Introduction
Readers of the epistle
Occasion and purpose of writing the epistle
Time and place of writing
Division of the epistle by content
Authenticity of the epistle
Literature
Readers of the epistle
To this day it has not been definitively established where to find the readers of this epistle—the churches of Galatia. According to a long-established view, Galatia, to which the Apostle Paul directed his epistle, is a region in central Asia Minor that received its name from the Celtic tribes that settled there (around 277 BC), whose principal cities were Ankara and Pessinus. Supporters of this view argue that Paul visited this region for the first time during the journey mentioned in Acts 16:6, and at that time preached the gospel there. Later he visited Galatia once more (Acts 18:23; cf. Gal 4:13).
Other scholars believe that by Galatia one should understand not only the region where the Galatians lived, but the entire Roman province of Galatia, which included proper Galatia and in addition the regions of Phrygia, Pisidia, and Lycaonia—that is, the regions that the Apostle Paul and Barnabas visited during their first apostolic journey (Acts 13:14), with cities: Antioch (in Pisidia), Iconium, Lystra, and Derbe. Under such an assumption, the Apostle’s first stay in Galatia coincides with the journey mentioned in Acts 13 and Acts 14, and the second with that mentioned in Acts 16:6.
Of these two assumptions we consider the first more correct—that is, we believe the Apostle Paul by Galatia meant only the region of the Galatians or properly the northern part of the Roman province of Galatia—for the following reasons. According to Gal 4:13 and following, Paul founded churches in Galatia because he was detained in those places by his illness. But in Acts 13 and Acts 14 there is no indication of any illness of the Apostle. On the contrary, according to the account in these chapters, the Apostle Paul at that time showed extremely intensive activity and traveled quickly from one place to another. Meanwhile, it is highly probable that the very illness that overtook Paul in Galatia is what the author of Acts understands in Acts 16:6 and following, where it is said that the “Spirit” prevented Paul from going to Asia, that is, to the coast of present-day Asia Minor, and so the Apostle remained to preach the gospel in the interior of Asia Minor (in Phrygia and Galatia). But if the Apostle at that time came to the “Galatians” for the first time, then clearly by “Galatians” one must understand not the Christian communities mentioned in Acts 13 and Acts 14, but those that existed in Galatia in the narrow sense of that term.
By the time of the Apostle Paul, the Galatians, at least in the cities, were already under the influence of Greek culture and had exchanged their Celtic language for Greek. But their character—vivid, receptive, and inconstant—remained. Furthermore, they were superstitious, arrogant, and inclined to mutual quarrels, but at the same time hospitable and cordial. Jews also lived among them, and they attracted many Galatians to the side of the Law of Moses.
So the Apostle Paul founded a church in Galatia during his second apostolic journey, after he had established churches in Pisidia and Lycaonia in his first journey. The Apostle began his preaching in Galatia under unfavorable circumstances—while ill—but nevertheless his work here was successful, and the Galatians received him as an angel of God, as Christ himself (Gal 4:14-15). New life was expressed in various spiritual gifts among the Galatians. During his third apostolic journey the Apostle visited Galatia again, but now he noticed in the Galatians a tendency toward the Judaism that had appeared there and rebuked them for it (Acts 18:22-23; Gal 1:9). The church of the Galatians undoubtedly consisted, as the main element, of those whom Paul had converted from paganism (Gal 4:9), but there were also Jews and proselytes in it.
Occasion and purpose of writing the epistle
After the Apostle Paul departed from Galatia, Judaizing Christians—opponents of the Apostle Paul—invaded the Galatian churches. Paul refers to them with supreme contempt. He calls them troublemakers of the gospel of Christ (Gal 1:7). He accuses them of opportunism, hypocrisy, and vanity (Gal 6:12 and following).
These Judaizing teachers of the faith proclaimed to the Galatians that they were obliged to observe the Law of Moses. They said that only through them could the Galatians become acquainted with the true, genuine gospel (Gal 1:6), and that the teaching which Paul had brought them was incomplete (Gal 3:3). Paul, they claimed, had not told the Galatians—and this was supposedly necessary to say—that only through the fulfillment of the Law of Moses and through receiving circumcision could gentiles become descendants of Abraham and heirs of the divine promises given to that patriarch and eternal blessedness (Gal 3:6 and following). However, they did not require the Galatians to fulfill all the individual precepts of the Law of Moses, but only the principal ones—namely, the ordinances concerning circumcision and the observance of Jewish festivals (Gal 5:2).
Hand in hand with the exaltation of this new “gospel” in a particular Judaizing form, these false teachers pursued the aim of discrediting the Apostle Paul in the eyes of the Galatians. They pointed out to the Galatians that Paul was not a direct disciple of the Lord Jesus Christ, whereas they, the Judaizers, stood behind the Apostles called by Christ himself, the most prominent figures in the Church (Gal 2:2), the pillars of Christendom. Everything good in Paul’s teaching was received from these pillars, while everything that belongs to Paul himself is nothing other than a product of human fantasy (Gal 1:12). Paul owes his apostolic position to the mediation of the chief apostles (Gal 1:1) and his apostleship is of lower rank. He himself acknowledged this when he submitted his teaching to the chief apostles for examination during his stay in Jerusalem (Gal 2:2). They said that Paul is such a person who can deceive his listeners with his oratorical skill (Gal 1:10), that he seeks popularity by every means (Gal 1:10) and sometimes does not hesitate even to preach, where it benefits him, the necessity of circumcision (Gal 5:11)...
With these slanders Paul’s opponents managed to influence the Galatian Christians. When Paul wrote the epistle to the Galatians, the latter were already prepared to side with legalistic Judaism (Gal 1:6), to accept circumcision (Gal 5:2 and following), and had already begun to celebrate Jewish festivals (Gal 4:10). In short, an extraordinary metamorphosis had come upon the Galatians, and Paul was directly astounded by this circumstance (Gal 3:1). The situation of Paul’s gospel was highly critical. The question was being decided whether the young Christian religion should bind itself to the dying forms of Judaism stiffened in externals or continue its soaring flight over the world by virtue of the new spirit inherent in it. Galatia became the arena of that struggle, on the outcome of which the destiny of the entire world depended. What later occurred in Corinth and Rome was only the conclusion of this great struggle, only its echoes. In the epistle to the Romans one does not hear that same combative spirit that prevails in the epistle to the Galatians: there is heard the quiet voice of a man who has achieved victory over the Judaizers. But in the epistle to the Galatians the Apostle Paul comes forward with all the passion of a fighter for his idea. Thus the Apostle’s purpose in writing the epistle to the Galatians was: first, to defend and restore his own apostolic authority, and then, second, to establish firmly in the consciousness of the Galatians the conviction that a gentile converted to Christianity needs the Law of Moses and circumcision not at all, and that without them he becomes an heir to all the promises given to Abraham.
Time and place of writing
His third apostolic journey, during which he also went through Galatia (Acts 18:23), the Apostle Paul concluded with a long stay in Ephesus (from 54 to 56 AD). As is evident from the epistle to the Galatians, it could not have been written too long after the Apostle’s departure from Galatia. He marvels indeed (Gal 1:6) that the Galatians are “so quickly” turning to Paul’s opponents—clearly he had not long since parted from them. From this we can suppose that the epistle to the Galatians was written by the Apostle soon after his arrival in Ephesus, namely at the end of 54 AD or the beginning of 55 AD.
Division of the epistle by content
By its content the entire epistle to the Galatians presents an unfolding of the idea that gentiles who believed in Christ have no need whatsoever to fulfill the Law of Moses. In this it resembles the epistle to the Romans with only the difference that there it speaks of the inadequacy of the law in general as a means to justify a person, whereas here it speaks of its needlessness for a Christian. All the content of the epistle can be divided into three sections: 1) the apologetic section, comprising the first two chapters of the epistle, in which the Apostle refutes the slanders brought against him by the Judaizers and restores his apostolic authority; 2) the dogmatic-polemical section, extending from Gal 3 to Gal 5:13, in which the Apostle proves that Christians are not required to undertake the fulfillment of the Law of Moses as if it would help a Christian from among the gentiles become a descendant of Abraham and inherit the promises given to that patriarch; and 3) the hortatory section, which contains instructions regarding proper Christian life.
The content of each section is explained in detail in the exposition of the epistle.
Authenticity of the epistle
Excerpts from the epistle to the Galatians appear in the earliest works of Christian literature—in the writings of the apostolic fathers, though these are not strictly quotations but rather somewhat modified repetitions of the thoughts contained in the epistle. As time went on, these borrowings became clearer. In the Muratorian canon and in the Peshitta it is already found as an epistle of the Apostle Paul. But from the 1850s, scholars of the Baur school began to reject the authenticity of this epistle, and in 1888 Professor Steck published his tract on the epistle to the Galatians, in which he attempted to prove that this epistle derives all its content from the epistles to the Corinthians and to the Romans and arose precisely at the time when the struggle with Judaism became acute in the Christian church—that is, at the beginning of the second century.
However, the very fact that only a few scholars sided with Steck shows that the grounds he advanced in defense of his hypothesis seemed rather weak to learned theologians. And indeed, Steck’s principal argument that the epistle’s polemic against Judaism betrays its late origin is entirely unfounded, because grounds for opposition to Paul’s gospel from Judaism could exist precisely in the first century, when churches from the gentiles were only beginning to arise. After that, in the second century, collisions between Judaism and Paul’s gospel would be completely incomprehensible, since in the second century the missionary activity of converting gentiles to the bosom of the Church of Christ was already completed. Moreover, from the writings of the apostolic fathers we see that among second-century Christians the question of the relation of the law was already considered resolved in the spirit of the Apostle Paul’s teaching. As for the closeness of the epistle to the Galatians with the epistles to the Corinthians and Romans, this was entirely natural to expect from an epistle that appeared at the same time as those mentioned. The other objections to the authenticity of the epistle to the Galatians are nothing but manifestations of purely subjective misunderstanding of some truly difficult passages in the epistle to the Galatians for interpretation.
Literature
Among the patristic commentaries on the epistle to the Galatians deserve special attention those of Ephrem the Syrian, Augustine, Jerome, Chrysostom, Theodoret, and the Blessed Theophylact; and among Russian ones—Archimandrite Agathangel, Metropolitan Philaret, Bishop Theophan, Fr. I. Galakhov (Kazan 1897), and Professor Ya. Ya. Glubokovskiy: The Gospel of Christian Freedom in the Epistle of the Apostle Paul to the Galatians (St. Petersburg 1902). Among foreign works the finest commentary is that of Professor Zahn (Leipzig 1907). Literature of the epistle up to 1897 is detailed in the book of Fr. Galakhov. In 1912 appeared the “Popular Explanation of the Epistles to the Galatians, Ephesians, Colossians, and Philippians” by Archpriest Zefirov (Mogilev).