THE LETTER TO GALATIA
I am not going to go into an exhaustive study of the texts, which would take several volumes; I only want to point out enough to make out a decent case for my position. In the next document, the letter to Galatia, which apparently was written around 57 (or some think, even before), there are some things that are interesting for our purposes. In the salutation, Paul lays out his credentials as an Emissary of the Prince "whose authorization is both from Prince Jesus and God his Father, who brought him back from death." Again, we have the claim that the Resurrection is what is important. But listen to the way the body of the letter begins:
"I am appalled at how quickly you turned away from the one who by God's gift called you, and started after a different report of the good news--not that there really is a different one, except that there are people there who want to cause trouble and distort the good news about the Prince.
"But if even we--if an angel from heaven!--gives you a report that is different from the report we delivered to you, throw him out of your community! I've said it before, and I say it again; if anyone tells you a report different from the one that you received, throw him out!
"Do I look at the effect what I say has on men, or on God? Am I trying to make people like me? If I cared about what people thought of me, I wouldn't be the Prince's slave. So I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that the report of the good news that came from me was not something that came from a man; I didn't get it from any man or from being taught; I got it from a revelation by Prince Jesus."
Here we see that there are already people who are giving reports of the Good news that are different from what Paul, at least, thinks is authentic. This particular "different Report," as the rest of the letter indicates, included the requirement that the Gentile converts had to be circumcised like Jews, and presumably had to obey at least the major prescriptions of the Law.
This tells us a couple of things: First, that the Reports of the Good News that were being orally given were given in a Jewish context; Paul was breaking new ground in bringing them to the Gentiles--in fact, he says as much in this letter. But this means that any divinization would have to be in terms of YHWH, not some pagan god.
Secondly, the function of this letter is to show that what Paul originally taught the people of Galatia was not his own view, but the true teaching of the Christian community. The first thing he does is establish that he knows as much about Judaic practices as the "Judaizers" who were causing trouble. So what he was teaching did not spring from ignorance.
"You heard how I behaved when I was a believer in Judaism--how savagely I went after God's community and tried to destroy it, how I went deeper into Judaism than my own people of my own age, and was much more fanatical than they were in keeping the traditions of our ancestors.
"But the one who set me apart from before I was born and who called me--not that I deserve it--thought it good to reveal his Son in me so that I could deliver the report about him to the Gentiles; and right away, without consulting any flesh-and-blood person, and without going to Jerusalem to meet the Prince's emissaries who were appointed earlier than I was, I left for Arabia, and then went back to Damascus."
Paul was a Pharisee, and knew Jewish Theology even better than many of his Jewish contemporaries; and he claims, at least, that Jesus is no super-Gamaliel (under whom, we learn from Acts, he studied); he says he actually saw Jesus after Jesus' death, and Jesus personally explained to him what Christianity was all about.
But to confirm the authenticity of his revelation and his teaching, he checked it with the people who had known Jesus before he died:
"It was three years later that I went to Jerusalem to get to know Cephas (Peter, the Rock); and I stayed with him two weeks, without seeing any other emissary except James, the Master's relative. This is no lie that I am writing to you--before God it is not. . . .
"Then, fourteen years after that, I came to Jerusalem with Barnabas, and took Titus with us--I came because of a revelation I had had--and reported privately to people everyone respected about the good news I was delivering to the Gentiles, in case the path I'm following--and was following then--led nowhere."
Here Paul claims that what he is teaching--which, as we saw, is that Jesus died and came back to life, and that this means that our sins are forgiven and that we will return to life with him when he "comes out of seclusion"--is what people like Peter, James, and John were teaching, and what the community in Jerusalem was teaching the Jews. So Jesus the miracle-worker, not Jesus the sage, was the official view of Jesus among the people who actually saw Jesus alive, including a relative of his,(1) and of the early Jewish converts.
This is significant. Paul has used the expression "Son of God" to refer to Jesus; and if this was approved by the early Jewish community, it meant "Son of YHWH," not some kind of pagan semi-divinity. Doubtless no one realized what exactly this expression entailed at this point; but precisely because it made YHWH seem so much like Zeus, which would make the whole Christian enterprise so abhorrent to the Jews, it was almost certainly used with some reluctance and because the evidence that it should be used was overwhelming.
Paul counters the Judaizers by mentioning his confrontation with Peter; and in so doing he reveals what he considers the "meaningfulness" of Christianity:
"And in fact, when Cephas came to Antioch, I stood up to him and told him to his face that he should be ashamed of himself. He used to eat his meals with Gentiles, until some people came from James; and when they arrived, he stayed away and avoided them, because he was afraid of what the circumcised people would think. And the other Judeans(2) were as dishonest as he was; and even Barnabas got infected with the hypocrisy.
"Well, when I saw that they were not behaving consistently with the truth that was reported in the good news, I said to Cephas, "If you're a Judean and you do what the Gentiles do and don't live like a Judean, why do you insist on Judaizing the Gentiles? We--who were born Judeans and not sinners the way the Gentiles are--know that doing what the Law commands doesn't make anyone virtuous; a person only gets that way by belief in Jesus as the Prince; and so we have put our faith in Jesus as Prince, so that we'll become virtuous because of our faith in the Prince and not because of the law--because 'no material thing becomes virtuous' by doing what the Law commands.'"
So virtue can only be obtained now through belief that Jesus is the Prince, not by doing what the Law commands. And the reason is what follows (in Chapter 3):
"You aren't thinking, brothers and sisters in Galatia! Has someone cast a spell over you? You had the picture drawn before your very eyes of Prince Jesus on the cross. Let me just ask you this one thing: Did you receive the Spirit from doing what the Law says, or from belief in what you heard? Have you no heads? You started spiritually; are you going to end up materialists now? Is everything that happened to you for nothing?"
Here we have the first explicit reference to the crucifixion; and it is connected with receiving the Spirit--which, as the letter goes on to indicate, is connected with miraculous events among the people of Galatia themselves:
"If you keep on this way, it is for nothing! And so the one who condescended to bestow the Spirit on you and who performed deeds of power among you did it because of what you did in obeying the law. Didn't he? Or did he do it because of your belief in what you heard?"
Paul then says that those who believe in Jesus as the Prince are the true descendants of Abraham, and so the Judaizers are misleading the Galatians.
"After all, even Abraham 'believed in God, and this was evidence that he was a virtuous man.'
"So I want you to know that those who base their lives on belief are the ones who are descendants of Abraham. And Scripture foresaw that the Gentiles would become virtuous because of their belief when God gave this prophesy of good news to Abraham: 'All the nations--the Gentiles--will find approval in you.' So those who live from their belief win approval with the belief of Abraham.
"But people who base their lives on doing what the Law says are under a curse."
He elaborates on this a good deal, and adds the following in the course of it:
"The Prince bought freedom for us from the Law's curse when he became accursed himself for us; Scripture says, 'Everyone who is hanged is accursed'; and that allowed the blessing of Abraham in Prince Jesus to fall on the Gentiles, so that we could receive--through our belief--the Spirit that was promised. . . .
"Before belief came we were kept locked up in legal custody until the future belief would be disclosed. The Law was a kind of governess or school-master seeing to our upbringing toward the Prince, so that we could become virtuous by belief; and now that the belief has come, we aren't under the control of the governess any more.
"You are all children of God because of the belief in Jesus as the Prince. Those of you who were bathed in the Prince have put on the livery of the Prince; there's no such thing as Judean or Greek, or anything like slave or freeman, or male or female; you're all one person in Jesus the Prince; and if you are all part of the Prince, you are the 'descendant' of Abraham, and so heirs by the promise."
So Paul's idea is that belief that Jesus is the Prince makes a person one of the Prince's slaves, first of all--someone the ancients looked on as a tool (organon) of the master, like one of the organs of his body. Paul then stretches this to say that because (as he had said earlier, in a place I didn't quote) the life a believer lives is the Prince's life, then he actually becomes a cell in his body, and so is the one "descendant" who was to inherit the promise given to Abraham.
This is a far cry from repeating the sayings of Jesus the wise man. It is a working out of the implications of death for sin and resurrection, and reflection on what is the relation between the executed Prince and the documents of the Old Treaty. And this was written some thirty to thirty-five years after Jesus died.
But in this letter, Paul is not just fighting against the tendency to turn the original Christian message (which evidently focused precisely on the crucifixion and resurrection) into a "development" of Judaic thinking; he also has to deal with an attempt to turn it into a version of paganism:
"And that is how we are; when we were minors, we were enslaved by the things that make up the heavenly universe; and then when the time of bondage was up, God sent his Son, born to a woman, and born under the Law, to ransom us from the Law so that we could be adopted as sons and daughters. And to prove that you are sons and daughters, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into your hearts, where he cries, 'Abba!' ('Dad!')
"So you're not a slave any more; you are a son; and if you're a son, you are by God's act an heir; but before you knew about God, you were slaves to things which really weren't gods at all. But now that you recognize God--or rather, now that you're recognized by God--why are you turning back to these poor feeble components of the universe, and wanting to enslave yourselves to them all over again? You're starting to observe special days and months and seasons and years. I'm beginning to be afraid that all the trouble I took over you is being wasted."
Some of the converts seem to have reverted to reading horoscopes and guiding their lives by them. This is a tendency Paul confronts all through his letters, and an understandable one, given the background of the people and the superficial similarity between Christianity and paganism. We find the same thing somewhat more explicit in the letter to Colossae, for instance.
Where are we, then? The first letters of Paul indicate that the gist of what was being preached about Jesus was not the wise sayings, but the death and resurrection and what that implied for us, for our sins, and for our return to life from death. In this letter, Paul indicates that this is not just his Theology, but the same as the preaching that was going on from the people who saw Jesus before he died; and he deliberately tries to distance Christianity from being thought of as either a new interpretation of Judaism, as if Jesus were just a prophet bringing out hidden implications of the Law, or a kind of paganism, as if Jesus were a demigod who had power over the components of the universe.
So the early writings emphatically support the miracle-worker view of the historical Jesus, not the wise-sage theory.
Notes
1. The Greek word is adelphos, which ordinarily would mean "brother"; but it was used in a Judaic context for any close relative. E. g. Abram refers in Gen 13:8 to Lot, his nephew as (the Hebrew equivalent of) his ädelfój, and Moses speaks of cousins in Lev 10:4 also as ädelfoí. John mentions that at the foot of the cross were Jesus' mother and her mother's adelphe Mary of Clopas. Clearly, Mary's mother did not have two daughters both named Mary, this "sister" had to have been a cousin.
2. Jews. The term is like our "yankee," which actually referred to the people living in Judea, but which was applied to all the Hebrew people by those outside Judea and Galilee.
Next