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The Letter to the Galatians: Exegesis and Theology

(Originally published in /Between Two Horizons: Spanning New Testament Studies and Systematic Theology/ Joel B. Green and Max Turner, eds., 2000, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 205–36.

Reproduced by permission of the author.)

N. T. WRIGHT

The dense and dramatic argument of Galatians excites and baffles by turns.

Sometimes perceived as a flamboyant younger sister of the more settled and reflective letter to Rome, this epistle has provoked endless controversy at all levels, from details of exegesis to flights of systematic theology.

Nobody reading it can be in any doubt that it all mattered very much indeed to Paul.

But what it was that mattered, and why, and why it should matter to anyone two thousand years later — these are far harder questions to answer.

Nor can this chapter do more than restate the questions and hint at possible answers.

Our aim here is not to solve the problems in question but to discuss and illustrate the task.

Our aim is to discuss, particularly, what might happen when we allow questions of exegesis and theology to stare each other in the face.

It is of course generally recognized that anyone grappling with the exegesis of Galatians must do business with “theological” questions.

One must, that is to say, know something of the grammar of theological concepts, how God-language works (particularly, how it worked in the first century), how justification might relate to law and faith, and so on.

One must, in particular, be familiar with how Paul uses similar ideas in other letters, in this case especially Romans.

It is not that one should allow Paul’s meaning in one place to determine ahead of time what he might have said elsewhere, but that even if development, or a change of mind, has occurred, we are still dealing with the same person talking about more or less the same things.

Equally, no systematic or practical theology that would claim to be Christian can ignore the central and foundational texts of the NT.

Particularly, anyone offering a theological account of, say, justification would feel bound at least to make a visit to Galatians and to fit it somehow into the developing scheme.

And anyone wanting to offer a serious Christian account of central topics on contemporary applied theology — liberation, for instance, or postmodernity — ought, if such theology is to be fully Christian, to ground their reflections in the NT.

However, a good deal of historical and exegetical scholarship on this letter, as on others, has in fact proceeded in recent decades with only minimal attention to theological discussion — an omission sometimes justified on the grounds of maintaining historical neutrality, though sometimes in fact masking the historian’s unawareness of the deeper issues involved.

Likewise, many systematic theologians, in this and other fields, have become impatient with waiting for the mountain of historical footnotes to give birth to the mouse of theological insight, and have proceeded on the basis of an understanding of the text that simply reflects, it may not be too unkind to say, either the commentary that was in vogue when the theologian was a student or the pressing contemporary issues that condition a particular reading of the text.[1]

I intend in this essay to approach the problem from both ends, and to examine the bridge that might be thrown between these two now traditional positions.

This task is not to be thought of as one element in the wider project of bridging Lessing’s Ugly Ditch.

Such a project presupposes that which ought to be challenged — namely, the existence of such a ditch in the first place.

To be sure, a ditch between the historical and the theological task does indeed exist within Western consciousness, and the rise of historical scholarship owes something to it, since in that context the ditch has acted as a moat, protecting the historian from the prying eye and the heavy hand of the theological censor.

But the question always arises as to who is being protected from whom.

The ditch is equally useful to those who want to maintain a traditional faith within a pure ahistorical vacuum.

But the idea that there is a great gulf fixed between historical exegesis and Christian theology — this Enlightenment presupposition is precisely what ought to be challenged, not least when commenting on a biblical text.

One way of hinting at answers to the wider problems is to read a particular text without bracketing off any of these questions — or, to put the matter another way, one might propose putting to the text the questions that have accrued, and those that are newly emerging, out of the long history of the church’s engagement with its own faith (and, one should say, with its God) — and giving the text a chance to answer them, or at least to insist on their rewording.

With this in mind, I offer here (1) a brief account of the major exegetical issues that meet us in Galatians; (2) a suggestion of which major theological questions might profitably be put to the letter, and what answers might arise; and (3) some proposals about how these two tasks might be brought into fruitful interaction with one another through the work of a commentary and the further work (not least preaching) that a commentary is supposed to evoke.

!!! 1. Exegetical Issues

The basic task of exegesis is to address, as a whole and in parts, the historical questions: What was the author saying to the readers; and why?

These questions ultimately demand an answer at the broadest level in the form of a hypothesis to be tested against the verse-by-verse details.

One may, perhaps, allow the author some imprecision, particularly in such a heated composition, but if even a small number of details do not fit the hypothesis, it will be called into question.

Exegetes of course have ways of making things fit.

A puzzling verse can be labeled as a pre-Pauline fragment or an interpolation, or perhaps a mere “topos” in which a well-worn phrase, whose history-of-religions ancestry can be shown with an impressive footnote, should not be pressed for precise or powerful meaning.

(As though Paul, of all people, would be content to write a letter that was merely a set of conventional noises whose meaning could thus be reduced to a set of evocative grunts!)

Failing that, one can suggest that a puzzling verse simply reflects a moment where either Paul or his amanuensis lost the train of thought.

But I take it as a general rule, consonant with the wider rules for hypotheses and their verification, that the more moves like this one makes, the more one’s hypothesis stands condemned for lack of appropriate simplicity.

One must assume that there is a train of thought, “that the text has a central concern and a remarkable inner logic that may no longer be entirely comprehensible to us.”[2]

One must get in the data, and one must do so without undue complexity, without using that brute force which swaggers around the byways of a text arm-in-arm with ignorance.

At the level of large-scale exegesis, this problem meets us when we ask the questions normally thought of under the heading “Introduction.”

What was going on in Galatia that made Paul write the letter?

Which “Galatia” (north or south) are we talking about anyway?

When did Paul write the letter?

What relation, if any, did the episode have to the so-called “apostolic conference” of Acts 15?  Who were Paul’s opponents, the shadowy “agitators” who flit to and fro through the undergrowth of the epistle?

One well-worn path through these thickets has been made by those who insist that the agitators are legalists: proto-Pelagians who are trying to persuade the Galatians to seek justification by performing good moral deeds.

Among the many problems this view faces is the question, Why then does Paul spend so long, in chapter 5 in particular, warning the Galatians against what looks like antinomianism?

It will scarcely do to say (though many have) that he has suddenly focused on a quite different problem, with perhaps a quite different set of opponents or agitators.

A different basic analysis seems called for — one that will hold the two emphases of the letter (if that is what they are) in a single larger context, and that will perhaps question whether what appear to our post-Enlightenment and post-Reformation eyes as two separate, almost incompatible, emphases, would have appeared like that to either Paul or his readers.

And any such analysis must face the question from the theologian, and from those (such as preachers) who look to theologians’ work for help: Of what use are these “introductory” questions for theology?

Since two hundred years of research has failed to solve them, is there not something to be said for bracketing them and going straight into reading the text?

A similarly large-scale question to be addressed is, Why does Paul spend so long recounting his early visits to Jerusalem and his meeting with the apostles there?

Almost one-quarter of the letter (1:10-2:21, 36 verses out of 149) is devoted to this subject, and there may be further echoes of the subject elsewhere (e.g., 4:25).

Many readers have, of course, bypassed this question, regarding material prior to 2:11 as “introduction” and seeing what follows as the beginning of a systematic theological exposition of the doctrine of justification.

But Paul at least reckoned it necessary to preface the body of the letter with /this/ introduction rather than something else; and, since his introductions are normally good indicators of the main thrust of the letter, we should at least make the attempt to investigate the possible integration of the first two chapters with what follows.

A question that relates to this but has recently taken on a life of its own (particularly since the appearance twenty-five years ago of the commentary by H.-D. Betz) is, To what rhetorical genre does the letter belong?[3]

Is it deliberative, apologetic, or what?[4]

It has, I believe, been good for Pauline exegetes to be reminded that Paul wrote from within the wider world of Greco-Roman late antiquity, where there were well-known literary forms and genres that would, in themselves, give off clues as to what the writer thought he (or, less likely, she) was doing.

But it is important not to let the literary tail wag the epistolary dog.

Paul was an innovator, living in two or more worlds at once, and allowing them — in his own person, his vocation, his style of operation, and his writing — to knock sparks off each other (or, as it might be, to dovetail together in new ways).

Consideration of literary genre must always remain in dialogue with the question of what the text actually says.

Neither can claim the high ground and dictate to the other.

The same is true of the various forms of structural, or structuralist, analysis.

Similar points need to be made about the current burgeoning of social-scientific reading of Paul’s letters.[5]

To be sure, Paul and his readers lived within a social context in which all sorts of pressures and presuppositions operated that are quite unlike those in modern Western society.

A good many things that have traditionally been read as abstract ideas or beliefs did in fact come with heavy agendas attached in the areas of social grouping, organization, and culture, and we ignore this at our peril.

Equally, recognizing the existence and nonnegotiable importance of the social-scientific dimension of Paul’s letters does not mean denying that these same letters set out a train of thought that cannot, or at least cannot /a priori/, be reduced to terms of cryptic social agendas.

Just because every word and phrase carries a social context and dimension does not mean that Paul is not setting out a train of thought, a sequence of ideas.

We must beware, here as elsewhere, of false antitheses.

These are exactly the sorts of questions, once more, that will tend to make the theologian impatient.

Of what relevance, people sometimes say and often think, are these questions for the major and urgent issues that crowd in upon the church and its proclamation to the world?

The answer is that each of them demonstrably affects how we read the key texts for which the theologian or preacher is eager.

The question of justification by faith itself is intimately bound up with them.

Ernst Käsemann’s caustic remark, that those eager for “results” should keep their hands off exegesis, comes uncomfortably to mind.[6]

The influence of social context upon exegesis and theology is most obviously the case with the passage where many will feel that the letter finally “gets going” — namely, 2:11-21.

The brief and dense statement about justification in 2:15-21 is part of Paul’s description of what happened between Peter and himself at Antioch; we cannot assume, as many have done, that because we think we know ahead of time what Paul meant by “justification,” we can deduce that precisely this was the subject of the quarrel (imagining, for instance, that Peter was arguing for a semi-Pelagian position on the question of how people go to heaven after death).

Paul’s description of the altercation pushes us in quite another direction.

The question at issue was not, How can individual sinners find salvation?

but rather, Are Christian Jews bound, by the Jewish kosher laws, to eat separately from Christian Gentiles, or are they bound by the gospel to eat at the same table with them?

We may and must assume, indeed, that reflection on these questions would not only be influenced, in the minds of Peter and the others, by “pure” intellectual and theological arguments; Paul was asking them to break the habits not only of a lifetime but of a tightly integrated social grouping that had survived, precisely by maintaining these habits, for hundreds of years.

The detailed exegetical debates that have swirled around these verses have, as often as not, been caused by a sense that the traditional reading does not quite work, does not quite fit the words that Paul actually used.

Attention to the wider context on the one hand, and to theological issues of how the basic concepts function in general and in Paul in particular, may provide fresh ways forward.

And if that is so, a Careful reading of this passage in Galatians might well send shock waves through the reading of other Pauline texts, such as Romans 3-4 and Philippians 3.

The long argument of 3:1-5:1, which forms the solid center of the letter, offers almost endless puzzles for the exegete, down to the meaning of individual words and particles and the question of implicit punctuation (the early manuscripts, of course, have for the most part neither punctuation nor breaks between words).

And it is here that the larger issues of understanding Galatians, the questions that form the bridge between exegesis, history, and theology, begin to come to light.

Where does Paul suppose that he stands in relationship to the covenant that Israel’s God made with Abraham?

And to that with Moses?

And to the Torah, the Jewish law, which, though giving substance to the historical Mosaic covenant, seems to have taken on a life of its own?

What, in short, does Paul wish to say about what he himself, surprisingly perhaps, calls “Judaism” (1:13)?

Does he see it as a historical sequence of covenants and promises that have now reached their fulfillment in Jesus?

Or does he see it as a system to the whole of which the true God is now saying “no” in order to break in, through the gospel, and do a new thing?

A further important question, not usually considered sufficiently: Does Paul’s actual handling of the Jewish Scriptures, in terms of quotation, allusion, and echo, reflect the view he holds, or do the two stand in tension?[7]

These questions can, of course, only be resolved by detailed examination of the text, verse by verse and line by line.

But it is important to notice here the way in which, classically within the discipline of Pauline scholarship, two questions, in principle separable, have in fact been fused together in uncomfortable coexistence.

(1) What is Paul’s /theological/ relationship to Judaism? (2) What is Paul’s /historical/ relationship to Judaism?

The two have often been allowed to spill over into each other.

Thus, if Paul is perceived to have criticized “Judaism” (e.g., for its belief in justification by works of the law), it is assumed that he cannot have derived his basic ideas from Judaism — and that therefore the historical origin of his theology is to be found not in Judaism at all, but either in the Christ event as a totally new and essentially non-Jewish irruption into the world or in the pagan systems of religion, cult, and moral philosophy.

Conversely, if Paul is perceived to stand in a positive relation to Judaism at the historical level — i.e., if one supposes that Paul’s basic thought structure and beliefs remained Jewish after his conversion — it is often assumed that therefore he can have had no real critique of “Judaism.”

Both of these questions, of course, need integration with wider issues, not least Paul’s actual practice in its social setting.