by N. T. Wright
But, at around the same time as “certain persons came from James” to Syrian Antioch, it appears that certain persons, also claiming the authority of the Jerusalem church, came to Galatia. Their message was similar to the one the James people seem to have been articulating in Antioch. And that message was that all the fraternizing with Gentiles had to stop. Any Gentiles who wanted to be regarded as members of the true people of Israel, the family of Abraham, would have to be circumcised. God’s kingdom would indeed come, rescuing God’s people from the world and its wicked ways, but the only people who would inherit that kingdom would be the circumcised.
This sharp message for the little groups of Jesus-followers in Galatia also involved a personal attack on Paul himself. Paul, said the messengers, was only ever a second-order representative of the Jesus message. He had picked up his “gospel” in Jerusalem, but had failed to grasp one of its essential elements or perhaps had simply chosen not to pass it on. If the Galatians appealed to the top of the tree, to Jerusalem itself, they would find a different story from the one Paul told them.
We do not have to look far below the surface to see why all this seemed so urgent to the messengers and so important locally to many people in South Galatia. Jerusalem, as we have seen, was awash with zealous speculation about the coming kingdom, in which “the Gentiles” were usually the wicked villains who would at last receive their punishment. People disagreed on what exactly it meant to keep the Torah, but everyone agreed that keeping the Torah mattered. People might disagree as to why exactly Gentiles posed a threat to the ancestral beliefs and hopes of Israel, but everyone agreed that the Gentile threat was real. So any claim that Israel’s Messiah was now welcoming Gentiles on equal terms into a new community where normal Torah standards (including the covenant badge of circumcision) were set aside must have seemed a contradiction in terms. It would be like a grand-society wedding at which the noble-born bridegroom arrives, only to announce that he is running off with a gypsy girl he’d met down the street. Any Gentiles who thought they were now sharing the divine promises of Israel’s worldwide inheritance were deceived. And any Jews who were tempted to treat uncircumcised Gentiles as “family” were compromising the integrity of God’s people. They were placing the promised inheritance itself in jeopardy.
We noted a moment ago the pressure on the Jerusalem-based Jesus-followers themselves. We can see how natural it would be for them to want to demonstrate to their suspicious friends and neighbors in Jerusalem just how loyal they really were by trying to put matters right. If only those Gentiles who believed in Jesus would get circumcised, everybody would be happy! The charge of disloyalty would collapse. And so, just as Saul of Tarsus had set off a decade earlier to round up those blaspheming Jesus-followers, someone else—a shadowy, unnamed figure, presumably with a few friends—set off with a different though related agenda. He would bring this new movement into line. Paul would recognize what this person was doing. It is the sort of thing he would have done himself. It is quite likely that he knew the person in question.
At the same time, pressure would be mounting on the Jewish communities in South Galatia. As long as everybody in that thoroughly Romanized province knew who the Jews were within a particular town or city, all would be well. People might sneer at them for their funny customs, but at least everybody would know that they had official permission to forgo participation in the local cults, particularly the exciting new cults of Rome and Caesar, which were celebrating the new worldwide reality of peace and prosperity provided by the “Lord” and “Savior” in Rome itself.
But one of the first and most important things that happened whenever non-Jews were grasped by the gospel of Jesus was that, once they had heard that there was a true and living God and that he loved them personally, they would turn away from the idols they had previously worshipped. So suddenly a new group would emerge, in a world without privacy, where people knew one another’s business, and where social deviance was quickly noted and usually resented. This new group, the Jesus-followers, was not, or not obviously, Jewish; the males were not circumcised, the Sabbath was not being observed, and so on. But on the other hand, like the Jews, the members of this group were staying away from the regular rituals, the weekly, monthly, or annual ceremonies and celebrations. So if the Jesus-followers in Jerusalem were suspected of disloyalty because of their attitude toward Israel’s Temple and Torah, the Jesus-followers in the Diaspora would be suspected of disloyalty toward their own communities, and toward Rome itself, because of their attitude toward the local cults.
The Jewish communities in cities like Pisidian Antioch, Iconium, and Lystra—all Roman colonies, we recall—would then find themselves caught in the middle. We can imagine the civic authorities challenging them. “Who are these people,” they would ask, “who have suddenly stopped worshipping the gods? Are they Jews or are they not? We need to know! Sort it out or we will have questions to ask.” Local synagogue communities might well be divided in their response, but the social pressure would build up. The situation was intolerable. Something would have to be done. So we can easily imagine that local Jewish leaders would want to put pressure on local Jewish Jesus-followers to persuade their surprising new friends, the Gentile Jesus believers, to come into line. “Persuade them to get circumcised,” they urged. “Use any tactics, any pressure you like, but get it done. Otherwise we’re all in trouble.”
These reconstructions of the likely scenarios in Jerusalem and in Galatia are, of course, guesses. But they fit with what we know of the larger world of the time and with the kinds of challenges that local communities often faced. Above all, they make very good sense of the letter Paul then wrote. Nor should we imagine that these pressures—the grinding of gears between different social and cultural groupings—were seen, either by the people concerned or by Paul himself, as (in our terms) “sociological” rather than “religious” or “theological.” Such distinctions make no sense in the first century. Everybody knew that divine worship was central to communal life. It kept things together and fostered social stability. For Jesus-followers, worshipping the true and living God, who had acted dramatically in the gospel events and who was now continuing to act powerfully by his spirit, generated and sustained a new kind of communal life, holding it together and fostering its stability—at the necessary cost of disrupting the tidy patterns of all the other communal life of the region.
Paul, therefore, had a complex and challenging task. He would understand only too well the different anxieties, the complex web of social, cultural, religious, and theological pressures and agendas. He would see the communities he had founded caught in the middle—and would be shocked at how easily they, or some of them, had succumbed to the teaching of whoever it was who was “troubling” them. He would be personally hurt (this comes through at various points in the letter) that they would be disloyal to him after all that they had seen him go through on their behalf. But above all he would be shocked that they seemed not to have grasped the very center of it all, the meaning of Jesus himself and his death and resurrection and the fact that through him a new world, a new creation, had already come into being. They were in serious danger of stepping back from that new reality into the old world, as though the cross and resurrection had never taken place, as though the true and living God had not revealed his covenant love once and for all not only to Israel but through the personification of Israel, the Messiah, to the world.
It would take a whole separate book to work through the letter to the Galatians and explain how Paul, in his rapid-fire writing, hits these nails on the head with all the tools of rhetoric and irony available to him and at the same time with pathos and personal appeal. He has several things to say, and they come tumbling out on top of one another.
He interrupts his own opening greeting to insist that his “apostleship” was a direct gift from God and Jesus, not a secondhand or second-rate thing he got from elsewhere. “Paul, an apostle,” he begins—and then interrupts himself by adding, i
n brackets as it were, “my apostleship doesn’t derive from human sources . . .” Then he recovers his balance and states the foundation principle. His apostleship derives from God himself, and from Jesus the Messiah, our Kyrios,
who gave himself for our sins, to rescue us from the present evil age, according to the will of God our father, to whom be glory to the ages of ages. Amen.15
Each element here is vital. The “good news” Paul has announced is what the One God always planned and intended. It is not a sudden afterthought. The message about Jesus may look to Jews in Jerusalem or Galatia as though it’s a strange, peculiar eccentricity. But it is in truth the leading edge of the long-awaited new creation. This is central and will remain so throughout Paul’s work.
The central point concerns the difference between “the present evil age” and the new day that has dawned. Paul here affirms the well-known and widespread ancient Jewish belief that world history is divided into two “ages,” the “present age” of sorrow, shame, exile, and death and the “age to come,” when all things will be put right. That belief was common for centuries before Paul, and it remained the norm all the way through the much later rabbinic period. But for Paul something had happened. The living God had acted in person, in the person of Jesus, to rescue people from that “present age” and to launch “the age to come.” The two ages were not, as it were, back to back, the first stopping when the second began. The new age had burst upon the scene while the “present age” was still rumbling on. This was the direct effect of the divine plan by which Jesus “gave himself for our sins”; the power of the “present age” was thereby broken, and the new world could begin. There is a sense in which the whole letter, and in a measure all of Paul’s work, simply unpacks and explains this opening flourish.
It is always risky to summarize, but part of the point of the present book is to invite readers to so live within Paul’s world that they will be able to read the letters in their original contexts and so grasp the full import of what was being said. So, for Galatians, we may simply note five points that come out again and again. Each could be spelled out at length.
First, to repeat, Paul is offering a reminder that what has happened through Jesus is the launching of new creation. The messianic events of Jesus and the spirit are not simply another religious option, a new twist on an old theme. If they mean anything, they mean that the creator God has called time on the old creation and has launched the new one in the middle of it. No wonder this new reality is uncomfortable. “Circumcision . . . is nothing; neither is uncircumcision! What matters is new creation.”16 The messengers from Jerusalem and the local pressure groups are trying to put the hurricane of new creation back into the bottle of the old world. It can’t be done. The Messiah’s death has defeated the powers of the world. That is why non-Jewish idolaters have been set free from their former slavery. Paul’s analysis is sharp: “If you try to reverse this—as you would be doing, were you to get circumcised—you are saying you don’t believe in the new creation. You are saying that the Messiah didn’t need to die. You are saying you still belong in the old world. You are cutting off the branch you have been sitting on.”
Second, what has happened in the gospel events, and what has happened in Paul’s own ministry, is in fact the fulfillment of the scripturally sourced divine plan. Paul’s long explanation of his own early days in the movement, designed to ward off the charge that he got his gospel secondhand and muddled it up as he did so, echoes again and again the “call” of the prophets and of the “servant” in Isaiah who was to be the light of the nations. “Whatever Jewish messengers may tell you,” Paul is saying, “I can show you that what has happened through Jesus and what has been happening through my own work is what Israel’s scriptures themselves always envisaged.” Paul’s own commissioning on the Damascus Road and his subsequent visits to Jerusalem make it clear that his gospel was firsthand. The only thing the Jerusalem apostles contributed to it was support. Likewise, Paul’s suffering, which the Galatian churches had witnessed up close, was itself a dramatic signpost to the gospel. In particular—and this forms the central theme of the letter—the divine promises to Abraham have been fulfilled in Jesus the Messiah. God promised Abraham a worldwide family. In the Psalms and Isaiah this was focused on the coming king, the son of David who would be the son of God. In Jesus, God has done what he promised, launching the movement through which the new creation is coming about, the kingdom of God on earth as in heaven.
This leads Paul, third, to the vital point. All this has effectively bypassed the problem posed by Moses. The third chapter of the letter to the Galatians outflanks the eager Torah loyalty of the Jerusalem zealots and their diaspora cousins. Moses himself leaves Israel, at the end of Deuteronomy, with the warning of a curse, and the curse will culminate in exile, just as it had for Adam and Eve in Genesis 3. Moses’s Torah was given by God for a vital purpose, but that purpose was temporary, to cover the period before the fulfillment of the promise to Abraham. Now that this has happened, the Torah has no more to say on the subject.
All those who belong to the Messiah are the true “seed” of Abraham, guaranteed to inherit the promise of the kingdom, of new creation. Abraham believed God, quotes Paul from Genesis, “and it was counted to him for righteousness.”17 There is the phrase that, we have suggested, had haunted Saul of Tarsus from his days as a young zealot. Phinehas acted with zeal for God and the law, “it was counted to him for righteousness,” and God established his covenant with him. Mattathias, the father of Judas Maccabaeus, had quoted this phrase, referring to Abraham and Phinehas, as he commissioned his sons for their life of holy zeal.18 Now Paul is reinterpreting both covenant and zeal. God has fulfilled his promises to Abraham, but this does not drive a wedge between holy Jews and wicked Gentiles; instead, it is establishing a Jew-plus-Gentile family of faith—as God always intended.
Fourth, this has been accomplished through the long-awaited “new Exodus.” Every Jew knew the story: slavery in Egypt; divine victory over Pharaoh; Israel (as “God’s firstborn son”) redeemed and brought through the Red Sea; the gift of the Torah on Sinai; the glorious divine presence coming to dwell in the Tabernacle; Abraham’s children heading home to the “inheritance” of the promised land. Paul retells that story in Galatians 4:1–7 with Jesus and the spirit at the heart of it. The whole world is enslaved; God sent his son to redeem and his spirit to indwell; Abraham’s children are assured of their “inheritance.” There is a sting in the tail, however.19 Paul warns the Galatians that they are now in danger of behaving like those Israelites in the wilderness who wanted to go back to Egypt. If they get circumcised, they will be saying that they prefer the old slavery to the new freedom.
So, finally and decisively, the living God has created the single family he always envisaged, and it is marked by faith, pistis. God had not promised Abraham two families, a Jewish one and a non-Jewish one—which is what would have been implied by Peter’s behavior at Antioch, where Jewish and non-Jewish Jesus-followers were to eat at separate tables. Nor would it do to create that single family artificially, as it were, simply by circumcising male Gentile converts. If covenant membership were available through the Torah, the Messiah wouldn’t have needed to die.
How can you tell, then, where this single family is? The only sure indication is pistis—faith, faithfulness, loyalty. All of those and more besides. Not, of course, a generalized “religious faith,” but “Messiah faith,” the faithfulness of the Messiah himself, whose death overcame the power of sin and thus delivered people from the present evil age; the faith evoked by the gospel message, the kind that echoed the Messiah’s own faithfulness by confessing that Jesus is Kyrios and believing that God raised him from the dead; the loyalty that now clings to that message and refuses to be blown off course. Paul has taken one of the central themes that had motivated both the Torah loyalists in Jerusalem and the Caesar loyalists in Galatia and replaced it with a word, elevated almost to a technical term, that denoted loyalty to the
One God, the true and living one now made known in and as Jesus and now active through the spirit. It was a new, contested loyalty. Without leaving this home base of meanings, however, the word pistis encompassed so much more, especially the personal knowledge and trust that sprang up in hearts and minds at the news of Jesus, the sense of God’s intimate presence and love.
This, then, is Paul’s famous doctrine of “justification by faith.” It is not that “faith” in the sense of a “religious awareness” is somehow a kind of human experience that is superior to others, but that those who believed the gospel and who were loyal to the One God it unveiled were to be known, and were to know themselves, as the single worldwide family promised to Abraham. And that meant a new community sharing a common table despite all differences: neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, no “male and female,” since “all are one in the Messiah, Jesus.”20
A new kind of community, then, as the advance guard of the new creation. A dramatic new vision, claiming the deepest of roots in Israel’s scriptures and the most personal of relationships with Israel’s God. Paul tells the Galatians that because they are new-Exodus people, the true “children” of God, “God has sent the spirit of his son” into their hearts, “calling out ‘Abba, Father!’”21 The spirit thus anticipates and points to the ultimate inheritance, the promised land of new creation itself. And anyone who tries to disrupt this new reality, anyone who, for whatever mixture of motives, tries to drag them back into the old world—such a person is to be shunned. Anyone who suggests that Jerusalem is still the center of everything, so that its leaders must have the last word, is to be reminded that what counts is the heavenly Jerusalem.22 There cannot be “another gospel,” whether the “gospel” of Caesar or a supposed “gospel” of Torah-plus-Jesus. “What matters is new creation.”23