, R. H., A Critical Introduction to the New Testament (London, 1966).

Grant, R. M., A Historical Introduction to the New Testament (London, 1963).

Guthrie, D., New Testament Introduction (London, 31970).

Heard, R., An Introduction to the New Testament (London, 1950).

Kiimmel, W. G., Introduction to the New Testament, ETr (London, 1966).

Marxsen, W., Introduction to the New Testament, ETr (Oxford, 1968).

Moffatt, J., An Introduction to the Literature of the New Testament (Edinburgh, 31918).

Peake, A. S., A Critical Introduction to the New Testament (London, 1909).

Sparks, H. F. D., The Formation of the New Testament (London, 1952).

4. FESTSCHRIFTEN AND DENKSCHRIFTEN (abbreviated FS)

Black FS (1): Neotestamentica et Semitica: Studies in honour of Matthew Black, ed. E. E. Ellis and M. Wilcox (Edinburgh, 1969).

Black FS (2): Text and Interpretation: Studies in the New Testament presented to Matthew Black, ed. E. Best and R. McL. Wilson (Cambridge, 1979).

Bruce FS: Apostolic History and the Gospel: Biblical and Historical Essays presented to F. F. Bruce, ed. W. W. Gasque and R. P. Martin (Exeter, 1970).

Bultmann FS: Neutestamentliche Studien fur Rudolf Bultmann, ed. W. Eltester, BZNW 21 (Berlin, 1954).

Cullmann FS (1): Neotestamentica et Patristica: eine Freundesgabe ... Oscar Cullmann ... uberreicht, ed. W. C. van Unnik, NovTSup 6 (Leiden, 1962).

Cullmann FS (2): Neues Testament and Geschichte: historisches Geschehen and Deutung im Neuen Testament..., ed. H. Baltensweiler and B. Reicke (Zurich, 1972).

Daube FS: Donum Gentilicium: New Testament Studies in Honour of David Daube, ed. C. K. Barrett, E. Bammel, W. D. Davies (Oxford, 1978).

Deissmann FS: Festgabe fur Adolf Deissmann zum 60. Geburtstag (Tubingen, 1927).

Grant FS: Early Christian Literature and the Classical Intellectual Tradition. In Honorem Robert M. Grant, ed. W. R. Schoedel and R. L. Wilken, Theologie Historique 53 (Paris, 1979).

Grosheide FS: Arcana Revelata ... aangeboden an F. W. Grosheide, ed. N. J. Hommes et al. (Kampen, 1951).

Kdsemann FS: Rechtfertigung: Festschrift fur Ernst Kasemann, ed. J. Friedrich, W. Pohlmann, P. Stuhlmacher (Tubingen/Gottingen, 1976).

Knox FS: Christian History and Interpretation: Studies presented to John Knox, ed. W. R. Farmer, C. F. D. Moule, R. R. Niebuhr (Cambridge, 1967).

Manson FS: New Testament Essays: Studies in Memory of Thomas Walter Manson, ed. A. J. B. Higgins (Manchester, 1959).

Morris FS: Reconciliation and Hope: New Testament Essays on Atonement and Eschatology presented to L. L. Morris, ed. R. Banks (Exeter, 1974).

Moule FS: Christ and Spirit in the New Testament.- Studies in honour of Charles Francis Digby Moule, ed. B. Lindars and S. S. Smalley (Cambridge, 1973).

Oudersluys FS: Saved by Hope: Essays in Honor of Richard C. Oudersluys, ed. J. I. Cook (Grand Rapids, 1978).

Rigaux FS: Melanges Bibliques en hommage au R. P. Bella Rigaux, ed. A. Descamps and A. de Halleux (Gembloux, 1970).

Rost FS: Das Ferne and Nahe Wort: Festschrift Leonhard Rost zur Vollendung seines 70. Lebensjahres, ed. F. Maass, BZAW 105 (Berlin, 1967).

Schnackenburg FS: Neues Testament and Kirche: Festschrift fur Rudolf Schnackenburg, ed. J. Gnilka (Freiburg/Vienna, 1974).

Simon FS: Melanges offerts a Marcel Simon: Paganisme, JudaIsme, Christianisme, ed. A. Benoit, M. Philonenko, C. Vogel (Paris, 1978).

Stahlin FS: Verborum Veritas: Festschrift fur Gustav Stdhlin zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. 0. Bucher and K. Haacker (Wuppertal, 1970).

Tenney FS: Current Issues in Biblical and Patristic Interpretation: Studies in Honor of Merrill C. Tenney, ed. G. F. Hawthorne (Grand Rapids, 1975).

De Zwaan FS: Studia Paulina in honorem Johannis de Zwaan septuagenarii, ed. J. N. Sevenster and W. C. van Unnik (Haarlem, 1953).

5. OTHER WORKS

Bandstra, A. J., The Law and the Elements of the World (Kampen, 1964).

Barclay, W., Flesh and Spirit (London, 1962).

Barnikol, E., Der nichtpaulinische Ursprung des Parallelismus der Apostel Paulus and Petrus, Gal. 2,7-8, FEUNTK 5 (Kiel, 1931).

Barnikol, E., Die vorchristliche and friihchristliche Zeit des Paulus nach seinen geschichtlichen and geographischen Selbstzeugnissen in Galaterbrief, FEUNTK 1 (Kiel, 1929).

Barr, J., The Semantics of Biblical Language (Oxford, 1961).

Barrett, C. K., The Signs of an Apostle (London, 1970).

Bate, H. N., A Guide to the Epistles of St. Paul (London, 1926).

Baur, F. C., Paul: his Life and Works, ETr, I-II (London, 21876, 1875).

Baur, F. C., Church History of the First Three Centuries, ETr, I-II (London, 1878-79).

Bornkamm, G., Paul, ETr (New York, 1971).

Brown, R. E., and others (ed.), Peter in the New Testament (New York, 1973).

Brown, R. E., and others (ed.), Mary in the New Testament (London, 1978).

Bruce, E F., Paul: Apostle of the Free Spirit (Exeter, 21980).

Bruce, F. F., Men and Movements in the Primitive Church (Exeter, 1979).

Bruner, F. D., A Theology of the Holy Spirit (Grand Rapids, 1970).

Bruns, K. G., and Sachau, E. (ed.), Syrisch-romisches Rechtsbuch aus dem fiinften Jahrhundert (Leipzig, 1880).

Buchanan, J., The Doctrine of Justification (Edinburgh, 1867).

Bultmann, R., Exegetica (Tubingen, 1967).

Bultmann, R., Existence and Faith, ETr (London, 1964).

Bultmann, R., Theology of the New Testament, ETr, I-Il (London, 1952-55).

Burkitt, F. C., Christian Beginnings (London, 1924).

Caird, G. B., The Apostolic Age (London, 1955).

Caird, G. B., Principalities and Powers (Oxford, 1956).

Clark,S.B.,ManandWomaninChrist(AnnArbor,1980).

Cullmann, 0., The Christology of the New Testament, ETr (London, 1959).

Cullmann, 0., Peter: DiscipleApostle-Martyr, ETr (London, 21962).

Cullmann, 0., Salvation in History, ETr (London, 1967).

Daube, D., The New Testament and Rabbinic Judaism (London, 1956).

Davies, W. D., Paul and Rabbinic Judaism (London, 31980).

Davies, W. D., Torah in the Messianic Age and/or the Age to Come (Philadelphia, 1952).

DeBoer, W. P., The Imitation of Paul (Kampen, 1962).

Deissmann, A., Light from the Ancient East, ETr (London, 21927).

Deissmann, A., Paul: A Study in Social and Religious History, ETr (London, 1926).

Denney, J., The Death of Christ (London, 61907).

Dix, G., Jew and Greek (London, 1953).

Dodd, C. H., According to the Scriptures (London, 1952).

Dodd, C. H., The Bible and the Greeks (London, 1935).

Dodd, C. H., Gospel and Law (Cambridge, 1951).

Dodd, C. H., New Testament Studies (Manchester, 1953).

Dodd, C. H., More New Testament Studies (Manchester, 1968).

Drane, J. W., Paul: Libertine or Legalist? (London, 1975).

Diilmen, A. van, Die Theologie des Gesetzes bei Paulus (Stuttgart, 1968).

Dungan, D. L., The Sayings of Jesus in the Churches of Paul (Oxford, 1971).

Dunn, J. D. G., Baptism in the Holy Spirit, SBT n.s. 15 (London, 1970).

Dunn, J. D. G., Jesus and the Spirit (London, 1975).

Dunn, J. D. G., Unity and Diversity in the New Testament (London, 1977).

Ellis, E. E., Prophecy and Hermeneutic in Early Christianity (Tubingen/Grand Rapids, 1978).

Feret, H.M., Pierre et Paul a Antioche et a Jerusalem (Paris, 1955).

Field, F., Notes on the Translation of the New Testament (Cambridge, 1899).

Fridrichsen, A., The Apostle and his Message (Uppsala, 1947).

Fuller, R. H., The Formation of the Resurrection Narratives (London, 1972).

Furnish, V. P., The Love Command in the New Testament (Nashville, 1972).

Gaechter, P., Petrus and seine Zeit (Vienna/Munich, 1958).

Gerhardsson, B., Memory and Manuscript (Lund/Copenhagen, 1961).

Gore, C., The Reconstruction of Belief (London, 1925).

Guttgemanns, E., Der leidende Apostel and sein Herr (Gottingen, 1966).

Hahn, F., Mission in the New Testament, ETr, SBT 47 (London, 1965).

Halmel, A., Uber romisches Recht im Galaterbrief eine Untersuchung zur Geschichte des Paulinismus (Essen, 1895).

Hanson, A. T., Studies in Paul's Technique and Theology (London, 1974).

Harnack, A., Marcion: Das Evangelium vom fremden Gott (Leipzig, 11924).

Harris, J. R., Testimonies, I-II (Cambridge, 1916-20).

Haussleiter, J., Der Glaube Jesu Christi and der christliche Glaube (Leipzig, 1891).

Heitmdller, W., Luthers Stellung in der Religionsgeschichte des Christentums (Marburg, 1917).

Hengel, M., Crucifixion, ETr (London, 1977).

Hengel, M., The Son of God, ETr (London, 1976).

Hengel, M., Die Zeloten (Leiden, 1961).

Heussi, K., Die romische Petrustradition in kritischer Sicht (Tubingen, 1955).

Hill, D., Greek Words and Hebrew Meanings (Cambridge, 1967).

Holl, K., Gesammelte Aufsatze zur Kirchengeschichte, II: Der Osten (Tubingen, 1928).

Hubner, H., Das Gesetz bei Paulus (Gottingen, 1978).

Hunter, A. M., Paul and his Predecessors (London, 21961).

Jackson, F. J. F., and Lake, K. (ed.), The Beginnings of Christianity, Part 1, I-V (London, 1920-33).

Jeremias, J., Abba: Studien zur neutestamentlichen Theologie and Zeitgeschichte (Gottingen, 1966).

Jeremias, J., The Central Message of the New Testament (London, 1965).

Jeremias, J., The Prayers of Jesus, ETr (London, 1967).

Jewett, P. K., Man as Male and Female (Grand Rapids, 1975).

Jewett, R., Dating Paul's Life (London, 1979).

Jewett, R., Paul's Anthropological Terms (Leiden, 1971).

Jungel, E., Paulus and Jesus (Tubingen, 1962).

Kasemann, E., New Testament Questions of Today, ETr (London, 1961).

Kasemann, E., Perspectives on Paul, ETr (London, 1971).

Kim, S., The Origin of Paul's Gospel, WUNT 2/4 (Tubingen, 1981).

Klausner, J., From Jesus to Paul, ETr (London, 1944).

Klein, G., Studien uber Paulus (Stockholm, 1918).

Klein, G., Rekonstruktion and Interpretation (Munich, 1969).

Klein, G., Die zwolf Apostel (Gottingen, 1961).

Knox, J., Chapters in a Life of Paul (London, 1954).

Kramer, W., Christ, Lord, Son of God, ETr, SBT 50 (London, 1966).

Kummel, W. G., The Theology of the New Testament, ETr (London, 1974).

Kung, H., Justification, ETr (Edinburgh, 1961).

Kung, H., The Living Church, ETr (London, 1963).

Kuss, 0., Auslegung and Verkiindigung, I-I11 (Regensburg, 1963-71).

Lake, K., The Earlier Epistles of St. Paul (London, 1911).

Lampe, G. W. H., The Seal of the Spirit (London, 1951).

Leipoldt, J., Die Frau in der antiken Welt and im Urchristentum (Leipzig, 21962).

Lightfoot, J. B., Biblical Essays (London, 1893).

Lindars, B., New Testament Apologetic (London, 1961).

Lindemann, A. Paulus im altesten Christentum (Tubingen, 1977).

Lohmeyer, E., Galilaa and Jerusalem (Gottingen, 1936).

Longenecker, R. N., Biblical Exegesis in the Apostolic Period (Grand Rapids, 1975).

Longenecker, R. N., Paul, Apostle of Liberty (Grand Rapids, 1964).

Lorenzi, L. de (ed.), Paul de Tarse (Rome, 1979).

Lorenzi, L. de (ed.), Paolo a una chiesa divisa (Rome, 1980).

Liidemann, G., Paulus der Heidenapostel, I: Studien zur Chronologie (Gottingen, 1980).

Luz, U., Das Geschichtsverstandnis____.--_1__:- beiL..: Paulus (Munich, 1968).1QA.Q1

Machen, J. G., The Origin of Paul's Religion (New York, 1921).

Manson, T. W., The Sayings of Jesus (London, 21949).

Manson, T. W., Studies in the Gospels and Epistles (Manchester, 1962).

Marshall, I. H., The Origins of New Testament Christology (Leicester, 1977).

Mitteis, L., Reichsrecht and Volksrecht in den ostlichen Provinzen des romischen Kaiserreichs (Leipzig, 1891).

Moffatt, J., Grace in the New Testament (London, 1931).

Moffatt, J., Love in the New Testament (London, 1929).

Moule, C. F. D., The Birth of the New Testament (London, 1962).

Moule, C. F. D., An Idiom-Book of New Testament Greek (Cambridge, 1953).

Moule, C. F. D., The Origin of Christology (Cambridge, 1977).

Moule, C. F. D., The Phenomenon of the New Testament (London, 31981).

Munck, J., Paul and the Salvation of Mankind, ETr (London, 1959).

Neusner, J., The Rabbinic Traditions about the Pharisees before 70, 1-111 (Leiden, 1971).

Nickle, K. F., The Collection: A Study in Paul's Strategy, SBT 49 (London, 1966).

Nock, A. D., Essays on Religion and the Ancient World, I-H (Oxford, 1972). 1972).

Nock, A. D., St. Paul (London, 1938).

O'Brien, P. T., Introductory Thanksgivings in the Letters of Paul, NovTSup 49 (Leiden, 1977).

Ogg, G., The Chronology of the Life of Paul (London, 1968).

Ollrog, W.-H., Paulus and seine Mitarbeiter: Untersuchungen zu Theorie and Praxis der paulinischen Mission, WMANT 50 1979). (Neuldrchen/Vluyn,

Perrot, G., De Galatia Provincia Romana (Paris, 1867).

Plooij, D., De Chronologie van het Leven van Paulus (Leiden, 1918).

Ramsay, W. M., The Church in the Roman Empire before A.D. 170 (London, 51897).

Ramsay, W M., Cities and Bishoprics of Phrygia, I-II (Oxford, 1895-97).

Ramsay, W. M., The Cities of St. Paul (London, 1907).

Ramsay, W. M., Historical Geography of Asia Minor (London, 1890).

Ramsay, W. M., St. Paul the Traveller and the Roman Citizen (London, 141920).

Ramsay, W. M., The Teaching of Paul in Terms of the Present Day (London, 1913).

Regul, J., Die antimarcionitischen Evangelienprologe i>;_,.:1,.,_..(Freiburg, 1969).

Renan, E., St. Paul, ETr (London, 1887).

Richardson, P., Israel in the Apostolic Church, SNTSM 10 (Cambridge, 1969).

Richardson, P., Paul's Ethic of Freedom (Philadelphia, 1979).

Ridderbos, H. N., Paul: An Outline of his Theology, ETr (Grand Rapids, 1975).

Ridderbos, H. N., When the Time Had Fully Come (Grand Rapids, 1957).

Robinson, J. A. T., Redating the New Testament (London, 1916).

Sanders, E. P., Paul and Palestinian Judaism (London, 1977).

Schlier, H., Principalities and Powers in the New Testament, ETr (Freiburg, 1961).

Schmithals, W., The Office of Apostle in the Early Church, ETr (London, 1971).

Schmithals, W., Paul and the Gnostics, ETr (Nashville/New York, 1972).

Schmithals, W., Paul and James, ETr, SBT 46 (London, 1965).

Schmitz, 0., Die Christusgemeinschaft des Paulus im Lichte seines Genetivgebrauchs (Gutersloh, 1924).

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Schoeps, H.-J., Aus fi-uhchristlicher Zeit (Tubingen, 1950).

Schoeps,H.-J., Paul: The Theology of the Apostle in the Light of Jewish Religious History, ETr (London, 1961).

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Schubert, P., Form and Function of the Pauline Thanksgivings, BZNW 20 (Berlin, 1939).

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Schutz, J. H., Paul and the Anatomy of Apostolic Authority, SNTSM 26 (Cambridge, 1975).

Schweitzer, A., The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle, ETr (London, 1931).

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Walker, D., `The Legal Terminology in the Epistle to the Galatians', The Gift of Tongues (Edinburgh, 1906), 81-175.

Weiss, J.-, Earliest Christianity, ETr, 1-11 (New York, 1959).

Weizsacker, C. von, The Apostolic Age, ETr, I-II (London, 1907-12).

White, J. L., The Body of the Greek Letter (Missoula, 1972).

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Wibbing, S., Die Tugend- and Lasterkataloge im Neuen Testament and ihre Traditionsgeschichte, BZNW 25 (Berlin, 1959).

Wikenhauser, A., Pauline Mysticism, ETr (Edinburgh/London, 1960).

Wiles, G. P., Paul's Intercessory Prayers, SNTSM 24 (Cambridge, 1974).

Williams, N. P., The Grace of God (London, 1930).

Wilson, S. G., The Gentiles and the Gentile Mission in Luke-Acts, SNTSM 23 (Cambridge, 1973).

Wissmann, h., Das Verhaltnis von HIETIE and Christusfi mmigkeit bei Paulus (Gottingen, 1926).

Wrede, W., Paul, ETr (London, 1907).

Ziesler, J. A., The Meaning of Righteousness in Paul, SNTSM 20 (Cambridge, 1972).

Zuntz, G., The Text of the Epistles (London, 1953).

COMMENTARY

I

SALUTATION

(1:1-5)

Paul greets the churches of Galatia, emphasizing the divine source of his apostolic commission.

Paul, an apostle (commissioned) neither by men nor through man, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father who raised him from the dead, and all the brothers who are with me, to the churches of Galatia: grace and peace be yours from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself for our sins in order to deliver us from the present evil age according to the will of our God and Father, to whom be the glory for ever and ever. Amen.

TEXTUAL NOTES

v 1 xaL eeov na'rpos om Mcion (& a&rov pro avzov?)

v 3 r)µwv xat xuptou K A 33 81 al / xat xUetou ylµwv Pae, 51via B D G H byz lat syr copra / xat XUQLOU 1877 Pelag Chrys Aug / i.twv xat xugtov 11twv copb° eth

v 4 vneg P51 B H 33 pm TR / nepL p4Gvtd ti" A D G byz

Letters in Near Eastern antiquity were regularly introduced by the formula: `X to Y: greetings'. Cf. 'artahs`ast' melek malekayya' 1e'ezra' kahana' sapar data' di-'elah semayya' gemir, `Artaxerxes, king of kings, to Ezra the priest, scribe of the law of the God of heaven, greetings' (Ezr. 7:12); Oewv (wvt TU) Hate! xai@cLv, `Theon to Theon his father, greetings' (E Oxy. 119.1); M. Cicero Q. fratri s[alutem1, `Marcus Cicero to Quintus his brother, health' (Cicero, Ep. ad Q. fratrem, i.2). The introductions to the various NT letters exhibit the same pattern, including the letters of Paul, one or more of the three elements (the author, the addressee, the greetings) being variously amplified as may be appropriate to the occasion.

The three elements are readily recognizable in the introduction to this letter: (a) `Paul ... and all the brothers who are with me' (1:1, 2a), (b) `to the churches of Galatia' (1:2b), (c) `grace and peace.' (1:3). The first and third elements are considerably amplified.

1:1 flctUXog &atootoXos. More often than not Paul introduces himself as an apostle. In Rom. 1:1 he calls himself `a slave (bovXog) of Christ Jesus' but adds xXitog &3tooToXos in the next phrase (cf. 1 Cor. 1:1); in Phil. 1:1 he describes himself and Timothy as `slaves of Christ Jesus'; in Phm. 1 he designates himself `a prisoner (Seoµtog) of Christ Jesus'.

An &noazoXos is, in general, `one who is sent' (the word is so used in Jn. 13:16), but regularly in the NT he is one who has received a special commission from Christ. When Paul uses the term of himself, he claims a status not inferior to those who, as he says, `were apostles before me' (v 17): if they had been commissioned by Christ (which he does not dispute), so had he. Paul knew of other apostles who were commissioned by men, like the &noaiokot exxXrlattuv to whom he refers in 2 Cor. 8:23-men whose commission was entirely valid, but took its character from those by whom they were commissioned. If the NT &nboioXog bears some relation to Heb. saluah or saliah (which seems probable), then of the one as of the other it was true that seluho sel 'adam kemoto, `a man's delegate is like himself' (m. Ber. 5.5), i.e. the authority of the person commissioned is that of the person who commissions him. So, when Paul speaks or acts as an apostle of Christ, he does so with Christ's authority (cf. 2 Cor. 10:8).

There is a voluminous bibliography on apostles and apostleship. See inter alia K. H. Rengstorf, TDNT I, 407-447 (s.v. &:tooroXos); H. Riesenfeld, RGG3 I, 497-499 (s.v. `Apostel'); D. Muller and C. Brown, NIDNTT I, 126-137 (s.v. `Apostle'); E. Kasemann, `Die Legitimitat des Apostels', ZNW 41 (1942), 33-71; A. Fridrichsen, The Apostle and his Message (Uppsala, 1947); H. von Campenhausen, `Der urchristliche Apostelbegriff', ST 1 (1948-49), 96-130; J. Munck, `Paul, the Apostles and the Twelve', ST 3 (1950-51), 96-110; E. Lohse, `Ursprung and Pragung des chrisdichen Apostolats', TZ 9 (1953), 259-275; G. Klein, Die zwolf Apostel (Gottingen, 1961); R. Schnackenburg, `Apostles before and during Paul's Time', Bruce FS, 287-303; C. K. Barrett, The Signs of an Apostle (London, 1970), and `Shaliah and Apostle', Daube FS, 88-102; W. Schmithals, The Office of Apostle in the Early Church, ETr (London, 1971); J. H. Schutz, Paul and the Anatomy of Apostolic Authority (Cambridge, 1975).

Unlike that of the &nootOXot xxXrlottiv, Paul's apostolic commission was not derived `from men' (ovx &n' &v0ewn(ov). It was not even derived through a human intermediary (ob& bt' &v0pthtov); it was received immediately `through Jesus Christ'. We should probably be right in inferring from Paul's emphatic language that his Galatian converts had been given a different account of his apostleship-an account which maintained that he had no commission apart from what he had received from men who had been Christian leaders before him, whether the apostles and elders of the Jerusalem church or the Christian leaders of Damascus or Antioch: even if his commission could be traced back ultimately to Christ, it was transmitted through these leaders. Paul denies this: his commission was received directly, without mediation, from the risen Christ. The occasion of his receiving it was his Damascus-road experience in which, as he says below in vv 15f., `God ... saw fit to reveal his Son in me'.

It is strange, then, to find the preposition St&, used to indicate mediation in the phrase ob& St' &vOp67tov, repeated before 'Irloov Xetotov. Paul hardly means that Jesus Christ was the intermediary through whom he received his apostleship. One could indeed conceive his meaning to be that he received it from God the Father through Jesus Christ, but that is excluded in the present context because 0£o1U 7Late6g stands under the regimen of 5t& as much as does 'Irloov XQLOTov (Sta 'Ii1oo6 Xptorov xai OEOV narp6s). Moreover, when Paul enlarges on the subject in the course of this letter or elsewhere, he makes it plain that he is the commissioned apostle of the risen Lord, to whom he is accountable for the discharge of his commission (cf. v 10; 6:17; 1 Cor. 4:1-4; 9:1f., 14-27; Rom. 15:15-21). It may be concluded, then, that while St& before &vOpwatov means `through' in the sense of mediation, it is used in the more general sense of agency when it precedes Irloov Xptotoii xai Ocov JTate6s. Cf. St' ov Ex)\,i01tc, said of God (1 Cor. 1:9); St' ov Ta it&VTa, also said of God (Heb. 2:10); see BDF 223 (2).

Paul enlarges on the unmediated character of his dominical commission in the narrative of vv 15ff.

In distinguishing `Jesus Christ and God the Father' from human authority or agency Paul sets Christ in a category apart from ordinary men (see note on v 12). Now that he is risen and exalted, Christ is naturally thought of and mentioned alongside God the Father, at whose right hand he is enthroned, according to the common primitive-Christian application of Ps. 110:1 (cf. Rom. 8:34). The unselfconscious way in which Paul repeatedly couples God and Christ together bears eloquent witness to his understanding of the person and status of Christ.

tov syEipavtos avtov ex vexQwv. God the Father is further defined as he who raised Christ from the dead. Like other Jews who believed in the resurrection, Paul had been brought up to acclaim God as `the raiser of the dead' (mehayyeh hammetim, as he is called in the second of the Eighteen Benedictions; cf. Rom. 4:17, OEOV tov l;woatoLovvtos tons vExpovs, and 2 Cor. 1:9, tw Oew tw tons vexeovs). But now he had learned that the first stage in the expected >yE(Qovtt resurrection had already come with the raising of Christ. The raising of Christ, moreover, was specially relevant to Paul's commissioning, for it was his Damascus-road experience that simultaneously confronted him with the risen Christ, thereby convincing him that God had indeed raised Christ from the dead, and brought home to him the call of the risen Christ to be his apostle to the Gentile world. The call was Christ's, but it was also God's, for it was God who revealed his Son to Paul in that confrontation (vv 15f.).

1:2 xai of ovv eµoi &SeXcpoi. In the initial salutation of several of his letters Paul associates with himself by name one or more of his companions who are with him at the time of writing (cf. 1 Cor. 1:1; 2 Cor. 1:1; Phil. 1:1; Col. 1:1; 1 Thes. 1:1; 2 Thes. 1:1; Phm. 1). Here he mentions no one by name, but associates with himself `all the brothers who are with me'. Our conclusions about the probable identity of those brothers will depend on our view of the provenance and date of the letter. If it was sent from Syrian Antioch, not long after Paul and Barnabas returned from their evangelization of the cities of South Galatia (cf. Acts 14:26ff.), we should think of the leaders of the Antiochene church, including pre-eminently Barnabas (cf. Acts 13:1). In that case it might be asked why Barnabas is not singled out by name, since he was Paul's senior colleague in the evangelization of South Galatia. R. J. Bauckham (`Barnabas in Galatians', JSNT, Issue 2 [1979], 65) suggests that Paul's generalizing phrase `covers his embarrassment in not being able to ask his partner to endorse the letter' after the painful incident narrated below in 2:11-13. On the other hand, Paul may wish to indicate to the Galatians that he is expressing no merely individual viewpoint, but one shared by his colleagues. The phrase of ovv &SeX,(po( Etol occurs in the final greetings of Phil. 4:21, where the reference (less general than at&vteg of aytoL in the following verse) seems to be to his missionary associates.

tats xxa.tlotaLc tfj Fakattag. The addressees are specified with the utmost brevity. `The churches of Galatia' are mentioned again in 1 Cor. 16:1. It has been argued above (pp. 5-18) that the churches addressed here are those of South Galatia, whose founding by Paul and Barnabas is recorded in Acts 13:14-14:23.

It was evidently a circular letter, designed to be taken by a messenger to one of the Galatian churches, then to the next on his itinerary, and so on until each church had heard its contents. If some of the churches wished to make and retain a copy, that could no doubt be done. But Paul apparently did not send several copies, one for each church; his words in 6:11 imply that each church would see the one copy that he sent and take note of the `large letters' that characterized his own handwriting.

1:3 x&QLS vµ_Lv xal Ele~v1. The normal word of salutation at the beginning of a Greek letter was xa(QELv ('rejoice'); the normal word of salutation at the beginning of a Jewish letter was sdlom, Eie1jvq ('peace'). The amplified form `mercy and peace' (cf. 6:16) seems to have been current in some Jewish circles (cf. 2 Bar. 78:2). The form `grace' xa@L; xal Etpijvrl is characteristically Pauline; both and `peace' have their full Christian force. Grace is God's unconditioned good will towards mankind which is decisively expressed in the saving work of Christ (cf. v 6; 2:21); peace is the state of life-peace with God (Rom. 5:1) and peace with one another (Eph. 2:14-18)-enjoyed by those who have effectively experienced the divine grace (cf. 5:22; 6:16).

See E. Lohmeyer, `Probleme paulinischer Theologie, I. Briefliche Grussuberschriften', ZNW 26 (1927), 158-173 (where it is argued that the formula was primarily liturgical and only secondarily epistolary); A. Pujol, 'De salutatione apostolica "gratia vobis et pax"', VD 12 (1932), 38-40, 76-82; C. E. B. Cranfield, Romans, 71f.; E. Kasemann, Romans, 16.

The Christian force of the grace and peace is emphasized by the added words &Jtd 6eov ttatpog i6v xai xve(ov 'Iriaov XQtotov. These added words appear, with minor variations, in most of Paul's opening salutations (they are missing in 1 Thes. 1:1; xal xvelov 'Iri(3ov XQLatov is missing in Col. 1:2). As in v 2 `Jesus Christ' and `God the Father' are brought together under the common regimen of SL&, so here `God our Father' and `the Lord Jesus Christ' are brought together under the common regimen of &ato. Such language bespeaks the exalted place which the risen Christ occupies in Paul's thinking. In resurrection he wears a heavenly humanity, as `a life-giving spirit' (1 Cor. 15:45-49), and has been invested by God with the designation xvekoc, `Lord'`the name which is above every name' (Phil. 2:9). God and Christ are completely at one in the bestowal of salvation: the grace which lies behind this salvation is indiscriminately called `the grace of God' (2:21) and `the grace of Christ' (1:6), and the peace which this salvation produces is indiscriminately called `the peace of God' (Phil. 4:7) and `the peace of Christ' (Col. 3:15).

1:4 Tov Sovtos Eavt6v xtX. Exceptionally, the third element in the salutation ('grace and peace ..:) is further amplified here with what appears to be part of an early confession of faith or kerygmatic summary, which is reflected in several NT contexts. bovvat Eavtov is identical with 6ovvau avtov trly ywxrly in Mk. 10:45, except that the latter preserves the Semitic idiom (Aram. 1`'meheb napseh, where nepes with pronominal suffix does duty for the reflexive pronoun). Cf. 2:20, Tov ... napa66vTos iavt6v vn%p eµ.ov. Paul more often uses TtapaSCSwµt than the simple bibwµt in this connexion, but cf. 1 Tim. 2:6, 6 Sous £avtov &VT(XvTpov veep Jt&vtwv, and Tit. 2:14, os 98wxev Eavt6v v~tE f.uiv (in a later development of the present formula).

57th TO-)V aµaptuuv 71µw5. vatep is better attested here than the variant 7Epi. Cf. 1 Cor. 15:3, XptoTOg &te0avev v7tp Twv aµaprtwv tjltwv (also in a traditional kerygmatic summary). `For our sins' means `for the forgiveness or expiation of our sins' (for the sense cf. Mk. 10:45, 8ovvat t71v Vvxily avtov 7v5tQov &vTi 71OWOv); the wording possibly owes something to the fourth Isaianic servant song (cf. Is. 53:5, 12 LXX, Etpautatlo0rl 8ta tag 71µw5... atUQTias Sta tas &voµlas anTwy 7a@E860r)); cf. Rom. 4:25, SS 7aeE860rl 8t6 to 7aea7T6)µaTa tjµwv. The use of 5:E@ with the genitive here rather than Mt with the accusative may be influenced by 57tp 71µwv in a similar context (cf. 3:13; Rom. 5:8; 8:32; 2 Cor. 5:21; 1 Thes. 5:10; Tit. 2:14; also 57th etov in Gal. 2:20); but one may compare the use of 57Ep in 3 Ki. (MT 1 Ki.) 16:18f., &7E0avev 57ip Twv &lta€Ttwv avtov, where v7Ep must mean `because of': Zimri died as a penalty for his sins (hardly by way of an atonement for them). Cf. Polycarp 1:2, os 57eµEtvev 57th twv &µaettwv tjµwv Eton Oav&rov xatavtfoat ('who suffered for our sins even to the point of death').

onws el;EXrJtat fµas. Christ's self-oblation not only procures for his people the forgiveness of their past sins; it delivers them from the realm in which sin is irresistible into the realm where he himself is Lord. Cf. Rom. 14:9, `to this end Christ died and came to life, that he might be Lord both of the dead and of the living.'

This is the only occurrence of E~ateeoµat in Paul: he prefers on.)l;w, evoµat, eXEVOEpow or (Ei;)ayoe&~w to express the saving act of God in Christ. It is common in the LXX in this sense, however (especially to translate the hiph'il of nasal), and the LXX usage is followed in Acts-not only in OT allusions and quotations (7:10, 34) but elsewhere (12:11; 23:27; 26:17). Paul's use of E~atpeoµat here adds weight to the opinion that he is quoting a form of words well known to his readers, which summed up the gospel which they had received and from which, he feared, they were now departing. See F. Bovon, `Une formule prepaulinienne dans l'Epitre aux Galates', in Simon FS, 91-107, especially 97-105.

The pattern of this form of words, in which the statement about Christ's self-giving is followed by a clause of purpose, is followed closely in Tit. 2:14, who gave himself for us, that he might redeem us (Na Avtph"tat rlµas) from all iniquity and purify for himself a people of his own (Xabv Jtcetovatov), zealous for good works'.

For deliverance from `this present evil age' (ex tov aivos rov fvEOTtcos Jrovr1eov) cf. Sir. 51:11, i;~e(Xov µe Ex xcueov 7tovr1eov. But there xaLpos novr1e6s is `an evil plight', some deadly peril from which Ben Sira was delivered (so the Hebrew text, teniwaye'mall' be'yom sarah, `and he rescued me in the day of trouble'), whereas Paul's akbv Jtov1eos is an age dominated by an ethically evil power-one which, far from being `according to the will of our God and Father', is totally opposed to it.

Those who accept the gospel are thereby delivered from the godless Zeitgeist: for the missionary setting of such language cf. E. Haenchen (Acts, 184 n. 8) on Acts 2:40, `Save yourselves from this perverse generation' (an echo of the description of the wilderness generation in Dt. 1:35; 32:5). But the designation of the present age (o alwv 6 arvEot(h, Heb. hii'olam hazzeh) as `evil', by contrast with the age to come (6 aiwv 6 eexoLevoc, Heb. ha`olam habba'), belonged to Paul's background: the gospel sharpened this awareness of the ethical distinction between the two ages. A parallel is provided in Qumran literature, where the current age is the `epoch of wickedness' (qes haris`ah, e.g. lQpHab 5:7f.) during which Belial, the power opposed to the will of God, is let loose. Another sectarian Jewish outlook is expressed in 4 Ezr. 7:12f.: `The entrances of this world (Lat. huius saeculi) are narrow and painful and toilsome; they are few and evil, full of dangers and beset by great hardship' (as distinct from the broad and safe entrances to `the greater world', which lead to immortality)where, however, the ethical emphasis is played down. Yet another parallel is provided by the `Freer logion', where the disciples say, `This age (6 aibyovtos) of lawlessness and unbelief is subject to Satan' (Mk. 16:14 W).

The deliverance of which Paul speaks is not out of the material world but from the evil which dominates it (cf. Jn. 17:15 where xooµos has much the same sense as Paul's auwv). Similarly in Rom. 12:2 Paul urges the Roman Christians not to be conformed to this age (t4 aWwvt Tovr(p) but to be transformed by inward renewal so as to prove by experience how good (by contrast) the will of God is. So here, xata to 6EXr)µa rov 6cov xal Jrateos ijµwv may imply not only that believers' deliverance from `the present evil age' is in accordance with God's will but that such deliverance enables them to live in conformity with God's will.

Here, then, is Paul's `realized eschatology'. Temporally, the age to come, the resurrection age, still lies in the future; spiritually, believers in Christ have here and now been made partakers of it, because they share the risen life of Christ (cf. 2:19f.), who has already entered the resurrection age. They have thus been delivered from the control of the powers which dominate the present age. As 1 Cor. 7:31 puts it, `the form of this world (to oxiµa tov xooµov tovtov) is passing away', and therefore believers in Christ should manifest a spirit of detachment from it. The indwelling Spirit not only helps them to look forward in confidence to the life of the age to come (cf. 5:5); he enables them to enjoy it even while in mortal body they live in the present age. Thanks to the work of the Spirit, applying to believers the redemption and victory won by Christ, the `not yet' has become for them the `already'.

It is particularly relevant to the argument of this letter that the law, to which the Galatian Christians were being urged to submit, belongs to this present age: it is associated with `the elemental powers of the world' (ta otoLXEta Tov xooµov) under which they were enslaved before they came to faith in Christ (4:3, 9).

On aUv in Paul see E. D. Burton, Galatians, 426-433. It has much the same force as the Johannine xoo sos in the sense of the `godless world' (cf. I Jn. 2:15-17); indeed, Paul occasionally uses xooµos as a synonym for auuv (cf. 1 Cor. 1:20; 2:12; 3:19; also 7:31, quoted above), denoting not only the current era of world history but the way of life that characterizes it.

The appended phrase, `according to the will of our God and Father', may have a further significance. It is Christ who `gave himself for our sins that he might deliver us...'; the appended phrase reminds us afresh that in this selfgiving and deliverance Christ and God are at one, that `God has reconciled us to himself through Christ'-that, in fact, `God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself' (2 Cor. 5:18f.).

This is probably the earliest written statement in the NT about the significance of the death of Christ. It relates his death to the supersession of the old age by the new. His people accordingly (as other places in the Pauline corpus affirm) are those `upon whom the ends of the ages have come' (1 Cor. 10:11; cf. similar phraseology in Heb. 1:2; 9:26; 1 Pet. 1:20); they have been delivered by God `from the dominion of darkness and transferred... to the kingdom of his beloved Son' (Col. 1:13). Moreover, it relates his death to the forgiveness of his people's sins. This is not an insight peculiar to Paul; he uses language to the same effect in other passages where there is reason to recognize pre-Pauline summaries of the Christian faith and message. To the Corinthians as early as AD 50 he `delivered', as part of the gospel which he had `received' and which he shared with the leaders of the Jerusalem church, `that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures' (1 Cor. 15:3); to the Romans (not as telling them something new but using words with which he could presume their acquaintance and agreement) he describes the risen Lord as the one `who was delivered up for our trespasses' (Rom. 4:25). (See R. Bultmann, Theology of the NT, ETr, I [London, 1952], 46f.) But if this interpretation of the death of Christ was widely held among his followers within twenty years after the event, it is antecedently probable that he himself gave the impetus to it. The earliest evangelist represents him as accepting his death in this spirit: speaking of himself as giving his life as `a ransom for many' (Mk. 10:45), speaking of his `covenant blood' as `poured out for many' (Mk. 14:24; the epexegetic e[S &(PEOLV &µaetLcuv in Mt. 26:28 makes explicit what is implicit in Mark's account).

1:5 w 7l Sofia ens tons cdthvas tcuv adwvwv. This addition of a doxology to the end of the introductory salutation is unparalleled in Paul's letters (there is a NT parallel in Rev. 1:5b, 6). But the doxology may be prompted here by the gospel summary of v 4 (cf. the doxology of I Tim. 1:17 following the amplified `faithful saying' of vv 15f.). There is the further possibility that the doxology here takes the place of the missing thanksgiving (see note on v 6).

The antecedent to the relative w is probably the immediately preceding `our God and Father' (cf. Phil. 4:20). The `glory' (Heb. kd¢od) of the God of Israel in the OT is primarily the radiance of his presence; when `glory' is ascribed to him it denotes the transcendent praise and worship of which he is worthy (cf. Pss. 29:2; 96:8, `Ascribe to Yahweh the glory due to his name'). els tons akivas tc3v a[Gwwv is a more emphatic variant (cf. Ps. 84:5 [LXX 83:4]) of the commoner Septuagintalism ct; toy atcuva tov akcuvos, meaning `for all eternity' in the most unlimited sense. Like the doxologies appended to the first four books of the OT psalter (Pss. 41:13; 72:19; 89:52; 106:48), the NT doxologies regularly end with `Amen'. As this letter was read in the churches of Galatia, the hearers would add their `Amen' to Paul's at the end of the doxology, thus endorsing the ascription of glory to God (cf. 2 Cor. 1:20).

II

NO OTHER GOSPEL

(1:6 -10)

Paul expresses his astonishment that the Galatian Christians are turning so quickly from the gospel they received from him and accepting a different form of teaching which is no gospel at all. He invokes a solemn curse on any one who brings a counterfeit gospel, and insists that his concern is to please God, and not to trim his message to suit his audience.

(a) Paul's indignant astonishment (1:6-9)

I am astonished that you are removing yourselves so quickly from him who called you by [Christ's] grace to another 'gospel'-which is not really 'another gospel'; only, there are some people who are confusing you and wish to pervert the gospel of Christ. But even if we, or an angel from heaven, preach a gospel [to you] other than the one which we preached to you, let him be accursed. As we have said before, so now I say again: if any one brings you a gospel other than the one which you received, let him be accursed.

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Ii. No Other Gospel (1:6-10) 79