Galatians Part One Deep Dive

TO CUT OR NOT TO CUT? AN OVERVIEW OF THE LETTER OF GALATIANS | DR ADAM WHITE

I remember when I was first saved experiencing a radical transformation. I had always had some sort of faith in God or Jesus, I did the whole Sunday school thing as a kid, but this was really different. God was real in my life and I wanted to know everything there was to know and do everything there was to do. I also remember being in a church surrounded by lots of people who had been Christians for years (some longer than I had been alive) and wanting to be just like them. So, I became a sponge. I asked lots of questions, I hung around whoever I could, I watched, I learned, I mimicked. It was like an information overload from these know-everything men and women of God. The problem for me, though, was that I had no filter. I didn’t know anything, so everything from an older person in the faith sounded true. Who was I to argue? After all, I’d been saved for all of five minutes. My story might resonate with you and your experience. It is certainly what I see when I look at the Galatians. 

There is a whole controversy in scholarship as to when Galatians was written (and pretty much everything else to do with Paul and his letters). It’s not worth getting into the details, only to say that I am of the school that sees Galatians being written immediately after Paul’s first missionary trip. In the context of Acts, it looks like this:

A 14:26-15:2 From Attalia they sailed back to Antioch, where they had been committed to the grace of God for the work they had now completed. On arriving there, they gathered the church together and reported all that God had done through them and how he had opened a door of faith to the Gentiles. And they stayed there a long time with the disciples. <insert Galatians here> Certain people came down from Judea to Antioch and were teaching the believers: “Unless you are circumcised, according to the custom taught by Moses, you cannot be saved.” This brought Paul and Barnabas into sharp dispute and debate with them. So Paul and Barnabas were appointed, along with some other believers, to go up to Jerusalem to see the apostles and elders about this question. 

The letter to the Galatians came on the back of a successful twelve-month missionary endeavour that saw a number of Gentiles in the region of Galatia come to the faith. This was all brand new and very uncharted territory for the Church, who, until this point, had been basically all Jews. What do we do with these uncircumcised, pork-eating, sabbath-breaking, formerly unclean Gentiles that are now part of our community? Can they really be members, really call themselves the people of God, with all of these things going on? Do they need to change to be ‘full members’? Many of the Jewish Christians, men such as Paul and Barnabas, had already come to the conclusion that it was fine. We are all the people of God, Jew or Gentile alike, nothing needs to change. They knew this intuitively, but nothing had ever been formalised saying as much. And in the absence of such a formal outline of requirements for membership, there was room for question. It was into this space that another group of Jewish Christians (who Paul refers to as Judaizers and who referred to themselves as the ‘circumcision group’ [thank the good Lord we don’t have stupid names for Christian groups any more…]) inserted their two cents. “Of course, they need to be circumcised, it’s right there in the Law of Moses!” Under normal circumstances between mature Christians, these sorts of debates can go back and forward, each one holding their ground and making their arguments, and no one is really hurt. At the end of the day, just agree to disagree and go and start a new denomination for the foreskins. But it’s a whole different matter when naïve young Christians are the rope in the theological tug-of-war. Enter the Galatians. 

At some point, after Paul and Barnabas returned to Antioch, Luke tells us that ‘Certain people came down from Judea to Antioch and were teaching the believers: “Unless you are circumcised, according to the custom taught by Moses, you cannot be saved”’. This debate was certainly happening in Antioch amongst the well-established Christian groups there; but more troublingly, this same group had taken their message on the road—to Galatia. They had gone around to the newly established Christian communities and were bringing a new message that went something like: “We hear you just had a visit from Paul and Barnabas and, as a result, you’re now Christians, like us. Hey, great news, welcome to the club. But we’ve heard a bit about what Paul has, or, more importantly, hasn’t told you. It seems he has given you the diet, no-sugar, caffeine-free version of the gospel—Gospel Lite, as we like to call it. That’s no surprise, really; Paul is, after all, not really a ‘full’ apostle. So, we thought it a matter of urgency (as did the twelve true apostles in Jerusalem who sent us) to come and give you the full version. Um, gentlemen, do you mind stepping out in the back room with us, there’s something we need to take care of.”

You can understand how some of these newly minted Gentile Christians would feel compelled to listen and go along with this. After all, they had been Christians for five minutes and these men standing in front of them had been the ‘People of God’ since birth. Who were they to argue with such obvious authorities? However, through some channel of information, Paul got wind of this and responded immediately with his first (as we have it) letter. 

Dr Adam White began his working career as a spray painter and from there moved into ministry as a youth pastor then an associate pastor at Riverlands Christian Church in Penrith. Then at the age of 25, he felt called to study theology at Southern Cross College (now AC); this continued through an honours degree up to a Doctorate of Ancient History at Macquarie University. He is married to Rachel and has a daughter named Sophia and two sons, Alexander, and Sebastian.

recommended

An Introduction to the Old Testament

Galatians part One

Zechariah part Two