Sermon Tone Analysis

Lesson 3: Ethnicity and Galatians

Ethnic identity - Review

Primordial - A sense of being derived from Territory or Descent

Social anthropological model and related propositions - Richard Jenkins and Markus Cromhout

Constructivist theoretical position (Fredrik Barth) - group defined by ethnic boundary

Group definition only exists in relation to other groups

Cultural objects can change over time

Ethnic identity - Asano

Primordial - Physio-cultural features as a priori

Instrumental - Physio-cultural features as a means to another end

Transactional - Physio-cultural features negotiated with other groups at the boundary line

Ethnic identity and community-identity construction

Community-identity construction

Fluid nature of cultural features

Expressed in a rather stable sense of identity (See Appendix I)

Allows for some degree of flexibility while retaining enough common understanding of a symbol that those who do not share the same understanding would be identified as outsiders and at times deviants.

Instrumental

Transactional

The key question for community-identity is which physio-cultural features should be stable and which can be fluid.

We see in an exchange of negotiation between several parties that seems to have differing views on the key features of communal identity.

Overview of Galatians

F. F. Bruce

The occasion of the letter was Paul’s receiving news of people who had visited his Galatian mission-field and were persuading his converts there to accept a different form of teaching from that which he had given them.

He refers to these people as ‘trouble-makers’ (ταράσσοντες, 1:7; 5:10) or ‘agitators’ (ἀναστατοῦντες, 5:12).

According to the information reaching Paul, they were trying to impose on the Galatian Christians some requirements of the Jewish law, preeminently circumcision; there is also some word of observance of special days, presumably those of the Jewish sacred calendar (4:10).

It might have been expected that Jewish food-restrictions would also have figured in the new teaching; if so, Paul makes no reference to their doing so, although insisting on those food-restrictions by some Christians is implied in his account of Peter’s withdrawal from table-fellowship with Gentiles at Antioch (2:11–14).

The new teaching is denounced by Paul as a perversion of the true gospel of Christ (1:7), and the Galatian Christians who pay heed to it are warned that to submit to it is to turn away from God (1:6), to be severed from Christ, to fall from grace (5:4).

The trouble-makers are incurring a curse because they substitute a spurious message for gospel truth (1:8f.);

they are exposing themselves to certainty of divine judgment (5:10).

Even if they demand only a token measure of law-keeping from the Galatians, any such demand involves acceptance of the principle of justification by works of the law.

This principle is clean contrary to the gospel of justification by faith—even if it were practicable, which it is not (3:11).

Persuasive as the new teaching may be, it does not come from God (5:8), as did the original message which brought salvation to the members of the Galatian churches (1:6); the two are incompatible.

It is clearly implied, however, that the ‘trouble-makers’ tried to gain credence for their teaching among Paul’s converts by disparaging him and casting doubt on his apostolic credentials.

In consequence, the Galatians who lent a ready ear to his teaching had a sense of estrangement from Paul, not to speak of hostility to him (4:16)—the fruit of an uneasy conscience.

Audience

Does Galatia refer to ethnic group or administrative province?

Is the letter addressed to Jews or Gentiles?

Was the letter written before or after the Jerusalem Council ()?

Does the facts line up between Acts and Galatians?

Do they need to be?

What was the issue of the Jerusalem Council?

What is the issue when Paul opposed Peter ()?

North vs South Galatians

Issue of date (F.

F. Bruce, Galatians)

Acts and Galatians (See Appendix II)

North vs South Galatians

Witherington:

What must also be borne in mind is that since the Roman province of Galatia included many different tribes and peoples and not just the descendents of the Celts or Gauls, the only term which could be predicated of all of them in Paul’s day would be Galatians.

He could not for instance call them Phrygians or Lycaonians if he had evangelized a cross section of the residents of this Roman province.

There is no internal evidence in Paul’s letter to the Galatians to settle who Paul particularly has in mind when he speaks to and of the Galatians, and so the debate has centered on several passages in Acts, in particular Acts 16:6 and Acts 18:23.

Several factors must be taken into consideration when evaluating these texts.

Firstly, while Paul does normally use Roman provincial designations (cf., e.g., 1 Cor.

16:15 and 19), Luke seems to use mainly the local and ethnic terminology.

Secondly, if one gives at least some credence to the itineraries of Paul’s journeys in Acts, in this case the itineraries for the second and third missionary journeys, it is in order to point out that there is no clear evidence even in Acts that Paul ever evangelized the cities of the northern part of Galatia.

At most there might be a reference to his passing through the region and strengthening existing converts in the area, but even this conclusion is doubtful.

In closing this part of the discussion it is important to note that everything in Galatians suggests that the majority, perhaps the vast majority, of Paul’s Galatian converts are Gentiles not Jews, otherwise all these arguments about not submitting to circumcision would not be on target.

One must also make sense of the fact that Paul feels he can use an elaborate Jewish allegory in Gal. 4 and arguments about covenants and Abraham and the development of salvation history to convince them not to listen to or follow the teaching of the agitators.

In short, Paul is using Jewish arguments to convince Gentiles not to become more Jewish!

This too suggests an audience conversant with Judaism and perhaps the basic lineaments of the Hebrew Scriptures as well.

All of this is understandable if Acts 13–14 is right that Paul’s standard operating procedure when he was in the province of Galatia was to preach in the synagogue first until he was thrust out, and that his converts, both Jewish and Gentile came out of that Jewish matrix (cf.

Acts 13:43, 48; 14:1).

In other words, Galatians would be a word on target if his audience already knew a good deal about Judaism and the Hebrew Scriptures, it would be a word on target if he is in the main addressing God-fearers.

It would be less apt if the Gentiles he is worried about had had no association with or knowledge of Judaism prior to Paul’s arrival in Galatia.

In any case, the issue that is pertinent to our study is how the Jewish ethnic identity played a role in the early Christ movement.

Regardless whether the audience is an ethnic group or not, the construct of their in-Christ identity has been breached with a tug of war between the Judiazers and Paul.

The resulting conflict has to do with the identity formation that conforms to a Jewish sect or a new identity as Paul argues.

Issue of date

Bruce:

The dating of the letter in the context of Acts will depend partly on whether the addressees are regarded as ‘South Galatians’ or ‘North Galatians’.

If they were South Galatians, then the letter could conceivably have been written any time after the end of the missionary expedition related in Acts 13:4–14:26; if, on the other hand, they were North Galatians, it must have been written after the journey summarized in Acts 16:6, when Paul ‘went through the Phrygian and Galatic region’

A comparative study of Galatians alongside those Pauline letters which can be more certainly dated is not decisive for the dating of this letter.

But nothing in such a comparative study prohibits our giving Galatians a place quite early among the Pauline letters, if an early place appears probable on other grounds.

When, as we are told in Acts 15:1, Judaean visitors came to Syrian Antioch and started to teach the Christians there that those who were not circumcised in accordance with the law of Moses could not be saved, it is antecedently probable that others who wished to press the same line visited the recently formed daughter-churches of Antioch, not only in Syria and Cilicia, as the apostolic letter indicates (Acts 15:23), but also in South Galatia.

If so, then the letter to the Galatians was written as soon as Paul got news of what was afoot, on the eve of the Jerusalem meeting described in Acts 15:6ff.

This, it is suggested, would yield the most satisfactory correlation of the data of Galatians and Acts and the most satisfactory dating of Galatians.

It must be conceded that, if this is so, Galatians is the earliest among the extant letters of Paul.56

I know of no evidence to make this conclusion impossible, or even improbable.

Even on this early dating, Paul had been a Christian for at least fifteen years, and the main outlines of his understanding of the gospel, which took shape from his Damascus-road p 56 experience, would have been as well defined by then as they were ever likely to be.

Galatians, whatever its date, is a most important document of primitive Christianity, but if it is the earliest extant Christian document, its importance is enhanced.

Acts and Galatians

Dunn:

The whole issue hangs for most to a decisive degree on the relation between Galatians and Acts.

Acts speaks of Paul’s passing through ‘Galatia’ on subsequent missionary trips (Acts 16:6 and 18:23), and in the former reference the implication is clear that ‘Phrygia and Galatia’ are distinct from the cities named earlier (Derbe and Lystra at least, referred to in 16:1–5).2

That also implies that for Luke (the author of Acts) ‘Galatia’ refers to ethnic Galatia.

If this correlates with Paul’s usage, then Paul cannot be referring to the churches established on ‘the first missionary journey’ and must be referring to those initially established in the mission indicated in 16:6.3

For obvious reasons this view is usually named ‘the north Galatian hypothesis’.4

Alternatively, we need not assume that Paul’s and Luke’s usages were mutually compatible.

‘Galatia’ and ‘Galatians’ were quite proper designations of the towns in the south of the Roman province and of their inhabitants.

And it is difficult to see what p 7 other single designation could embrace all four towns: Iconium, Lystra and Derbe belonged to Lycaonia; but Antioch would be more properly designated as in Pisidia.

‘The south Galatian hypothesis’ therefore identifies the Galatians with the churches established by Paul in these towns during ‘the first missionary journey’.1

Witherington:

Much ink has been spilt over the relationship between the meeting described in Galatians 2:1–10 and the one Luke describes in Acts 15.

Probably the majority of scholars think these are two different accounts of the same meeting.

It then becomes very difficult to explain why it is that Paul nowhere in Galatians mentions the decision of the Jerusalem Council in support of his rejection of the suggestion by the agitators that his Galatian converts be circumcised, nor for that matter does he mention citing the Decree when he opposed Peter to his face over the matter of table fellowship between Jews and Gentiles.

The discussion in Gal.

2:1–14 is about events that transpired in Antioch and in places visited on Paul’s first missionary journey which were then further discussed in Jerusalem—events involving Peter, Barnabas, Paul, and the Judaizers.

For what it is worth, the main discussion in Acts of the Antioch church comes in Acts 11 not in Acts 15, and Peter is a prominent player in Acts 10–12, while Acts 13–14 records the first missionary journey which also transpires before the Acts 15 council.

Then too, Peter is not portrayed as a major figure after Acts 15.

The Judaizers appear in Acts 15:1 and 5.