Q. One thing that emerges from your discussion of Gal. 5 is that you think the agitators are not in fact like zealous Saul the Pharisee was in terms of meticulous keeping of the whole Mosaic covenant, nor are they trying to impose the whole Law on the Galatians. You surmise that they merely want the Galatians to do the things that make them appear to be Jewish to outsiders so they can claim the Jewish exemption from pagan religious observance and avoid persecution by either Jews or pagans. Am I reading you right at this point? I must admit, I had not thought this was all they were asking. I do think the agitators had not told the Galatians that if you get circumcised you have to keep the rest of the Law too. Paul is enlightening them on that point. And yes Paul accuses the agitators of not completely keeping the Law themselves. But that could merely be him saying they are inconsistent in their observance, not that they behaved that way on principle. What led you to this conclusion? I ask because Acts 15.1ff seems to suggest that such agitators were deadly serious about Gentiles like Titus becoming full fledged Jews in order to be in the Christian community.
A. There are all kinds of things going on socio-culturally, with interesting presumed differences between the situation in southern Turkey and the situation in Jerusalem (for Acts 15 or for the earlier meeting in Gal 2.1-10). Basically as you know from Paul and the Faithfulness of God ch 12 I am following through on the suggestions of Justin Hardin, Bruce Winter and others who have picked up those hints in chs 5 and 6 about the ‘agitators’ not being interested in ‘real’ Torah-observance, etc. – and have put those within the situation of all Christians in the pagan world, of the sudden abandoning of the very public (and also private) worship of ‘the gods’ – with the gods in southern Turkey now including the Roman ones. This deeply anti-social behaviour – tantamount to calling down divine curses on the polis or household – could only be justified by saying ‘Well, under Roman law the Jews don’t have to worship the gods, and we are Abraham’s children in fact so that law applies to us’. That argument worked in Corinth as we see from Acts 18 where Gallio says ‘OK, it’s all just varieties of Jewish practice, no concern of ours’. But we have no reason to suppose it worked elsewhere. Paul knew perfectly well what real, actual, hard-nosed, Pharisaic Torah-keeping looked like and he knew that the urge to get people circumcised had nothing to do with that . . .
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In