§1 Approaching Galatians (session 4, part 1)—Paul’s Letter to the Galatians: A Presbyterian Adult Spiritual Formation Series
[The
series continues and now commences the fourth in-person session. Find the last post here.]
McMaken: Welcome, faithful remnant of our study together. We are fewer today—thanks to all the ice, I'm sure. I’d like to begin with a quick recap. We’ve talked about the date of the writing and the audience to whom Paul was writing. We also worked our way through some key sources that I'm using to fuel reflection. We talked about Luther: his two kinds of righteousness, his two kingdoms, his two uses of the law, and his ideas about justification by faith. We talked about Calvin: his work on his biblical commentaries and how he has similar but different focuses from Luther. Then, last time, we talked about J. Louis Martyn—who has done a lot of work on reading Paul through an apocalyptic lens—as well as some of the history of scholarship around research into Jesus and Paul. Today, we have one last book to talk about before we get into the text!
e.
Nancy Bedford and Galatians
This last book is Nancy Bedford’s
book on Galatians in the Belief: A Theological
Commentary on the Bible series.[1]
If you want to read one of the books that I’m using in this series, then this
is the one you should pick up. It's written for as broad an audience as
possible, so it is more accessible than some of the others. Bedford also has
some interesting scholarly contributions, including how she thinks about the
outline of the book of Galatians, which we'll get to in a bit. Her approach is
to think broadly about how the different Christian traditions of interpreting
Galatians fit together and what it can mean for us today, including some of
those more practical applications for us in our lives.
How does
Bedford understand the Galatians, the recipients of this letter? She speaks
about the letter in terms of intra-Christian debates. Paul is arguing with his
opponents, and the Galatians are stuck in the middle. It isn’t a situation of
Christians on one side and Jews on the other—everyone involved in the argument
is a “Christian.” We've been over this idea a few times already. Bedford
basically agrees, although she speaks in terms of “intra-Christian” debate.
Strictly speaking, that suggests a highly developed concept and identity of
“Christian” in distinction from the Jewish community that wasn’t around in
Paul’s day. It’s later language pushed back in time, as it were. But Bedford is
getting at the right idea. If we wanted to be more technical, as we’ve done
before, we’d say that we're talking about some Jewish-Jesus followers arguing
with other Jewish-Jesus followers about what to do with Gentile-Jesus
followers.
Bedford
thinks that these intra-Christian debates, these debates among different groups
of Jesus-followers, are serious debates. They are more serious, for example,
than Calvin's way of framing it about differences in customs between churches,
where one church expects another church to do things the same way they do them.
The question at stake is: How are Jewish Jesus-followers going to incorporate
Gentile Jesus-followers into the Jesus-following community?
This wasn’t
a totally new or surprising question at the time Paul wrote Galatians. The
question has new inflections because it’s all now centered on Jesus, but the
Jewish community had been interacting with Gentiles, and with Gentiles who were
interested in the whole Jewish religious thing, for quite a while. Versions of
this question are all through the Hebrew scriptures. Even more recently, there
was Jewish contact with what we called Hellenism—the cultural environment that
comes out of Greece and the Greek colonies and cities all around the Eastern
Mediterranean. Alexander the Great’s empire in the 4th century BCE was a large
part of the story of Greek culture expanding throughout the Eastern
Mediterranean, including Palestine. When he died, his kingdom splintered into
different pieces. He was Greek, so you've got Greek control of all these
different sections of his empire. One piece of that previous empire was run out
of Syria and included Palestine.
Fast forward
a few centuries and you get to a king named Antiochus the 4th Epiphanes. An “epiphany”
is like a revelation, an experience of God, a knowing of God. Basically,
Antiochus thought he was literally God's gift—well, not “God’s” gift; more like
“a god’s” gift, but you get the idea. Antiochus was all about the superiority
of Greek culture, and he tried to impose this throughout his kingdom in a new
way. Suddenly, you've got the situation in Jerusalem where Antiochus expects
the Jewish temple not to be devoted only to the one Jewish God, but to be
devoted to all the Greek gods as well. And in some ways, Antiochus wanted to be
treated like a god as well. The way this played out in Jewish areas was predictable.
It wasn't a very popular move, although many—or, at least, some—of the more
urban and well-off Jewish folks seem to have been on board and wanted access to
the benefits of Hellenization. But then Antiochus and his soldiers barged their
way into the temple and sacrificed the pig in the inner precincts. This added
insult to injury, as it were, because the Jewish tradition regards pigs as
unclean animals. It was at that point that a minor house in the priestly
lineage in Judea arose. They were called the Maccabees. Scholars aren’t
entirely sure what “Maccabees” means but the best guess is that it means “hammer.”
So Judah Maccabee, Judah the Hammer, raises an army in rebellion. Have we all seen
the movie Braveheart? That how I always picture what’s goeing on here.
They're out in the hills among the shepherds, putting together a ragtag army,
until – eventually – the meet Antiochus' forces in a pitched battle.
Surprisingly, Antiochus loses, and the Maccabees end up establishing their own
rule. That lasted from about 160 BCE to 63 BCE, when Rome marched in and took
over.
All through
this period, however, there are intense debates about how much Greek-ness, or
Hellenism, Jews are willing to tolerate. With the Maccabees in control in
Palestine, things tend to be more conservative with less Hellenization. But out
in the diaspora, among the Jewish communities outside of Palestine, things look
different. The diaspora is made up of Jews who left Palestine for one reason or
another, whether voluntarily or through forced emigration, throughout the first
millennium BCE. There are Jewish communities in many Greek cities throughout
the eastern Mediterranean, for instance. There are also significant Jewish
communities in Babylon and Egypt. They had synagogues where they gathered,
prayed, and read their Scriptures, whether in Hebrew or in Greek translation. And
in the Greek-speaking diaspora, there was not sharp conflict between Jewish and
Greek culture.
From the Hellenistic
perspective, there are lots of gods and lots of different people worshiping
them, so what’s the problem with one more? Additionally, Hellenistic culture
had a high regard for things that were old and, of course, the Jewish people
and their beliefs are very old. Hellenistic folks saw a venerable old tradition
maintained by a particular group of people who weren’t harming anyone. They
figure that just means there’s one more god invested in the success and safety
of their city, which is a good thing. And there was a lot of fluidity between
Jewish communities in these cities and the Hellenistic communities on the side
of Jews in diaspora, even to the point where there seems to be attestation in
the records of Jewish folks being involved in all kinds of different civic
organizations. Think if groups like the Knights of Columbus, the Masons, or the
Better Business Bureau—but with different rituals and observances tied to pagan
gods. These organizations help make the community function well by making sure
that the city’s gods help it to prosper. People who disrupt that function are
bad. But Jewish folks were able to fit into this social situation without
causing any of those kinds of problems because they didn’t seem to think it
somehow compromised their devotion to the Lord.
Part of the
conceptual world that helped make sense of all this religious intermingling is
monotheism. The idea of monotheism, that only one God exists, wasn’t common in
the ancient world. Each group of people thought their god was the best god and
the high god, but everybody accepted that all the gods existed. So, for Jewish
folks, the other gods ultimately answered to their God, but that doesn't mean
they don't exist. The world is full of these kinds of spiritual powers and
forces, like we talked about with apocalyptic thought. From the perspective of
diaspora Jewish, what’s the problem with being associated with other gods that
exist so long as their ultimate allegiance is to the Lord, whom they believe is
the high god? Nothing. Given this kind of perspective, Jewish folks in these
communities could be good citizens right along with the Hellenistic folks.
So,
there’s a long tradition and broad spectrum of how Jewish folks in different
contexts think about their interactions with Gentiles and Greek culture. In Palestine—in
the Promised Land, so to speak—these boundaries are much more strictly
maintained than in the diaspora, where the boundaries are very fluid. One
question that then arises for the Jewish communities is: what do you do with
Gentiles who become interested in and devoted to the Jewish God, the Lord?
Ultimately, there are two levels of interest or involvement here, and reference
to both comes up from time to time in the New Testament.
“God-fearers”
are the first category. These are Gentiles who became impressed with the Jewish
god and added that god to the other gods that they worshiped. Many folks in the
ancient world thought that you can never have too many gods on your side. So
these Gentiles spent time with the Jewish communities gathered around the
synagogues, listened to the scriptures read and prayers said, and generally
learned about what devotion to the Lord means. But all the while they are still
worshiping their families’ and cities’ gods.
The second
category of Gentiles interested in the Jewish god is “proselytes.” Proselytes
are full-blown converts who leave their other family ties and the gods that go
with them and become, for all practical purposes, Jewish. The main way that
they do this is through circumcision, which is why circumcision shows up in
Galatians and becomes such a big deal in Paul's letters. The idea here is that
someone who was a Gentile now becomes a Jew, and therefore is no longer a
Gentile. And this involved changing your allegiance to deities. Now, as far as
we can tell, this was a rare occurrence because it meant such a dramatic change
in one’s life: completely new religious and ethical commitments, completely new
social locations, the loss of family ties, etc. God-fearers were more common,
but proselytes were rare.
Participant: Does this mean that only men are Jews? How did Women
become Jews?
McMaken: Your husband. That's really your only option. Or you could
marry a Jewish man, but your Gentile family probably wouldn’t allow that. Women
didn’t have much, if any, say over who they married. But, if you’re a woman who
was a Gentile and is now a Jew, either that’s because your husband converted or
you married in.
Participant: I would imagine they're not thinking about this as
individualistically as we do. There's an individual element to salvation. But
if you convert from Judaism to Christianity, you're probably doing so as a
household. Not necessarily just this one person.
McMaken: It would depend on your status in the family. If the paterfamilias
changed, then everybody changes. But if you’re the second son, for instance, you're
probably not taking many people with you.
Now, here is
something that is really interesting. There seems to have been a minority
position within the Jewish conversation at the time that said it was impossible
for Gentiles to become Jews, even if they do the whole proselyte thing. Paula
Fredricksen, whom I’ve talked about before, thinks that Paul might have been
part of this group.[2] I
think that makes a lot of sense, and we’ll come back to that topic as we go
along.
So, if that’s
how Gentiles could become part of the Jewish community apart from any consideration
of Jesus, then what happens when you add Jesus to this dynamic? Well, on the
one hand, you have the people Paul is arguing with in Galatians who seem to
think that if Gentiles want to participate in the Jesus thing, then they need to
take the steps that Gentile proselytes take to become Jews—they need to be
circumcised. And since they are becoming Jewish through circumcision, they also
need to observe the Jewish law and keep what we would today call a kosher diet.
Folks who answered the question this way drew on a pattern that was already in
place, especially outside of Palestine in the diaspora Jewish communities
around the Roman Empire.
But Paul has
a very different idea of how this should go. He argues that Gentiles don't have
to become Jewish proselytes in order to follow Jesus. He thinks that there is a
Gentile way of following Jesus that does not require them to become Jews. Fredriksen
talks about “eschatological Gentiles”[3]
because, as part of that apocalyptic expectation, as part of the Jewish
traditions of thinking about what's going to happen when God makes everything
right, there is this idea that Gentiles are going to be included in what God
does. You see this especially in Isaiah, which Paul draws on through the Book
of Romans when he's thinking about these things. This is Isaiah 2:1–5:[4]
The word
that Isaiah son of Amoz saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem.
2 In days to
come
the mountain of the Lord’s house
shall be
established as the highest of the mountains
and shall be raised above the hills;
Have you ever read in the Psalms and
noticed a heading on one of them calling it a Psalm of Ascent? That means it is
a Psalm of “going up.” They have this name because in the Jewish mind, both
geographically and in terms of elevation, you always went “up” to Jerusalem. Jerusalem
and the temple are up on the top of a hill, so when you go there, you have to
go “up” the hill. And this takes on symbolic meaning as well with the idea that
the temple is where God lives, and it is the high, central point where heaven
and earth touch. So you always go “up,” an this passage in Isaiah predicts a
time when—literally, or at least symbolically—this becomes true for the whole
world and not just for Jews. The passage continues:
all the
nations shall stream to it.
“Nations” here refers to the folks
we’ve been calling “Gentiles.” So the Gentiles are streaming to the Lord’s
house.
3 Many peoples shall come and say,
“Come, let
us go up to the mountain of the Lord,
to the house of the God of Jacob,
that he may
teach us his ways
and that we may walk in his paths.”
When we read this passage from our
contemporary Christian perspective, we make a mental substitution in our mind
so that we take “many peoples” to mean “many people.” We assume that this means
a large group of individuals, a large group of people. But what the text is
really talking about is all the many “nations” that we just read about. These
are all the different kinds of Gentiles that exist in the world, and they are
all streaming to the Lord’s house.
For out of
Zion shall go forth instruction
and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.
4 He shall
judge between the nations
and shall arbitrate for many peoples;
they shall
beat their swords into plowshares
and their spears into pruning hooks;
nation shall
not lift up sword against nation;
neither shall they learn war any more.
5 O house of
Jacob,
come, let us walk
in the light
of the Lord!
So, as reflected in and developing
from this passage in Isaiah, there was this expectation that when God shows up
to set the world right in the end, all the Gentiles are going to get really interested
in Israel's God. And, in this passage: do the Gentile nations ever stop being
the nations? Does it say they're going to come and become Jews? No. The nations
stay the nations. Sure, they stop fighting each other. They stop engaging in
typical Gentile behavior. But they are still Gentiles. All the Gentiles are
coming to Zion, to Jerusalem, and God is judging among the Gentiles—basically,
what we see here is the idea that the sovereignty of Israel’s God over all
things will be real and effectual in a new kind of way. It is what you might
expect if you prayed for God’s kingdom to come and God’s will to be done, and
then it very straightforwardly was! But all of these different kinds of Gentiles,
these nations, are listening, learning, and obeying the God of Israel while
remaining Gentiles.
This seems
to be the way of thinking that Paul works within and adapts to the new
situation, the new time on God’s clock, that he sees as the result of Jesus. Paul
sees Gentiles getting in on the Jesus thing and thinks of them in terms of
these “eschatological gentiles” (to circle back to Fredriksen).[5]
And, just like the nations in Isaiah 2, Paul doesn’t think that the Gentiles have
to stop being Gentiles in order to worship and obey the Lord. Thanks to Jesus,
thse Gentiles are now involved with God, they are part of God’s work in the
world, and they are part of a people of God that still has Israel at its core
but has now expanded beyond Israel to the nations.
Importantly,
for Paul, if you make these Gentiles become Jews then you’re getting in the way
of what God is doing in this new “age,” this new time on God’s clock. If you
make Gentiles become Jews, then they can’t be these eschatological Gentiles.
For Paul and this tradition he follows—which, again, seems to have been a
minority report in his day—Israel is supposed to say Israel, the Gentiles are
supposed to stay Gentiles, and the Lord is Lord over all of them. And that’s
why it would make sense if Paul didn’t think a Gentile could really become a
Jew through conversion as a proselyte. Why? Because, building on this sort of
tradition we see in Isaiah, the Gentiles aren't supposed to become Jews: they
are supposed to become eschatological Gentiles.
It is
important to understand this to understand all the negative comments Paul makes
about circumcision in his letters. Whenever he does that, whether in Galatians
5 when he wishes his opponents might castrate themselves, or in Phillians 2 when
he talks about the “dogs…who mutilate the flesh”[6]—Paul
is not talking about Jewish people who are circumcising their sons on the eighth
day. He's talking about those giving and receiving proselyte circumcision and
he’s denigrating the fact that they think they can turn Gentiles into Jews by
circumcising them. That's what he rejects and that’s what he’s criticizing. His
criticism of proselyte circumcision and of following the Jewish dietary guidelines
is not a rejection of Judaism or Jewish ways of following Jesus. Paul’s point
is that these things don’t apply to Gentiles because Gentiles, based on this
tradition out of Isaiah, don't need to become Jews in the last days. God will deal
with them precisely as eschatological Gentiles. To come back to Bedford, she
has a nice turn of phrase that sums this up: “In Christ, there is ample room
for difference.”[7]
[This is an edited transcript from an adult spiritual formation group that met at St. Charles Presbyterian Church in St. Charles, Missouri. It was transcribed and edited with the help of a student worker at Lindenwood University who wishes to remain anonymous, but who was also a big help. Click here to find an index of the full series.]
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