More on Galatians

Last updated on: July 18, 2016 at 8:58 am by Gerald McDermott

More on Galatians 2016-07-18T08:58:12-04:00 Gerald McDermott

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While more scholars in recent years have started to notice that Galatians makes more sense if Paul’s primary audience there was gentile, many good scholars still see in Galatia a mixed church of Jews and gentiles.

Some of them would say that “we who are Jews by birth” (2.15) and the discussion of whether the law is opposed to the promises (3.19-25) both indicate Jews at Galatia. So would Paul’s insistence that circumcision is not necessary–only for Jews would that be relevant. And the metaphor of law as pedagogue would make sense only to Jews.

Furthermore, some have argued that Gager is wrong in saying that the idea of angelic mediation of the Law is nowhere in Jewish sources. It can be found, for example, in the Testament of Dan (6.2).

Others have pointed out that some Jews did write about Israel being under the *stoichea (*the elemental spirits of the universe) in the apocalyptic literature. So Paul’s reference to that in 4.3 did not require a gentile audience.

There is no airtight case that can be made for or against the thesis that Paul’s primary audience is gentile.

But it still seems to make the best sense of this important letter.

Even if some Jewish writers said their fellow Jews could be slaves of the elemental spirits of the cosmos, I can’t imagine any Jew saying to their fellow Jews in the first century that before they knew the messiah “you did not know God” (4.8).

And how else to make sense of the same Paul who says in Romans 3, “Do we overthrow the Law by this faith? By no means! On the contrary, we uphold the Law” (3.31). Or Rom 7.12: “The law is holy, and the commandment is holy and just and good” (12). And the Paul who circumcised Timothy but not Titus (Timothy was a Jew with a Jewish mother, but Titus was a gentile)? Why would he do circumcisions at all if he meant in Galatians that circumcision was entirely a thing of the past for all Jesus-believers?

Why would Luke say he made it clear, years after Galatians, that he still was telling Jews to circumcise their children (Ac 21.17-26, esp 21)?

Any perspective of Paul’s audience in Galatians has to cohere with what we know of Paul elsewhere in the NT–unless we say that Paul went from being anti-circumcision to being pro-circumcision, from anti-Torah to pro-Torah, and so was incoherent. I would rather think Paul was coherent, and the appearance of incoherence is our problem, not Paul’s.

The first-century Jewish philosopher Philo said that every Sabbath thousands of gentiles around the Empire attended synagogue to “listen to Moses” because they recognized the superiority of Judaism to Greco-Roman religion. These were the “god-fearers” Luke mentions more than once in Acts.

If this was the case in Galatia–and scholars such as Sanders and Lloyd Gaston and others think it was–then these gentiles would have been familiar with all these Jewish concerns. Besides, what observant Jew would question if “the law” (and here I think this Pauline phrase usually means “the legal parts of Torah as opposed to other parts such as Genesis”) was opposed to God’s promises? Most Jews believed there was perfect harmony between the legal and non-legal parts of Torah. They might not have been able to explain that harmony, but they would refuse to countenance the possibility that God was incoherent in his revelation.

And if the church there was primarily Jewish, Paul would never have to say, “If you belong to messiah, then you are the seed of Abraham” (3.29). Jews knew they were the seed of Abraham already.

And what Jew would need to be reminded that circumcision requires adherence to all the Law (5.3)?

So, even if there were Jews at Galatia too, it seems that gentiles were Paul’s primary addressees. Which lends supports to the thesis that when Paul says circumcision is no longer required, he is reminding gentiles of what Torah and Judaism had always said.

Thus Paul was not dispensing with Torah.

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