by N. T. Wright
Understanding a letter like Galatians—where the author is dictating so fast and assuming so much shared understanding that he skips over a hundred things we wish he had spelled out more fully—is notoriously like listening to one side of a complicated telephone conversation. Speaker and hearer assume a great deal that the listener has to fill in. Misunderstandings are easy, particularly when, in the case of a letter like Galatians, controversies from much later periods have imposed their own grid of expectation and have thus highlighted, and perhaps distorted, some of Paul’s key themes. Ideally, the more we understand about the larger worlds within which the whole conversation was taking place, the more we will see why Paul needed to say exactly what he said.
We return, then, to the sequence of events in Antioch. The first occurrence is easy to understand. Peter came to Antioch, perhaps in early 48. His arrival is unexplained, but then all Peter’s movements are unrecorded after his surprising escape from prison in Acts 12:17; all we know is that he worked as a traveling missionary. The key point is that he had initially been happy to go along with the practice of the local Jesus-followers, having Jewish believers and Gentile believers living together as “family,” sharing the same table. This was, after all, the principle that he, Peter, had himself embraced in Acts 10–11, when he visited Cornelius, justifying his actions to critics in Jerusalem. “What God made clean,” he had been told, “you must not regard as common.”5 Peter had acted on that principle, reckoning that the power of the gospel had “cleansed” the Gentiles of the ritual or moral defilement that they possessed in Jewish eyes, defilement that would normally be seen as a barrier to the intimacy of table fellowship.
So far, so good. With the second event, however, everything changes. Some people—we don’t know who they are, but Paul says they “came from James” in Jerusalem—arrived in Antioch and insisted that if these Gentiles wanted to be part of the true family, to share in the great rescue operation that the One God had now set in motion, they would have to be circumcised. Paul, describing this moment to the Galatians, says that this made Peter change his mind. Up to this point he had happily sat down to eat with the Jesus-believing Gentiles, but now, seeing that the newcomers were taking a hard line, he drew back. Granted the status that Peter himself had in the movement, it isn’t surprising that the other Jewish Jesus believers followed suit. And, says Paul, “Even Barnabas was carried along by their sham.”6
It was not, then, simply a matter of teaching, of theoretical disagreements. It was about practice, the practice that revealed an underlying belief. The original practice in Antioch had reflected the belief that all Jesus believers, whether circumcised or not, belonged at the same table. The people who came from Judaea to Antioch were clearly saying that table fellowship with uncircumcised Gentiles was wrong and that Jewish Jesus-followers, as loyal Jews, should withdraw.
The lasting shock of this moment is concentrated in Paul’s use of the word “even.” There is pain in that word, like someone trying to take a step on a foot with a broken bone in it. Even Barnabas! Barnabas had been with him through the joys and the trials of the mission in Galatia. They had shared everything; they had prayed and worked and celebrated and suffered side by side. They had themselves welcomed many non-Jews into the family. And now this. So what had happened?
Paul is careful not to say that James had actually sent the people who came from Jerusalem. However, they seem to have come with some kind of claim to be acting on James’s authority. And the focus of their concern, readily explicable in view of the tensions in Jerusalem we explored a moment ago, was the vital importance of maintaining covenant loyalty. Circumcision was nonnegotiable because the purity of God’s people was essential. If God was indeed bringing in his kingdom, rescuing Israel and the world from the powers of darkness to which the pagan nations had given their allegiance, then of course a clean break was vital. If pagans were allowed into the covenant people, the people who would inherit God’s new creation, they would have to exhibit covenant loyalty too. And that meant circumcision.
From the perspective of a Jerusalem full of eager, zealous kingdom-minded Jews, all this made sense. From the perspective of Paul, who had already thought through what it meant that God was bringing his kingdom through the crucified Messiah, it made no sense at all. Paul had come to believe that Jesus couldn’t simply be added on to the earlier picture of God’s rescuing kingdom. The shocking and unexpected events of the Messiah’s death and resurrection, coupled with the dramatic sense of personal renewal for which the only explanation was the outpoured divine spirit, meant that everything had changed. A new world had been launched. And if people were trying to live in that new world while wanting at the same time to put on a good face before people who hadn’t realized just how radical this new world was, they were precisely “putting on a face,” playing a part, covering up reality with a mask. They were, in short, “playacting.” The Greek word for “playacting” is hypokrisis, from which we get the English term “hypocrisy.”
We can imagine the uproar and confusion, the mutual accusation and recrimination that followed. Paul gives a quick summary of what he himself had said in confronting Peter; how much of this anyone might have been able to hear in the confusion we cannot tell, and as with other summaries we may assume that Paul originally said it at much greater length. The problem was personal as well as theological. As one of the recognized “pillars,” Peter had drawn the other Jewish Jesus-followers with him in stepping back from the common table. Once he had made this move as one of the best-known figures in the whole movement, it would have been very hard for the other Jews to hold their nerve. This made it no doubt harder for Paul to confront him, but also all the more necessary. Peter had to be stopped in his tracks. Paul has acquired over time a reputation for being a cantankerous and controversial figure, and no doubt there was that element in his makeup. But if you see a friend about to step out, unawares, into the path of oncoming traffic, leading a group with him, the most loving thing to do is to yell that they must stop at once. That is exactly what Paul did:
When Cephas came to Antioch, I stood up to him face to face. He was in the wrong. . . . When I saw that they weren’t walking straight down the line of gospel truth, I said to Cephas in front of them all: “Look here: you’re a Jew, but you’ve been living like a Gentile. How can you force Gentiles to become Jews?”7
Forcing Gentiles to become Jews. That may not have been what Peter thought he had been doing, but Paul looks behind the immediate issue (Peter and the other Jews withdrawing from table fellowship with Gentile Jesus-followers) to the clear implication and effect. Once you create a circle within a circle, you are sending a message to those in the outer ring that they should move into the inner one. But Peter had been already “living like a Gentile”—not in the sense that he had been worshipping idols or indulging in sexual immorality, but in the sense that he had been in the habit of eating with people without regard for the Jew/Gentile distinction. He was therefore “in the wrong.” Either his present behavior meant that his previous stance had been wrong, or his previous stance, being right, meant that his present behavior was wrong.
Paul was in no doubt which of these was the correct analysis:
We are Jews by birth, not “Gentile sinners.” But we know that a person is not declared “righteous” by works of the Jewish law, but through the faithfulness of Jesus the Messiah.8
This is where, traditionally, interpreters have jumped to the wrong conclusion. The question of “righteousness” has dominated Western theological discussion, and most have assumed that Paul here suddenly switches from talking about Peter eating with Gentiles (or not eating, as the case may be) and starts talking about “how someone is justified” in the traditional Western sense, in other words, how someone previously a “sinner” comes to be “righteous” in God’s sight.
Now, Paul clearly believes in the importance of sin and of being rescued from it. But that is not what is at stake in Jerusalem, Antioch, or Galatia. Wh
at matters is status within the covenant family. The word “righteous,” like the Greek and Hebrew words that term often translates, refers here to someone “being in a right relationship” with the One God, and the “relationship” in question is the covenant that God made with Abraham. As we will see presently, for instance in the decisive conclusion to the central argument in Galatians 3:29, the question Paul has to address is: How can you tell who are the true children of Abraham? And his answer is focused firmly on Jesus. So Paul’s point to Peter is simple. What matters is being part of the covenant family, and the covenant family is not defined by Jewish law, but “through the faithfulness of Jesus the Messiah.”
Here again we meet the powerful and many-sided word “faithfulness,” pistis in Greek. As we have seen, that same Greek word can mean “faith” in its various senses and also “faithfulness,” “loyalty,” or “reliability.” Here and elsewhere Paul seems to play on what seem to us multiple meanings; they may not, of course, have looked like that to him. The point is that, in a world where the key thing for a zealous Jew was “loyalty” to God and his law, Paul believed (1) that Jesus the Messiah had been utterly faithful to the divine purpose, “obedient even to the death of the cross” as he says elsewhere;9 (2) that following Jesus, whatever it took, had to be seen as itself a central expression of loyalty to Israel’s God; (3) that the followers of Jesus were themselves marked out by their belief in him, confessing him as “Lord” and believing that he was raised from the dead; and (4) if this Jesus-shaped loyalty was the vital thing, then nothing that the law could say was to come between one Jesus-follower and another. In other words (continuing Paul’s description of what he said to Peter):
That is why we too believed in the Messiah, Jesus: so that we might be declared “righteous” on the basis of the Messiah’s faithfulness, and not on the basis of works of the Jewish law. On that basis, you see, no creature will be declared “righteous.”10
This adds another element, which Paul does not here spell out. Once Jewish law is made the standard for membership, that very law will raise sharp questions about anyone at all, Jews included. Read Deuteronomy and see that Israel as a whole will rebel, turn away from the One God, and suffer the consequences. On this basis, Paul urges Peter (and all the others listening to the confrontation or who hear his letter when it is read out loud) to think through the quite new position:
Well, then: if, in seeking to be declared “righteous” in the Messiah, we ourselves are found to be “sinners,” does that make the Messiah an agent of “sin”? Certainly not! If I build up once more the things which I tore down, I demonstrate that I am a lawbreaker.11
In other words, if we start with the normal Jewish categories that Paul states above (“We are Jews by birth, not ‘Gentile sinners’”), in which Gentiles are automatically “sinners” because they don’t have the law, then if someone like Peter finds himself called to live on equal terms with “Gentile sinners” because that is required by his membership of the Messiah’s people, does that mean that the Messiah is now condoning or colluding with “sin”? This, we recall, is exactly the kind of thing that people in Jerusalem would be worried about. They might see this as fraternizing with the enemy, just when they, back home, were doing their best to stay loyal to God and the law and so to hasten the coming kingdom! They might see, in Paul’s claim to be following the Messiah, a false Messiah who was leading people astray. This, they might say, is just what the law itself had warned might happen.
Paul counters this line of thought at once. If Peter or anyone else starts by pulling down the wall between Jew and Gentile (as Peter had indeed done: “You’re a Jew, but you’ve been living like a Gentile”) and then decides to rebuild it, all he is doing is pointing the finger back at himself. He is admitting that he was wrong to “live like a Gentile,” and he is invoking the law, which will simply remind him that he is in any case a lawbreaker.
There is only one way forward, and that is to go where the Messiah has led, through death to new life. This journey is the same for all the Messiah’s people, Jew and Gentile alike. Here we come to the very heart of Paul’s understanding of what had happened in the messianic events involving Jesus. It is the central principle around which his answer to the three very different situations—in Jerusalem, in Syrian Antioch, and in Galatia—had been thought out. Paul describes this in the first-person singular (“I”) not because he is holding himself up as a shining example of a particular spiritual experience, but because if even he, as a zealous Jew, had to tread this path, then it would be obvious that it was the only way to go:
Let me explain it like this. Through the law I died to the law, so that I might live to God. I have been crucified with the Messiah. I am, however, alive—but it isn’t me any longer, it’s the Messiah who lives in me. And the life I do still live in the flesh, I live within the faithfulness of the son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.12
Through the law I died to the law, so that I might live to God. That is one of the most extraordinary statements ever written by a Jew of the first or perhaps any century. It tells us at the same moment that Paul regards himself as a loyal Jew, loyal to God and the law—and that he had come to see the law itself as pointing forward to a kind of “death,” pointing to something beyond itself, something that could only be attained by coming out of the law’s own private sphere and emerging into a new world. The law itself had envisaged a moment when it would be upstaged by a new reality, the messianic reality. Though Paul does not mention baptism in this passage—he will come to that a chapter later—the sequence of thought he describes here is exactly what, in his view, baptism is all about (as in Romans 6), which is leaving the old life behind and coming through “death” into a new life entirely. And insofar as he is still the same flesh-and-blood human being (“the life I do still live in the flesh”), he now finds his identity not in his human genealogy or status, but in the Messiah himself and his (the Messiah’s) faithfulness and loyalty. If, in other words, it’s loyalty to God and the law that you want, then the Messiah’s death and resurrection has defined for all time what that actually looks like. When someone comes to be part of that messianic reality, then this, rather than their previous standing as “Jew” or “Gentile” (along with any outward marks of that standing), is the only thing that matters.
The mention of the Messiah’s “love” (“who loved me and gave himself for me”) is not merely an appeal to emotion, though it is that as well. The idea of a “love,” coming from Israel’s God and rescuing people from the fate they would otherwise suffer, goes all the way back to the covenant between God and Israel and the rescuing act of the Exodus. Paul will develop this thought elsewhere. For the moment, as a summary of what he said to Peter in Antioch (and with “certain persons from James” listening in, no doubt shocked at what they were hearing), it leads directly to Paul’s conclusion:
I don’t set aside God’s grace. If “righteousness” comes through the law, then the Messiah died for nothing.13
In other words, if Peter and, by implication, those who have come from James try to reestablish a two-tier Jesus movement, with Jews at one table and Gentiles at another, all they are doing is declaring that the movement of God’s sovereign love, reaching out to the utterly undeserving (“grace,” in other words), was actually irrelevant. God need not have bothered. If the Torah, the Five Books of Moses, was sufficient for all time to define the people of God, then there is no need for a crucified Messiah. Or to put it the other way, if God has declared, in the resurrection, that the crucified Jesus really was and is the Messiah, then God is also declaring that Moses could only take them so far. He pointed to a promised land, an “inheritance,” but could not himself take the people into it. Galatians is all about the ultimate “inheritance” that God had promised. And, as we shall see presently, Paul insisted that the “heirs” of this “inheritance” could not be defined by the Torah, but only by the Messiah himself, the ultimate “heir.”
So much, then,
for the confrontation between Paul and Peter at Antioch. It has been commonplace among New Testament interpreters to assume that Paul lost the argument and so had to set off on his later missionary journeys without the support of the Antioch church. I see no good reason for this conclusion. The distance from Syrian Antioch to South Galatia is not great, and the entire situation assumes that people could and did travel quickly and easily between the two. Had Paul lost the argument, I think it extremely unlikely that he would have referred to it at all, let alone in these terms, in writing to Galatia. In any case, he later returns to Antioch without any hint of trouble.14 But this brings us to the point where we have to back up and examine the third element in the situation at Antioch. What had been going on in Galatia itself?
* * *
The situation behind Paul’s letter was clearly complex. To reconstruct it, we will not be relying simply on “mirror reading” from what Paul actually says, though there is bound to be some of that. We will also be doing our best to understand the larger situation in Jerusalem, in Galatia, and in Paul’s base at Antioch.
Once again we must avoid oversimplifications, especially any suggestion (this has been common) that the Galatian Jesus-followers, having been taught good Reformed theology, were now embracing Arminianism or Pelagianism and trying to add to their God-given salvation by doing some “good works” of their own. We should also, of course, avoid the equal and opposite suggestion, that Paul was simply trying to manipulate communities, putting forth a “sociological” agenda and using “theological” arguments as a smokescreen for his real purposes. Neither of these proposals will do. All the signs are that Paul understood the scripturally rooted purposes of the One God to have been fulfilled in the Messiah, Jesus, and that he understood this to involve the creation of a particular type of community. As far as he was concerned, therefore, what we call “theology” and what we call “sociology” belonged firmly together.
