4. Only one gospel
The bane of Paul’s life and ministry was the insidious activity of false teachers. They dogged his footsteps wherever he went. No sooner had he planted the gospel somewhere, than false teachers began to trouble the church by perverting it. Furthermore, as we have seen, in order to discredit Paul’s message, they also challenged his authority.
This matter is important for us because Paul’s detractors have plenty of successors in the Christian church today. They tell us that we do not need to pay too much attention to his writings. They forget or deny that he was an apostle of Jesus Christ, uniquely called, commissioned, authorized and inspired to teach in his name. They ignore Paul’s own claim (1:11–12) that he derived his gospel not from other people but from Jesus Christ.
One of the ways in which some false teachers of Paul’s day tried to undermine his authority was to hint that his gospel was different from Peter’s, and indeed from the views of all the other apostles in Jerusalem. ‘As a result,’ they said, ‘the church is being saddled with two gospels, Paul’s and Peter’s, each claiming a divine origin. Which are we going to accept?’ ‘Surely,’ they went on, ‘we cannot follow Paul if he is in a minority of one, and if Peter and the rest of the apostles disagree with him?’ This was evidently one of the spurious arguments of the Judaizers. They were trying to disrupt the unity of the apostolic circle. They were openly alleging that the apostles contradicted one another. Their game, we might say, was not ‘robbing Peter to pay Paul’, but exalting Peter to spite Paul!
Paul now addresses himself to this suggestion. He has shown in chapter 1 that his gospel came from God and was not of human origin. He now shows in the first part of chapter 2 that his gospel was precisely the same as that of the other apostles; it was not different. To prove that his gospel was independent of the other apostles, he has stressed that he paid only one visit to Jerusalem in fourteen years, and that this lasted only fifteen days. To prove that his gospel was yet identical with theirs, he now stresses that when he paid a proper visit to Jerusalem, his gospel was endorsed and approved by them.
Let us consider the circumstances of this visit to Jerusalem:
Then after fourteen years, I went up again to Jerusalem, this time with Barnabas. I took Titus along also. I went in response to a revelation and, meeting privately with those esteemed as leaders, I presented to them the gospel that I preach among the Gentiles. I wanted to be sure I was not running and had not been running my race in vain.
This was his second visit (I went up again), and it was after fourteen years (dating probably from his conversion, not from his first visit). There are two important aspects of this visit, namely his companions and his message.
First, his companions. These were Barnabas and Titus. What is particularly remarkable about that is that Barnabas was a Jew (although he was associated with Paul in his mission to the Gentiles in Antioch and later on the first missionary journey), whereas Titus was a Greek. That is, Titus was an uncircumcised Gentile, himself a product of the very Gentile mission which was then in dispute and which the Judaizers were challenging.
Second, his gospel. Paul’s gospel, which he preached to the Gentiles, he now laid before the other apostles. It is true that this was not his reason for going to Jerusalem. The occasion of his visit was different. He went in response to a revelation, he says (2). That is to say, he went up because God told him to go, not because the Jerusalem apostles had sent for him to reprimand him. (What this revelation was we do not know, but the reference may be to Agabus’s prophecy of a famine, as a result of which Paul and Barnabas were sent to Jerusalem on a relief mission; see Acts 11:27–30.) It is also true that the consultation between Paul and the other apostles was a small and private affair. It was not in any sense an official conference or ‘synod’.
Nevertheless, although it was neither the purpose of his visit to Jerusalem nor an official arrangement, this consultation did take place. In it, Paul presented to the Jerusalem apostles the gospel that he was preaching to the Gentiles, and he says he did it because he wanted to be sure I was not running and had not been running my race in vain. It was not, we may be sure, that he had any personal doubts or misgivings about his gospel and needed the reassurance of the other Jerusalem apostles, for he had been preaching it for fourteen years; but rather in case his ministry, past and present, should be rendered fruitless by the Judaizers. It was to overthrow their influence, not to strengthen his own conviction, that he presented his gospel to the Jerusalem apostles.
These were the two vital features of his visit. He took with him to Jerusalem a Gentile companion and a Gentile gospel. It was a tense and crucial situation, an occasion fraught with great danger and equally great possibility for the subsequent history of the Christian church. What would be the reaction of the apostles in Jerusalem to Paul’s Gentile companion and Gentile mission? Would they receive Titus as a brother or reject him because he was uncircumcised? Would they endorse Paul’s gospel or attempt to modify it in some way? These were the questions in everybody’s mind. Behind them was the basic question: would the liberty with which Christ has made us free be maintained, or would the church be condemned to bondage and sterility? Had the Judaizers any ground for their rumour that there was a rift in the ranks of the apostles?
Paul tells his readers what happened at that momentous consultation. His Gentile companion Titus was not compelled to be circumcised (3–5), and his Gentile gospel was not contradicted or even modified in any way (6–10). On the contrary, Titus was accepted, and Paul’s gospel was accepted also. A great and resounding victory was won for the truth of the gospel. The rift in the apostolic ranks was a myth; there was no substance to it.
Having introduced the main thrust of the argument in these verses, we must now examine them in greater detail.
1. Paul’s companion (2:3–5)
It was, of course, a daring step of Paul’s to take Titus with him at all. To introduce a Gentile into the headquarters of the Jerusalem church in this way could have been interpreted as a deliberate act of provocation. In a sense, it probably was, although Paul’s motive was not provocative. It was not in order to stir up strife that he brought Titus with him to Jerusalem, but in order to establish the truth of the gospel. This truth is that Jews and Gentiles are accepted by God on the same terms, namely through faith in Jesus Christ, and must therefore be accepted by the church without any discrimination between them.
This was the issue. And in the event, the point was made and the truth established: Titus was not compelled to be circumcised, though he was a Greek. However, the victory was not won without a battle, for strong pressure was exerted on Paul to circumcise Titus. This came from false believers, whom the New English Bible calls ‘sham-Christians’ and J. B. Phillips, ‘pseudo-Christians’. They were almost certainly Judaizers, and Paul has some stern words to say about them. They had infiltrated our ranks. This may mean either that they had no business to be in the church fellowship at all, or that they had gatecrashed the private conference with the apostles. This is how J. B. Phillips understood it, translating ‘who wormed their way into our meeting’. In either case, in Paul’s view they were spies. They had infiltrated our ranks to spy on the freedom we have in Christ Jesus and to make us slaves. In particular, they tried to insist on Titus being circumcised. We know that this was the platform of the Judaizing party, for their slogan is given us in Acts 15:1: ‘Unless you are circumcised, according to the custom taught by Moses, you cannot be saved.’
Paul saw the issue clearly. It was not just a question of circumcision and uncircumcision, of Gentile and Jewish customs. It was a matter of basic importance regarding the truth of the gospel, namely of Christian freedom versus bondage. Christians have been set free from the law in the sense that our acceptance before God depends entirely upon God’s grace in the death of Jesus Christ received by faith. To introduce the works of the law and make our acceptance depend on our obedience to rules and regulations was to bring free people back into slavery. Titus was a test case of this principle. It is true that he was an uncircumcised Gentile, but he was a converted Christian. Having believed in Jesus, he had been accepted by God in Christ, and that, Paul said, was enough. Nothing further was necessary for his salvation, as the Council of Jerusalem was later to confirm (see Acts 15).
So Paul stood firm. The truth of the gospel was at stake, and he was determined to maintain it at all costs. He resisted the pressure of the Judaizers, and the apostles did not compel Titus to be circumcised. We did not give in to them [that is, the false believers] for a moment (5).
It is necessary to add that these verses could be interpreted, and are interpreted by some commentators, in such a way as to understand that Paul gave in and that Titus was circumcised. Bishop Lightfoot refers to the paragraph as ‘this shipwreck of grammar’. Paul is evidently writing under the stress of strong emotion, even of considerable embarrassment. He leaves his sentence in verse 4 unfinished, and we can only guess what he would have said if he had completed it. Further, although all the great Greek manuscripts include the negative in verse 5 (‘we did not give in to them’), there are one or two Latin versions which omit it. This is reflected in the margin of the New English Bible: ‘I yielded to their demand for the moment.’ It seems right to reject this reading. But if by chance it is correct, then we must understand that Paul circumcised Titus, as he later circumcised Timothy, as a conciliatory gesture (Acts 16:3). Once a vital principle of gospel truth had been established, Paul was willing to make policy concessions. But, he insists here, he did it voluntarily, not out of compulsion. For whether Titus was circumcised or not, verse 3 is clear in saying that he was not compelled to be. So does verse 5b, that Paul’s motive was to preserve the truth of the gospel. However, my own belief is that Titus was not circumcised. As Bishop Lightfoot very properly points out, the people to whom Paul made concessions were weak believers, not false.
2. Paul’s gospel (2:6–9a)
As we have already seen, Paul had a private interview with the Jerusalem apostles (2). We know who these men were to whom he presented his gospel, because they are identified by name later in verse 9. They are James the Lord’s brother, Peter and John. In other verses in this paragraph, however, Paul uses indirect expressions to describe them. They are those esteemed as leaders (2), those who were held in high esteem (6) and those esteemed as pillars (9). In each case Paul refers to them according to their reputation. He is not being insulting to them, for he has acknowledged them already in Galatians 1:17 as ‘apostles before I was’, and he is to tell us in verse 9 that they gave him ‘the right hand of fellowship’. Why then does he refer to them in this roundabout way? Probably his expressions were influenced by the fact that the Judaizers were exaggerating the status of the Jerusalem apostles at the expense of his own.
Perhaps the false believers were drawing attention to what they regarded as the superior qualifications of James, Peter and John – that James was one of the Lord’s brothers, and that Peter and John had belonged to the inner circle of three. Besides this, they had of course known Jesus in the days of his earthly ministry, which Paul probably had not. It may be this that Paul refers to in verse 6: whatever they were makes no difference to me; God does not show favouritism. Paul’s words are neither a denial of, nor a mark of disrespect for, their apostolic authority. He is simply indicating that, although he accepts their office as apostles, he is not overawed by their person as it was being inflated by the Judaizers.
3. The outcome of the consultation (2:9b–10)
Here, then, is Paul presenting his gospel to the Jerusalem apostles. What was the outcome of this consultation? Did they contradict his gospel? Did they modify it, edit it, trim it, supplement it? No. Paul mentions two results, one negative and the other positive.
The negative outcome is seen at the end of verse 6: they added nothing to my message. In other words, they did not find Paul’s gospel defective. They made no attempt to add circumcision to it, or to add to it in any other way. They did not say to Paul, ‘Your gospel is all right as far as it goes, but it does not go far enough; you must add to it.’ In fact, they changed nothing. Significantly, Paul describes the gospel which he presented to the apostles as ‘the gospel that I preach’ (present tense). It is as if he wrote: ‘the gospel which I submitted to the other apostles is the gospel which I am still preaching. The gospel which I am preaching today was not altered by them. It is the same as I preached before I saw them. It is the gospel which I preached to you and which you received. I have added nothing, subtracted nothing, changed nothing. It is you Galatians who are deserting the gospel; it is not I.’ This, then, was the negative result. They ‘added nothing to my message’.
The positive outcome of the consultation was that they gave me . . . the right hand of fellowship (9). They recognized that they and Paul had been entrusted with the same gospel. The only difference between them was that they had been allocated different areas in which to preach it. What the apostles realized was that God was at work in his grace through both Peter and Paul (8–9). So they gave Paul the right hand of fellowship, which means that they ‘accepted Barnabas and myself as partners, and shook hands upon it’ (neb). They simply recognized that we should go to the Gentiles, and they to the circumcised (9).
They also added that they wanted Paul and Barnabas to remember the poor, the poverty-stricken churches of Judea, which, Paul says, was the very thing I had been eager to do all along (10). Indeed, it was primarily for famine relief that he and Barnabas were in Jerusalem at that time, as we saw earlier. And he continued to care for the poor in the following years, organizing his famous collection. He urged the more wealthy Gentile churches of Macedonia and Achaia to support the poorer churches of Judea, and regarded their gift as a means to foster and demonstrate Jewish–Gentile solidarity in the fellowship of the Christian church.
Looking back over the first paragraph of Galatians 2, we have learnt that, on his second visit to Jerusalem, Paul met two groups, whose attitudes to him differed completely. The ‘false believers’, who disagreed with his gospel and his policy, tried to compel Titus to be circumcised. Paul refused to submit to them. The apostles, on the other hand, acknowledged the truth of Paul’s gospel and gave him their hand in confirmation.
4. Conclusion
Some people who read these pages will no doubt be tempted to be impatient. It seems to them no more than a complicated fuss. A visit of Paul to Jerusalem in the first century ad, the question of whether Titus was circumcised or not, a consultation between Paul and the Jerusalem apostles – it all appears very remote and quite unrelated to today’s problems. But this is not so. At least two principles of the utmost importance emerge from this paragraph.
a. The truth of the gospel is one and unchanging
We saw, when we were considering Galatians 1:6–10, that there is only one gospel. We can now go further and say that the whole New Testament presents this one gospel consistently. It is fashionable in some quarters to talk about the ‘Pauline’ gospel and the ‘Petrine’ gospel and the ‘Johannine’ gospel, as if they were quite different from one another. Some people refer to ‘Paulinism’, as if it were a distinctive brand of Christianity, even a different religion altogether. And sometimes people set Paul and James over against each other as if they contradicted each other.
But all this is mistaken. The apostles of Jesus Christ do not contradict one another in the New Testament. Certainly, there are differences of style between them, because their inspiration did not obliterate their individual personalities. There are also differences of emphasis, because they were called to different spheres and preached or wrote to different audiences. Consequently, they stressed different aspects of the gospel. For example, Paul was writing against those who over-emphasized the place of God’s law, and James against those who didn’t take it seriously enough. But they complement one another. There is only one gospel, the apostolic faith, a recognizable body of doctrine taught by the apostles of Jesus Christ and preserved for us in the New Testament. Paul takes care in this passage to show that he was in full agreement with the Jerusalem apostles and they with him. He makes the same point in 1 Corinthians 15:11: ‘Whether, then, it is I or they, this is what we preach, and this is what you believed.’ There is only one New Testament gospel, only one Christianity; there are not several different valid alternatives.
It is still so today. If there is only one gospel in the New Testament, there is only one gospel for the church. The gospel has not changed with the changing centuries. Whether it is preached to young or old, to East or West, to Jews or Gentiles, to cultured or uncultured, to scientists or non-scientists, although its presentation may vary, its substance is the same. Paul and Peter had a different commission, but they had a common message.
b. The truth of the gospel must be maintained
This is the second principle which is illustrated in Galatians 2. Paul was determined to resist these Judaizers. He was even prepared, as we shall see in the next paragraph (11–14), to oppose Peter to his face when his behaviour contradicted the gospel. Paul was very gentle with ‘weak’ believers, whose conscience was over-scrupulous. He was ready to make policy concessions, as when he later circumcised Timothy. But on a matter of principle, when the truth of the gospel was at stake, he stood firm and would not budge.