The Expositor's Bible: The Epistle to the Galatians
by George G. Findlay · English · Gutenberg #42645 · 786,058 chars · public domain (US)
The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Expositor's Bible: The Epistle to the Galatians
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.
Title: The Expositor's Bible: The Epistle to the Galatians
Author: George G. Findlay
Release date: May 5, 2013 [eBook #42645]
Most recently updated: October 23, 2024
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/42645
Credits: Produced by Colin Bell, Julia Neufeld and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE EXPOSITOR'S BIBLE: THE EPISTLE TO THE GALATIANS ***
Transcriber's note:
This e-text includes Greek characters and punctuation that will
only display in UTF-8 (Unicode) text readers, e.g. παρεχέτω If
any of these characters do not display properly, make sure your
text reader’s “character set” or “file encoding” is set to Unicode
(UTF-8). You may also need to change the default font. As a last
resort, use the ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1) version of this text instead, in
which the Greek words have been transliterated.
THE
EPISTLE TO THE GALATIANS.
BY THE REV. PROFESSOR
G. G. FINDLAY, B.A.,
HEADINGLEY COLLEGE, LEEDS.
NEW YORK:
A. C. ARMSTRONG & SON,
51 EAST TENTH STREET, NEAR BROADWAY.
1893.
CONTENTS.
_THE PROLOGUE._
CHAPTER i. 1-10.
CHAPTER I.
PAGE
THE ADDRESS 3
CHAPTER II.
THE SALUTATION 19
CHAPTER III.
THE ANATHEMA 34
_THE PERSONAL HISTORY._
CHAPTER i. 11-ii. 21.
CHAPTER IV.
PAUL'S GOSPEL REVEALED BY CHRIST 53
CHAPTER V.
PAUL'S DIVINE COMMISSION 68
CHAPTER VI.
PAUL AND THE PRIMITIVE CHURCH 83
CHAPTER VII.
PAUL AND THE FALSE BRETHREN 98
CHAPTER VIII.
PAUL AND THE THREE PILLARS 113
CHAPTER IX.
PAUL AND PETER AT ANTIOCH 129
CHAPTER X.
THE PRINCIPLES AT STAKE 146
_THE DOCTRINAL POLEMIC._
CHAPTER iii. 1-v. 12.
CHAPTER XI.
THE GALATIAN FOLLY 165
CHAPTER XII.
ABRAHAM'S BLESSING AND THE LAW'S CURSE 180
CHAPTER XIII.
THE COVENANT OF PROMISE 196
CHAPTER XIV.
THE DESIGN OF THE LAW 211
CHAPTER XV.
THE EMANCIPATED SONS OF GOD 227
CHAPTER XVI.
THE HEIR'S COMING OF AGE 242
CHAPTER XVII.
THE RETURN TO BONDAGE 257
CHAPTER XVIII.
PAUL'S ENTREATY 272
CHAPTER XIX.
THE STORY OF HAGAR 286
CHAPTER XX.
SHALL THE GALATIANS BE CIRCUMCISED? 302
CHAPTER XXI.
THE HINDERERS AND TROUBLERS 316
_THE ETHICAL APPLICATION._
CHAPTER v. 13-vi. 10.
CHAPTER XXII.
THE PERILS OF LIBERTY 333
CHAPTER XXIII.
CHRIST'S SPIRIT AND HUMAN FLESH 347
CHAPTER XXIV.
THE WORKS OF THE FLESH 361
CHAPTER XXV.
THE FRUIT OF THE SPIRIT 375
CHAPTER XXVI.
OUR BROTHER'S BURDEN AND OUR OWN 390
CHAPTER XXVII.
SOWING AND REAPING 405
_THE EPILOGUE._
CHAPTER vi. 11-18.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
THE FALSE AND THE TRUE GLORYING 421
CHAPTER XXIX.
RITUAL NOTHING: CHARACTER EVERYTHING 435
CHAPTER XXX.
THE BRAND OF JESUS 448
_THE PROLOGUE._
CHAPTER i. 1-10.
CHAPTER I.
_THE ADDRESS._
"Paul, an apostle (not from men, neither through man, but
through Jesus Christ, and God the Father, who raised Him from
the dead), and all the brethren which are with me, unto the
Churches of Galatia."[1]--GAL. i. 1, 2.
[1] The text used in this exposition is, with very few
exceptions, that of the Revised English Version, or its margin.
Antiquity has nothing to show more notable in its kind, or more
precious, than this letter of Paul to the Churches of Galatia. It
takes us back, in some respects nearer than any other document we
possess, to the beginnings of Christian theology and the Christian
Church. In it the spiritual consciousness of Christianity first
reveals itself in its distinctive character and its full strength,
free from the trammels of the past, realizing the advent of the new
kingdom of God that was founded in the death of Christ. It is the
voice of the Church testifying "God hath sent forth the Spirit of His
Son into our hearts." Buried for a thousand years under the weight
of the Catholic legalism, the teaching of this Epistle came to life
again in the rise of Protestantism. Martin Luther put it to his lips
as a trumpet to blow the reveillé of the Reformation. His famous
Commentary summoned enslaved Christendom to recover "the liberty
wherewith Christ hath made us free." Of all the great Reformer's
writings this was the widest in its influence and the dearest to
himself. For the spirit of Paul lived again in Luther, as in no other
since the Apostle's day. The Epistle to the Galatians is the charter
of Evangelical faith.
The historical criticism of the present century has brought this
writing once more to the front of the conflict of faith. Born in
controversy, it seems inevitably to be born for controversy. Its
interpretation forms the pivot of the most thoroughgoing recent
discussions touching the beginnings of Christian history and the
authenticity of the New Testament record. The Galatian Epistle is,
in fact, the key of New Testament Apologetics. Round it the Roman
and Corinthian Letters group themselves, forming together a solid,
impregnable quaternion, and supplying a fixed starting-point and
an indubitable test for the examination of the critical questions
belonging to the Apostolic age. Whatever else may be disputed, it
is agreed that there was an apostle Paul, who wrote these four
Epistles to certain Christian societies gathered out of heathenism,
communities numerous, widely scattered, and containing men of
advanced intelligence; and this within thirty years of the death
of Jesus Christ. Every critic must reckon with this fact. The most
sceptical criticism makes a respectful pause before our Epistle.
Hopeless of destroying its testimony, Rationalism treats it with
an even exaggerated deference; and seeks to extract evidence from
it against its companion witnesses amongst the New Testament
writings. This attempt, however misdirected, is a signal tribute
to the importance of the document, and to the force with which the
personality of the writer and the conditions of the time have
stamped themselves upon it. The deductions of the Baurian criticism
appear to us to rest on a narrow and arbitrary examination of
isolated passages; they spring from a mistaken _à priori_ view of the
historical situation. Granting however to these inferences, which
will meet us as we proceed, their utmost weight, they still leave
the testimony of Paul to the supernatural character of Christianity
substantially intact.
Of the four major Epistles, this one is superlatively characteristic
of its author. It is _Paulinissima Paulinarum_--most Pauline of
Pauline things. It is largely autobiographical; hence its peculiar
value. Reading it, we watch history in the making. We trace the
rise of the new religion in the typical man of the epoch. The
master-builder of the Apostolic Church stands before us, at the
crisis of his work. He lets us look into his heart, and learn the
secret of his power. We come to know the Apostle Paul as we know
scarcely any other of the world's great minds. We find in him a man
of the highest intellectual and spiritual powers, equally great in
passion and in action, as a thinker and a leader of men. But at every
step of our acquaintance the Apostle points us beyond himself; he
says, "It is not I: it is Christ that lives in me." If this Epistle
teaches us the greatness of Paul, it teaches us all the more the
Divine greatness of Jesus Christ, before whom that kingly intellect
and passionate heart bowed in absolute devotion.
The situation which the Epistle reveals and the personal references
in which it abounds are full of interest at every point. They furnish
quite essential data to the historian of the Early Church. We could
wish that the Apostle, telling us so much, had told us more. His
allusions, clear enough, we must suppose, to the first readers, have
lent themselves subsequently to very conflicting interpretations.
But as they stand, they are invaluable. The fragmentary narrative
of the Acts requires, especially in its earlier sections, all the
illustration that can be obtained from other sources. The conversion
of Paul, and the Council at Jerusalem, events of capital importance
for the history of Apostolic times, are thereby set in a light
certainly more complete and satisfactory than is furnished in Luke's
narrative, taken by itself. And Paul's references to the Judean
Church and its three "pillars," touch the crucial question of New
Testament criticism, namely that concerning the relation of the
Gentile Apostle to Jewish Christianity and the connection between
his theology and the teaching of Jesus. Our judgement respecting
the conflict between Peter and Paul at Antioch in particular will
determine our whole conception of the legalist controversy, and
consequently of the course of Church history during the first two
centuries. Around these cursory allusions has gathered a contest only
less momentous than that from which they sprung.
The personal and the doctrinal element are equally prominent in
this Epistle; and appear in a combination characteristic of the
writer. Paul's theology is the theology of experience. "It pleased
God," he says, "to reveal His Son in me" (ch. i. 16). His teaching
is cast in a psychological mould. It is largely a record of the
Apostle's spiritual history; it is the expression of a living,
inward process--a personal appropriation of Christ, and a growing
realization of the fulness of the Godhead in Him. The doctrine of
Paul was as far as possible removed from being the result of abstract
deduction, or any mere combination of data externally given. In his
individual consciousness, illuminated by the vision of Christ and
penetrated by the Spirit of God, he found his message for the world.
"We believe, and therefore speak. We have received the Spirit of
God, that we may know the things freely given us of God:" sentences
like these show us very clearly how the Apostle's doctrine formed
itself in his mind. His apprehension of Christ, above all of the
cross, was the focus, the creative and governing centre, of all his
thoughts concerning God and man, time and eternity. In the light of
this knowledge he read the Old Testament, he interpreted the earthly
life and teaching of Jesus. On the ground of this personal sense
of salvation he confronted Peter at Antioch; on the same ground he
appeals to the vacillating Galatians, sharers with himself in the
new life of the Spirit. Here lies the nerve of his argument in this
Epistle. The theory of the relation of the Law to the Abrahamic
promise developed in the third chapter, is the historical counterpart
of the relation of the legal to the evangelical consciousness, as he
had experienced the two states in turn within his own breast. The
spirit of Paul was a microcosm, in which the course of the world's
religious evolution was summed up, and brought to the knowledge of
itself.
The Apostle's influence over the minds of others was due in great
part to the extraordinary force with which he apprehended the facts
of his own spiritual nature. Through the depth and intensity of his
personal experience he touched the experience of his fellows, he
seized on those universal truths that are latent in the consciousness
of mankind, "by manifestation of the truth commending himself to
every man's conscience in the sight of God." But this knowledge
of the things of God was not the mere fruit of reflection and
self-searching; it was "the ministration of the Spirit." Paul did not
simply _know_ Christ; he was one with Christ, "joined to the Lord,
one spirit" with Him. He did not therefore speak out of the findings
of his own spirit; the absolute Spirit, the Spirit of truth and of
Christ, spoke in him. Truth, as he knew it, was the self-assertion of
a Divine life. And so this handful of old letters, broken and casual
in form, with their "rudeness of speech," their many obscurities,
their rabbinical logic, have stirred the thoughts of men and swayed
their lives with a power greater perhaps than belongs to any human
utterances, saving only those of the Divine Master.
The features of Paul's style show themselves here in their most
pronounced form. "The style is the man." And the whole man is in this
letter. Other Epistles bring into relief this or that quality of the
Apostle's disposition and of his manner as a writer; here all are
present. The subtlety and trenchant vigour of Pauline dialectic are
nowhere more conspicuous than in the discussion with Peter in ch. ii.
The discourse on Promise and Law in ch. iii. is a master-piece of
exposition, unsurpassed in its keenness of insight, breadth of view,
and skill of application. Such passages as ch. i. 15, 16; ii. 19, 20;
vi. 14, take us into the heart of the Apostle's teaching, and reveal
its mystical depth of intuition. Behind the masterful dialectician we
find the spiritual seer, the man of contemplation, whose fellowship
is with the eternal and unseen. And the emotional temperament of
the writer has left its impress on this Epistle not less distinctly
than his mental and spiritual gifts. The denunciations of ch. i.
6-10; ii. 4, 5; iv. 9; v. 7-12; vi. 12-14, burn with a concentrated
intensity of passion, a sublime and holy scorn against the enemies of
the cross, such as a nature like Paul's alone is capable of feeling.
Nor has the Apostle penned anything on the other hand more amiable
and touching, more winningly frank and tender in appeal, than the
entreaty of ch. iv. 11-20. His last sentence, in ch. vi. 17, is an
irresistible stroke of pathos. The ardour of his soul, his vivacity
of mind and quick sensibility, are apparent throughout. Those sudden
turns of thought and bursts of emotion that occur in all his Epistles
and so much perplex their interpreters, are especially numerous in
this. And yet we find that these interruptions are never allowed to
divert the writer from his purpose, nor to destroy the sequence of
his thought. They rather carry it forward with greater vehemence
along the chosen course, as storms will a strong and well-manned
ship. The Epistle is strictly a unity. It is written, as one might
say, at a single breath, as if under pressure and in stress of mind.
There is little of the amplitude of expression and the delight in
lingering over some favourite idea that characterize the later
Epistles. Nor is there any passage of sustained eloquence to compare
with those that are found in the Roman and Corinthian letters. The
business on which the Apostle writes is too urgent, his anxiety too
great, to allow of freedom and discursiveness of thought. Hence this
Epistle is to an unusual degree closely packed in matter, rapid in
movement, and severe in tone.
In its construction the Epistle exhibits an almost dramatic
character. It is full of action and animation. There is a gradual
unfolding of the subject, and a skilful combination of scene and
incident brought to bear on the solution of the crucial question.
The Apostle himself, the insidious Judaizers, and the wavering
Galatians,--these are the protagonists of the action; with Peter
and the Church at Jerusalem playing a secondary part, and Abraham
and Moses, Isaac and Ishmael, appearing in the distance. The first
Act conducts us rapidly from scene to scene till we behold Paul
labouring amongst the Gentiles, and the Churches of Judea listening
with approval to the reports of his success. The Council of Jerusalem
opens a new stage in the history. Now Gentile liberties are at stake;
but Titus' circumcision is successfully resisted, and Paul as the
Apostle of the Uncircumcised is acknowledged by "the pillars" as
their equal; and finally Peter, when he betrays the truth of the
Gospel at Antioch, is corrected by the Gentile Apostle. The third
chapter carries us away from the present conflict into the region
of first principles,--to the Abrahamic Covenant with its spiritual
blessing and world-wide promise, opposed by the condemning Mosaic
Law, an opposition finally resolved by the coming of Christ and the
gift of His Spirit of adoption. At this point the Apostle turns the
gathered force of his argument upon his readers, and grapples with
them front to front in the expostulation carried on from ch. iv. 8
to v. 12, in which the story of Hagar forms a telling episode. The
fifth and closing Act, extending to the middle of ch. vi., turns on
the antithesis of Flesh and Spirit, bringing home the contention to
the region of ethics, and exhibiting to the Galatians the practical
effect of their following the Pauline or the Judaistic leadership.
Paul and the Primitive Church; Judaism and Gentile-Christian
liberties; the Covenants of Promise and of Law; the circumcision or
non-circumcision of the Galatians; the dominion of Flesh or Spirit:
these are the contrasts through which the Epistle advances. Its
centre lies in the decisive question given in the _fourth_ of these
antitheses. If we were to fix it in a single point, ver. 2 of ch. v.
is the sentence we should choose:--
"Behold, I Paul say unto you,
If ye be circumcised, Christ will profit you nothing."
The above analysis may be reduced to the common threefold division,
followed in this exposition:--viz. (1) _Personal History_, ch. i.
11-ii. 21; (2) _Doctrinal Polemic_, ch. iii. 1-v. 12; (3) _Ethical
Application_, ch. v. 13-vi. 10.
The epistolary Introduction forms the _Prologue_, ch. i. 1-10; and an
_Epilogue_ is appended, by way of renewed warning and protestation,
followed by the concluding signature and benediction,--ch. vi. 11-18.
* * * * *
The Address occupies the first two verses of the Epistle.
I. On the one side is _the writer_: "Paul, an Apostle." In his
earliest Letters (to Thessalonica) the title is wanting; so also
in Philippians and Philemon. The last instance explains the other
two. To the Macedonian Churches Paul writes more in the style of
friendship than authority: "for love's sake he rather entreats." With
the Galatians it is different. He proceeds to define his apostleship
in terms that should leave no possible doubt respecting its character
and rights: "not from men," he adds, "nor through man; but through
Jesus Christ, and God the Father, that raised Him from the dead."
This reads like a contradiction of some statement made by Paul's
opposers. Had they insinuated that he _was_ "an apostle from men,"
that his office was derived, like their own, only from the mother
Church in Jerusalem? Such insinuations would very well serve their
purpose; and if they were made, Paul would be sure not to lose a
moment in meeting them.
The word _apostle_ had a certain latitude of meaning.[2] It was
already, there is reason to believe, a term of Jewish official
usage when our Lord applied it to His chosen Twelve. It signified
a _delegate_ or _envoy_, accredited by some public authority, and
charged with a special message. We can understand therefore its
application to the emissaries of particular Churches--of Jerusalem
or Antioch, for example--despatched as their messengers to other
Churches, or with a general commission to proclaim the Gospel. The
recently discovered "Teaching of the Apostles" shows that this use
of the title continued in Jewish-Christian circles to the end of the
first century, alongside of the restricted and higher use. The lower
apostleship belonged to Paul in common with Barnabas and Silas and
many others.
[2] Compare Acts xiv. 4, 14 (_Barnabas and Paul_); 1 Thess. ii. 6
(_Paul and his comrades_); Rom. xvi. 7 (_Andronicus and Junias_);
2 Cor. viii. 23 (_Titus and others_, "apostles of the churches");
2 Cor. xi. 13 ("false apostles": _Judean emissaries_); also Rev.
ii. 2; Heb. iii. 1; John xiii. 16. On the N.T. use of _apostle_,
see Lightfoot's Galatians, pp. 92-101; but especially Huxtable's
_Dissertation_ in the Pulpit Commentary (Galatians), pp.
xxiii.-l., the most satisfactory elucidation of the subject we
have met with. Prebendary Huxtable however presses his argument
too far, when he insists that St. Paul held his higher commission
entirely in abeyance until the crisis of the Judaic controversy.
In the earlier period of his ministry, the Apostle was seemingly
content to rank in public estimation with his companions in the
Gentile mission. But a time came when he was compelled to arrogate to
himself the higher dignity. His right thereto was acknowledged at
the memorable conference in Jerusalem by the leaders of the Jewish
Church. So we gather from the language of ch. ii. 7-9. But the full
exercise of his authority was reserved for the present emergency,
when all his energy and influence were required to stem the tide of
the Judaistic reaction. We can well imagine that Paul "gentle in the
midst" of his flock and "not seeking to be of weight" (1 Thess. ii.
6, 7), had hitherto said as little as need be on the subject of his
official rights. His modesty had exposed him to misrepresentations
both in Corinth and in Galatia. He will "have" these people "to
know" that his gospel is in the strictest sense Divine, and that he
received his commission, as certainly as any of the Twelve, from the
lips of Jesus Christ Himself (ver. 11).
"Not from men" excludes human derivation; "not through man," human
intervention in the conferment of Paul's office. The singular number
(_man_) replaces the plural in the latter phrase, because it stands
immediately opposed to "Jesus Christ" (a striking witness this to His
Divinity). The second clause carries the negation farther than the
first; for a call from God may be, and commonly is, imposed by human
hands. There are, says Jerome, four kinds of Christian ministers:
first, those sent neither from men nor through man, like the prophets
of old time and the Apostles; secondly, those who are from God, but
through man, as it is with their legitimate successors; thirdly,
those who are from men, but not from God, as when one is ordained
through mere human favour and flattery; the fourth class consists of
such as have their call neither from God nor man, but wholly from
themselves, as with false prophets and the false apostles of whom
Paul speaks. His vocation, the Apostle declares, was superhuman,
alike in its origin and in the channel by which it was conveyed. It
was no voice of man that summoned Saul of Tarsus from the ranks of
the enemies to those of the servants of Christ, and gave him the
message he proclaimed. Damascus and Jerusalem in turn acknowledged
the grace given unto him; Antioch had sent him forth on her behalf
to the regions beyond: but he was conscious of a call anterior to
all this, and that admitted of no earthly validation. "Am I not an
apostle?" he exclaims, "have I not seen Jesus our Lord?" (1 Cor. ix.
1). "Truly the signs of the Apostle were wrought in him," both in
the miraculous powers attending his office, and in those moral and
spiritual qualities of a minister of God in which he was inferior to
none.[3] For the exercise of his ministry he was responsible neither
to "those of repute" at Jerusalem, nor to his censurers at Corinth;
but to Christ who had bestowed it (1 Cor. iv. 3, 4).
[3] 1 Cor. xv. 10; 2 Cor. iv. 2; vi. 3-10; xi. 5, 16-xii. 13.
The call of the Apostle proceeded also from "God the Father, who
raised Jesus Christ from the dead." Christ was in this act the
mediator, declaring the Supreme will. In other places, more briefly,
he styles himself "Apostle by the will of God." His appointment
took place by a Divine intervention, in which the ordinary sequence
of events was broken through. Long after the Saviour in His bodily
presence had ascended to heaven, when in the order of nature it was
impossible that another Apostle should be elected, and when the
administration of His Church had been for several years carried on
by human hands, He appeared once more on earth for the purpose of
making this man His "minister and witness;" He appeared in the name
of "the Father, who had raised Him from the dead." This interposition
gave to Paul's ministry an exceptional character. While the mode of
his election was in one aspect humbling, and put him in the position
of "the untimely one," the "least of the Apostles," whose appearance
in that capacity was unlooked for and necessarily open to suspicion;
on the other hand, it was glorious and exalting, since it so richly
displayed the Divine mercy and the transforming power of grace.
But why does he say, _who raised Him from the dead_? Because it was
the _risen Jesus_ that he saw, and that he was conscious of seeing
in the moment of the vision. The revelation that arrested him before
Damascus, in the same moment convinced him that Jesus was risen, and
that he himself was called to be His servant. These two convictions
were inseparably linked in Paul's recollections. As surely as God
the Father had raised His Son Jesus from the dead and given Him
glory, so surely had the glorified Jesus revealed Himself to Saul
his persecutor to make him His Apostle. He was, not less truly than
Peter or John, a witness of His resurrection. The message of the
Resurrection was the burden of the Apostleship.
He adds, "and all the brethren which are with me." For it was Paul's
custom to associate with himself in these official letters his
fellow-labourers, present at the time. From this expression we gather
that he was attended just now by a considerable band of companions,
such as we find enumerated in Acts xx. 2-6, attending him on his
journey from Ephesus to Corinth during the third missionary tour.
This circumstance has some bearing on the date of the letter. Bishop
Lightfoot (in his Commentary) shows reason for believing that it was
written, not from Ephesus as commonly supposed, but at a somewhat
later time, from _Macedonia_. It is connected by numerous and close
links of internal association with the Epistle to the Romans, which
on this supposition speedily followed, and with 2 Corinthians,
immediately preceding it. And the allusion of the text, though of
no decisive weight taken by itself, goes to support this reasoning.
Upon this hypothesis, our Epistle was composed in Macedonia,
during the autumn of 57 (or possibly, 58) A.D. The emotion which
surcharges 2 Corinthians runs over into Galatians: while the theology
which labours for expression in Galatians finds ampler and calmer
development in Romans.
II. Of _the readers_, "the churches of Galatia," it is not necessary
to say much at present. The character of the Galatians, and the
condition of their Churches, will speak for themselves as we proceed.
_Galatian_ is equivalent to _Gaul_, or _Kelt_. This people was a
detached fragment of the great Western-European race, which forms the
basis of our own Irish and West-British populations, as well as of
the French nationality. They had conquered for themselves a home in
the north of Asia Minor during the Gaulish invasion that poured over
South-eastern Europe and into the Asiatic peninsula some three and
a half centuries before. Here the Gallic intruders stubbornly held
their ground; and only succumbed to the irresistible power of Rome.
Defeated by the Consul Manlius in 189 B.C., the Galatians retained
their autonomy, under the rule of native princes, until in the year
25 B.C., on the death of Amyntas, the country was made a province of
the Empire. The people maintained their distinctive character and
speech despite these changes. At the same time they readily acquired
Greek culture, and were by no means barbarians; indeed they were
noted for their intelligence. In religion they seem to have largely
imbibed the Phrygian idolatry of the earlier inhabitants.
The Roman Government had annexed to Galatia certain districts
lying to the south, in which were situated most of the cities
visited by Paul and Barnabas in their first missionary tour. This
has led some scholars to surmise that Paul's "Galatians" were
really Pisidians and Lycaonians, the people of Derbe, Lystra, and
Pisidian Antioch. But this is improbable. The inhabitants of these
regions were never called Galatians in common speech; and Luke
distinguishes "the Galatic country" quite clearly from its southern
borderlands. Besides, the Epistle contains no allusions, such as we
should expect in the case supposed, to the Apostle's earlier and
memorable associations with these cities of the South. Elsewhere he
mentions them by name (2 Tim. iii. 11); and why not here, if he were
addressing this circle of Churches?
The Acts of the Apostles relates nothing of Paul's sojourn in
Galatia, beyond the fact that he twice "passed through the Galatic
country" (Acts xvi. 6; xviii. 23), on the first occasion during the
second missionary journey, in travelling north and then westwards
from Pisidia; the second time, on his way from Antioch to Ephesus, in
the course of the third tour. Galatia lay outside the main line of
Paul's evangelistic career, as the historian of the Acts describes
it, outside the Apostle's own design, as it would appear from ch. iv.
13. In the first instance Galatia follows (in the order of the Acts),
in the second precedes Phrygia, a change which seems to indicate
some new importance accruing to this region: the further clause in
Acts xviii. 23, "strengthening all the disciples," shows that the
writer was aware that by this time a number of Christian societies
were in existence in this neighbourhood.
No _city_ is mentioned in the address, but the _country_ of Galatia
only--the single example of the kind in Paul's Epistles. The
Galatians were countryfolk rather than townsfolk. And the Church
seems to have spread over the district at large, without gathering
itself into any one centre, such as the Apostle had occupied in other
parts of his Gentile field.
Still more significant is the curtness of this designation. Paul does
not say, "To the Churches _of God_ in Galatia," or "to the saints
and faithful brethren in Christ," as in other Epistles. He is in no
mood for compliments. These Galatians are, he fears, "removing from
God who had called them" (ver. 6). He stands in doubt of them. It is
a question whether they are now, or will long continue, "Churches
of God" at all. He would gladly commend them if he could; but he
must instead begin with reproaches. And yet we shall find that, as
the Apostle proceeds, his sternness gradually relaxes. He remembers
that these "foolish Galatians" are his "children," once ardently
attached to him (ch. iv. 12-20). His heart yearns towards them; he
travails over them in birth again. Surely they will not forsake
him, and renounce the gospel of whose blessings they had enjoyed so
rich an experience (ch. iii. 3; v. 10). He calls them "brethren"
once and again; and with this kindly word, holding out the hand of
forgiveness, he concludes the letter.
CHAPTER II.
_THE SALUTATION._
"Grace to you and peace from God the Father, and our Lord Jesus
Christ, who gave Himself for our sins, that He might deliver us
out of this present evil world, according to the will of our God
and Father: to whom be the glory for ever and ever. Amen."--GAL.
i. 3-5.
The greetings and benedictions of the Apostolic Letters deserve
more attention from us than they sometimes receive. We are apt to
pass over them as if they were a kind of pious formality, like the
conventional phrases of our own epistles. But to treat them in such
fashion is to do injustice to the seriousness and sincerity of Holy
Scripture. This salutation of "Grace and Peace" comes from Paul's
very heart. It breathes the essence of his gospel.
This formula appears to be of the Apostle's coining. Other writers,
we may believe, borrowed it from him. _Grace_ represents the common
Greek salutation,--_joy to you_, χαίρειν changing to the kindred
χάρις; while the more religious _peace_ of the Hebrew, so often heard
from the lips of Jesus, remains unaltered, only receiving from the
New Covenant a tenderer significance. It is as though East and West,
the old world and the new, met here and joined their voices to bless
the Church and people of Jesus Christ.
_Grace_ is the sum of all blessing bestowed by God; _peace_, in its
wide Hebraic range of meaning, the sum of all blessing experienced
by man. _Grace_ is the Father's goodwill and bounty in Christ to
His undeserving children; _peace_, the rest and reconcilement, the
recovered health and gladness of the child brought home to the
Father's house, dwelling in the light of his Father's face. _Grace_
is the fountain of redeeming love; _peace_ is the "river of life
proceeding from the throne of God and of the Lamb," that flows calm
and deep through each believing soul, the river whose "streams make
glad the city of God."
What could a pastor wish better for his people, or friend for the
friend he loves most, than this double blessing? Paul's letters are
perfumed with its fragrance. Open them where you will, they are
breathing out, "Grace to you and peace." Paul has hard things to
write in this Epistle, sorrowful complaints to make, grievous errors
to correct; but still with "Grace and peace" he begins, and with
"Peace and grace" he will end! And so this stern and reproachful
letter to these "foolish Galatians" is all embalmed and folded up in
grace and peace. That is the way to "be angry and sin not." So mercy
rejoices over judgement.
These two benedictions, we must remember, go together. Peace comes
through grace. The proud heart never knows peace; it will not yield
to God the glory of His grace. It scorns to be a debtor, even to Him.
The proud man stands upon his rights, upon his merits. And he will
have them; for God is just. But peace is not amongst them. No sinful
child of man deserves that. Is there wrong between your soul and God,
iniquity hidden in the heart? Till that wrong is confessed, till
you submit to the Almighty and your spirit bows at the Redeemer's
cross, what hast thou to do with peace? No peace in this world, or
in any world, for him who will not be at peace with God. "When I kept
silence," so the ancient confession runs (Ps. xxxii. 3-5), "my bones
waxed old through my moaning all the day long"--that is why many a
man is old before his time! because of this continual inward chafing,
this secret, miserable war of the heart against God. "Day and night
Thy hand was heavy upon me; my moisture was turned into the drought
of summer"--the soul withered like grass, all the freshness and pure
delight of life wasted and perishing under the steady, unrelenting
heat of the Divine displeasure. "Then I said"--I could bear it no
longer--"I said, I will confess my transgression unto the Lord; and
Thou forgavest the iniquity of my sin." And then peace came to the
weary soul. The bitterness and hardness of life were gone; the heart
was young again. The man was new born, a child of God.
But while Paul gives this salutation to all his Churches, his
greeting is extended and qualified here in a peculiar manner. The
Galatians were falling away from faith in Christ to Jewish ritualism.
He does not therefore wish them "Grace and peace" in a general way,
or as objects to be sought from any quarter or by any means that
they might choose; but only "from God our Father, and our Lord Jesus
Christ, who gave Himself for our sins." Here is already a note of
warning and a tacit contradiction of much that they were tempted to
believe. It would have been a mockery for the Apostle to desire for
these fickle Galatians grace and peace on other terms. As at Corinth,
so in Galatia, he is "determined to know nothing save Jesus Christ
and Him crucified." Above the puerilities of their Jewish ritual,
above the pettiness of their wrangling factions, he directs his
readers' gaze once more to the sacrifice of Calvary and the sublime
purpose of God which it reveals.
Do _we_ not need to be recalled to the same sight? We live in a
distracted and distracting age. Even without positive unbelief, the
cross is too frequently thrust out of view by the hurry and press of
modern life. Nay, in the Church itself is it not in danger of being
practically set on one side, amidst the throng of competing interests
which solicit, and many of them justly solicit, our attention? We
visit Calvary too seldom. We do not haunt in our thoughts the sacred
spot, and linger on this theme, as the old saints did. We fail to
attain "the fellowship of Christ's sufferings;" and while the cross
is outwardly exalted, its inward meaning is perhaps but faintly
realised. "Tell us something new," they say; "that story of the
cross, that evangelical doctrine of yours we have heard it so often,
we know it all so well!" If men are saying this, if the cross of
Christ is made of none effect, its message staled by repetition, we
must be strangely at fault either in the hearing or the telling. Ah,
if we knew the cross of Christ, it would crucify us; it would possess
our being. Its supremacy can never be taken from it. That cross is
still the centre of the world's hope, the pillar of salvation. Let
the Church lose her hold of it, and she loses everything. She has no
longer any reason to exist.
I. So the Apostle's greeting invites his readers to contemplate anew
_the Divine gift bestowed upon sinful men_. It invokes blessing upon
them "from our Lord Jesus Christ, who gave Himself for our sins."
To see this gift in its greatness, let us go a little farther back;
let us consider who the Christ is that thus "gives Himself." He is,
we are taught, the almoner of all the Divine bounties. He is not
the object alone, but the depositary and dispenser of the Father's
good pleasure to all worlds and all creatures. Creation is rooted
in "the Son of God's love" (Col. i. 15-18). Universal life has its
fountain in "the Only-begotten, which is in the bosom of the Father."
The light that dispelled the weltering gloom of chaos, the more
wondrous light that shone in the dawn of human reason, came from this
"outbeaming of the Father's glory." Countless gifts had He, "the
life of men, the Word that was from the beginning," bestowed on a
world that knew Him not. Upon the chosen race, the people whom on the
world's behalf he formed for Himself, He showered His blessings. He
had given them promise and law, prophet and priest and king, gifts of
faith and hope, holy obedience and brave patience and deep wisdom and
prophetic fire and heavenly rapture; and His gifts to them have come
through them to us, "partakers with them of the root and fatness of
the olive tree."
But now, to crown all, _He gave Himself_! "The Word became flesh."
The Son of God planted Himself into the stock of human life, made
Himself over to mankind; He became the Son of man. So in the fulness
of time came the fulness of blessing. Earlier bestowments were
instalments and prophecies of this; later gifts are its outcome and
its application. What could He have done more than this? What could
the Infinite God do more, even for the most worthy, than He has done
for us in "sending His Son, the Only-begotten, that we might live
through Him!" Giving us Him, surely He will give us grace and peace.
And if our Lord Jesus Christ "gave Himself," is not that sufficient?
What could Jewish ritual and circumcision add to this "fulness of the
Godhead?" Why hunt after the shadows, when one has the substance?
Such were the questions which the Apostle has to ask his Judaizing
readers. And what, pray, do _we_ want with modern Ritualism, and
its scenic apparatus, and its priestly offices? Are these things
designed to eke out the insufficiency of Christ? Will they recommend
Him better than His own gospel and the pure influence of His Spirit
avail to do in these latter days? Or has modern thought, to be sure,
and the progress of the 19th century carried us beyond Jesus Christ,
and created spiritual wants for which He has no supply? Paul at least
had no anticipation of this failure. All the need of hungry human
hearts and searching minds and sorrowing spirits, to the world's
latest ages, the God of Paul, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, is
able to supply in Him. "We are complete in Him,"--if we but knew our
completeness. The most advanced thinkers of the age will still find
Jesus Christ in advance of them. Those who draw the most largely from
His fulness, leave its depths unsounded. There are resources stored
for the times to come in the revelation of Christ, which our age is
too slight, too hasty of thought, to comprehend. We are straitened in
ourselves; never in Him.
From this supreme gift we can argue down to the humblest necessities,
the commonest trials of our daily lot. It adapts itself to the small
anxieties of a struggling household, equally with the largest demands
of our exacting age. "Thou hast given us Thy Son," says some one,
"and wilt Thou not give us bread?" We have a generous Lord. His
only complaint is that we do not ask enough. "Ye are My friends,"
He says: "I have given My life for you. Ask what ye will, and it
shall be done unto you." Giving us Himself, He has given us all
things. Abraham and Moses, David and Isaiah, "Paul and Apollos and
Cephas--yea the world itself, life and death, things present and to
come--all are ours; and we are Christ's and Christ is God's" (1 Cor.
iii. 22, 23). Such is the chain of blessing that hangs on this single
gift.
Great as the gift is, it is not greater than our need. Wanting a
Divine Son of man, human life remains a baffled aspiration, a pathway
leading to no goal. Lacking Him, the race is incomplete, a body
without its head, a flock that has no master. By the coming of Christ
in the flesh human life finds its ideal realized; its haunting dream
of a Divine helper and leader in the midst of men, of a spiritual
and immortal perfection brought within its reach, has attained
fulfilment. "God hath raised up a horn of salvation for us in the
house of His servant David; as He spake by the mouth of His holy
prophets, which have been since the world began." Jacob's vision has
come true. There is the golden ladder, with its foot resting on the
cold, stony earth, and its top on heaven's starry platform, with its
angels ascending and descending through the darkness; and you may
climb its steps, high as you will! So humanity receives its crown of
life. Heaven and earth are linked, God and man reunited in the person
of Jesus Christ.
But Paul will not suffer us to linger at Bethlehem. He hastens on
to Calvary. The Atonement, not the Incarnation, is in his view the
centre of Christianity. To the cross of Jesus, rather than to His
cradle, he attaches our salvation. "Jesus Christ gave Himself"--what
for, and in what way? What was the errand that brought Him here,
in such a guise, and at such a time? Was it to meet our _need_, to
fulfil our human aspirations, to crown the moral edifice, to lead
the race onward to the goal of its development? Yes--ultimately, and
in the final issue, for "as many as receive Him"; it was to "present
every man perfect in Christ." But that was not the primary object of
His coming, of such a coming. Happy for us indeed, and for Him, if it
could have been so. To come to a world waiting for Him, hearkening
for the cry, "Behold thy God, O Israel," would have been a pleasant
and a fitting thing. But to find Himself rejected by His own, to be
spit upon, to hear the multitude shout, "Away with Him!" was this
the welcome that He looked for? Yea surely, nothing else but this.
For He gave Himself _for our sins_. He came to a world steeped in
wickedness, seething with rebellion against God, hating Him because
it hated the Father that sent Him, sure to say as soon as it saw Him,
"We will not have this man to reign over us." Not therefore by way
of incarnation and revelation alone, as it might have been for an
innocent race; but by way of _sacrifice_, as a victim on the altar of
expiation, "a lamb led to the slaughter," He gave Himself up for us
all. "To deliver us from an evil world," says the Apostle; to mend
a faulty and imperfect world, something less and other would have
sufficed.
Extreme diseases call for extreme remedies. The case with which
our good Physician had to deal was a desperate one. The world was
sick at heart; its moral nature rotting to the core. Human life was
shattered to its foundation. If it was to be saved, if the race was
to escape perdition, the fabric must be reconstructed upon another
basis, on the ground of a new righteousness, outside ourselves and
yet akin to us, near enough to take hold of us and grow into us,
which should draw to itself the broken elements of human life, and
as a vital organic force refashion them, "creating" men "anew in
Christ Jesus"--a righteousness availing before God, and in its depth
and width sufficient to bear a world's weight. Such a new foundation
Jesus Christ has laid in His death. "He laid down His life for us,"
the Shepherd for the sheep, the Friend for His perishing friends,
the Physician for sufferers who had no other remedy. It had come to
this,--either He must die, or we must die for ever. Such was the
sentence of the All-wise Judge; on that judgement the Redeemer acted.
"His judgements are a great deep"; and in this sentence there are
depths of mystery into which we tremble to look, "secret things that
belong unto the Lord our God." But so it was. There was no way but
this, no moral possibility of saving the world, and yet saving Him
the accursed death.
If there had been, would not the Almighty Father have found it out?
would He not have "taken away the cup" from those white, quivering
lips? No; He must _die_. He must consent to be "made sin, made a
curse" for us. He must humble His stainless innocence, humble His
glorious Godhead down to the dust of death. He must die, at the hands
of the men He created and loved, with the horror of the world's sin
fastened on Him; die under a blackened heaven, under the averting of
the Father's face. And He did it. He said, "Father, Thy will be done.
Smite the Shepherd; but let the sheep escape." So He "gave Himself
for our sins."
Ah, it was no easy march, no holiday pageant, the coming of the Son
of God into this world of ours. He "came to _save sinners_." Not to
help good men--this were a grateful task; but to redeem bad men--the
hardest work in God's universe. It tasked the strength and the
devotion of the Son of God. Witness Gethsemane. And it will cost His
Church something, more haply than we dream of now, if the work of
the Redeemer is to be made effectual, and "the travail of His soul
satisfied."
In pity and in sorrow was that gift bestowed; in deep humility and
sorrow must it be accepted. It is a very humbling thing to "receive
the atonement," to be made righteous on such terms as these. A man
who has done well, can with satisfaction accept the help given him
to do better. But to know that one has done very ill, to stand in
the sight of God and truth condemned, marked with the disgrace that
the crucifixion of the Son of God has branded on our human nature,
with every stain of sin in ourselves revealed in the light of His
sacrifice, is a sore abasement. When one has been compelled to cry
out, "Lord, save; or I perish!" he has not much left to plume himself
upon. There was Saul himself, a perfect moralist, "blameless in the
righteousness of the law." Yet he must confess, "How to perform that
which is good I find not. In me, that is in my flesh, dwelleth no
good thing. Wretch that I am, who shall deliver me?" Was not this
mortifying to the proud young Pharisee, the man of strict conscience
and high-souled moral endeavour? It was like death. And whoever has
with sincerity made the same attempt to attain in the strength of his
will to a true virtue, has tasted of this bitterness.
This however is what many cannot understand. The proud heart says,
"No; I will not stoop to that. I have my faults, my defects and
errors, not a few. But as for what you call _sin_, as for guilt and
inborn depravity, I am not going to tax myself with anything of the
kind. Leave me a little self-respect." So with the whole herd of
the self-complacent, half-religious Laodiceans. Once a week they
confess themselves "miserable sinners," but their sins against God
never yet cost them one half hour of misery. And Paul's "gospel is
hid to them." If they read this Epistle, they cannot tell what it
is all about; why Paul makes so much ado, why these thunderings
of judgement, these cries of indignation, these beseechings and
protestings and redoubled arguments,--all because a parcel of
foolish Galatians wanted to play at being Jews! They are inclined
to think with Festus, that this good Paul was a little beside
himself. Alas! to such men, content with the world's good opinion
and their own, the death of Christ is made of none effect. Its moral
grandeur, its infinite pathos, is lost upon them. They pay it a
conventional respect, but as for _believing_ in it, as for making
it their own, and dying with Christ to live in Him--they have no
idea what it means. That, they will tell you, is "mysticism," and
they are practical men of the world. They have never gone out of
themselves, never discovered their moral insufficiency. These are
they of whom Jesus said, "The publicans and the harlots go into the
kingdom of God before you." It is our human independence, our moral
self-conceit, that robs us of the Divine bounty. How should God give
His righteousness to men so well furnished with their own? "Blessed"
then "are the poor in spirit"; blessed are the broken in heart--poor
enough, broken enough, bankrupt enough to stoop to a Saviour "who
gave Himself for our sins."
II. Sinful men have made an _evil world_. The world, as Paul knew
it, was evil indeed. "The existing evil age," he says, the world as
it then was, in contrast with the glory of the perfected Messianic
kingdom.
This was a leading distinction of the rabbinical schools; and
the writers of the New Testament adopt it, with the necessary
modification, that "the coming age," in their view, commences with
the _Parousia_, the full advent of the Messiah King.[4] The period
that intervenes since His first appearing is transitional, belonging
to both eras. It is the conclusion of "this world,"[5] to which it
appertains in its outward and material relations;[6] but under the
perishing form of the present there lies hidden for the Christian
believer the seed of immortality, "the earnest" of his future
and complete inheritance.[7] Hence the different and seemingly
contradictory ways in which Scripture speaks of the world that now is.
[4] 2 Thess. i. 5-7; 2 Tim. iv. 18; Heb. x. 12, 13; 1 Pet. v. 10.
[5] 1 Cor. x. 11; Heb. ix. 26.
[6] 1 Cor. vii. 31; 1 John ii. 17.
[7] Rom. viii. 18; Eph. i. 13, 14.
To Paul at this time the world wore its darkest aspect. There is a
touching emphasis in the order of this clause. "The present world,
_evil as it is_:" the words are a sigh for deliverance. The Epistles
to Corinth show us how the world just now was using the Apostle.
The wonder is that one man could bear so much. "We are made as the
filth of the world," he says, "the offscouring of all things."[8] So
the world treated its greatest living benefactor. And as for his
Master--"the princes of this world crucified the Lord of glory."
Yes, it was a bad old world, that in which Paul and the Galatians
lived--false, licentious, cruel. And that "evil world" still exists.
[8] 1 Cor. iv. 9-13; xv. 30, 32; 2 Cor. vi. 4, 10; xi. 16, 33.
True, the world, as we know it, is vastly better than that of Paul's
day. Not in vain have Apostles taught, and martyrs bled, and the
Church of Christ witnessed and toiled through so many ages. "Other
men have laboured; we enter into their labours." An English home
of to-day is the flower of the centuries. To those cradled in its
pure affections, endowed with health and honourable work and refined
tastes, the world must be, and was meant to be, in many aspects a
bright and pleasant world. Surely the most sorrowful have known days
in which the sky was all sunshine and the very air alive with joy,
when the world looked as when it came forth fresh from its Creator's
hand, "and behold, it was very good." There is nothing in the Bible,
nothing in the spirit of true religion to damp the pure joy of such
days as these. But there are "the days of darkness;" and they are
many. The Serpent has crept into our Paradise. Death breathes on it
his fatal blast.
And when we look outside the sheltered circles of home-life and
Christian brotherhood, what a sea of misery spreads around us. How
limited and partial is the influence of religion. What a mass of
unbelief and godlessness surges up to the doors of our sanctuaries.
What appalling depths of iniquity exist in modern society, under the
brilliant surface of our material civilization. And however far the
dominance of sin in human society may be broken--as, please God, it
shall be broken, still evil is likely to remain in many tempting
and perilous forms until the world is burnt to ashes in the fires
of the Last Judgement. Is it not an evil world, where every morning
newspaper serves up to us its miserable tale of disaster and of
crime, where the Almighty's name is "all the day blasphemed," and
every night drunkenness holds its horrid revels and the daughters
of shame walk the city streets, where great Christian empires tax
the poor man's bread and make his life bitter to maintain their huge
standing armies and their cruel engines of war, and where, in this
happy England and its cities teeming with wealth, there are thousands
of patient, honest working women, whose life under the fierce stress
of competition is a veritable slavery, a squalid, dreary struggle
just to keep hunger from the door? Ay, it is a world so evil that no
good and right-thinking man who knows it, would care to live in it
for a single day, but for the hope of helping to make it better.
Now it was the purpose of Jesus Christ, that for those who believe
in Him this world's evil should be brought absolutely to an end. He
promises a full deliverance from all that tempts and afflicts us
here. With sin, the root of evil, removed, its bitter fruits at last
will disappear. We shall rise to the life immortal. We shall attain
our perfect consummation and bliss both in body and soul. Kept from
the evil of the world while they remain in it, enabled by His grace
to witness and contend against it, Christ's servants shall then be
lifted clean out for it of ever. "Father, I will," prayed Jesus,
"that they also whom Thou hast given Me, may be with Me where I am."
To that final salvation, accomplished in the redemption of our body
and the setting up of Christ's heavenly kingdom, the Apostle's words
look forward: "that He might deliver us _out of_ this present evil
world." This was the splendid hope which Paul offered to the dying
and despairing world of his day. The Galatians were persuaded of it
and embraced it; he entreats them not to let it go.
The self-sacrifice of Christ, and the deliverance it brings, are
both, the Apostle concludes, "according to the will of God, even our
Father." The wisdom and might of the Eternal are pledged to the work
of human redemption. The cross of Jesus Christ is the manifesto of
Infinite Love. Let him therefore who rejects it, know against Whom he
is contending. Let him who perverts and falsifies it, know with what
he is trifling. He who receives and obeys it, may rest assured that
all things are working for his good. For all things are in the hands
of our God and Father; "to Whom," let us say with Paul, "be glory for
ever. Amen."
CHAPTER III.
_THE ANATHEMA._
"I marvel that ye are so quickly removing from him that called
you in the grace of Christ unto a different gospel; which is
not another _gospel_: only there are some that trouble you, and
would pervert the gospel of Christ. But though we, or an angel
from heaven, should preach unto you any gospel other than that
which we preached unto you, let him be anathema. As we have said
before, so say I now again, If any man preacheth unto you any
gospel other than that which ye received, let him be anathema.
For am I now persuading men, or God? or am I seeking to please
men? if I were still pleasing men, I should not be a servant of
Christ."--GAL. i. 6-10.
After the Salutation in Paul's Epistles comes the Thanksgiving.
Ἐυχαριστῶ or Εὐλογητός--these are the words we expect first to meet.
Even in writing to Corinth, where there was so much to censure and
deplore, he begins, "I give thanks to my God always for you." This
letter deviates from the Apostle's devout and happy usage. Not "I
give thanks," but "I marvel;" not blessing, but _anathema_ is coming
from his lips: a surprise that jars all the more upon one's ears,
because it follows on the sublime doxology of the preceding verse.
"I marvel to see you so quickly falling away to another gospel....
But if any one preach unto you any gospel other than that ye
received--ay, though it were ourselves, or an angel from heaven--I
have said once, and I say again, LET HIM BE ANATHEMA."
These words were well calculated to startle the Galatians out of
their levity. They are like a lightning-flash which shows one to be
standing on the edge of a precipice. We see at once the infinite
seriousness of the Judaic controversy, the profound gulf that lies
between Paul and his opposers. He is for open war. He is in haste
to fling his gage of defiance against these enemies of the cross.
With all his tact and management, his readiness to consult the
susceptibilities and accommodate the scruples of sincere consciences,
the Apostle can find no room for conciliation here. He knows the
sort of men he has to deal with. He perceives that the whole truth
of the Gospel is at stake. Not circumstantials, but essentials; not
his personal authority, but the honour of Christ, the doctrine of the
cross, is involved in this defection. He must speak plainly; he must
act strongly, and at once; or the cause of the Gospel is lost. "If
I continued any longer to please men," he says, "I should not be a
servant of Christ." To stand on terms with such opponents, to palter
with this "other gospel," would be treason against Him. There is but
one tribunal at which this quarrel can be decided. To Him "who had
called" the Galatian believers "in Christ's grace," who by the same
grace had called the Apostle to His service and given him the message
he had preached to them--to _God_ he appeals. In His name, and by the
authority conferred upon him and for which he must give account, he
pronounces these troublers "anathema." They are enemies of Christ, by
their treachery excluded from His kingdom.
However unwelcome, however severe the course the Apostle takes,
he has no alternative. "For now," he cries, "is it _men_ that I
persuade, or _God_?" He must do his duty, let who will condemn.
Paul was ready to go all lengths in pleasing men in consistence
with loyalty to Christ, where he could do it "for their good, unto
edification." But if their approval clashed with God's, then it
became "a very small thing:"[9] he did not heed it one jot. Such is
the temper of mind which the Epistles to Corinth disclose in Paul
at this juncture. In the same spirit he indites these trenchant and
displeasing words.
[9] 1 Cor. iv. 3, 4; 2 Cor. v. 9-12; xii. 19.
With a heavy heart Paul has taken up his pen. If we judge rightly
of the date of this letter, he had just passed through the darkest
hour of his experience, when not his life alone, but the fate of his
Gentile mission hung in the balance. His expulsion from Ephesus,
coming at the same time as the Corinthian revolt, and followed by a
prostrating attack of sickness, had shaken his soul to its depths.
Never had his heart been so torn with anxiety, never had he felt
himself so beaten down and discomfited, as on that melancholy journey
from Ephesus to Macedonia.[10] "Out of anguish of heart and with
many tears" and after-relentings (2 Cor. ii. 4; vii. 8) he wrote
his First letter to Corinth. And this Epistle is even more severe.
There runs through it a peculiar mental tension, an exaltation of
feeling such as prolonged and deep suffering leaves behind in a
nature like Paul's. "The marks of Jesus" (ch. vi. 17) are visible,
impressed on his spirit no less than on his body. The Apostle's
heart is full to overflowing. Its warm glow is felt under the calmer
course of narrative and argument: while at the beginning and end of
the Epistle it breaks forth in language of burning indignation and
melting pathos. Before advancing a single step, before entering on
any sort of explanation or discussion, his grief at the fickleness of
his Galatian children and his anger against their seducers must find
expression.
[10] 2 Cor. i. 8-10; ii. 12, 13; iv. 8-11; vii. 5-7.
These sentences demand, before we proceed further, a few words of
exegetical definition. For the reference of "so quickly" it is
needless to go beyond the verb it qualifies. The Apostle cannot
surely mean, "_so soon_ falling away (after your conversion)." For
the Galatian Churches had been founded five, if not seven, years
before this time; and the backsliding of recent converts is less, and
not more, surprising than of established believers. What astonishes
Paul is the _suddenness_ of this movement, the facility with which
the Galatians yielded to the Judaizing "persuasion," the rapid spread
of this new leaven. As to the double "other" (ἕτερον, _different_,
R.V.--ἄλλο) of vv. 6 and 7, and the connection of the idiomatic
"only" (εἰ μή, _except_),--we regard the second _other_ as an abrupt
correction of the first; while the _only_ clause, extending to the
end of ver. 7, mediates between the two, qualifying the statement
"There is no other gospel," by showing in what sense the writer at
first had spoken of "another." "Ye are falling away," says he, "to
another sort of gospel--which is not another, except that there
are certain that trouble you and would fain pervert the gospel of
Christ." The word _gospel_ is therefore in the first instance applied
ironically. Paul yields the sacred title up to his opponents, only
to snatch it out of their false hands. "_Another_ gospel! there
is only one; although there are men that falsify it, and seek to
foist something else upon you in its name." Seven times in this
context (vv. 6-11) does the Apostle reiterate, in noun or verb, this
precious word, as though he could not let it go. A strange sort
of "good news" for the Galatians, that they must be circumcised
forsooth, and observe the Jewish Kalendar! (ch. v. 2, 3; vi. 12; iv.
9, 10.)
I. In Paul's view, there is but one gospel for mankind. _The gospel
of Jesus Christ bears a fixed, inviolable character._
On this position the whole teaching of Paul rests,--and with it, may
we not add, Christianity itself? However variously we may formulate
the essentials of a Christian man's faith, we are generally agreed
that there are such essentials, and that they are found in Paul's
gospel to the Gentiles. With him the good tidings about Christ
constituted a very definite and, as we should say, _dogmatic_ body of
truth. In whatever degree his gospel has been confused and overlaid
by later teachings, to his own mind its terms were perfectly clear,
and its authority incontestable. With all its breadth, there is
nothing nebulous, nothing limp or hesitating about the theology of
Paul. In its main doctrines it is fixed and hard as adamant; and at
the challenge of this Judaistic perversion it rings out an instant
and peremptory denial. It was the ark of God on which the Jewish
troublers laid their unholy hands. "Christ's grace" is lodged in
it. God's call to mankind was conveyed by these "good tidings." The
Churches which the Apostle had planted were "God's husbandry, God's
building;" and woe to the man who tampered with the work, or sought
to lay another foundation than that which had been laid (1 Cor.
iii. 5-11). To distort or mutilate "the word of the truth of the
gospel," to make it mean now one thing and now another, to disturb
the faith of half-instructed Christians by captious reasonings and
self-interested perversions, was a capital offence, a sin against
God and a crime against humanity. Paul possesses in his gospel truth
of unspeakable value to mankind, the supreme revelation of God's
mercy to the world. And he is prepared to launch his anathema against
every wilful impugner, no matter what his pretensions, or the quarter
from which he comes.
"Well," it may be said, "this is sheer religious intolerance. Paul is
doing what every dogmatist, every ecclesiastical bigot has done in
his turn. His beliefs are, to be sure, _the_ truth; and accordingly
he unchurches and anathematizes those who cannot agree with him.
With all his nobility of mind, there is in Paul a leaven of Jewish
rancour. He falls short of the sweet reasonableness of Jesus." So
some will say, and in saying claim to represent the mild and tolerant
spirit of our age. But is there not in every age an intolerance that
is just and necessary? There is a logical intolerance of sophistry
and trifling. There is a moral intolerance of impurity and deceit.
And there is a religious intolerance, which includes both these and
adds to them a holy jealousy for the honour of God and the spiritual
welfare of mankind. It is mournful indeed to think how many crimes
have been perpetrated under the cloak of pious zeal. _Tantum Religio
potuit suadere malorum._ The corruption of Christianity by human
pride and cruelty has furnished copious illustrations of the terrible
line of Lucretius. But the perversion of this noblest instinct of
the soul does not take away either its reasonableness or its use.
The quality of a passion is one thing; the mode of its expression is
another. The hottest fires of bigotry are cold when compared with the
scorching intolerance of Christ's denunciations of the Pharisees.
The anathemas of Jesus and of Paul are very different from those of
arrogant pontiffs, or of narrow sectaries, inflamed with the idolatry
of their own opinions. After all, the zeal of the rudest fanatic in
religion has more in it of manly worth and moral capability than
the languors of a blasé scepticism, that sits watching with amused
contempt the strife of creeds and the search of human hearts after
the Living God. There is an idle, listless, cowardly tolerance, as
there is an intolerance that is noble and just.
The _one gospel_ has had many interpreters. Their voices, it must
be confessed, sound strangely discordant. While the teachings of
Christianity excite so intensely a multitude of different minds, of
every variety of temper and capacity, contradiction will inevitably
arise. Nothing is easier than to scoff at "the Babel of religious
opinions." Christian truth is necessarily refracted and discoloured
in passing through disordered natures and defective minds. And, alas,
that Church which claims to hold the truth without possibility of
error or variation, has perverted Christ's gospel most of all.
But notwithstanding all differences, there exists a large and an
increasing measure of agreement amongst the great body of earnest
Christians. Slowly, yet surely, one debate after another comes to
its settlement. The noise and publicity with which discussion on
matters of faith is carried on in an age of religious freedom, and
when liberty of thought has outrun mental discipline, should not
lead us to exaggerate the extent of our disagreements. In the midst
of human controversy and error, the Spirit of truth is carrying on
His work. He is the supreme witness of Jesus Christ. And He abides
with us for ever. The newly awakened historical conscience of our
times is visibly making for unity. The Church is going back to the
New Testament. And the more thoroughly she does this, the more
directly and truthfully she addresses herself to the original record
and comes face to face with Christ and His Apostles there, so much
the more shall we realize the oneness and certainty of "the faith
once delivered to the saints." Beneath the many superstructures,
faulty and changing in their form, we reach the one "foundation of
the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ Himself being the chief
corner-stone." There we touch solid rock. "The unity of the faith"
lies in "the knowledge of the Son of God." Of Him we shall learn most
from those who knew Him best. Let us transport ourselves into the
fellowship of His first disciples; and listen to His gospel as it
came fresh from the lips of Peter and John and Paul, and the Divine
Master Himself. Let us bid the voices of the centuries be silent,
that we may _hear Him_.
For the Galatian readers, as for Paul, there could be but _one
gospel_. By his voice the call of God had reached their hearts, (ver.
6; ch. v. 8). The witness of the Spirit of God and of Christ in the
supernatural gifts they had received, and in the manifold fruit of
a regenerate life (ch. iii. 2-5; v. 22, 23), was evidence to them
that the Apostle's message was "the true gospel of the grace of God."
This they had gratefully acknowledged at the time of his first visit
(ch. iv. 15). The proclamation of the crucified and risen Christ had
brought to them unspeakable blessing. Through it they received the
knowledge of God; they were made consciously sons of God, heirs of
life eternal (ch. iii. 26; iv. 6-9; vi. 8). To entertain any other
gospel, after this experience and all these professions, was an act
of apostasy. "Ye are deserting (like runaway soldiers), _turning
renegades_ from God:" such is the language in which Paul taxes
his readers. In listening to the persuasion of the Judaists, they
were "disobeying the truth" (ch. v. 7, 8). They were disloyal to
conscience; they were trifling with the most sacred convictions of
their lives, and with the testimony of the Spirit of God. They were
forgetting the cross of Christ, and making His death of none effect.
Surely they must have been "bewitched" to act thus; some deadly spell
was upon them, which had laid memory and conscience both to sleep
(ch. ii. 21-iii. 3).
The nature and the contents of the two "gospels" current in Galatia
will be made clear in the further course of the Epistle. They were
the gospels of Grace and of Law respectively; of Salvation by Faith,
and by Works; of life in the Spirit, and in the Flesh; of the Cross
and the Resurrection on the one hand, and of Circumcision and the
Kalendar and "Clean meats" on the other; the gospels of inwardness,
and of externalism--of Christ, and of self. The conflict between
these two was the great struggle of Paul's life. His success was,
historically speaking, the salvation of Christianity.
But this contention did not end with his victory. The Judaistic
perversion appealed to tendencies too persistent in our nature to
be crushed at one blow. The gospel of externalism is dear to the
human heart. It may take the form of culture and moralities; or of
"services" and sacraments and churchly order; or of orthodoxy and
philanthropy. These and such things make themselves our idols; and
trust in them takes the place of Faith in the living Christ. It is
not enough that the eyes of our heart should once have seen the
Lord, that we should in other days have experienced "the renewing of
the Holy Ghost." It is possible to forget, possible to "remove from
Him that called us in the grace of Christ." With little change in
the form of our religious life, its inward reality of joy in God,
of conscious sonship, of fellowship in the Spirit, may be utterly
departed. The gospel of formalism will spring up and flourish on the
most evangelical soil, and in the most strictly Pauline Churches.
Let it be banned and barred out never so completely, it knows how to
find entrance, under the simplest modes of worship and the soundest
doctrine. The serried defence of Articles and Confessions constructed
against it will not prevent its entrance, and may even prove its
cover and intrenchment. Nothing avails, as the Apostle says, but a
constant "new creation." The life of God in human souls is sustained
by the energy of His Spirit, perpetually renewed, ever proceeding
from the Father and the Son. "The life that I live in the flesh, I
live by the Faith of the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself
for me." This is the true orthodoxy. The vitality of his personal
faith in Christ kept Paul safe from error, faithful in will and
intellect to the _one gospel_.
II. We have still to consider the import of _the judgement pronounced
by Paul upon those who pervert the gospel of Christ_. "Let him be
anathema. Even should it be ourselves, or an angel from heaven, _let
him be anathema_."
These are tremendous words. Commentators have been shocked at the
Apostle's damning his opponents after this fashion, and have sought
to lighten the weight of this awful sentence. It has been sometimes
toned down into an act of excommunication or ecclesiastical
censure. But this explanation will not hold. Paul could not think
of subjecting "an angel" to a penalty like that. He pronounced
excommunication against disorderly members of the Thessalonian
Church; and in 1 Cor. v. 1-8 he gives directions for the carrying
out of a similar decree, attended with severe bodily affliction
supernaturally adjudged, against a sinner whose presence grossly
stained the purity of the Church. But this sentence goes beyond
either of those. It contemplates the exclusion of the offenders from
the Covenant of grace, their loss of final salvation.
Thrice besides has Paul used this ominous word. The cry "Jesus is
anathema," in 1 Cor. xii. 3, reveals with a lurid effect the frenzied
malignity towards Christ of which the spirit of evil is sometimes
capable. In a very different connection the word appears in Rom. ix.
3; where Paul "could wish himself anathema from Christ," if that were
possible, for his brethren's sake; he could find it in his heart
to be cut off for ever from that love of God in Christ of which
he has just spoken in terms of unbounded joy and confidence (Rom.
viii. 31-39), and banished from the heavenly kingdom, if through his
exclusion his Jewish kindred might be saved. Self-sacrifice can go no
further. No heavier loss than this could be conceived for any human
being. Nearest to our passage is the imprecation at the end of 1
Corinthians: "If any man love not the Lord, let him be anathema,"--a
judgement proclaimed against cold and false hearts, knowing His love,
bearing His name, but with no true love to Him.
This Greek word in its Biblical use has grown out of the _chérem_ of
the Old Testament, the _ban_ declared against that which was cut off
from the Divine mercies and exposed to the full sweep of judgement.
Thus in Deut. xiii. 12-18, the city whose people should "go and
serve other gods," is declared _chérem (anathema)_, an "accursed,"
or "devoted thing" (R.V.), on which ensues its destruction by sword
and fire, leaving it to remain "a ruin-heap for ever." Similarly in
Joshua vi., vii., the spoil of Jericho is _anathema_, Achan's theft
is therefore _anathema_, and Israel is made by it _anathema_ until
"the accursed thing is destroyed" from among the people. Such were
the recollections associated with this word in the Mosaic law, which
it would inevitably carry with it to the minds of those against whom
it was now directed. And there is nothing in later Jewish usage to
mitigate its force.
Now the Apostle is not writing like a man in a passion, who flings
out his words as missiles, eager only to wound and confound his
opponents. He repeats the sentence. He quotes it as one that he
had already affirmed in the hearing of his readers. The passage
bears the marks of well-weighed thought and judicial solemnity. In
pronouncing this judgement on "the troublers," Paul acts under the
sense of Apostolic responsibility. We must place the sentence in
the same line as that of Peter against Ananias and Sapphira, and
of Paul himself against Elymas the Cypriot sorcerer, and against
the incestuous Corinthian. In each case there is a supernatural
insight and authorization, "the authority which the Lord gave" and
which is wielded by His inspired Apostle. The exercise of this
judicial function was one of "the signs of the Apostle." This was
the proof of "Christ speaking in him" which Paul was so loth to give
at Corinth,[11] but which at this crisis of his ministry he was
compelled to display. And if he "reckons to be bold against" his
adversaries in Galatia, he knows well the ground on which he stands.
[11] 2 Cor. x. 1-11; xiii. 1-10; 1 Cor. iv. 18-21.
His anathema struck at men who were the worst enemies of Christ. "We
can do nothing against the truth," he says; "but for the truth" he
was ready to do and dare everything,--to "come with a rod," as he
tells the proud Corinthians. There was no authority, however lofty,
that he was not warranted to use on Christ's behalf, no measure,
however severe, from which he would shrink, if it were required
in defence of the truth of the Gospel. "He possesses weapons, not
fleshly, but mighty through God"; and he is prepared to bring them
all into play rather than see the gospel perverted or overthrown.
Paul will hurl his anathema at the prince of the archangels, should
He come "preaching another gospel," tempting his children from their
allegiance to Christ. This bolt was not shot a moment too soon.
Launched against the legalist conspiracy, and followed up by the
arguments of this and the Roman Epistle, it saved the Church from
being overpowered by reactionary Judaism. The Apostle's judgement
has marked the gospel of the cross for all time as God's inviolable
truth, guarded by lightnings.
The sentences of judgement pronounced by the Apostles present a
striking contrast to those that have fulminated from the Chair of
their self-styled successors. In the Canons of the Council of Trent,
for example, we have counted one hundred and thirty-five anathemas.
A large proportion of these are concerned with the rights of the
priesthood; others with complicated and secondary points of doctrine;
some are directed virtually against the teaching of Paul himself.
Here is one specimen: "If any one shall say that justifying faith
is nothing else but a trust in the Divine mercy, remitting sins
for Christ's sake, or that it is this trust alone by which we are
justified: let him be anathema."[12] Again, "If any one shall say
that the Canon of the Mass contains errors, and therefore should be
abrogated: let him be anathema."[13] In the closing session, the
final act of the presiding Cardinal was to pronounce, "Anathema to
all heretics;" to which the assembled prelates shouted in response,
"Anathema, anathema." With this imprecation on their lips the Fathers
of the Church concluded their pious labours. It was the Reformation,
it was "the liberty of the sons of God" that Rome anathematized.
Paul's censure holds good against all the Conciliar Canons and Papal
Bulls that contravene it. But twice has he pronounced this awful
word; once against any that "love not the Lord," a second time
upon those who wilfully pervert His gospel. The Papal anathemas
sound like the maledictions of an angry priesthood, jealous for its
prerogatives; here we have the holy severity of an inspired Apostle,
concerned only for the truth, and for his Master's honour. There
speaks the conscious "lord over God's heritage," wearing the triple
crown, wielding the powers of Interdict and Inquisition, whose
word sets armies in motion and makes kings tremble on their seats.
Here a feeble, solitary man, "his bodily presence weak, his speech
contemptible," hunted from place to place, scourged and stoned,
shut up for years in prison, who could not, except for love's sake,
command the meanest service. How conspicuous in the one case, how
wanting in the other, is the might of the Spirit and the dignity of
the inspired word, the transcendence of moral authority.
[12] Session vi., Can. xii.
[13] Session xxii., Can. vi.
It is _the moral conduct_ of those he judges that determines in
each case the sentence passed by the Apostle. For a man knowing
Jesus Christ, as we presume the members of the Corinthian Church did
know Him, not to love Him, argues a bad heart. Must not we count
_ourselves_ accursed, if with our knowledge of Christ we had no love
for Him? Such a man is already virtually _anathema_. He is severed
as a branch from its vine, ready to be gathered for the burning
(John xv. 6). And these Galatian disturbers were something worse
than mere mistaken enthusiasts for their native Jewish rites. Their
policy was dishonourable (ch. iv. 17). They made the gospel of Christ
subservient to factious designs. They sought to win credit with
their fellow-countrymen and to escape the reproach of the cross by
imposing circumcision on the Gentiles (ch. ii. 4; vi. 12, 13). They
prostituted religion to selfish and party purposes. They sacrificed
truth to popularity, the glory of Christ and the cross to their
own. They were of those whom the Apostle describes as "walking in
craftiness and handling the word of God deceitfully," who "traffic"
in the gospel, peddling with it as with petty wares, cheapening and
adulterating it like dishonest hucksters to make their own market by
it (2 Cor. ii. 17; iv. 2). Did not Paul do well to smite them with
the rod of his mouth? Justly has he marked with the brand of this
fiery anathema the false minister, "who serves not the Lord Christ,
but his own belly."
But does this declaration preclude in such a case the possibility of
repentance? We trow not. It declares the doom which is due to any,
be he man or angel, who should do what these "troublers" are doing.
It is a general sentence, and has for the individuals concerned
the effect of a warning, like the announcement made concerning the
Traitor at the Last Supper. However unlikely repentance might be in
either instance, there is nothing to forbid it. So when Peter said to
Simon Magus, "Thy money perish with thee!" he nevertheless continued,
"Repent, therefore, of this thy wickedness, and pray the Lord, if
perhaps the thought of thy heart shall be forgiven thee" (Acts viii.
20-22). To his worst opponents, on any sign of contrition, Paul, we
may be sure, would have gladly said the same.
_THE PERSONAL HISTORY._
CHAPTER i. 11-ii. 21.
CHAPTER IV.
_PAUL'S GOSPEL REVEALED BY CHRIST._
"For I make known to you, brethren, as touching the gospel which
was preached by me, that it is not after man. For neither did
I receive it from man, nor was I taught it, but _it came to
me_ through revelation of Jesus Christ. For ye have heard of
my manner of life in time past in the Jews' religion, how that
beyond measure I persecuted the church of God, and made havock
of it: and I advanced in the Jews' religion beyond many of mine
own age among my countrymen, being more exceedingly zealous for
the traditions of my fathers."--GAL. i. 11-14.
Here the Epistle begins in its main purport. What has gone before is
so much exordium. The sharp, stern sentences of vv. 6-10 are like the
roll of artillery that ushers in the battle. The mists rise from the
field. We see the combatants arrayed on either side. In due order and
with cool self-command the Apostle proceeds to marshal and deploy
his forces. His truthful narrative corrects the misrepresentations
of his opponents, and repels their attack upon himself. His
powerful dialectic wrests from their hands and turns against them
their weapons of Scriptural proof. He wins the citadel of their
position, by establishing the claim of the men of faith to be the
sons of Abraham. On the ruins of confuted legalism he builds up an
impregnable fortress for Christian liberty, an immortal vindication
of the gospel of the grace of God.
The cause of Gentile freedom at this crisis was bound up with the
person of the Apostle Paul. His Gospel and his Apostleship must stand
or fall together. The former was assailed through the latter. He was
himself just now "the pillar and stay of the truth." If his character
had been successfully attacked and his influence destroyed, nothing,
humanly speaking, could have saved Gentile Christendom at this
decisive moment from falling under the assaults of Judaism. When he
begins his crucial appeal with the words, "Behold, _I Paul_ say unto
you" (ch. v. 2), we feel that the issue depends upon the weight which
his readers may attach to his personal affirmation. He pits his own
truthfulness, his knowledge of Christ, his spiritual discernment and
authority, and the respect due to himself from the Galatians, against
the pretensions of the new teachers. The comparison is not indeed
so open and express as that made in 2 Corinthians; none the less it
tacitly runs through this Epistle. Paul is compelled to put himself
in the forefront of his argument. In the eyes of his children in the
faith, he is bound to vindicate his Apostolic character, defamed by
Jewish malice and untruth.
The first two chapters of this Epistle are therefore Paul's _Apologia
pro vita sua_. With certain chapters in 2 Corinthians, and scattered
passages in other letters, they form the Apostle's autobiography, one
of the most perfect self-portraitures that literature contains. They
reveal to us the man more effectively than any ostensible description
could have done. They furnish an indispensable supplement to the
external and cursory delineations given in the Acts of the Apostles.
While Luke skilfully presents the outward framework of Paul's life
and the events of his public career, it is to the Epistles that we
turn--to none more frequently than this--for the necessary subjective
data, for all that belongs to his inner character, his motives and
principles. This Epistle brings into bold relief the Apostle's moral
physiognomy. Above all, it throws a clear and penetrating light on
the event which determined his career--the greatest event in the
history of Christianity after the Day of Pentecost--Paul's conversion
to faith in the Lord Jesus.
This was at once the turning-point in the Apostle's life, and the
birth-hour of his gospel. If the Galatians were to understand his
teaching, they must understand this occurrence; they must know why he
became a Christian, how he had received the message which he brought
to them. They would, he felt sure, enter more sympathetically into
his doctrine, if they were better acquainted with the way in which
he had arrived at it. They would see how well-justified was the
authority, how needful the severity with which he writes. Accordingly
he begins with a brief relation of the circumstances of his call
to the service of Christ, and his career from the days of his
Judaistic zeal, when he made havoc of the faith, till the well-known
occasion on which he became its champion against Peter himself, the
chief of the Twelve (ch. i. 11-ii. 21.) His object in this recital
appears to be threefold: to refute the misrepresentations of the
Circumcisionists; to vindicate his independent authority as an
Apostle of Christ; and further, to unfold the nature and terms of his
gospel, so as to pave the way for the theological argument which is
to follow, and which forms the body of the Epistle.
I. _Paul's gospel was supernaturally conveyed to him, by a personal
intervention of Jesus Christ._ This assertion is the Apostle's
starting-point. "My gospel is not after man. I received it as Jesus
Christ revealed it to me."
That the initial revelation was made to him by Christ in person, was
a fact of incalculable importance for Paul. This had made him an
Apostle, in the august sense in which he claims the title (ver. 1).
This accounts for the vehemence with which he defends his doctrine,
and for the awful sentence which he has passed upon its impugners.
The Divine authorship of the gospel he preached made it impossible
for him to temporize with its perverters, or to be influenced by
human favour or disfavour in its administration. Had his teaching
been "according to man," he might have consented to a compromise;
he might reasonably have tried to humour and accommodate Jewish
prejudices. But the case is far otherwise. "I am not at liberty
to please men," he says, "for my gospel comes directly from Jesus
Christ" (vv. 10, 11). So he "gives" his readers "to know," as if by
way of formal notification.[14]
[14] Comp. Rom. ix. 22; 1 Cor. xii. 3; xv. 1; 2 Cor. viii. 1.
The gospel of Paul was inviolable, then, because of its superhuman
character. And this character was impressed upon it by its superhuman
origin: "not according to man, for neither _from man_ did I receive
it, nor was I taught it, but by a revelation of Jesus Christ." The
Apostle's knowledge of Christianity did not come through the ordinary
channel of tradition and indoctrination; Jesus Christ had, by a
miraculous interposition, taught him the truth about Himself. He
says, "Neither did _I_," with an emphasis that points tacitly to the
elder Apostles, whom he mentions a few sentences later (ver. 17). To
this comparison his adversaries forced him, making use of it as they
freely did to his disparagement.[15] But it comes in by implication
rather than direct assertion. Only by putting violence upon himself,
and with strong expressions of his unworthiness, can Paul be brought
to set his official claims in competition with those of the Twelve.
Notwithstanding, it is perfectly clear that he puts his ministry on
a level with theirs. He is no Apostle at second-hand, no disciple of
Peter's or dependant of the "pillars" at Jerusalem. "Neither did I,"
he declares, "any more than they, take my instructions from other
lips than those of Jesus our Lord."
[15] See ch. ii. 6-14; 1 Cor. i. 12; iii. 22; iv. 9; ix. 1-5; xv.
8-10.
But what of this "revelation of Jesus Christ," on which Paul lays
so much stress? Does he mean a revelation made _by_ Christ, or
_about_ Christ? Taken by itself, the expression, in Greek as in
English, bears either interpretation. In favour of the second
construction--viz. that Paul speaks of a revelation by which Christ
was made known to him--the language of ver. 16 is adduced: "It
pleased God to reveal His Son in me." Paul's general usage points in
the same direction. With him Christ is the _object_ of manifestation,
preaching, and the like. 2 Cor. xii. 1 is probably an instance to the
contrary: "I will come to visions and revelations of the Lord."[16]
But it should be observed that wherever this genitive is objective
(a revelation revealing Christ), _God_ appears in the context, just
as in ver. 16 below, to Whom the authorship of the revelation is
ascribed. In this instance, _the gospel_ is the object revealed;
and _Jesus Christ_, in contrast with man, is claimed for its Author.
So at the outset (ver. 1) Christ, in His Divine character, was the
_Agent_ by whom Paul, as veritably as the Twelve, had received his
Apostleship. We therefore assent to the ordinary view, reading this
passage in the light of the vision of Jesus thrice related in the
Acts.[17] We understand Paul to say that no _mere man_ imparted to
him the gospel he preached, but _Jesus Christ revealed it_.
[16] This genitive is, however, open to the other construction,
which is unquestionable in 1 Cor. i. 7; 2 Thess. i. 7; also 1
Pet. i. 7, 13. Rev. i. 1 furnishes a prominent example of the
_subjective_ genitive.
[17] Acts ix. 1-19; xxii. 5-16; xxvi. 12-18.
On the Damascus road the Apostle Paul found his mission. The vision
of the glorified Jesus made him a Christian, and an Apostle. The act
was a _revelation_--that is, in New Testament phrase, a supernatural,
an immediately Divine communication of truth. And it was a revelation
not conveyed in the first instance, as were the ordinary prophetic
inspirations, through the Spirit; "Jesus Christ," in His Divine-human
person, made Himself known to His persecutor. Paul had "seen that
Just One and heard a voice from His mouth."
The appearance of Jesus to Saul of Tarsus was in itself a gospel,
an earnest of the good tidings he was to convey to the world. "Why
persecutest thou Me?" that Divine voice said, in tones of reproach,
yet of infinite pity. The sight of Jesus the Lord, meeting Saul's
eyes, revealed His grace and truth to the persecutor's heart. He
was brought in a moment to the obedience of faith; he said, "Lord,
what wilt Thou have me to do?" He "confessed with his mouth the Lord
Jesus"; he "believed in his heart that God had raised Him from the
dead." It was true, after all, that "God had made" the crucified
Nazarene "both Lord and Christ;" for this was He!
The cross, which had been Saul's stumbling-block, deeply affronting
his Jewish pride, from this moment was transformed. The glory of the
exalted Redeemer cast back its light upon the tree of shame. The
curse of the Law visibly resting upon Him, the rejection of men,
marked Him out as God's chosen sacrifice for sin. This explanation at
once presented itself to an instructed and keenly theological mind
like Saul's, so soon as it was evident that Jesus was not accursed,
as he had supposed, but approved by God. So Paul's gospel was given
him at a stroke. Jesus Christ dying for our sins, Jesus Christ living
to save and to rule--behold "the good news"! The Apostle had it on no
less authority than that of the risen Saviour. From Him he received
it to publish wide as the world.
Thus Saul of Tarsus was born again. And with the Christian man, the
Christian thinker, the theologian, was born in him. The Pauline
doctrine has its root in Paul's conversion. It was a single, organic
growth, the seed of which was this "revelation of Jesus Christ."
Its creative impulse was given in the experience of the memorable
hour, when "God who said, Light shall shine out of darkness, in the
face of Jesus Christ shined" into Saul's heart. As the light of
this revelation penetrated his spirit, he recognised, step by step,
the fact of the resurrection, the import of the crucifixion, the
Divinity of Jesus, His human mediatorship, the virtue of faith, the
office of the Holy Spirit, the futility of Jewish ritual and works
of law, and all the essential principles of his theology. Given the
genius of Saul and his religious training, and the Pauline system of
doctrine was, one might almost say, _a necessary deduction_ from the
fact of the appearance to him of the glorified Jesus. If that form
of celestial splendour was Jesus, then He was risen indeed; then He
was the Christ; He was, as He affirmed, the Son of God. If He was
Lord and Christ, and yet died by the Father's will on the cross of
shame, then His death could only be a propitiation, accepted by God,
for the sins of men, whose efficacy had no limit, and whose merit
left no room for legal works of righteousness. If this Jesus was
the Christ, then the assumptions of Saul's Judaism, which had led
him into blasphemous hatred and outrage towards Him, were radically
false; he will purge himself from the "old leaven," that his life may
become "a new lump." From that moment a world of life and thought
began for the future Apostle, the opposite in all respects of that
in which hitherto he had moved. "The old things," he cries, "passed
away; lo, they have become new" (2 Cor. v. 17). Paul's conversion was
as complete as it was sudden.
This intimate relation of doctrine and experience gives to
Paul's teaching a peculiar warmth and freshness, a vividness of
human reality which it everywhere retains, despite its lofty
intellectualism and the scholastic form in which it is largely
cast. It is theology alive, trembling with emotion, speaking words
like flames, forming dogmas hard as rock, that when you touch them
are yet glowing with the heat of those central depths of the human
spirit from which they were cast up. The collision of the two great
Apostles at Antioch shows how the strength of Paul's teaching lay
in his inward realization of the truth. There was _life_ behind his
doctrine. He was, and for the time the Jewish Apostle was not, acting
and speaking out of the reality of spiritual conviction, of truth
personally verified. Of the Apostle Paul above all divines the saying
is true, _Pectus facit theologum_. And this personal knowledge of
Christ, "the master light of all his seeing," began when on the way
to Damascus his eyes beheld Jesus our Lord. His farewell charge to
the Church through Timothy (2 Tim. i. 9-12), while referring to the
general manifestation of Christ to the world, does so in language
coloured by the recollection of the peculiar revelation made at the
beginning to himself: "God," he says, "called us with a holy calling,
according to His purpose and grace, which hath now been manifested by
the appearing[18] of our Saviour Christ Jesus, who abolished death
and brought life and immortality to light[19] through the gospel,
whereunto _I_ was appointed a preacher and apostle. For which cause
I also suffer these things. But I am not ashamed: for I _know_ Him
in whom I have believed." This manifestation of the celestial Christ
shed its brightness along all his path.
[18] Ἐπιφανεία, a supernatural appearance, such as that of the
Second Advent.
[19] Φωτίζω, comp. 2 Cor. iv. 6.
II. His assertion of the Divine origin of his doctrine Paul
sustains by referring to _the previous course of his life_. There
was certainly nothing in that to account for his preaching Christ
crucified. "For you have heard," he continues, "of my manner of life
aforetime, when I followed Judaism."
Here ends the chain of _fors_ reaching from ver. 10 to 13--a
succession of explanations linking Paul's denunciation of the
Christian Judaizers to the fact that he had himself been a violent
anti-Christian Judaist. The seeming contradiction is in reality a
consistent sequence. Only one who had imbibed the spirit of legalism
as Saul of Tarsus had done, could justly appreciate the hostility of
its principles to the new faith, and the sinister motives actuating
the men who pretended to reconcile them. Paul knew Judaism by
heart. He understood the sort of men who opposed him in the Gentile
Churches. And if his anathema appear needlessly severe, we must
remember that no one was so well able to judge of the necessities of
the case as the man who pronounced it.
"You have heard"--from whom? In the first instance, probably,
from Paul himself. But on this matter, we may be pretty sure, his
opponents would have something to say. They did not scruple to assert
that he "still preached circumcision"[20] and played the Jew even now
when it suited him, charging him with insincerity. Or they might say,
"Paul is a renegade. Once the most ardent of zealots for Judaism, he
has passed to the opposite extreme. He is a man you cannot trust.
Apostates are proverbially bitter against their old faith." In these
and in other ways Paul's Pharisaic career was doubtless thrown in his
teeth.
[20] Ch. v. 11; comp. 1 Cor. ix. 20; Acts xvi. 3; xxi. 20-26;
xxiii. 6.
The Apostle sorrowfully confesses "that above measure he persecuted
the Church of God and laid it waste." His friend Luke makes the same
admission in similar language.[21] There is no attempt to conceal
or palliate this painful fact, that the famous Apostle of the
Gentiles had been a persecutor, the deadliest enemy of the Church
in its infant days. He was the very type of a determined, pitiless
oppressor, the forerunner of the Jewish fanatics who afterwards
sought his life, and of the cruel bigots of the Inquisition and the
Star-chamber in later times. His restless energy, his indifference
to the feelings of humanity in this work of destruction, were due to
religious zeal. "I thought," he says, "I ought to do many things
contrary to the name of Jesus of Nazareth." In him, as in so many
others, the saying of Christ was fulfilled: "The time cometh, when
whoso killeth you will think that he is offering a sacrifice to
God." These Nazarenes were heretics, traitors to Israel, enemies of
God. Their leader had been crucified, branded with the extremest
mark of Divine displeasure. His followers must perish. Their success
meant the ruin of Mosaism. God willed their destruction. Such were
Saul's thoughts, until he heard the protesting voice of Jesus as he
approached Damascus to ravage His little flock. No wonder that he
suffered remorse to the end of his days.
[21] Acts vii. 58; viii. 1-3; ix. 1.
Saul's persecution of the Church was the natural result of his
earlier training, of the course to which in his youth he committed
himself. The Galatians had heard also "how proficient he was in
Judaism, beyond many of his kindred and age; that he was surpassed
by none in zeal for their ancestral traditions." His birth (Phil.
iii. 4, 5), education (Acts xxii. 3), temperament, circumstances,
all combined to make him a zealot of the first water, the pink and
pattern of Jewish orthodoxy, the rising hope of the Pharisaic party,
and an instrument admirably fitted to crush the hated and dangerous
sect of the Nazarenes. These facts go to prove, not that Paul is a
traitor to his own people, still less that he is a Pharisee at heart,
preaching Gentile liberty from interested motives; but that it must
have been some extraordinary occurrence, quite out of the common run
of human influences and probabilities, that set him on his present
course. What could have turned this furious Jewish persecutor all at
once into the champion of the cross? What indeed but the revelation
of Christ which he received at the Damascus gate? His previous
career up to that hour had been such as to make it impossible that
he should have received his gospel through human means. The chasm
between his Christian and pre-Christian life had only been bridged by
a supernatural interposition of the mercy of Christ.
Our modern critics, however, think that they know Paul better than
he knew himself. They hold that the problem raised by this passage
is capable of a natural solution. Psychological analysis, we are
told, sets the matter in a different light. Saul of Tarsus had
a tender conscience. Underneath his fevered and ambitious zeal,
there lay in the young persecutor's heart a profound misgiving, a
mortifying sense of his failure, and the failure of his people, to
attain the righteousness of the Law. The seventh chapter of his
Epistle to the Romans is a leaf taken out of the inner history of
this period of the Apostle's life. Through what a stern discipline
the Tarsian youth had passed in these legal years! How his haughty
spirit chafed and tortured itself under the growing consciousness
of its moral impotence! The Law had been truly his παιδαγωγός (ch.
iii. 24), a severe tutor, preparing him unconsciously "for Christ."
In this state of mind such scenes as the martyrdom of Stephen could
not but powerfully affect Saul, in spite of himself. The bearing of
the persecuted Nazarenes, the words of peace and forgiveness that
they uttered under their sufferings, stirred questionings in his
breast not always to be silenced. Self-distrust and remorse were
secretly undermining the rigour of his Judaic faith. They acted like
a "goad" (Acts xxvi. 14), against which he "kicked in vain." He rode
to Damascus--a long and lonely journey--in a state of increasing
disquiet and mental conflict. The heat and exhaustion of the desert
march, acting on a nervous temperament naturally excitable and
overwrought, hastened the crisis. Saul fell from his horse in an
access of fever, or catalepsy. His brain was on fire. The convictions
that haunted him suddenly took form and voice in the apparition of
the glorified Jesus, whom Stephen in his dying moments had addressed.
From that figure seemed to proceed the reproachful cry which the
persecutor's conscience had in vain been striving to make him hear.
A flash of lightning, or, if you like, a sunstroke, is readily
imagined to fire this train of circumstances,--and the explanation
is complete! When, besides, M. Renan is good enough to tell us that
he has himself "experienced an attack of this kind at Byblos," and
"with other principles would certainly have taken the hallucinations
he then had for visions,"[22] what more can we desire? Nay, does not
Paul himself admit, in ver. 16 of this chapter, that his conversion
was essentially a spiritual and subjective event?
[22] _Les Apôtres_, p. 180, note 1.
Such is the diagnosis of Paul's conversion offered us by rationalism;
and it is not wanting in boldness nor in skill. But the corner-stone
on which it rests, the hinge of the whole theory, is imaginary and in
fatal contradiction with the facts of the case. Paul himself _knows
nothing_ of the remorse imputed to him previously to the vision of
Jesus. The historian of the Acts knows nothing of it. In a nature so
upright and conscientious as that of Saul, this misgiving would at
least have induced him to desist from persecution. From first to last
his testimony is, "I did it _ignorantly_, in unbelief." It was this
ignorance, this absence of any sense of wrong in the violence he
used against the followers of Jesus, that, in his view, accounted for
his "obtaining mercy" (1 Tim. i. 13). If impressions of an opposite
kind were previously struggling in his mind, with such force that on
a mere nervous shock they were ready to precipitate themselves in the
shape of an over-mastering hallucination, changing instantly and for
ever the current of his life, how comes it that the Apostle has told
us nothing about them? That he should have _forgotten_ impressions
so poignant and so powerful, is inconceivable. And if he has of set
purpose ignored, nay, virtually denied this all-important fact, what
becomes of his sincerity?
The Apostle was manifestly innocent of any such predisposition
to Christian faith as the above theory imputes to him. True, he
was conscious in those Judaistic days of his failure to attain
righteousness, of the disharmony existing between "the law of his
reason" and that which wrought "in his members." His conviction
of sin supplied the moral precondition necessary in every case to
saving faith in Christ. But this negative condition does not help
us in the least to explain the vision of the glorified Jesus. By no
psychological process whatever could the experience of Rom. vii.
7-24 be made to project itself in such an apparition. With all his
mysticism and emotional susceptibility, Paul's mind was essentially
sane and critical. To call him _epileptic_ is a calumny. No man so
diseased could have gone through the Apostle's labours, or written
these Epistles. His discussion of the subject of supernatural gifts,
in 1 Cor. xii. and xiv., is a model of shrewdness and good sense.
He had experience of trances and ecstatic visions; and he knew,
perhaps as well as M. Renan, how to distinguish them from objective
realities.[23] The manner in which he speaks of this appearance
allows of no reasonable doubt as to the Apostle's full persuasion
that "in sober certainty of waking sense" he had seen Jesus our Lord.
[23] 1 Cor. xiv. 18; 2 Cor. xii. 1-6; Acts xvi. 9; xviii. 8, 9;
xxii. 17, 18.
It was this sensible and outward revelation that led to the inward
revelation of the Redeemer to his soul, of which Paul goes on to
speak in ver. 16. Without the latter the former would have been
purposeless and useless. The objective vision could only have
revealed a "Christ after the flesh," had it not been the means
of opening Saul's closed heart to the influence of the Spirit of
Christ. It was the means to this, and in the given circumstances the
indispensable means.
To a history that "knows no miracles," the Apostle Paul must remain
an enigma. His faith in the crucified Jesus is equally baffling to
naturalism with that of the first disciples, who had laid Him in
the grave. When the Apostle argues that his antecedent relations
to Christianity were such as to preclude his conversion having
come about by natural human means, we are bound to admit both the
sincerity and the conclusiveness of his appeal.
CHAPTER V.
_PAUL'S DIVINE COMMISSION._
"But when it was the good pleasure of God, who separated me,
_even_ from my mother's womb, and called me through His grace,
to reveal His Son in me, that I might preach Him among the
Gentiles; immediately I conferred not with flesh and blood:
neither went I up to Jerusalem to them which were apostles
before me: but I went away into Arabia; and again I returned
unto Damascus."--GAL. i. 15-17.
_It pleased God to reveal His Son in me_: this is after all the
essential matter in Paul's conversion, as in that of every Christian.
The outward manifestation of Jesus Christ served in his case to
bring about this result, and was necessary to qualify him for his
extraordinary vocation. But of itself the supernatural vision had no
redeeming virtue, and gave Saul of Tarsus no message of salvation
for the world. Its glory blinded and prostrated the persecutor; his
heart might notwithstanding have remained rebellious and unchanged.
"I am Jesus," said the heavenly Form,--"Go, and it shall be told thee
what thou shalt do";--that was all! And that was not salvation. "Even
though one rose from the dead," still it is possible not to believe.
And faith is possible in its highest degree, and is exercised to-day
by multitudes, with no celestial light to illumine, no audible voice
from beyond the grave to awaken. The sixteenth verse gives us the
inward counterpart of that exterior revelation in which Paul's
knowledge of Christ had its beginning,--but only its beginning.
The Apostle does not surely mean by "in me," _in my case, through me
(to others)_. This gives a sense true in itself, and expressed by
Paul elsewhere (ver. 24; 1 Tim. i. 16), but unsuitable to the word
"reveal," and out of place at this point of the narrative. In the
next clause--"that I might preach Him among the Gentiles"--we learn
what was to be the issue of this revelation for the world. But in
the first place it was a Divine certainty _within the breast of Paul
himself_. His Gentile Apostleship rested upon the most assured basis
of inward conviction, upon a spiritual apprehension of the Redeemer's
person. He says, laying emphasis on the last two words, "to reveal
His Son _within me_." So Chrysostom: Why did he not say _to me_,
but _in me_? Showing that not by words alone he learned the things
concerning faith; but that he was also filled with the abundance of
the Spirit, the revelation shining through his very soul; and that he
had Christ speaking in himself.
I. _The substance of Paul's gospel was, therefore, given him by the
unveiling of the Redeemer to his heart._
The "revelation" of ver. 16 takes up and completes that of ver. 12.
The dazzling appearance of Christ before his eyes and the summons of
His voice addressed to Saul's bodily ears formed the special mode in
which it pleased God to "call him by His grace." But "whom He called,
He also justified." In this further act of grace salvation is first
personally realised, and the gospel becomes the man's individual
possession. This experience ensued upon the acceptance of the fact
that the crucified Jesus was the Christ. But this was by no means
all. As the revelation penetrated further into the Apostle's soul,
he began to apprehend its deeper significance. He knew already that
the Nazarene had claimed to be the Son of God, and on that ground
had been sentenced to death by the Sanhedrim. His resurrection,
now a demonstrated fact, showed that this awful claim, instead of
being condemned, was acknowledged by God Himself. The celestial
majesty in which He appeared, the sublime authority with which He
spoke, witnessed to His Divinity. To Paul equally with the first
Apostles, He "was declared Son of God in power, by the resurrection
of the dead." But this persuasion was borne in upon him in his after
reflections, and could not be adequately realised in the first shock
of his great discovery. The language of this verse throws no sort
of suspicion on the reality of the vision before Damascus. Quite
the opposite. The inward presupposes the outward. Understanding
follows sight. The subjective illumination, the inward conviction of
Christ's Divinity, in Paul's case as in that of the first disciples,
was brought about by the appearance of the risen, Divine Jesus.
That appearance furnishes in both instances the explanation of the
astounding change that took place in the men. The heart full of
blasphemy against His name has learnt to own Him as "the Son of
God, who loved me and gave Himself for me." Through the bodily eyes
of Saul of Tarsus the revelation of Jesus Christ had entered and
transformed his spirit.
Of this interior revelation _the Holy Spirit_, according to the
Apostle's doctrine, had been the organ. The Lord on first meeting
the gathered Apostles after His resurrection "breathed upon them,
saying, Receive ye the Holy Ghost" (John xx. 22). This influence was
in truth "the power of His resurrection"; it was the inspiring breath
of the new life of humanity issuing from the open grave of Christ.
The baptism of Pentecost, with its "mighty rushing wind," was but
the fuller effusion of the power whose earnest the Church received
in that gentle breathing of peace on the day of the resurrection.
By His Spirit Christ made Himself a dwelling in the hearts of His
disciples, raised at last to a true apprehension of His nature.
All this was recapitulated in the experience of Paul. In his case
the common experience was the more sharply defined because of the
suddenness of his conversion, and the startling effect with which
this new consciousness projected itself upon the background of his
earlier Pharisaic life. Paul had his Resurrection-vision on the road
to Damascus. He received his Pentecostal baptism in the days that
followed.
It is not necessary to fix the precise occasion of the second
revelation, or to connect it specifically with the visit of Ananias
to Saul in Damascus, much less with his later "ecstasy" in the
temple (Acts ix. 10-19; xxii. 12-21). When Ananias, sent by Christ,
brought him the assurance of forgiveness from the injured Church,
and bade him "recover his sight, and be filled with the Holy Ghost,"
this message greatly comforted his heart, and pointed out to him
more clearly the way of salvation along which he was groping. But
it is the office of the Spirit of God to reveal the Son of God; so
Paul teaches everywhere in his Epistles, taught first by his own
experience. Not from Ananias, nor from any man had he received this
knowledge; _God_ revealed His Son in the soul of the Apostle--"sent
forth the Spirit of His Son into his heart" (ch. iv. 6). The language
of 2 Cor. iii. 12-iv. 6 is the best commentary on this verse. A veil
rested on the heart of Saul the Pharisee. He read the Old Covenant
only in the condemning letter. Not yet did he know "the Lord" who
is "the spirit." This veil was done away in Christ. "The glory of
the Lord" that burst upon him in his Damascus journey, rent it once
and for ever from his eyes. God, the Light-giver, had "shined in
his heart, in the face of Jesus Christ." Such was the further scope
of the revelation which effected Paul's conversion. As he writes
afterwards to Ephesus, "the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father
of glory, had given him a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the
knowledge of Christ; eyes of the heart enlightened to know the hope
of His calling, and His exceeding power to usward, according to that
He wrought in Christ when He raised Him from the dead, and set Him at
His own right hand" (Eph. i. 17-21). In these words we hear an echo
of the thoughts that passed through the Apostle's mind when first "it
pleased God in him to reveal His Son."
II. _In the light of this inner revelation Paul received his Gentile
mission._
He speedily perceived that this was the purpose with which the
revelation was made: "that I should preach Him among the Gentiles."
The three accounts of his conversion furnished by the Acts witness to
the same effect. Whether we should suppose that the Lord Jesus gave
Saul this commission directly, at His first appearance, as seems to
be implied in Acts xxvi., or infer from the more detailed narrative
of chapters ix. and xxii., that the announcement was sent by Ananias
and afterwards more urgently repeated in the vision at the Temple, in
either case the fact remains the same; from the beginning Paul knew
that he was appointed to be Christ's witness to the Gentiles. This
destination was included in the Divine call which brought him to
faith in Jesus. His Judaic prejudices were swept away. He was ready
to embrace the universalism of the Gospel. With his fine logical
instinct, sharpened by hatred, he had while yet a Pharisee discerned
more clearly than many Jewish Christians the bearing of the doctrine
of the cross upon the legal system. He saw that the struggle was one
of life and death. The vehemence with which he flung himself into the
contest was due to this perception. But it followed from this, that,
once convinced of the Messiahship of Jesus, Paul's faith at a bound
overleaped all Jewish barriers. "Judaism--or the religion of the
Crucified," was the alternative with which his stern logic pursued
the Nazarenes. Judaism _and_ Christianity--this was a compromise
intolerable to his nature. Before Saul's conversion he had left that
halting-place behind; he apprehended already, in some sense, the
truth up to which the elder Apostles had to be educated, that "in
Christ Jesus there is neither Greek nor Jew." He passed at a step
from the one camp to the other. In this there was consistency. The
enlightened, conscientious persecutor, who had debated with Stephen
and helped to stone him, was sure, if he became a Christian, to
become a Christian of Stephen's school. When he entered the Church,
Paul left the Synagogue. He was ripe for his world-wide commission.
There was no surprise, no unpreparedness in his mind when the
charge was given him, "Go; for I will send thee far hence among the
Gentiles."
In the Apostle's view, his personal salvation and that of the race
were objects united from the first. Not as a privileged Jew, but as
a sinful man, the Divine grace had found him out. The righteousness
of God was revealed to him on terms which brought it within the
reach of every human being. The Son of God whom he now beheld was a
personage vastly greater than his national Messiah, the "Christ after
the flesh" of his Jewish dreams, and His gospel was correspondingly
loftier and larger in its scope. "God was in Christ, reconciling,"
not a nation, but "_a world_ unto Himself." The "grace" conferred
on him was given that he might "preach among the Gentiles Christ's
unsearchable riches, and make all men see the mystery" of the counsel
of redeeming love (Eph. iii. 1-11). It was the world's redemption of
which Paul partook; and it was his business to let the world know it.
He had fathomed the depths of sin and self-despair; he had tasted the
uttermost of pardoning grace. God and the world met in his single
soul, and were reconciled. He felt from the first what he expresses
in his latest Epistles, that "the grace of God which appeared" to
him, was "for the salvation of all men" (Tit. ii. 11). "Faithful is
the saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came
into the world to save sinners, of whom I am chief" (1 Tim. i. 15).
The same revelation that made Paul a Christian, made him the Apostle
of mankind.
III. _For this vocation the Apostle had been destined by God from the
beginning._ "It pleased God to do this," he says, "who had marked me
out from my mother's womb, and called me by His grace."
While "Saul was yet breathing out threatening and slaughter" against
the disciples of Jesus, how different a future was being prepared
for him! How little can we forecast the issue of our own plans,
or of those we form for others. His Hebrew birth, his rabbinical
proficiency, the thoroughness with which he had mastered the tenets
of Legalism, had fitted him like no other to be the bearer of the
Gospel to the Gentiles. This Epistle proves the fact. Only a graduate
of the best Jewish schools could have written it. Paul's master,
Gamaliel, if he had read the letter, must perforce have been proud
of his scholar; he would have feared more than ever that those who
opposed the Nazarene might "haply be found fighting against God." The
Apostle foils the Judaists with their own weapons. He knows every
inch of the ground on which the battle is waged. At the same time, he
was a born Hellenist and a citizen of the Empire, native "of no mean
city." Tarsus, his birthplace, was the capital of an important Roman
province, and a centre of Greek culture and refinement. In spite of
the Hebraic conservatism of Saul's family, the genial atmosphere
of such a town could not but affect the early development of so
sensitive a nature. He had sufficient tincture of Greek letters and
conversance with Roman law to make him a true cosmopolitan, qualified
to be "all things to all men." He presents an admirable example of
that versatility and suppleness of genius which have distinguished
for so many ages the sons of Jacob, and enable them to find a home
and a market for their talents in every quarter of the world. Paul
was "a chosen vessel, to bear the name of Jesus before Gentiles and
kings, and the sons of Israel."
But his mission was concealed till the appointed hour. Thinking
of his personal election, he reminds himself of the words spoken
to Jeremiah touching his prophetic call. "Before I formed thee in
the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest out of the womb I
sanctified thee. I appointed thee a prophet unto the nations" (Jer.
i. 5). Or like the Servant of the Lord in Isaiah he might say, "The
Lord hath called me from the womb; from the bowels of my mother hath
He made mention of my name. And He hath made my mouth like a sharp
sword, in the shadow of His hand hath He hid me; and He hath made me
a polished shaft, in His quiver hath He kept me close" (Isa. xlix. 1,
2). This belief in a fore-ordaining Providence, preparing in secret
its chosen instruments, so deeply rooted in the Old Testament faith,
was not wanting to Paul. His career is a signal illustration of its
truth. He applies it, in his doctrine of Election, to the history of
every child of grace. "Whom He foreknew, He did predestinate. Whom
He did predestinate, He called." Once more we see how the Apostle's
theology was moulded by his experience.
The manner in which Saul of Tarsus had been prepared all his life
long for the service of Christ, magnified to his eyes the sovereign
grace of God. "He called me _through His grace_." The call came at
precisely the fit time; it came at a time and in a manner calculated
to display the Divine compassion in the highest possible degree. This
lesson Paul could never forget. To the last he dwells upon it with
deep emotion. "In me," he writes to Timothy, "Jesus Christ first
showed forth all His longsuffering. I was a blasphemer, a persecutor,
insolent and injurious; but I obtained mercy" (1 Tim. i. 13-16).
He was so dealt with from the beginning, he had been called to the
knowledge of Christ under such circumstances that he felt he had
a right to say, above other men, "By the grace of God I am what I
am." The predestination under which his life was conducted "from his
mother's womb," had for its chief purpose, to exhibit God's mercy
to mankind, "that in the ages to come He might show the exceeding
riches of His grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus" (Eph. ii.
7). To this purpose, so soon as he discerned it, he humbly yielded
himself. The Son of God, whose followers he had hunted to death, whom
in his madness he would have crucified afresh, had appeared to him
to save and to forgive. The _grace_ of it, the infinite kindness and
compassion such an act revealed in the Divine nature, excited new
wonder in the Apostle's soul till his latest hour. Henceforth he was
the bondman of grace, the celebrant of grace. His life was one act of
thanksgiving "to the praise of the glory of His grace!"
IV. From Jesus Christ in person Paul had received his knowledge of
the Gospel, without human intervention. In the revelation of Christ
to his soul he possessed the substance of the truth he was afterwards
to teach; and with the revelation there came the commission to
proclaim it to all men. His gospel-message was in its essence
complete; the Apostleship was already his. Such are the assertions
the Apostle makes in reply to his gainsayers. And he goes on to
show that _the course he took after his conversion sustains these
lofty claims_: "When God had been pleased to reveal His Son in me,
immediately (right from the first) I took no counsel with flesh and
blood. I avoided repairing to Jerusalem, to the elder Apostles; I
went away into Arabia, and back again to Damascus. It was three years
before I set foot in Jerusalem."
If that were so, how could Paul have received his doctrine or his
commission from the Church of Jerusalem, as his traducers alleged?
He acted from the outset under the sense of a unique Divine call,
that allowed of no human validation or supplement. Had the case been
otherwise, had Paul come to his knowledge of Christ by ordinary
channels, his first impulse would have been to go up to the mother
city to report himself there, and to gain further instruction. Above
all, if he intended to be a minister of Christ, it would have been
proper to secure the approval of the Twelve, and to be accredited
from Jerusalem. This was the course which "flesh and blood" dictated,
which Saul's new friends at Damascus probably urged upon him. It
was insinuated that he had actually proceeded in this way, and put
himself under the direction of Peter and the Judean Church. But he
says, "I did nothing of the sort. I kept clear of Jerusalem for
three years; and then I only went there to make private acquaintance
with Peter, and stayed in the city but a fortnight." Although Paul
did not for many years make public claim to rank with the Twelve,
from the commencement he acted in conscious independence of them.
He calls them "Apostles _before me_," by this phrase assuming the
matter in dispute. He tacitly asserts his equality in official status
with the Apostles of Jesus, assigning to the others precedence only
in point of time. And he speaks of this equality in terms implying
that it was already present to his mind at this former period. Under
this conviction he held aloof from human guidance and approbation.
Instead of "going up to Jerusalem," the centre of publicity, the
head-quarters of the rising Church, Paul "went off into Arabia."
There were, no doubt, other reasons for this step. Why did he choose
_Arabia_ for his sojourn? and what, pray, was he doing there? The
Apostle leaves us to our own conjectures. _Solitude_, we imagine,
was his principal object. His Arabian retreat reminds us of the
Arabian exile of Moses, of the wilderness discipline of John the
Baptist, and the "forty days" of Jesus in the wilderness. In each
of these instances, the desert retirement followed upon a great
inward crisis, and was preparatory to the entrance of the Lord's
servant on his mission to the world. Elijah, at a later period of his
course, sought the wilderness under motives not dissimilar. After
such a convulsion as Paul had passed through, with a whole world of
new ideas and emotions pouring in upon him, he felt that he must be
alone; he must get away from the voices of men. There are such times
in the history of every earnest soul. In the silence of the Arabian
desert, wandering amid the grandest scenes of ancient revelation,
and communing in stillness with God and with his own heart, the
young Apostle will think out the questions that press upon him; he
will be able to take a calmer survey of the new world into which he
has been ushered, and will learn to see clearly and walk steadily
in the heavenly light that at first bewildered him. So "the Spirit
immediately driveth him out into the wilderness." In Arabia one
confers, not with flesh and blood, but with the mountains and with
God. From Arabia Saul returned in possession of himself, and of his
gospel.
The Acts of the Apostles omits this Arabian episode (Acts ix. 19-25).
But for what Paul tells us here, we should have gathered that he
began at once after his baptism to preach Christ in Damascus, his
preaching after no long time[24] exciting Jewish enmity to such
a pitch that his life was imperilled, and the Christian brethren
compelled him to seek safety by flight to Jerusalem. The reader of
Luke is certainly surprised to find a period of three years,[25]
with a prolonged residence in Arabia, interpolated between Paul's
conversion and his reception in Jerusalem. Luke's silence, we judge,
is _intentional_. The Arabian retreat formed no part of the Apostle's
public life, and had no place in the narrative of the Acts. Paul only
mentions it here in the briefest terms, and because the reference was
necessary to put his relations to the first Apostles in their proper
light. For the time the converted Saul had dropped out of sight; and
the historian of the Acts respects his privacy.
[24]ἡμέραι ἱκαναί, _a considerable time_. The expression is
indefinite.
[25] Ver. 18: that is, parts of "three years," according to
ancient reckoning--say from 36 to 38 A.D., possibly less than two
in actual duration.
The place of the Arabian journey seems to us to lie between vv.
21 and 22 of Acts ix. That passage gives a twofold description of
Paul's preaching in Damascus, in its earlier and later stages, with a
double note of time (vv. 19 and 23). Saul's first testimony, taking
place "straightway," was, one would presume, a mere declaration of
faith in Jesus: "In the synagogues he proclaimed Jesus, (saying)
that He is the Son of God" (R.V.), language in striking harmony
with that of the Apostle in the text (vv. 12, 16). Naturally this
recantation caused extreme astonishment in Damascus, where Saul's
reputation was well-known both to Jews and Christians, and his
arrival was expected in the character of Jewish inquisitor-in-chief.
Ver. 22 presents a different situation. Paul is now preaching in
his established and characteristic style; as we read it, we might
fancy we hear him debating in the synagogues of Pisidian Antioch or
Corinth or Thessalonica: "He was confounding the Jews, _proving_ that
this is the Christ." Neither Saul himself nor his Jewish hearers in
the first days after his conversion would be in the mood for the
sustained argumentation and Scriptural dialectic thus described.
The explanation of the change lies behind the opening words of the
verse: "But Saul increased in strength"--a growth due not only to
the prolonged opposition he had to encounter, but still more, as
we conjecture from this hint of the Apostle, to the period of rest
and reflection which he enjoyed in his Arabian seclusion. The two
marks of time given us in vv. 19 and 23 of Luke's narrative, may be
fairly distinguished from each other--"certain days," and "sufficient
days" (or "a considerable time")--as denoting a briefer and a longer
season respectively: the former so short that the excitement caused
by Saul's declaration of his new faith had not yet subsided when he
withdrew from the city into the desert--in which case Luke's note
of time does not really conflict with Paul's "immediately"; the
latter affording a lapse of time sufficient for Saul to develope
his argument for the Messiahship of Jesus, and to provoke the Jews,
worsted in logic, to resort to other weapons. From Luke's point of
view the sojourn in Arabia, however extended, was simply an incident,
of no public importance, in Paul's early ministry in Damascus.
The disappearance of Saul during this interval helps however, as we
think, to explain a subsequent statement in Luke's narrative that is
certainly perplexing (Acts ix. 26, 27). When Saul, after his escape
from Damascus, "was come to Jerusalem," and "essayed to join himself
to the disciples," they, we are told, "were all afraid of him, not
believing that he was a disciple!" For while the Church at Jerusalem
had doubtless heard at the time of Saul's marvellous conversion three
years before, his long retirement and avoidance of Jerusalem threw an
air of mystery and suspicion about his proceedings, and revived the
fears of the Judean brethren; and his reappearance created a panic.
In consequence of his sudden departure from Damascus, it is likely
that no public report had as yet reached Judæa of Saul's return to
that city and his renewed ministry there. Barnabas now came forward
to act as sponsor for the suspected convert. What induced him to do
this--whether it was that his largeness of heart enabled him to read
Saul's character better than others, or whether he had some earlier
private acquaintance with the Tarsian--we cannot tell. The account
that Barnabas was able to give of his friend's conversion and of his
bold confession in Damascus, won for Paul the place in the confidence
of Peter and the leaders of the Church at Jerusalem which he never
afterwards lost.
The two narratives--the history of Luke and the letter of
Paul--relate the same series of events, but from almost opposite
standpoints. Luke dwells upon _Paul's connection with the Church at
Jerusalem and its Apostles_. Paul is maintaining _his independence of
them_. There is no contradiction; but there is just such discrepancy
as will arise where two honest and competent witnesses are relating
identical facts in a different connection.
CHAPTER VI.
_PAUL AND THE PRIMITIVE CHURCH._
"Then after three years I went up to Jerusalem to visit Cephas,
and tarried with him fifteen days. But other of the apostles
saw I none, but only James the Lord's brother. Now touching
the things which I write unto you, behold, before God, I lie
not. Then I came into the regions of Syria and Cilicia And I
was still unknown by face unto the churches of Judæa which were
in Christ: but they only heard say, He that once persecuted us
now preacheth the faith of which he once made havock; and they
glorified God in me."--GAL. i. 18-24.
For the first two years of his Christian life, Paul held no
intercourse whatever with the Church at Jerusalem and its chiefs. His
relation with them was commenced by the visit he paid to Peter in the
third year after his conversion. And that relation was more precisely
determined and made public when, after successfully prosecuting for
fourteen years his mission to the heathen, the Apostle again went up
to Jerusalem to defend the liberty of the Gentile Church (ch. ii.
1-10).
A clear understanding of this course of events was essential to the
vindication of Paul's position in the eyes of the Galatians. The
"troublers" told them that Paul's doctrine was not that of the mother
Church; that his knowledge of the gospel and authority to preach it
came from the elder Apostles, with whom since his attack upon Peter
at Antioch he was at open variance. They themselves had come down
from Judæa on purpose to set his pretensions in their true light,
and to teach the Gentiles the way of the Lord more perfectly.
Modern rationalism has espoused the cause of these "deceitful
workers" (2 Cor. xi. 13-15). It endeavours to rehabilitate the
Judaistic party. The "critical" school maintain that the opposition
of the Circumcisionists to the Apostle Paul was perfectly legitimate.
They hold that the "pseud-apostles" of Corinth, the "certain from
James," the "troublers" and "false brethren privily brought in" of
this Epistle, did in truth represent, as they claimed to do, the
principles of the Jewish Christian Church; and that there was a
radical divergence between the Pauline and Petrine gospels, of which
the two Apostles were fully aware from the time of their encounter
at Antioch. However Paul may have wished to disguise the fact to
himself, the teaching of the Twelve was identical, we are told,
with that "other gospel" on which he pronounces his anathema; the
original Church of Jesus never emancipated itself from the trammels
of legalism; the Apostle Paul, and not his Master, was in reality
the author of evangelical doctrine, the founder of the catholic
Church. The conflict between Peter and Paul at Antioch, related in
this Epistle, supplies, in the view of Baur and his followers, the
key to the history of the Early Church. The Ebionite assumption of a
personal rivalry between the two Apostles and an intrinsic opposition
in their doctrine, hitherto regarded as the invention of a desperate
and decaying heretical sect, these ingenious critics have adopted for
the basis of their "scientific" reconstruction of the New Testament.
Paul's Judaizing hinderers and troublers are to be canonized; and
the pseudo-Clementine writings, forsooth, must take the place of the
discredited Acts of the Apostles. Verily "the whirligig of time hath
its revenges." To empanel Paul on his accusers' side, and to make
this Epistle above all convict him of heterodoxy, is an attempt which
dazzles by its very daring.
Let us endeavour to form a clear conception of the facts touching
Paul's connection with the first Apostles and his attitude and
feeling towards the Jewish Church, as they are in evidence in the
first two chapters of this Epistle.
I. On the one hand, it is clear that the Gentile Apostle's relations
to Peter and the Twelve were those of _personal independence and
official equality_.
This is the aspect of the case on which Paul lays stress. His
sceptical critics argue that under his assertion of independence
there is concealed an opposition of principle, a "radical
divergence." The sense of independence is unmistakable. It is on
that side that the Apostle seeks to guard himself. With this aim
he styles himself at the outset "an Apostle not from men, nor by
man"--neither man-made nor man-sent. Such apostles there were; and
in this character, we imagine, the Galatian Judaistic teachers, like
those of Corinth,[26] professed to appear, as the emissaries of the
Church in Jerusalem and the authorised exponents of the teaching of
the "pillars" there. Paul is an Apostle at first-hand, taking his
commission directly from Jesus Christ. In that quality he pronounces
his benediction and his anathema. To support this assumption he
has shown how impossible it was in point of time and circumstances
that he should have been beholden for his gospel to the Jerusalem
Church and the elder Apostles. So far as regarded the manner of his
conversion and the events of the first decisive years in which his
Christian principles and vocation took their shape, his position had
been altogether detached and singular; the Jewish Apostles could in
no way claim him for their son in the gospel.
[26] 2 Cor. xi. 13; iii. 1-3. See the remarks on the word
_Apostle_ in Chapter I. p. 12.
But at last, "after three years," Saul "did go up to Jerusalem." What
was it for? To report himself to the authorities of the Church and
place himself under their direction? To seek Peter's instruction,
in order to obtain a more assured knowledge of the gospel he had
embraced? Nothing of the kind. Not even "_to question_ Cephas,"
as some render ἱστορῆσαι, following an older classical usage--"to
gain information" from him; but "I went up _to make acquaintance
with_ Cephas." Saul went to Jerusalem carrying in his heart the
consciousness of his high vocation, seeking, as an equal with an
equal, to make personal acquaintance with the leader of the Twelve.
_Cephas_ (as he was called at Jerusalem) must have been at this time
to Paul a profoundly interesting personality. He was the one man
above all others whom the Apostle felt he must get to know, with whom
it was necessary for him to have a thorough understanding.
How momentous was this meeting! How much we could wish to know what
passed between these two in the conversations of the fortnight
they spent together. One can imagine the delight with which Peter
would relate to his listener the scenes of the life of Jesus; how
the two men would weep together at the recital of the Passion, the
betrayal, trial and denial, the agony of the Garden, the horror of
the cross; with what mingled awe and triumph he would describe the
events of the Resurrection and the Forty Days, the Ascension, and the
baptism of fire. In Paul's account of the appearances of the risen
Christ (1 Cor. xv. 4-8), written many years afterwards, there are
statements most naturally explained as a recollection of what he had
heard privately from Peter, and possibly also from James, at this
conference. For it is in his gospel message and doctrine, and his
Apostolic commission, not in regard to the details of the biography
of Jesus, that Paul claims to be independent of tradition. And with
what deep emotion would Peter receive in turn from Paul's lips the
account of his meeting with Jesus, of the three dark days that
followed, of the message sent through Ananias, and the revelations
made and purposes formed during the Arabian exile. Between two such
men, met at such a time, there would surely be an entire frankness
of communication and a brotherly exchange of convictions and of
plans. In that case Paul could not fail to inform the elder Apostle
of the extent of the commission he had received from their common
Master; although he does not appear to have made any public and
formal assertion of his Apostolic dignity for a considerable time
afterwards. The supposition of a private cognizance on Peter's part
of Paul's true status makes the open recognition which took place
fourteen years later easy to understand (ch. ii. 6-10).
"But other of the Apostles," Paul goes on to say, "saw I none, but
only James the brother of the Lord." James, _no Apostle_ surely;
neither in the higher sense, for he cannot be reasonably identified
with "James the son of Alphæus;" nor in the lower, for he was, as
far as we can learn, stationary at Jerusalem. But he stood so near
the Apostles, and was in every way so important a person, that if
Paul had omitted the name of James in this connection, he would have
seemed to pass over a material fact. The reference to James in 1
Cor. xv. 7--a hint deeply interesting in itself, and lending so much
dignity to the position of James--suggests that Paul had been at this
time in confidential intercourse with James as well as Peter, each
relating to the other how he had "seen the Lord."
So cardinal are the facts just stated (vv. 15-19), as bearing on
Paul's apostleship, and so contrary to the representations made by
the Judaizers, that he pauses to call God to witness his veracity:
"Now in what I am writing to you, lo, before God, I lie not." The
Apostle never makes this appeal lightly; but only in support of some
averment in which his personal honour and his strongest feelings are
involved.[27] It was alleged, with some show of proof, that Paul was
an underling of the authorities of the Church at Jerusalem, and that
all he knew of the gospel had been learned from the Twelve. From ver.
11 onwards he has been making a circumstantial contradiction of these
assertions. He protests that up to the time when he commenced his
Gentile mission, he had been under no man's tutelage or tuition in
respect to his knowledge of the gospel. He can say no more to prove
his case. Either his opposers or himself are uttering falsehood. The
Galatians know, or ought to know, how incapable he is of such deceit.
Solemnly therefore he avouches, closing the matter so far, as if
drawing himself up to his utmost height: "Behold, before God, I do
not lie!"
[27] See Rom. ix. 1; 2 Cor. i. 17, 18, 23; 1 Thess. ii. 5.
But now we are confronted with the narrative of the Acts (chap.
ix. 26-30), which renders a very different account of this passage
in the Apostle's life. (To vv. 26, 27 of Luke's narrative we have
already alluded in the concluding paragraphs of Chapter V). We are
told there that Barnabas introduced Saul "to the Apostles"; here,
that he saw none of them but Cephas, and only James besides. The
_number_ of the Apostolate present in Jerusalem at the time is a
particular that does not engage Luke's mind; while it is of the
essence of Paul's affirmation. What the Acts relates is that Saul,
through Barnabas' intervention, was now received by the Apostolic
fellowship as a Christian brother, and as one who "had seen the
Lord." The object which Saul had in coming to Jerusalem, and the fact
that just then Cephas was the only one of the Twelve to be found
in the city, along with James--these are matters which only come
into view from the private and personal standpoint to which Paul
admits us. For the rest, there is certainly no contradiction when
we read in the one report that Paul "went up to make acquaintance
with Cephas," and in the other, that he "was with them going in and
out at Jerusalem, preaching boldly in the name of the Lord;" that
"he spake and disputed against the Hellenists," moving their anger
so violently that his life was again in danger, and he had to be
carried down to Cæsarea and shipped off to Tarsus. Saul was not the
man to hide his head in Jerusalem. We can understand how greatly his
spirit was stirred by his arrival there, and by the recollection of
his last passage through the city gates. In these very synagogues of
the Hellenists he had himself confronted Stephen; outside those walls
he had assisted to stone the martyr. Paul's address delivered many
years later to the Jewish mob that attempted his life in Jerusalem,
shows how deeply these remembrances troubled his soul (Acts xxii.
17-22). And they would not suffer him now to be silent. He hoped
that his testimony to Christ, delivered in the spot where he had
been so notorious as a persecutor, would produce a softening effect
on his old companions. It was sure to affect them powerfully, one
way or the other. As the event proved, it did not take many words
from Saul's lips to awaken against him the same fury that hurried
Stephen to his death. A fortnight was time quite sufficient, under
the circumstances, to make Jerusalem, as we say, too hot to hold
Saul. Nor can we wonder, knowing his love for his kindred, that there
needed a special command from heaven (Acts xxii. 21), joined to the
friendly compulsion of the Church, to induce him to yield ground
and quit the city. But he had accomplished something; he had "made
acquaintance with Cephas."
This brief visit to the Holy City was a second crisis in Paul's
career. He was now thrust forth upon his mission to the heathen. It
was evident that he was not to look for success among his Jewish
brethren. He lost no opportunity of appealing to them; but it
was commonly with the same result as at Damascus and Jerusalem.
Throughout life he carried with him this "great sorrow and unceasing
pain of heart," that to his "kinsmen according to the flesh," for
whose salvation he could consent to forfeit his own, his gospel
was hid. In their eyes he was a traitor to Israel, and must count
upon their enmity. Everything conspired to point in one direction:
"Depart," the Divine voice had said, "for I will send thee far hence
unto the Gentiles." And Paul obeyed. "I went," he relates here, "into
the regions of Syria and Cilicia" (ver. 21).
To Tarsus, the Cilician capital, Saul voyaged from Judæa. So we
learn from Acts ix. 30. His native place had the first claim on the
Apostle after Jerusalem, and afforded the best starting-point for
his independent mission. Syria, however, precedes Cilicia in the
text; it was the leading province of these two, in which Paul was
occupied during the fourteen years ensuing, and became the seat of
distinguished Churches. In Antioch, the Syrian capital, Christianity
was already planted (Acts xi. 19--21). The close connection of
the Churches of these provinces, and their predominantly Gentile
character, are both evident from the letter addressed to them
subsequently by the Council of Jerusalem (Acts xv. 23, 24). Acts xv.
41 shows that a number of Christian societies owning Paul's authority
were found at a later time in this region. And there was a highroad
direct from Syro-Cilicia to Galatia, which Paul traversed in his
second visit to the latter country (Acts xviii. 22, 23); so that the
Galatians would doubtless be aware of the existence of these older
Gentile Churches, and of their relation to Paul. He has no need to
dwell on this first chapter of his missionary history. After but a
fortnight's visit to Jerusalem, Paul went into these Gentile regions,
and there for twice seven years--with what success was known to
all--"preached the faith of which once he made havoc."
This period was divided into two parts. For five or six years the
Apostle laboured alone; afterwards in conjunction with Barnabas,
who invited his help at Antioch (Acts xi. 25, 26). Barnabas was
Paul's senior, and had for some time held the leading position in
the Church of Antioch; and Paul was personally indebted to this
generous man (p. 82). He accepted the position of helper to Barnabas
without any compromise of his higher authority, as yet held in
reserve. He accompanied Barnabas to Jerusalem in 44 (or 45) A.D.,
with the contribution made by the Syrian Church for the relief of the
famine-stricken Judean brethren--a visit which Paul seems here to
forget.[28] But the Church at Jerusalem was at that time undergoing a
severe persecution; its leaders were either in prison or in flight.
The two delegates can have done little more than convey the moneys
entrusted to them, and that with the utmost secrecy. Possibly Paul on
this occasion never set foot inside the city. In any case, the event
had no bearing on the Apostle's present contention.
[28] Acts xi. 27-30. It is significant that this ministration was
sent "to the Elders."
Between this journey and the really important visit to Jerusalem
introduced in chap. ii. 1, Barnabas and Paul undertook, at the
prompting of the Holy Spirit expressed through the Church of
Antioch (Acts xiii. 1-4), the missionary expedition described in
Acts xiii., xiv. Under the trials of this journey the ascendancy
of the younger evangelist became patent to all. Paul was marked
out in the eyes of the Gentiles as their born leader, the Apostle
of heathen Christianity. He appears to have taken the chief part
in the discussion with the Judaists respecting circumcision, which
immediately ensued at Antioch; and was put at the head of the
deputation sent up to Jerusalem concerning this question. This was a
turning-point in the Apostle's history. It brought about the public
recognition of his leadership in the Church. The seal of man was now
to be set upon the secret election of God.
During this long period, the Apostle tells us, he "remained unknown
by face to the Churches of Judæa." Absent for so many years
from the metropolis, after a fortnight's flying visit, spent in
private intercourse with Peter and James, and in controversy in the
Hellenistic synagogues where few Christians of the city would be
likely to follow him,[29] Paul was a stranger to the bulk of the
Judean disciples. But they watched his course, notwithstanding,
with lively interest and with devout thanksgiving to God (vv. 22,
23). Throughout this first period of his ministry the Apostle acted
in complete independence of the Jewish Church, making no report to
its chiefs, nor seeking any direction from them. Accordingly, when
afterwards he did go up to Jerusalem and laid before the authorities
there his gospel to the heathen, they had nothing to add to it; they
did not take upon themselves to give him any advice or injunction,
beyond the wish that he and Barnabas should "remember the poor," as
he was already forward to do (ch. ii. 1-10). Indeed the three famous
Pillars of the Jewish Church at this time openly acknowledged Paul's
equality with Peter in the Apostleship, and resigned to his direction
the Gentile province. Finally at Antioch, the head-quarters of
Gentile Christianity, when Peter compromised the truth of the gospel
by yielding to Judaistic pressure, Paul had not hesitated publicly
to reprove him (ch. ii. 11-21). He had been compelled in this way to
carry the vindication of his gospel to the furthest lengths; and he
had done this successfully. It is only when we reach the end of the
second chapter that we discover how much the Apostle meant when he
said, "My gospel is not according to man."
[29] For the ministry alluded to in Acts xxvi. 20 there were
other, later opportunities, especially in the journey described
in Acts xv. 3; see also Acts xxi. 15, 16.
If there was any man to whom as a Christian teacher he was bound to
defer, any one who might be regarded as his official superior, it was
the Apostle Peter. Yet against this very Cephas he had dared openly
to measure himself. Had he been a disciple of the Jewish Apostle, a
servant of the Jerusalem Church, how would this have been possible?
Had he not possessed an authority derived immediately from Christ,
how could he have stood out alone, against the prerogative of Peter,
against the personal friendship and local influence of Barnabas,
against the example of all his Jewish brethren? Nay, he was prepared
to rebuke all the Apostles, and anathematize all the angels, rather
than see Christ's gospel set at nought. For it was in his view "the
gospel of the glory of the blessed God, _committed to my trust_!" (1
Tim. i. 11).
II. But while Paul stoutly maintains his independence, he does this
in such a way as to show that there was no hostility or personal
rivalry between himself and the first Apostles. His relations to the
Jewish Church were all the while those of _friendly acquaintance and
brotherly recognition_.
That Nazarene sect which he had of old time persecuted, was "the
Church of God" (ver. 13). To the end of his life this thought gave
a poignancy to the Apostle's recollection of his early days. To
"the Churches of Judæa"[30] he attaches the epithet _in Christ_,
a phrase of peculiar depth of meaning with Paul, which he could
never have conferred as matter of formal courtesy, nor by way of
mere distinction between the Church and the Synagogue. From Paul's
lips this title is a guarantee of orthodoxy. It satisfies us that
the "other gospel" of the Circumcisionists was very far from being
the gospel of the Jewish Christian Church at large. Paul is careful
to record the sympathy which the Judean brethren cherished for his
missionary work in its earliest stages, although their knowledge of
him was comparatively distant: "Only they continued to hear that
our old persecutor is preaching the faith which once he sought
to destroy. And in me they glorified God." Nor does he drop the
smallest hint to show that the disposition of the Churches in the
mother country toward himself, or his judgement respecting them, had
undergone any change up to the time of his writing this Epistle.
[30] Ver. 22. It is arbitrary in Meyer to exclude from this
category the Church of Jerusalem.
He speaks of the elder Apostles in terms of unfeigned respect. In
his reference in ch. ii. 11-21 to the error of Peter, there is great
plainness of speech, but no bitterness. When the Apostle says that
he "went up to Jerusalem to see Peter," and describes James as "the
Lord's brother," and when he refers to both of them, along with
John, as "those accounted to be pillars," can he mean anything but
honour to these honoured men? To read into these expressions a covert
jealousy and to suppose them written by way of disparagement, seems
to us a strangely jaundiced and small-minded sort of criticism. The
Apostle testifies that Peter held a Divine trust in the Gospel,
and that God had "wrought for Peter" to this effect, as for
himself. By claiming the testimony of the Pillars at Jerusalem to
his vocation, he shows his profound respect for theirs. When the
unfortunate difference arose between Peter and himself at Antioch,
Paul is careful to show that the Jewish Apostle on that occasion was
influenced by the circumstances of the moment, and nevertheless
remained true in his real convictions to the common gospel.
In view of these facts, it is impossible to believe, as the
_Tendency_ critics would have us do, that Paul when he wrote this
letter was at feud with the Jewish Church. In that case, while he
taxes Peter with "dissimulation" (ch. ii. 11-13), he is himself
the real dissembler, and has carried his dissimulation to amazing
lengths. If he is in this Epistle contending against the Primitive
Church and its leaders, he has concealed his sentiments toward
them with an art so crafty as to overreach itself. He has taught
his readers to reverence those whom on this hypothesis he was most
concerned to discredit. The terms under which he refers to Cephas
and the Judean Churches would be just so many testimonies against
himself, if their doctrine was the "other gospel" of the Galatian
troublers, and if Paul and the Twelve were rivals for the suffrages
of the Gentile Christians.
The one word which wears a colour of detraction is the parenthesis
in ver. 6 of ch. ii.: "whatever aforetime[31] they (those of repute)
were, makes no difference to me. God accepts no man's person." But
this is no more than Paul has already said in ch. i. 16, 17. At the
first, after receiving his gospel from the Lord in person, he felt it
to be out of place for him to "confer with flesh and blood." So now,
even in the presence of the first Apostles, the earthly companions
of his Master, he cannot abate his pretensions, nor forget that his
ministry stands on a level as exalted as theirs. This language is
in precise accord with that of 1 Cor. xv. 10. The suggestion that
the repeated οἱ δοκοῦντες conveys a sneer against the leaders at
Jerusalem, as "seeming" to be more than they were, is an insult to
Paul that recoils upon the critics who utter it. The phrase denotes
"those of repute," "reputed to be pillars," the acknowledged heads of
the mother Church. Their position was recognised on all hands; Paul
assumes it, and argues upon it. He desires to magnify, not to minify,
the importance of these illustrious men. They were pillars of his own
cause. It is a maladroit interpretation that would have Paul cry down
James and the Twelve. By so much as he impaired their worth, he must
assuredly have impaired his own. If their status was mere _seeming_,
of what value was their endorsement of his? But for a preconceived
opinion, no one, we may safely affirm, reading this Epistle would
have gathered that Peter's "gospel of the circumcision" was the
"other gospel" of Galatia, or that the "certain from James" of ch.
ii. 12 represented the views and the policy of the first Apostles.
The assumption that Peter's dissimulation at Antioch expressed the
settled doctrine of the Jewish Apostolic Church, is unhistorical.
The Judaizers _abused_ the authority of Peter and James when they
pleaded it in favour of their agitation. So we are told expressly in
Acts xv.; and a candid interpretation of this letter bears out the
statements of Luke. In James and Peter, Paul and John, there were
indeed "diversities of gifts and operations," but they had received
the same Spirit; they served the same Lord. They held alike the one
and only gospel of the grace of God.
[31] We follow Lightfoot in reading the ποτὲ as in ch. i. 23, and
everywhere else in Paul, as a particle of _time_.
CHAPTER VII.
_PAUL AND THE FALSE BRETHREN._
"Then after the space of fourteen years I went up again to
Jerusalem with Barnabas, taking Titus also with me. And I went
up by revelation; and I laid before them the gospel which I
preach among the Gentiles, but privately before them who were
of repute, [_asking them_ whether I am running, or had run, in
vain: but not even Titus who was with me, being a Greek, was
compelled to be circumcised. But _it was_[32]] because of the
false brethren privily brought in, who came in privily to spy
out our liberty which we have in Christ Jesus, that they might
bring us into bondage: to whom we gave place in the way of
subjection, no, not for an hour; that the truth of the gospel
might continue with you."--GAL. ii. 1-5.
[32] The writer is compelled in this instance to depart from
the rendering of the English Version, for reasons given in the
sequel. See also a paper on _Paul and Titus at Jerusalem_, in
THE EXPOSITOR, 3rd series, vol. vi., pp. 435-442. The last three
words within the brackets agree with the R.V. _margin_.
"Fourteen years" had elapsed since Paul left Jerusalem for Tarsus,
and commenced his Gentile mission.[33] During this long period--a
full half of his missionary course--the Apostle was lost to the sight
of the Judean Churches. For nearly half this time, until Barnabas
brought him to Antioch, we have no further trace of his movements.
But these years of obscure labour had, we may be sure, no small
influence in shaping the Apostle's subsequent career. It was a kind
of Apostolic apprenticeship. Then his evangelistic plans were laid;
his powers were practised; his methods of teaching and administration
formed and tested. This first, unnoted period of Paul's missionary
life held, we imagine, much the same relation to his public ministry
that the time of the Arabian retreat did to his spiritual development.
[33] These fourteen years probably amounted to something less in
our reckoning,--say, from 38 to 51 A.D. Some six years elapsed
before Paul was summoned to Antioch.
We are apt to think of the Apostle Paul only as we see him in the
full tide of his activity, carrying "from Jerusalem round about unto
Illyricum" the standard of the cross and planting it in one after
another of the great cities of the Empire, "always triumphing in
every place;" or issuing those mighty Epistles whose voice shakes
the world. We forget the earlier term of preparation, these years of
silence and patience, of unrecorded toil in a comparatively narrow
and humble sphere, which had after all their part in making Paul
the man he was. If Christ Himself would not "clutch" at His Divine
prerogatives (Phil. ii. 5-11), nor win them by self-assertion and
before the time, how much more did it become His servant to rise to
his great office by slow degrees. Paul served first as a private
missionary pioneer in his native land, then as a junior colleague and
assistant to Barnabas, until the summons came to take a higher place,
when "the signs of an Apostle" had been fully "wrought in him." Not
in a day, nor by the effect of a single revelation did he become the
fully armed and all-accomplished Apostle of the Gentiles whom we meet
in this Epistle. "After the space of fourteen years" it was time for
him to stand forth the approved witness and minister of Jesus Christ,
whom Peter and John publicly embraced as their equal.
Paul claims here the initiative in the momentous visit to Jerusalem
undertaken by himself and Barnabas, of which he is going to speak.
In Acts xv. 2 he is similarly placed at the head of the deputation
sent from Antioch about the question of circumcision. The account
of the preceding missionary tour in Acts xiii., xiv., shows how
the headship of the Gentile Church had come to devolve on Paul. In
Luke's narrative they are "Barnabas and Saul" who set out; "Paul
and Barnabas" who return.[34] Under the trials and hazards of this
adventure--at Paphos, Pisidian Antioch, Lystra--Paul's native
ascendancy and his higher vocation irresistibly declared themselves.
Age and rank yielded to the fire of inspiration, to the gifts of
speech, the splendid powers of leadership which the difficulties
of this expedition revealed in Paul. Barnabas returned to Antioch
with the thought in his heart, "He must increase; I must decrease."
And Barnabas was too generous a man not to yield cheerfully to his
companion the precedence for which God thus marked him out. Yet the
"sharp contention" in which the two men parted soon after this time
(Acts xv. 36-40), was, we may conjecture, due in some degree to a
lingering soreness in the mind of Barnabas on this account.
[34] Acts xiii. 2, 7, 13, 43, 45, 46, 50; xiv. 12, 14; xv. 2, 12.
The Apostle expresses himself with modesty, but in such a way as
to show that _he_ was regarded in this juncture as the champion of
the Gentile cause. The "revelation" that prompted the visit came to
him. The "taking up of Titus" was his distinct act (ver. 1). Unless
Paul has deceived himself, he was quite the leading figure in the
Council; it was his doctrine and his Apostleship that exercised the
minds of the chiefs at Jerusalem, when the delegates from Antioch
appeared before them. Whatever Peter and James may have known or
surmised previously concerning Paul's vocation, it was only now that
it became a public question for the Church. But as matters stood, it
was a vital question. The status of uncircumcised Christians, and the
Apostolic rank of Paul, constituted the twofold problem placed before
the chiefs of the Jewish Church. At the same time, the Apostle, while
fixing our attention mainly on his own position, gives to Barnabas
his meed of honour; for he says, "I went up with Barnabas,"--"_we_
never yielded for an hour to the false brethren,"--"the Pillars
gave _to me and Barnabas_ the right hand of fellowship, that we
might go to the Gentiles." But it is evident that the elder Gentile
missionary stood in the background. By the action that he takes Paul
unmistakably declares, "I am the Apostle of the Gentiles;"[35] and
that claim is admitted by the consenting voice of both branches of
the Church. The Apostle stepped to the front at this solemn crisis,
not for his own rank or office' sake, but at the call of God, in
defence of the truth of the gospel and the spiritual freedom of
mankind.
[35] Comp. Rom. xi. 13; xv. 16, 17.
This meeting at Jerusalem took place in 51, or it may be, 52 A.D.
We make no doubt that it is the same with the Council of Acts xv.
The identification has been controverted by several able scholars,
but without success. The two accounts are different, but in no sense
contradictory. In fact, as Dr. Pfleiderer acknowledges,[36] they
"admirably supplement each other. The agreement as to the chief
points is in any case greater than the discrepancies in the details;
and these discrepancies can for the most part be explained by the
different standpoint of the relaters." A difficulty lies, however, in
the fact that the historian of the Acts makes this the _third_ visit
of Paul to Jerusalem subsequently to his conversion; whereas, from
the Apostle's statement, it appears to have been the _second_. This
discrepancy has already come up for discussion in the last Chapter
(p. 92). Two further observations may be added on this point. In the
first place, Paul does not say that he had never been to Jerusalem
since the visit of ch. i. 18; he does say, that on this occasion he
"went up again," and that meanwhile he "remained unknown by face" to
the Christians of Judæa (ch. i. 22)--a fact quite compatible, as we
have shown, with what is related in Acts xi. 29, 30. And further, the
request addressed at this conference to the Gentile missionaries,
that they should "remember the poor," and the reference made by the
Apostle to his previous zeal in the same business (vv. 9, 10), are in
agreement with the earlier visit of charity mentioned by Luke.
[36] _Hibbert Lectures_, p. 103. This testimony is the more
valuable as coming from the ablest living exponent of the Baurian
theory.
I. The emphasis of ver. 1 rests upon its last clause,--_taking along
with me also Titus_. Not "Titus as well as Barnabas"--this cannot be
the meaning of the "also"--for Barnabas was Paul's colleague, deputed
equally with himself by the Church of Antioch; nor "Titus as well as
others"--there were other members of the deputation (Acts xv. 2), but
Paul makes no reference to them. The _also_ (καὶ) calls attention to
the fact of Paul's taking _Titus_, in view of the sequel; as though
he said, "I not only went up to Jerusalem at this particular time,
under Divine direction, but I took along with me Titus besides."
The prefixed _with_ (συν-) of the Greek participle refers to Paul
himself: compare ver. 3, "Titus who was with me." As for the "certain
others" referred to in Acts xv. 2, they were most likely Jews; or if
any of them were Gentiles, still it was Titus whom Paul had chosen
for his companion; and his case stood out from the rest in such a way
that it became the decisive one, the _test-case_ for the matter in
dispute.
The mention of _Titus'_ name in this connection was calculated to
raise a lively interest in the minds of the Apostle's readers. He is
introduced as known to the Galatians; indeed by this time his name
was familiar in the Pauline Churches, as that of a fellow-traveller
and trusted helper of the Apostle. He was with Paul in the latter
part of the third missionary tour--so we learn from the Corinthian
letters--and therefore probably in the earlier part of the same
journey, when the Apostle paid his second visit to Galatia. He
belonged to the heathen mission, and was Paul's "true child after a
common faith" (Tit. i. 4), an uncircumcised man, of Gentile birth
equally with the Galatians. And now they read of his "going up to
Jerusalem with Paul," to the mother-city of believers, where are
the pillars of the Church--the Jewish teachers would say--the true
Apostles of Jesus, where His doctrine is preached in its purity, and
where every Christian is circumcised and keeps the Law. Titus, the
unclean Gentile, at Jerusalem! How could he be admitted or tolerated
there, in the fellowship of the first disciples of the Lord?
This question Paul's readers, after what they had heard from the
Circumcisionists, would be sure to ask. He will answer it directly.
But the Apostle goes on to say, that he "went up in accordance
with a revelation." For this was one of those supreme moments
in his life when he looked for and received the direct guidance
of heaven. It was a most critical step to carry this question of
Gentile circumcision up to Jerusalem, and to take Titus with him
there, into the enemies' stronghold. Moreover, on the settlement of
this matter Paul knew that his Apostolic status depended, so far as
human recognition was concerned. It would be seen whether the Jewish
Church would acknowledge the converts of the Gentile mission as
brethren in Christ; and whether the first Apostles would receive him,
"the untimely one," as a colleague of their own. Never had he more
urgently needed or more implicitly relied upon Divine direction than
at this hour.
"And I put before them (the Church at Jerusalem) the gospel which I
preach among the Gentiles--but privately to those of repute: am I
running (said I), or have I run, in vain?" The latter clause we read
_interrogatively_, along with such excellent grammatical interpreters
as Meyer, Wieseler, and Hofmann. Paul had not come to Jerusalem _in
order to solve any doubt in his own mind_; but he wished the Church
of Jerusalem _to declare its mind_ respecting the character of his
ministry. He was not "running as uncertainly;" nor in view of the
"revelation" just given him could he have any fear for the result of
his appeal. But it was in every way necessary that the appeal should
be made.
The interjected words, "but privately," etc., indicate that there
were _two_ meetings during the conference, such as those which seem
to be distinguished in Acts xv. 4 and 6; and that the Apostle's
statement and the question arising out of it were addressed more
pointedly to "those of repute." By this term we understand, here and
in ver. 6, "the apostles and elders" (Acts xv.), headed by Peter and
James, amongst whom "those reputed to be pillars" are distinguished
in ver. 9. Paul dwells upon the phrase οἱ δοκοῦντες, because, to
be sure, it was so often on the lips of the Judaizers, who were in
the habit of speaking with an imposing air, and by way of contrast
with Paul, of "the authorities" (at Jerusalem)--as the designation
might appropriately be rendered. These very men whom the Legalists
were exalting at Paul's expense, the venerated chiefs of the mother
Church, had on this occasion, Paul is going to say, given their
approval to his doctrine; they declined to impose circumcision on
Gentile believers. The Twelve were not stationary at Jerusalem, and
therefore could not form a fixed court of reference there; hence a
greater importance accrued to the Elders of the city Church, with the
revered James at their head, the brother of the Lord.
The Apostle, in bringing Titus, had brought up the subject-matter of
the controversy. The "gospel of the uncircumcision" stood before the
Jewish authorities, an accomplished fact. Titus was there, by the
side of Paul, a sample--and a noble specimen, we can well believe--of
the Gentile Christendom which the Jewish Church must either
acknowledge or repudiate. How will they treat him? Will they admit
this foreign protege of Paul to their communion? Or will they require
him first to be circumcised? The question at issue could not take a
form more crucial for the prejudices of the mother Church. It was one
thing to acknowledge uncircumcised fellow-believers in the abstract,
away yonder at Antioch or Iconium, or even at Cæsarea; and another
thing to see Titus standing amongst them in his heathen uncleanness,
on the sacred soil of Jerusalem, under the shadow of the Temple, and
to hear Paul claiming for him--for this "dog" of a Gentile--equally
with himself the rights of Christian brotherhood! The demand was most
offensive to the pride of Judaism, as no one knew better than Paul;
and we cannot wonder that a revelation was required to justify the
Apostle in making it. The case of _Trophimus_, whose presence with
the Apostle at Jerusalem many years afterwards proved so nearly fatal
(Acts xxi. 27-30), shows how exasperating to the legalist party his
action in this instance must have been. Had not Peter and the better
spirits of the Church in Jerusalem laid to heart the lesson of the
vision of Joppa, that "no man must be called common or unclean," and
had not the wisdom of the Holy Spirit eminently guided this first
Council of the Church,[37] Paul's challenge would have received a
negative answer; and Jewish and Gentile Christianity must have been
driven asunder.
[37] Acts xv. 28: "It seemed good to the Holy Ghost and to us."
This was in the Early Church no mere pious official form.
The answer, the triumphant answer, to Paul's appeal comes in the next
verse: "Nay, not even[38] Titus who was with me, being a Greek, was
compelled to be circumcised." Titus _was not circumcised_, in point
of fact--how can we doubt this in view of the language of ver. 5:
"Not even for an hour did we yield in subjection?" And he "was _not
compelled_ to be circumcised"--a mode of putting the denial which
implies that in refusing his circumcision urgent solicitation had
to be withstood, solicitation addressed to Titus himself, as well as
to the leaders of his party. The kind of pressure brought to bear in
the case and the quarter from which it proceeded, the Galatians would
understand from their own experience (ch. vi. 12; comp. ii. 14).
[38] For this use of ἀλλ' οὐδὲ compare Acts xix. 2 (here also
after a question); 1 Cor. iii. 2; iv. 3. We observe a similar
instance of the phrase in Æschylus, _Persæ_, l. 792. Ἀλλ' opposes
itself to the expectation of the Judaistic "compellers," present
to the mind of Paul and his readers.
The attempt made to bring about Titus' circumcision signally failed.
Its failure was the practical reply to the question which Paul tells
us (ver. 2) he had put to the authorities in Jerusalem; or, according
to the more common rendering of ver. 2_b_, it was the answer to the
apprehension under which he addressed himself to them. On the former
of these views of the connection, which we decidedly prefer, the
authorities are clear of any share in the "compulsion" of Titus.
When the Apostle gives the statement that his Gentile companion
"was not compelled to be circumcised" as the reply to his appeal to
"those of repute," it is as much as to say: "The chiefs at Jerusalem
did not require Titus' circumcision. They repudiated the attempt
of certain parties to force this rite upon him." This testimony
precisely accords with the terms of the rescript of the Council, and
with the speeches of Peter and James, given in Acts xv. But it was
a great point gained to have the liberality of the Jewish Christian
leaders put to the proof in this way, to have the generous sentiments
of speech and letter made good in this example of uncircumcised
Christianity brought to their doors.
To the authorities at Jerusalem the question put by the delegates
from Antioch on the one side, and by the Circumcisionists on the
other, was perfectly clear. If they insist on Titus' circumcision,
they disown Paul and the Gentile mission: if they accept Paul's
gospel, they must leave Titus alone. Paul and Barnabas stated the
case in a manner that left no room for doubt or compromise. Their
action was marked, as ver. 5 declares, with the utmost decision. And
the response of the Jewish leaders was equally frank and definite. We
have no business, says James (Acts xv. 19), "to trouble those from
the Gentiles that turn to God." Their judgement is virtually affirmed
in ver. 3, in reference to Titus, in whose person the Galatians could
not fail to see that their own case had been settled by anticipation.
"Those of repute" disowned the Circumcisionists; the demand that
the yoke of circumcision should be imposed on the Gentiles had no
sanction from them. If the Judaizers claimed their sanction, the
claim was false.
Here the Apostle pauses, as his Gentile readers must have paused
and drawn a long breath of relief or of astonishment at what he has
just alleged. If Titus was not compelled to be circumcised, even at
Jerusalem, who, they might ask, was going to compel _them_?--The full
stop should therefore be placed at the end of ver. 3, not ver. 2. Vv.
1-3 form a paragraph complete in itself. Its last sentence resolves
the decisive question raised in this visit of Paul's to Jerusalem,
when he "took with him also Titus."
II. The opening words of ver. 4 have all the appearance of commencing
a new sentence. This sentence, concluded in ver. 5, is grammatically
incomplete; but that is no reason for throwing it upon the previous
sentence, to the confusion of both. There is a transition of thought,
marked by the introductory _But_,[39] from the issue of Paul's second
critical visit to Jerusalem (vv. 1-3) to _the cause which made it
necessary_. This was the action of "false brethren," to whom the
Apostle made a determined and successful resistance (vv. 4, 5). The
opening "But" does not refer to ver. 3 in particular, rather to the
entire foregoing paragraph. The ellipsis (after "But") is suitably
supplied in the marginal rendering of the Revisers, where we take
_it was_ to mean, not "Because of the false brethren _Titus was not_
(or _was not compelled to be_) _circumcised_," but "Because of the
false brethren _this meeting came about_, or, _I took the course
aforesaid_."
[39] This particle is a serious obstacle in the way of the
ordinary punctuation, which attaches the following clause to ver.
3. The δὲ is similar to that of ver. 6 (ἀπὸ δὲ τ. δοκούντων); not
of κατ' ἰδίαν δὲ in ver. 2, nor of θανάτον δὲ σταύρου (Phil. ii.
8), which are parenthetical qualifications. And to say, "Because
of the false brethren Titus was not compelled to be circumcised,"
is simply an inconsequence. Would he have been compelled to be
circumcised if they had _not_ required it? This is the assumption
implied by the above construction.
To know what Paul means by "false brethren," we must turn to ch.
i. 6-9, iii. 1, iv. 17, v. 7-12, vi. 12-14, in this Epistle; and
again to 2 Cor. ii. 17-iii. 1, iv. 2, xi. 3, 4, 12-22, 26; Rom.
xvi. 17, 18; Phil. iii. 2. They were men bearing the name of Christ
and professing faith in Him, but Pharisees at heart, self-seeking,
rancorous, unscrupulous men, bent on exploiting the Pauline Churches
for their own advantage, and regarding Gentile converts to Christ as
so many possible recruits for the ranks of the Circumcision.
But where, and how, were these traitors "privily brought in?"
Brought in, we answer, to the field of the Gentile mission; and
doubtless by local Jewish sympathisers, who introduced them
without the concurrence of the officers of the Church. They "came
in privily"--slipped in by stealth--"to spy out our liberty which
we have in Christ Jesus." Now it was at Antioch and in the pagan
Churches that this liberty existed in its normal exercise--the
liberty for which our Epistle contends, the enjoyment of Christian
privileges independently of Jewish law--in which Paul and his brother
missionaries had identified themselves with their Gentile followers.
The "false brethren" were Jewish spies in the Gentile Christian
camp. We do not see how the Galatians could have read the Apostle's
words otherwise; nor how it could have occurred to them that he was
referring to the way in which these men had been originally "brought
into" the Jewish Church. That concerned neither him nor them. But
_their getting into the Gentile fold_ was the serious thing. They
are the "certain who came down from Judæa, and taught the (Gentile)
brethren, saying, Except ye be circumcised after the custom of Moses,
ye cannot be saved;" and whom their own Church afterwards repudiated
(Acts xv. 24). With Antioch for the centre of their operations, these
mischief-makers disturbed the whole field of Paul and Barnabas'
labours in Syria and Cilicia (Acts xv. 23; comp. Gal. i. 21). For
the Galatian readers, the terms of this sentence, coming after the
anathema of ch. i. 6-9, threw a startling light on the character
of the Judean emissaries busy in their midst. This description of
the former "troublers" strikes at the Judaic opposition in Galatia.
It is as if the Apostle said: "These false brethren, smuggled in
amongst us, to filch away our liberties in Christ, wolves in sheep's
clothing--I know them well; I have encountered them before this. I
never yielded to their demands a single inch. I carried the struggle
with them to Jerusalem. There, in the citadel of Judaism, and before
the assembled chiefs of the Judean Church, I vindicated once and for
all, under the person of Titus, your imperilled Christian rights."
But as the Apostle dilates on the conduct of these Jewish intriguers,
the precursors of such an army of troublers, his heart takes fire; in
the rush of his emotion he is carried away from the original purport
of his sentence, and breaks it off with a burst of indignation: "To
whom," he cries, "not even for an hour did we yield by subjection,
that the truth of the gospel might abide with you." A breakdown
like this--an _anacoluthon_, as the grammarians call it--is nothing
strange in Paul's style. Despite the shipwrecked grammar, the sense
comes off safely enough. The clause, "we did not yield," etc.,
describes in a negative form, and with heightened effect, the course
the Apostle had pursued from the first in dealing with the false
brethren. In this unyielding spirit he had acted, without a moment's
wavering, from the hour when, guided by the Holy Spirit, he set
out for Jerusalem with the uncircumcised Titus by his side, until
he heard his Gentile gospel vindicated by the lips of Peter and
James, and received from them the clasp of fellowship as Christ's
acknowledged Apostle to the heathen.
It was therefore the action of Jewish interlopers, men of the same
stamp as those infesting the Galatian Churches, which occasioned
Paul's second, public visit to Jerusalem, and his consultation with
the heads of the Judean Church. This decisive course he was himself
inspired to take; while at the same time it was taken on behalf
and under the direction of the Church of Antioch, the metropolis
of Gentile Christianity. He had gone up with Barnabas and "certain
others"--including the Greek Titus chosen by himself--the company
forming a representative deputation, of which Paul was the leader and
spokesman. This measure was the boldest and the only effectual means
of combatting the Judaistic propaganda. It drew from the authorities
at Jerusalem the admission that "Circumcision is nothing," and that
Gentile Christians are free from the ritual law. This was a victory
gained over Jewish prejudice of immense significance for the future
of Christianity. The ground was already cut from under the feet of
the Judaic teachers in Galatia, and of all who should at any time
seek to impose external rites as things essential to salvation in
Christ. To all his readers Paul can now say, so far as his part is
concerned: _The truth of the gospel abides with you_.
CHAPTER VIII.
_PAUL AND THE THREE PILLARS._
"But from those who were reputed to be somewhat (what they
once were, it maketh no matter to me: God accepteth not man's
person)--they, I say, who were of repute imparted nothing to
me: but contrariwise, when they saw that I had been intrusted
with the gospel of the uncircumcision, even as Peter with _the
gospel_ of the circumcision (for he that wrought for Peter
unto the apostleship of the circumcision wrought for me also
unto the Gentiles); and when they perceived the grace that was
given unto me, James and Cephas and John, they who were reputed
to be pillars, gave to me and Barnabas the right hands of
fellowship, that we should go unto the Gentiles, and they unto
the circumcision; only _they would_ that we should remember the
poor; which very thing I was also zealous to do."--GAL. ii. 6-10.
We have dealt by anticipation, in Chapter VI., with several of the
topics raised in this section of the Epistle--touching particularly
the import of the phrase "those of repute," and the tone of
disparagement in which these dignitaries appear to be spoken of in
ver. 6. But there still remains in these verses matter in its weight
and difficulty more than sufficient to occupy another Chapter.
The grammatical connection of the first paragraph, like that of vv.
2, 3, is involved and disputable. We construe its clauses in the
following way:--(1) Ver. 6 begins with a _But_, contrasting "those of
repute" with the "false brethren" dealt with in the last sentence.
It contains another _anacoluthon_ (or incoherence of language), due
to the surge of feeling remarked in ver. 4, which still disturbs
the Apostle's grammar. He begins: "But from those reputed to be
something"--as though he intended to say, "I received on my part
nothing, no addition or qualification to my gospel." But he has no
sooner mentioned "those of repute" than he is reminded of the studied
attempt that was made to set up their authority in opposition to
his own, and accordingly throws in this protest: "what they were
aforetime,[40] makes no difference to me: man's person God doth not
accept." But in saying this, Paul has laid down one of his favourite
axioms, a principle that filled a large place in his thoughts;[41]
and its enunciation deflects the course of the main sentence, so that
it is resumed in an altered form: "For to me those of repute imparted
nothing." Here the _me_ receives a greater emphasis; and _for_ takes
the place of _but_. The fact that the first Apostles had nothing to
impart to Paul, signally illustrates the Divine impartiality, which
often makes the last and least in human eyes equal to the first.
[40] For this rendering of ποτὲ comp. ch. i. 13, 23; and see
Lightfoot, or Beet, _in loc._.
[41] Comp. Rom. ii. 11; 1 Cor. i. 27-31; xv. 9, 10; Eph. vi. 9;
Col. iii. 25.
(2) Vv. 7-9 state the _positive_, as ver. 6 the _negative_ side of
the relation between Paul and the elder Apostles, still keeping
in view the principle laid down in the former verse. "Nay, on the
contrary, when they saw that I have in charge the gospel of the
uncircumcision, as Peter that of the circumcision (ver. 7)--and when
they perceived the grace that had been given me, James and Cephas and
John, those renowned pillars of the Church, gave the right hand of
fellowship to myself and Barnabas, agreeing that we should go to the
Gentiles, while they laboured amongst the Jews" (ver. 9).
(3) Ver. 8 comes in as a parenthesis, explaining how the authorities
at Jerusalem came to see that this trust belonged to Paul. "For,"
he says, "He that in Peter's case displayed His power in making
him (above all others) Apostle of the Circumcision, did as much
for me in regard to the Gentiles." It is not human ordination, but
Divine inspiration that makes a minister of Jesus Christ. The noble
Apostles of Jesus had the wisdom to see this. It had pleased God to
bestow this grace on their old Tarsian persecutor; and they frankly
acknowledged the fact.
Thus Paul sets forth, in the first place, _the completeness of
his Apostolic qualifications_, put to proof at the crisis of the
circumcision controversy; and in the second place, _the judgement
formed respecting him and his office by the first Apostles and
companions of the Lord_.
I. "To me those of repute added nothing." Paul had spent but a
fortnight in the Christian circle of Jerusalem, fourteen years ago.
Of its chiefs he had met at that time only Peter and James, and them
in the capacity of a visitor, not as a disciple or a candidate for
office. He had never sought the opportunity, nor felt the need, of
receiving instruction from the elder Apostles during all the years in
which he had preached Christ amongst the heathen. It was not likely
he would do so now. When he came into conference and debate with them
at the Council, he showed himself their equal, neither in knowledge
nor authority "a whit behind the very chiefest." And they were
conscious of the same fact.
On the essentials of the gospel Paul found himself in agreement with
the Twelve. This is implied in the language of ver. 6. When one
writes, "A adds nothing to B," one assumes that B has already what
belongs to A, and not something different. Paul asserts in the most
positive terms he can command, that his intercourse with the holders
of the primitive Christian tradition left him as a minister of Christ
exactly where he was before. "On me," he says, "they conferred
nothing"--rather, perhaps, "_addressed no communication_ to me." The
word used appears to deny their having made any motion of the kind.
The Greek verb is the same that was employed in ch. i. 16, a rare and
delicate compound.[42] Its meaning varies, like that of our _confer_,
_communicate_, as it is applied in a more or less active sense. In
the former place Paul had said that he "did not confer with flesh and
blood"; now he adds, that flesh and blood did not confer anything
upon him. Formerly he did not bring his commission to lay it before
men; now they had nothing to bring on their part to lay before him.
The same word affirms the Apostle's independence at both epochs,
shown in the first instance by his reserve toward the dignitaries at
Jerusalem, and in the second by their reserve toward him. Conscious
of his Divine call, he sought no patronage from the elder Apostles
then; and they, recognising that call, offered him no such patronage
now. Paul's gospel for the Gentiles was complete, and sufficient
unto itself. His ministry showed no defect in quality or competence.
There was nothing about it that laid it open to correction, even on
the part of those wisest and highest in dignity amongst the personal
followers of Jesus.
[42] We cannot explain προσανέθεντο here by the ἀναθέμην of
ver. 2, as though Paul wished to say, "I imparted to them my
gospel; they imparted to me nothing _further_." Forπρος- implies
_direction_, rather than _addition_. See Meyer on this verb in
ch. i. 16.
So Paul declares; and we can readily believe him. Nay, we are tempted
to think that it was rather the Pillars who might need to learn
from him, than he from them. In doctrine, Paul holds the primacy in
the band of the Apostles. While all were inspired by the Spirit of
Christ, the Gentile Apostle was in many ways a more richly furnished
man than any of the rest. The Paulinism of Peter's First Epistle
goes to show that the debt was on the other side. Their earlier
privileges and priceless store of recollections of "all that Jesus
did and taught," were matched on Paul's side by a penetrating logic,
a breadth and force of intellect applied to the facts of revelation,
and a burning intensity of spirit, which in their combination were
unique. The Pauline teaching, as it appears in the New Testament,
bears in the highest degree the marks of original genius, the stamp
of a mind whose inspiration is its own.
Modern criticism even exaggerates Paul's originality. It leaves
the other Apostles little more than a negative part to play in the
development of Christian truth. In some of its representations, the
figure of Paul appears to overshadow even that of the Divine Master.
It was Paul's creative genius, it is said, his daring idealism, that
deified the human Jesus, and transformed the scandal of the cross
into the glory of an atonement reconciling the world to God. Such
theories Paul himself would have regarded with horror. "I received
_of the Lord_ that which I delivered unto you:" such is his uniform
testimony. If he owed so little as a minister of Christ to his
brother Apostles, he felt with the most sincere humility that he
owed everything to Christ. The agreement of Paul's teaching with
that of the other New Testament writers, and especially with that of
Jesus in the Gospels, proves that, however distinct and individual
his conception of the common gospel, none the less there was a
common gospel of Christ, and he did not speak of his own mind. The
attempts made to get rid of this agreement by postdating the New
Testament documents, and by explaining away the larger utterances of
Jesus found in the Gospels as due to Paulinist interpolation, are
unavailing. They postulate a craftiness of ingenuity on the part of
the writers of the incriminated books, and an ignorance in those who
first received them, alike inconceivable. Paul did not build up the
splendid and imperishable fabric of his theology on some speculation
of his own. Its foundation lies in the person and the teaching of
Jesus Christ, and was common to Paul with James and Cephas and
John. "Whether I or they," he testifies, "so we preach, and so ye
believed" (1 Cor. xv. 11). Paul satisfied himself at this conference
that he and the Twelve taught the same gospel. Not in its primary
data, but in their logical development and application, lies the
specifically _Pauline_ in Paulinism. The harmony between Paul and the
other Apostolic leaders has the peculiar value which belongs to the
agreement of minds of different orders, working independently.
The Judaizers, however, persistently asserted Paul's dependence on
the elder Apostles. "The authority of the Primitive Church, the
Apostolic tradition of Jerusalem"--this was the fulcrum of their
argument. Where could Paul, they asked, have derived his knowledge
of Christ, but from this fountain-head? And the power that made
him, could unmake him. Those who commissioned him had the right to
overrule him, or even to revoke his commission. Was it not known
that he had from time to time resorted to Jerusalem; that he had
once publicly submitted his teaching to the examination of the heads
of the Church there? The words of ver. 6 contradict these malicious
insinuations. Hence the positiveness of the Apostle's self-assertion.
In the Corinthian Epistles his claim to independence is made in
gentler style, and with expressions of humility that might have
been misunderstood here. But the position Paul takes up is the
same in either case: "I am an Apostle. I have seen Jesus our Lord.
You--Corinthians, Galatians--are my work in the Lord." That Peter
and the rest were in the old days so near to the Master, "makes no
difference" to Paul. They are what they are--their high standing is
universally acknowledged, and Paul has no need or wish to question
it; but, by the grace of God, _he_ also is what he is (1 Cor. xv.
10). Their Apostleship does not exclude or derogate from his.
The self-depreciation, the keen sense of inferiority in outward
respects, so evident in Paul's allusions to this subject elsewhere,
is after all not wanting here. For when he says, "God regards
not _man's person_," it is evident that in respect of visible
qualifications Paul felt that he had few pretensions to make.
Appearances were against him. And those who "glory in appearance"
were against him too (2 Cor. v. 12). Such men could not appreciate
the might of the Spirit that wrought in Paul, nor the sovereignty of
Divine election. They "reckoned" of the Apostle "as though he walked
according to flesh" (2 Cor. x. 2). It seemed to them obvious, as
a matter of course, that he was far below the Twelve. With men of
worldly wisdom the Apostle did not expect that his arguments would
prevail. His appeal was to "the spiritual, who judge all things."
So we come back to the declaration of the Apostle in ch. i. 11:
"I give you to know, brethren, that my gospel is not according to
man." Man had no hand either in laying its foundation or putting
on the headstone. Paul's predecessors in Apostolic office did not
impart the gospel to him at the outset; nor at a later time had they
attempted to make any addition to the doctrine he had taught far and
wide amongst the heathen. His Apostleship was from first to last a
supernatural gift of grace.
II. Instead, therefore, of assuming to be his superiors, or offering
to bestow something of their own on Paul, _the three renowned pillars
of the faith at Jerusalem acknowledged him as a brother Apostle_.
"They saw that I am intrusted with the gospel of the uncircumcision."
The form of the verb implies a trust given in the past and taking
effect in the present, a settled fact. Once for all, this charge had
devolved on Paul. He is "appointed herald and apostle" of "Christ
Jesus, who gave Himself a ransom for all,--teacher of the Gentiles
in faith and truth" (1 Tim. ii. 6, 7). That office Paul still holds.
He is the leader of Christian evangelism. Every new movement in
heathen missionary enterprise looks to his teaching for guidance and
inspiration.
The conference at Jerusalem in itself furnished conclusive evidence
of Paul's Apostolic commission. The circumcision controversy was a
test not only for Gentile Christianity, but at the same time for its
Apostle and champ
Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/42645