Q. There are places in Galatians from at least Gal. 3 on where it seems that Paul doesn’t know exactly who it is that is troubling the Galatians. He has heard what they are demanding the Galatian gentiles do, but he seems not to know who they are. Or do you think this is a case of damnation by anonymity? To me, the further we go in the letter, the more I think he doesn’t really know, but perhaps he suspects ‘the men who came from James’ are the same ones troubling the Galatians.
A. Actually I think Paul knows very well who it is – or at least who’s behind it all. Yes, I think ‘the men from James’ are a shadowy group but these are people Paul knows or at least knows of. The early church was quite a small world and with people coming and going (e.g. between Jerusalem and Antioch as in Gal 2) it’s unlikely that key players are a totally unknown quantity. Of course it’s possible that the principal ‘agitator’ in Galatia (see 5.10 for the singular) may have emerged from relative anonymity in the Galatian Jewish or Jewish-Christian fraternity, seeing the social and political danger of these Jesus-followers no longer worshipping the gods, and realizing that the urgent need was to get them circumcised ‘to make a good showing’ (not to make them genuine totally Torah-observant Jews but to keep Gentile authorities happy)…
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