Letter to the Galatians

Overview

About twelve pages, six chapters, one of the earliest and, by wide consensus, one of the most consequential of Paul’s surviving letters, written sometime between roughly 48 and 55 CE to a cluster of churches in Galatia, a Roman province in central Asia Minor whose exact location, and whose precise relationship to Paul’s own recorded missionary journeys in the book of Acts, remains a genuinely contested question among scholars, dividing between a north Galatian and south Galatian theory that affects the letter’s exact dating without changing its argument.

The letter’s occasion is specific and urgent: after Paul had established these churches and moved on, other Christian teachers, whom Paul refers to dismissively and does not name directly, arrived and began persuading the largely Gentile converts that faith in Christ alone was insufficient, that they also needed to be circumcised and to take on the full observance of Jewish law to be genuinely included among God’s people. Paul, hearing of this, writes in evident alarm and anger, and the letter that results is his most direct, most theologically concentrated argument for what would become one of Christianity’s founding distinctions from the Jewish tradition it emerged from: that righteousness before God comes through faith in Christ, not through observance of the law.

The argument

No other gospel, chapter 1. Paul dispenses with his usual opening courtesies almost entirely, moving within the first few verses to open astonishment and anger that the Galatians are so quickly deserting the gospel he preached to them for a different one, and pronouncing a curse, anathema, on anyone, even himself or an angel from heaven, who preaches a gospel contrary to the one he originally delivered. He then defends the authority and independence of his own apostolic calling at length, insisting his gospel did not come to him through any human source or teaching but through a direct revelation of Jesus Christ, and recounting that he did not immediately consult with the apostles in Jerusalem after his conversion but went first to Arabia, only meeting the Jerusalem leadership briefly some years later.

Confrontation at Antioch, chapter 2. Paul describes a later meeting with the Jerusalem apostles, James, Peter and John, at which his mission to the Gentiles without requiring circumcision was, he insists, formally recognized and endorsed. He then recounts a sharper and more troubling episode: a confrontation with Peter at Antioch, where Peter had been eating freely with Gentile believers until certain men associated with James arrived, whereupon Peter withdrew from that table fellowship out of evident fear of the more conservative, circumcision-observant faction, a withdrawal Paul says he opposed to Peter’s face, publicly, as clearly inconsistent with the truth of the gospel. This episode, an open dispute between two of the movement’s most prominent leaders, is one of the clearest windows anywhere in the New Testament into how genuinely contested and unsettled these questions of Jewish and Gentile inclusion actually were in the earliest Christian communities.

Justification by faith, chapters 3 and 4. The letter’s theological core. Paul argues that the Galatians received the Spirit, and experienced God’s evident work among them, by believing what they heard, not by performing works of the law, and asks pointedly whether it makes sense that having begun in the Spirit they would now be made perfect by the flesh, meaning by circumcision and legal observance. He builds a sustained argument from the figure of Abraham, pointing out that Abraham was reckoned righteous through faith, and that the promise to Abraham and his descendants was made centuries before the law was given at Sinai, so that the later law cannot annul or add a further condition to a promise already made and already received through faith.

Paul develops an extended allegorical reading of Abraham’s two sons, Ishmael born to the slave woman Hagar and Isaac born to the free woman Sarah, identifying the law-bound path with slavery and the promise-based path with freedom, and insisting that believers, like Isaac, are children of the promise and of the free woman rather than children of slavery. This chapter also contains the letter’s most sweeping single statement of the gospel’s social implications: in Christ there is no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female, all are one, a claim whose full social and political implications Christian communities would continue working out, unevenly and incompletely, for the following two millennia.

Freedom and its proper use, chapters 5 and 6. Having established the theological argument, Paul turns to its practical consequence: for freedom Christ has set believers free, and submitting again to circumcision and the full yoke of the law would be a return to slavery, a message Paul delivers with an edge of real exasperation, at one point expressing the wish that the circumcision advocates would go the whole way and castrate themselves.

But Paul is equally clear that this freedom is not license for self-indulgence; it is to be exercised through love, serving one another rather than gratifying the desires of the flesh. He contrasts the works of the flesh, a list including fornication, idolatry, enmity, strife, jealousy and drunkenness, with the fruit of the Spirit, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control, insisting there is no law needed against qualities of that kind, since they fulfill, rather than violate, what the law was actually aiming at. The letter closes with brief practical instructions about bearing one another’s burdens and doing good to all, and a final summary, in Paul’s own handwriting as he notes, restating that neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything, but only a new creation.

How to read it

Read chapters 1 and 2 as establishing the stakes and Paul’s own authority before the theological argument proper begins in chapter 3; the confrontation with Peter at Antioch is not a digression but essential evidence for how seriously contested, and how recently unsettled, the question of Gentile inclusion actually was even among the movement’s most senior leaders.

Read the Abraham argument in chapter 3 slowly, since it is doing careful, deliberate scriptural argument, not simply asserting a conclusion. Paul’s point that the promise preceded the law by centuries is central to his case that faith, not subsequent legal observance, was always the actual basis of the relationship with God he is describing.

Notice the emotional register throughout, the astonishment, the anger, the sarcasm toward the circumcision party, and consider what that tone tells you about how much Paul believed was genuinely at stake in this specific dispute, beyond any single point of ritual practice.

Read Luther’s own commentary on Galatians, or at least a substantial account of it, if you want to see how directly this letter’s argument against earning righteousness through the law became a central weapon in a dispute conducted sixteen centuries later, against a very different set of religious authorities and practices Luther believed had reintroduced a comparable error.

Read this letter alongside Romans, where Paul develops a related but more measured, systematic version of the same core argument about justification by faith, addressed to a church he had not personally founded and in a considerably calmer register than the urgent, personally wounded tone of Galatians.

Questions it raises

• Does Paul’s argument from the Abraham narrative, that the promise preceded and cannot be annulled by the later law, succeed as a piece of scriptural interpretation, or does it depend on reading the Genesis account in a way its original context does not obviously support?
• What does the public confrontation between Paul and Peter at Antioch suggest about how unified, or how genuinely contested, the earliest Christian movement’s core commitments actually were?
• Is there is no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female a statement of realized equality within the early Christian community, an aspirational ideal not yet achieved, or something the letter itself leaves ambiguous?
• Paul insists freedom from the law is not license for self-indulgence, and must be exercised through love. How does this qualification relate to, or potentially limit, the freedom he has just argued for at such length?
• Why does Paul respond to this particular dispute with such unusual anger and directness compared to the more measured tone of his other surviving letters? What does that anger suggest about what he believed was genuinely at risk?
• How much of later Christian debate about the relationship between faith, law and works, from the Reformation onward, actually depends on this one letter’s specific argument, and how much draws on other, potentially different emphases elsewhere in Paul’s writing?