Galatians and Christian Theology

Justification, the Gospel, and Ethics in Paul's Letter

Wright, N. T., Elliott, Mark W., Hafemann, Scott J., Frederick, John

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781441245892
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

The letter to the Galatians is a key source for Pauline theology as it presents Paul's understanding of justification, the gospel, and many topics of keen contemporary interest. In this volume, some of the world's top Christian scholars offer cutting-edge scholarship on how Galatians relates to theology and ethics. The stellar list of contributors includes John Barclay, Beverly Gaventa, Richard Hays, Bruce McCormack, and Oliver O'Donovan. As they emphasize the contribution of Galatians to Christian theology and ethics, the contributors explore how exegesis and theology meet, critique, and inform each other.

Part 1
Justification

1
Messiahship in Galatians?

N. T. WRIGHT

Introduction

Question and Method

My question in this essay brings together an unusual combination. Most scholars who write about Galatians pay no attention to messiahship; most who write about messiahship spend little time on Galatians. A long tradition of Pauline scholarship has assumed that Paul used the word Christos simply as a proper name, and even those who have allowed Paul some residual messianic meaning have not usually seen such meaning in this letter. Why, people might ask, would this letter, warning Paul’s gentile converts against the attractions of Judaism, make use of such an obviously Jewish notion as messiahship? I nevertheless want to propose that Jesus’s messiahship is central and vital in Galatians. For reasons of space, I shall concentrate on chapter 3 in particular.

In my proposal I am encouraged by Matthew Novenson’s recent book Christ among the Messiahs.1 Novenson has made a strong case for seeing Christos in Paul neither as a name, nor exactly as a “title,” but as an “honorific,” somewhat like Augustus in the triple phrase Imperator Caesar Augustus, where Imperator is a title, Caesar the personal name,2 and Augustus an honorific, adding an extra halo of meaning. Novenson wisely restricts himself to certain key texts, and though he naturally mentions Galatians (particularly 3:16), he does not venture far into its complexities.

There are problems of method and historical background in approaching a question like this, but there is no space here to set them out. In particular, I regard it as a red herring to discuss Christos as the possible carrier of Paul’s incarnational Christology. First-century meanings of “Messiah” were varied and complex, but incarnation was not among them.3 When we look not only at key texts but also at actual first-century men and movements who grabbed at vague royal expectations and bent them to their own purposes,4 we see that expectation was focused primarily on the nation, not on an individual;5 that a variety of scriptural texts was available to back up messianic claims;6 and particularly, that though we must assume that messianic or similar movements were inevitably “political,” looking for a radical change in their society, this too does not make them monochrome. A movement that beats its plowshares into swords and marches on Jerusalem is “political”; so is a movement that symbolically reenacts Joshua’s entry into the land by plunging people into the Jordan.

How then can one make the case for messianism in Galatians? I begin with two preliminary points concerning large-scale features of the first-century landscape.

The Landscape

First, as I have argued before, the idea of Jesus as Messiah was alive and well, actively not merely presuppositionally, in every other form of Christianity we know in the first century, including the Gospels, Acts, Hebrews, Revelation, and also the apostolic fathers.7 Some who suggest that Paul must have abandoned messianic belief as irrelevant or even repellent to the wider gentile world do not seem to notice that the same should then be true for Luke, or John, or Ignatius of Antioch, and it obviously is not.8 We recall the emperor Domitian’s investigating Jesus’s blood relatives on the assumption that they were part of a royal family,9 and Josephus’s referring to James as “the brother of the so-called Messiah” (had Christos been a mere name, one would not write “so-called”).10 The earliest church was firmly rooted in Jesus-based messianism.11 If, therefore, Paul made no use of the messianic significance of the word Christos, he would be the sole exception in an otherwise universally messianic movement,12 making it all the more peculiar that he should distinguish the word Christos so carefully from both Iēsous and Kyrios.13

Second, we must remind ourselves of the widespread and diverse Jewish practice of retelling the single ancient biblical story. The Bible itself contains such retellings, such as those in Deuteronomy, both the “wandering Aramaean” speech (in chap. 26) and the great prophetic covenant narrative in chapters 27–30. There are the psalms, particularly 105 and 106, and the Davidic psalms, which indicate the transfer of the Abrahamic promises to the royal house.14 The prophets tell the same story, looking back to Abraham from the time of exile and looking onward to redemption. The narrative prayers of Ezra 9, Nehemiah 9, and Daniel 9 do the same, with the Daniel narrative linking up with chapters 2 and 7 to provide a long-range story of successive world kingdoms that will be overthrown by the coming kingdom of God. We know from Josephus that Daniel was being read in the first century in terms of a world ruler who would arise from Judaea.15 The same point emerges from many Second Temple texts, both the complacent list of heroes in Sirach and the history of revolutionary zeal in 1 Maccabees 2. Works such as the Animal Apocalypse in 1 Enoch and the historical visions of 4 Ezra and 2 Baruch tell the same story from different angles, as do some of the Qumran documents. We might also compare, of course, Jubilees, Pseudo-Philo, and many others.16

Six things about these narratives need to be noticed. First, they are of many types, shapes, sizes, and emphases. There is no standard model. Second, they always get the historical order right: whichever heroes or villains they choose, they know and use the full implicit narrative. Third, however they tell this story, they always perceive it not merely as an ancient story from which one might cull types and patterns, examples and warnings, but as a single continuous story in which they themselves are now living.

Fourth and most important, almost all these retellings of Israel’s story are more about Israel’s rebellion and sin, and God’s judgment upon them, particularly in the exile, than they are about a smooth upward journey toward the light. (Obvious exceptions might be Psalm 105 and Sirach.) The nineteenth-century idea of immanent development has no foothold in these texts. Ancient Judaism regularly told its story in terms of persistent failure and God’s fresh redemptive actions; the Abrahamic covenant was invoked not as the start of a triumphalist progression, but as the ultimate hope for grace when otherwise the story had become a nightmare. The “apocalyptic” message of most of these extremely varied Jewish texts nests within the solid and unbroken covenant theology they all evince.

Fifth, we see the same tradition of Jewish-style storytellings continuing through the first two generations of the Christian movement, not least in the Gospels, Acts, and Hebrews. The New Testament as a whole, however varied its sociocultural context, does not abandon the Jewish tradition of fresh tellings of the biblical story as a covenantal narrative that had passed through many dark and catastrophic times but was now emerging into clarity and focus because of Jesus.17 Paul does the same in Romans 9 and 10.

Sixth, and most obviously relevant to our topic, these stories frequently point forward to a coming climactic figure, and that figure is often, admittedly not always, messianic: the warrior king in the Psalms of Solomon, the lion in 4 Ezra, the fountain and vine in 2 Baruch, arguably also the large white bull in the Animal Apocalypse, and not least the world ruler who, in first-century readings of Daniel, would arise from Judaea. One could indeed turn the point around. Not all Israel stories climax with a Messiah. Not all Messiahs, when they are there, look alike. But all Messiah narratives come at the point where an implicit Israel narrative is being resolved. They come in fulfillment of the ancient promises, especially those to Abraham, and they concern the rescue of the nation from the appalling mess into which its many rebellions have landed it.

You will see where this is going. But before we move to exegesis, let me introduce you to some statistics.

Vital Statistics

We have all learned to beware of word statistics. They can lead to mere concordance worship, or the left-brain attempt to turn theology into mathematics. Nevertheless, the word usage in Galatians does, I think, offer a straw in the wind.

If you were to ask someone reasonably biblically literate what Galatians is about, they might say “salvation from sin,” “Paul’s gospel,” or “justification by faith.” They might perhaps say “Paul’s theology of the cross” or “Paul’s critique of the law.” Those have all been major themes in the tradition of interpreting this letter. Conversely, Galatians has regularly been invoked in discussions of soteriology, where those ideas cluster together. But the sheer numbers raise a question mark. Paul never uses sōzein, sōtēr, or sōtēria in Galatians. He mentions hamartia only three times.18 The dikaios root, likewise, is comparatively infrequent, as is stauros and stauroō.19 The gospel, euangelion, is found seven times, as is the verb euangelizomai, almost all in the first two chapters.20

A higher strike rate occurs for pistis, “faith” or “faithfulness,” which occurs twenty-two times, and for the law, nomos, which is found thirty-two times, almost as many as ou, ouk, and ouch (36x altogether), or Paul’s vital connective gar (37x).21 Even theos is found only thirty-one times, and pneuma a mere eighteen. Out beyond them all is Christos, forty times or more (depending on variant readings), and backed up with a couple of key messianic references to Jesus as “Son of God.”22 By contrast, the title kyrios is found only five times: twice in the opening and closing greetings, and once in the reference to James, “the Lord’s brother.”23 Even the proper name “Jesus” is found only eighteen times, again allowing for variant readings. Christos, in other words, is far and away the most frequent term in Paul’s theological vocabulary in this letter. We might contrast Romans, where we find 155 uses of theos and 68 of Christos; similar proportions occur in the two Corinthian Letters.24 To find words in Galatians that occur more frequently than Christos, we have to look to hymeis in all its cases (47x) and, inevitably, kai and de (58x each).25 Christos is not far behind even these.

Now perhaps this means nothing at all. Perhaps Paul uses Iēsous or Christos interchangeably, and here just happens more often to call him Christos, as a mere proper name.26 But there are enough scholars who have insisted, against the trend, that Paul does use Christos with active and not merely residual messianic significance here, that his arguments do turn on this, and that we should be encouraged to look afresh at the way, and the contexts, in which the word is used.27 That is the task to which I now turn. I shall argue, first, that Christos does indeed mean “Messiah” in Galatians and that this meaning is active within the argument, not merely as a residual memory; second, that the word Christos seems to be at the heart of Paul’s incorporative ecclesiology in Galatians; and third, rather obviously granted the first two but not granted the history of scholarship, that the first of these explains the second.

Christos as “Messiah” in Galatians

My first and most important move has to do with the narrative that dominates Galatians. The very idea of such a narrative has often been ruled out or ascribed to Paul’s opponents rather than to him. But I persist.28 Throughout the letter, Paul regularly sees Jesus as the one in whom Israel’s long, strange, and often dark narrative has come to surprising but appropriate fulfillment. The point is obvious, in the light of our earlier quick survey of biblical, Second Temple, and early Christian retellings of the story of Israel: if we discover a narrative, starting with Abraham and continuing with Moses and the law, finding itself in deep trouble but then finding a God-sent deliverer through whom promises are fulfilled after all, the trouble is resolved, and God’s new age is ushered in—then, almost whatever words might be used for such a figure, the natural assumption would be that this person is Israel’s Mes...