Galatians

N. T. Wright

• Editorial: Eerdmans
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781467462174
• Categoría: Theology & Religion
• Categoría: Christian Theology

The first major biblical commentary from the pen of N. T. Wright

While full of theological import, Paul's letter to the Galatians also captures and memorializes a significant moment in the early history of Christianity. This commentary from N. T. Wright—the inaugural volume of the CCF series—offers a theological interpretation of Galatians that never loses sight of the political concerns of its historical context. With these two elements of the letter in dialogue with each other, readers can understand both what Paul originally meant and how his writing might be faithfully used to respond to present questions.

Each section of verse-by-verse commentary in this volume is followed by Wright's reflections on what the text says about Christian formation today, making this an excellent resource for individual readers and those preparing to teach or preach on Galatians. The focus on formation is especially appropriate for this biblical letter, in which Paul wrote to his fellow early Christians, "My children—I seem to be in labor with you all over again, until the Messiah is fully formed in you!"

Commentary

GALATIANS 1:1–17

TRANSLATION

1 Paul, an apostle … (my apostleship doesn’t derive from human sources! Nor did it come through a human being. It came through Jesus the Messiah, and God the Father who raised him from the dead) … 2 and the family who are with me; to the churches of Galatia. 3 Grace to you and peace from God our Father and Jesus the Messiah, our Lord, 4 who gave himself for our sins, to rescue us from the present evil age, according to the will of God our Father, 5 to whom be glory to the ages of ages. Amen.

6 I’m astonished that you are turning away so quickly from the one who called you by grace, and going after another gospel—7 not that it is another gospel, it’s just that there are some people stirring up trouble for you and wanting to pervert the gospel of the Messiah. 8 But even if we—or an angel from heaven!—should announce a gospel other than the one we announced to you, let such a person be accursed. 9 I said it before and I now say it again: if anyone offers you a gospel other than the one you received, let that person be accursed.

10 Well now … does that sound as though I’m trying to make up to people—or to God? Or that I’m trying to curry favor with people? If I were still pleasing people, I wouldn’t be a slave of the Messiah.

11 You see, brothers and sisters, let me make it clear to you: the gospel announced by me is not a mere human invention. 12 I didn’t receive it from human beings, nor was I taught it; it came through an unveiling of Jesus the Messiah.

13 You heard, didn’t you, the way I behaved when I was still within “Judaism.” I persecuted the church of God violently, and ravaged it. 14 I advanced in Judaism beyond many of my own age and people; I was extremely zealous for my ancestral traditions. 15 But when God, who set me apart from my mother’s womb and called me by his grace, was pleased 16 to unveil his Son in me, so that I might announce the good news about him among the nations—immediately I did not confer with flesh and blood. 17 Nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were apostles before me. No; I went away to Arabia, and afterward returned to Damascus.

INTRODUCTION

The very first verse of Paul’s letter to the Galatians plunges us into the well-known problem of mirror reading. As we look at Paul’s letter, we can see, reflected in it, all sorts of issues for which we have no other evidence. Why, for instance, in the very opening line, does he break off after two words in the Greek (Paulos, apostolos: “Paul, an apostle”) to deny that his apostleship is “from human sources” or that it came “through a human being”? Clearly, one would only do that if someone had cast doubt on the matter. So, changing the image from sight to hearing, we are to this extent like someone listening to one half of a telephone conversation. The voice we can hear is already agitated and defensive. We are trying to work out what has been said, or at least hinted at, on the other end of the line.

What we can tell is that throughout the first two chapters of the letter Paul is writing what we might call an “apologetic.” That is not to say he is, in our sense, apologizing. He isn’t saying “sorry.” He is explaining how things stand: his apostleship, he insists, is authentic; his gospel is authentic; and the message he announced to the Galatian churches was the complete version, not some truncated distortion. For Paul here, attack appears the best form of defense. If he is being accused, he will throw the accusation back as hard as it comes. But what is the accusation?

The Charge: Pleasing People

When we look a little more closely at what Paul’s opponents may have been saying about him, there is one telltale clue that isn’t always picked up. It comes in verse 10. There he says something three times, in very similar words, and it goes to the heart of it. “Does that sound,” he asks, “as though I’m trying to make up to people—or to God? Or that I’m trying to curry favor with people? If I were still pleasing people, I wouldn’t be a slave of the Messiah.” The key point is “making up to people,” “currying favor with people,” and “pleasing people.” The second and third are very nearly the same Greek phrase: anthrōpois areskein. (Anthrōpos means “human being”; areskein means “to please” or “to satisfy.”) We might see this merely in general terms: someone is accusing Paul of making up a message that will tickle people’s fancy, that will win him supporters because it’s the sort of thing people want to hear.¹ But there is a famous text from the Jewish world of Paul’s day that sharpens this up considerably.

We find this text among the so-called Pseudepigrapha, within the Septuagint but not in the Hebrew Scriptures. We may doubt whether Paul himself thought of it as “Scripture.” As he probably recognized, it clearly reflects its historical context in the century immediately before Jesus. But the book in question, the so-called Psalms of Solomon, was most likely written and cherished by people from the very world from which Paul himself came, namely, the world of strict Pharisaic Jews.² The Psalms of Solomon as a whole forms a fascinating backdrop to Paul’s thought, but for our purposes we can home in on one psalm in particular. Psalm 4 is specifically headed as a poem about “the people-pleasers,” the anthrōpareskoi. This word, found nowhere in classical or Koine Greek outside the New Testament, seems to be a Jewish coinage. In pre-Christian Greek, it is found only in the Septuagint of Psalm 52 (MT 53):6, but that psalm provides no particular clue as to a specific meaning beyond the generalized translation “ungodly.”³ Paul himself uses the word elsewhere, but without providing more clues to our present passage.⁴

Who, then, were the “people-pleasers” in the (probably Pharisaic) Psalms of Solomon? They were compromisers. They were hypocrites. They would be prepared to cut corners on obedience to God’s law in order to be in good favor with their pagan neighbors. They might fraternize with those pagan neighbors—might even go into their houses and eat with them. The problem about that, just to be clear, was that, in the eyes of the zealous Jews, the pagans worshiped idols. The world was full of idols. It was hard to avoid them even in the strictly Jewish territories of Judea and parts of Galilee. Every aspect of ordinary life in the non-Jewish world involved gods and goddesses of one sort or another. And the Jewish people, studying Deuteronomy, the prophets, and the psalms, knew that idols were seriously bad for your health. They polluted you, corrupted you, and finally killed you.⁵ The only way to be a truly human being was to worship Israel’s God, YHWH, the one true God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. But for many Jews, not least in the diaspora, this rigorist approach was simply impractical. Contact, business dealings, and friendships with non-Jews were inevitable. And this, for the hard-liners, meant compromise: disloyalty, a corruption at the heart of God’s people.

There are signs that the writer of the Psalms of Solomon is directing his anger, more specifically, against the Jewish rulers. The Pharisees, after all, were a populist pressure group, regarding the Sadducean elite in Jerusalem as irreducibly compromised. This fits with the rhetoric of the fourth psalm. The people under attack here would “sit in the holy assembly” but with their hearts far from the Lord (4:1).⁶ They were quick to condemn others but were guilty of all kinds of wickedness themselves (4:2–7). Such “people-pleasers” needed to be unmasked with scorn (4:7) as sinners who “speak the law with deceit” (4:8). Curses are heaped upon them, including (a possible echo of Ps 53:6?) the imprecation “May the flesh of the men-pleasers be scattered by wild beasts, and may the bones of the transgressors of the law lie before the sun in dishonor” (4:19). They are deceivers; however, the Lord will save his people from “every stumbling block” of the lawbreaker (apo pantos skandalou paranomou) (4:23). God, the righteous judge, will remove them (4:24).

This is not unfamiliar polemic. There are good grounds, quite independent of the fourth psalm, for supposing that the whole collection was written and used by strict Pharisees in the years after 63 BC—the year when the Roman general Pompey captured Jerusalem and, out of curiosity, it seems, walked right into the holy of holies in the temple. The naturally horrified reaction of devout Jews demonstrated that what mattered at the time was not simply the precise meaning of Torah (how a loyal Jew should live), but the larger struggle of what it meant to be a loyal Jew under Roman rule, when the local puppet rulers, the Hasmoneans, the Herodians, and the priestly aristocracy, were all heavily compromised.

The problem, then, was not simply one of what today we might call “legalism.” Yes, the Pharisees insisted on strict adherence to Torah, over against other Jews who were prepared to relax regulations, especially when they were with gentiles. But this was not because they were trying to amass enough “good works” to ensure that they went to heaven when they died. It was because they knew, on good biblical grounds, that God had called Israel to be holy, to be his special people—and that their holiness or otherwise would be directly linked to the great redemption they had been promised. If all Israel kept the Torah for a single day, said a later rabbi, then the Messiah would come. We do not know whether Pharisees in the early first century AD would have known that saying, but we can be sure that they believed its mirror image: if Israel failed to keep Torah, and compromised with the idolatrous world in the way that Deuteronomy had warned against, not only would the Messiah not come, not only would Israel’s God himself not come back at last to establish his kingdom with power and glory, but the pagans with whom the wicked had colluded might do once again what Babylon had done half a millennium earlier. The “people-pleasers,” seen from the point of view of an ardent Pharisee praying the Psalms of Solomon, were risking far more than “personal salvation.” The future of Israel as a whole, perhaps the world as a whole, was at stake.

That is why the Psalms of Solomon, not only the fourth one, are deeply concerned with how you can tell who God’s people really are. Who are the dikaioi, the righteous ones, as opposed to the hamartōloi, the “sinners”? That is the question—and it relates to the Jewish vision of salvation, not the Platonic one. This is not about “going to heaven,” but about how God is going to bring in his kingdom on earth as in heaven, and who will inherit it when he does. At this time of crisis, it was vital to know whom you could trust, who was really on your side; and the first centuries BC and AD presented a succession of social and political crises, interwoven with theological pressures. Pompey’s invasion and desecration of the temple, clearly in focus in Psalms of Solomon 1, 2, 5, and elsewhere, ranked high on the list. And the “people-pleasers,” the compromisers, were obviously on the wrong side.

It is a safe bet that the eager young Pharisee named Saul of Tarsus would have endorsed that entire viewpoint.

But now—this we know for sure through the most obvious “mirror reading” of Galatians 1:10—Paul himself had been on the receiving end of the same accusation. The rival teachers who had come to Galatia after Paul’s original missionary journey were clearly accusing him behind his back of only giving his converts half the message: he had, they suggested, told the Galatians about Jesus but not about the requirements of the Jewish law. But that was only the outward failing. The real charge against Paul was that he had himself become a “people-pleaser,” a compromiser. He had become the sort of Jew who would happily fraternize with gentile idolaters and thereby open the door to who knows what kinds of wickedness. (Psalms of Solomon 8 accuses the wicked of incest, adultery, and polluting the temple.) But why would people level this kind of accusation against Paul?

The answer is not difficult to determine. Paul was preaching—and this is what the letter to the Galatians is all about—that whenever anyone believes in the crucified Jesus as Israel’s Messiah and the risen Lord, that is already a sign that such a person is part of God’s true people, no matter what the person’s ethnic or moral background may be. New believers from a gentile background, Paul taught, were full members of God’s people without the demand for circumcision. Nor did they need the other regular signs of Jewish identity, the Sabbath and the food laws. These marked out the Jewish people from their pagan neighbors; the food laws specified not only what you could and couldn’t eat but who you could and couldn’t eat it with.⁷ But in Paul’s understanding of the gospel, the community of believers was not defined that way. And Paul must have known only too well—since he had formerly been as rigorous about these things as anyone could be—that to go soft on such things, to blur the clear lines between the Jewish and the pagan worlds, was precisely to be an anthrōpareskos, a people-pleaser. A compromiser. A traitor, in other words.

Only a few years earlier, Saul of Tarsus had strongly and angrily opposed such people. Now he finds rival teachers using the same rhetoric against him. He knows perfectly well why they’re doing it, and he resists as hard as he can. The irony of his position explains part at least of the heat we feel rising from every paragraph of the letter.

Some readers of Galatians in our own day may find that this historical reconstruction of Paul’s situation makes him feel remote. We do not face his challenges. Most Bible readers now are not Jewish by birth. Many will never have any dealings with a synagogue community, whether liberal, orthodox, or any shade in between. The sharp sensitivities that arise today between Jews and non-Jews are shaped by terrible events in the twentieth century, not by the turbulent happenings of the Second Temple period. Few if any of us, or our congregations, are tempted to get circumcised or to start observing the Jewish kosher laws. This, of course, is typical of the challenge of biblical hermeneutics. We must let the text be the text and understand it in its own terms rather than rushing at once to “application,” to “translating” it so it somehow fits our situation or indeed our theological analysis.

In particular, we have to avoid the assumption that Paul must “really” be talking about “faith and works” in the modern, post-sixteenth-century sense. That assumption effectively steamrollers the subtle contours and delicate plants in Paul’s garden so that we can then lay the flat concrete on which our own agendas can be built. Paul’s world, like that of the Psalms of So...