Introduction

A Letter Written in Anger

Paul’s preamble to Galatians, Theophylact observes at the head of his Argument, “is full of wrath, and so is almost the whole Epistle; for always to be gentle toward disciples who have need of rebuke belongs not to a teacher.” It is an observation about tone rather than content, and he notes that even the Lord rebukes Peter and calls his own disciples senseless when the occasion warrants it, and that Paul, though he can write with severity to the Corinthians too, reserves his sharpest words for the Galatians. The cause, as Theophylact reconstructs it, was a party of Jewish-Christian teachers who pressed circumcision and the observance of Sabbaths and new moons on Paul’s Gentile converts, claiming falsely that the apostles at Jerusalem required as much—and who, to undercut Paul’s authority to say otherwise, spread the charge that he was inconsistent, circumcising at one moment and abolishing circumcision at the next, and in any case no eyewitness of Christ but only a disciple of the apostles at second hand. It is against this campaign, burning in his own soul, that Paul composes the letter.

A Staged Rebuke: Paul and Peter at Antioch

The most delicate passage in the whole commentary is Paul’s account, in chapter two, of withstanding Peter “to his face” at Antioch. Theophylact takes some care to head off the natural reading—that an apostle is here caught in plain hypocrisy—and offers instead an explanation that had already become the standard Greek patristic account before him: the whole exchange, he argues, was “done and said by way of dispensation,” arranged between the two apostles for the instruction of onlookers rather than fought out over a real disagreement. Peter, who had already conceded the point in principle, withdrew from eating with Gentile believers only when men from Jerusalem arrived, so as not to give them offense; Paul’s public rebuke let the Jewish and Gentile disciples alike see the question settled without Peter having to argue it himself. “If there had truly been a quarrel over the truth,” Theophylact reasons, “they would not have rebuked each other in the presence of the disciples,” since that would only have scandalized them further. The confrontation becomes, on this reading, itself an act of apostolic cooperation rather than a rupture between two pillars of the Church.

A Consistent Apostle: Circumcision and Its Limits

The same Argument that explains the letter’s anger also answers, before Paul himself does, the charge of inconsistency his rivals raised against him. Theophylact grants the plain fact behind the slander: Paul did, on occasion, circumcise—he circumcised Timothy, and submitted himself to a purification according to the law. But this, Theophylact insists, was condescension to weak Jewish believers still attached to the law, offered freely where it could do no harm, never a concession forced on Gentile converts who had no such attachment to give up. Peter and the Jerusalem apostles had done the same, for the same pastoral reason, toward those they were preaching to; what the Galatian agitators suppressed was that this condescension was never meant to become a requirement binding on believers who had come to Christ from paganism. Theophylact’s Paul is not inconsistent but discerning, applying one principle—the law’s ritual demands bind no one under grace—in two different pastoral situations.

Hagar and Sarah: The Two Covenants

Theophylact gives sustained attention to Paul’s allegory of Hagar and Sarah in chapter four, calling it exactly that—an allegory, in which the history of Abraham’s two sons “not only signifies this, but also proclaims certain other things.” Hagar the bondwoman, bearing children to bondage, stands for Mount Sinai and the Jerusalem of the present, and so for the Mosaic law itself, which Theophylact judges to contain “much that is unfree and servile,” since it held out virtue for the sake of earthly reward and warned off wickedness by fear of earthly punishment. Sarah the free woman, by contrast, prefigures “the Jerusalem above,” the mother of those who live under grace rather than law. The allegory gives Theophylact his clearest statement of what is actually at stake in the letter’s anger: not a quarrel over ritual observance for its own sake, but the difference between a religion of earned reward and one of adoption as sons.

How to Read This Commentary

Galatians is short, and Theophylact’s commentary on it is correspondingly compact—six chapters treated with the same lemma-by-lemma method he brings to every Pauline letter, but without the room Romans affords for a leisurely doctrinal survey. Readers will find it repays attention to Paul’s own argumentative sequence: the defense of his independent apostolic call in chapters one and two, the case from Scripture and experience for justification by faith in chapters three and four, and the turn to practical exhortation—the fruit of the Spirit set against the works of the flesh—in the letter’s final two chapters. Because the whole letter is written under pressure, Theophylact’s comment is unusually alert to Paul’s tone as well as his content, and a reader who listens for that tone, and not only for the doctrine being defended, will hear the letter as Theophylact himself plainly heard it.