Galatians
As we will see, Paul’s gospel was the same gospel that the Jerusalem apostles also believed and preached. The implications of this message in a new missionary situation, however, were not grasped clearly by everyone at once. What we have in Gal 2 is a snapshot of the early church grappling with the problems of law and gospel, faith and freedom, historical particularity and evangelical inclusivism.
The Jerusalem church leaders welcomed him as a colleague and blessed his ministry. The churches of Judea, including some Paul himself had formerly persecuted, rejoiced in the great reversal they heard about in Paul’s life. While Paul wanted to assert as strongly as possible his independence from the Jerusalem church, he also wanted to claim a vital partnership with them in the service of a shared gospel and a common Lord.
Luther masterfully captured the genius of their appeal in his summary of their message: “ ‘Christ’s a fine master. He makes the beginning, but Moses must complete the structure.’ The devil’s nature shows itself therein: if he cannot ruin people by wronging and persecuting them, he will do it by improving them.”
Yet whatever its place in the lists of antiquity, the letter to the Galatians takes programmatic primacy for (1) an understanding of Paul’s teaching, (2) the establishing of a Pauline chronology, (3) the tracing out of the course of early apostolic history, and (4) the determination of many NT critical and canonical issues. It may even have been the first written of Paul’s extant letters. Possibly as well, excluding the confessional portions incorporated throughout the NT, it antedates everything else written in the NT. It is necessary, therefore, to understand Galatians aright if we are to understand Paul and the rest of the NT aright.
The letter begins by naming him as its author (1:1). Furthermore, the nature of its theological argument, its distinctive use of Scripture in support of that argument, the character of its impassioned appeals, and the style of writing all point to Paul as its author. If Galatians is not by Paul, no NT letter is by him, for none has any better claim.
Even today, this Galatian error is repeated when people say, “This is what you have to do to be saved; join our church, obey our rules, submit to our baptism, practice our liturgy, worship the way we do, work hard, prove your worth, and earn God’s love. In the end, if you are good enough, God will accept you.” A works-based gospel is different from the message of grace.
The word in v. 13 translated “hypocrisy” (hypokrisis) comes from the world of the theater, where it refers to the act of wearing a mask or playing a part in a drama. By negative transference it came to mean pretense, insincerity, acting in a fashion that belies one’s true convictions.
As Ebeling has put it so well: “To win them for the gospel means to bring the gospel to them, to deliver them, to see that they are changed from what they were to what they are. To strengthen the Jews in their devotion to the law through accommodation, to strengthen the Gentiles only in their libertinism (cf. Rom 1:18ff.) or their soaring speculations, to strengthen the weak, only in a weakness that they wrongly consider strength—that would win nothing.” Thus what was implicit in Peter’s withdrawal from table fellowship with Gentile believers was not simply a laudable honoring of the scruples of the “weaker” Jewish Christians but rather the imposition of an alien theology of salvation, one that reintroduced the very bondage from which Christ had died to make us free.
