The Order of the Books -- Galatians

From one of my many projects...

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A number of scholars think that Galatians was the first letter Paul wrote and thus the first book of the New Testament written. I’ll share that option at the end of the chapter. Let me first share how I picture the story unfolding, expanding on what Paul himself says in Galatians 1-2.

In Acts 13-14, Paul and two other individuals carry out a mission to the island of Cyprus—the so-called “first” missionary journey. The other two men are Barnabas, who is actually the leader of the mission, and John Mark, who goes along to help and assist. Mark was Barnabas’ cousin and is traditionally thought to be the author of the Gospel of Mark.

In all likelihood, Paul had already been preaching about Jesus’ death, resurrection, and return for almost a decade and a half before this time. After Jesus appeared to Paul around the year AD33, he got into trouble preaching in Damascus and Arabia (which at that time was just to the east of Damascus, Gal. 1:17). Then he probably preached for ten years in his home territory of Tarsus and perhaps even north in Cappadocia (Gal. 1:21).

After the three of them went to Cyprus, Paul suggests they go north to Asia Minor (modern day Turkey). Mark is not happy about the idea. He goes home. But Paul and Barnabas go north and found the churches of a region known as Galatia. These include cities like Antioch (of Pisidia), Iconium, Lystra, and Derbe. It is to these cities that Paul later addresses the letter called Galatians.

Galatians 1-2 tell the backstory that has led to the writing of this letter. Initially, Paul had been a vigorous opponent to the Jesus movement (1:13). He had been a Pharisee (Phil. 3:5). Pharisees were a Jewish group who followed the Jewish Law according to interpretations and traditions that were very strict and detailed. They were especially concerned with what you ate, how you ate it, and who you ate it with.

According to Acts 9, Paul was on his way to Damascus in the north to drag certain Christians back to Jerusalem. But Jesus appeared to him, blinding him and revealing himself to Paul. Paul indicates in Galatians that he had very little contact with Peter or any of the other disciples of Jesus during that time (1:18-19).

Fourteen years after he came to Christ, around the year AD49, the question of non-Jews came to a head. The leadership of the church in Jerusalem comes to an understanding. We find Paul’s side in Galatians 2. Acts 15 gives us another picture of the decision. They decide that Gentiles do not have to convert fully to Judaism to be saved. Gentile men do not have to get circumcised.

In Galatians 2, Paul describes it as a somewhat private meeting in Jerusalem. On the one side of the meeting is he and Barnabas. They meet with the core disciples of the church in Jerusalem—Peter, John, and Jesus’ half-brother James. Paul and Barnabas bring along a young Gentile convert named Titus as an object lesson.

Titus is “not forced” to be circumcised and fully convert to Judaism (2:3). The wording makes us wonder if that was their ideal. But they concede that a non-Jewish man could be saved from the coming wrath of God without becoming circumcised and fully becoming a Jew.

This decision was not unopposed. Paul mentions “false brothers” who did not agree (Gal. 2:4). They were Christians who were zealous for the Jewish Law. They wanted any Gentile believers to become Jews if they expected to be part of the Christ movement. Acts 15 says that there were Pharisees who had believed but apparently had not stopped being Pharisees (Acts 15:5).

Acts 15 apparently did not end the disagreement. Jesus’ brother James had become the leader of the church in Jerusalem. He had conceded that Gentiles did not have to convert to Judaism to escape the coming judgment. Gentiles did not have to keep all the Jewish Law. But he was apparently concerned that Jewish Christians themselves would become lax in their Law-keeping.

First, Peter comes up to Antioch. At first, he eats the weekly Lord’s Supper with the Gentile believers. All is well. But then some people come from James in Jerusalem. All the prejudices against Gentiles come into play. Where did this meat come from? Was it prepared properly? Are these Gentile Christians sexually immoral because “we all know” about those Gentiles?

Peter and the other Jewish Christians stop eating the weekly meal of the Lord’s Supper with them. Paul is incensed. He basically calls Peter a hypocrite in front of the whole church (Gal. 2:11-14). Even Barnabas seems to side with Peter, perhaps not so much because he agreed but because he wanted to address the issue in a way that submitted to authority.

As difficult as this situation must have been, God brought good things from it. Paul and Barnabas agree to disagree and separate. This doubles the mission. So while the argument may have been unpleasant, the good news ends up traveling to Greece much more quickly as a result.

God may also use this conflict to catalyze Paul’s sense that we are “justified by faith” and not by works of the Jewish Law. To be “justified” is to be right with God. Paul emphasizes that a person became right with God by faith in God, by trusting in God and committing to God.

It seemed hypocritical to Paul that Peter would insist on the Gentiles at Antioch keeping Old Testament purity laws when Peter himself wasn’t very careful. Remember, Paul had been a Pharisee. He knew a lot about purity laws. Peter had never kept the Law as scrupulously as he had.

As a Pharisee, Paul had kept the Jewish Law very well. In Philippians 3:6, he said he had been blameless at keeping it. So when Jesus called him, he realized God must be looking for something quite different. “Works of Law,” circumcision, purity rules, food laws, Sabbath observance—these were not the heart of getting right with God. Rather, it was faith or trust in God.

A Gentile could have faith in God without being circumcised. A Gentile could have faith in God and still eat pork. A Gentile could have faith in God and not observe the Jewish Sabbath. A Gentile could be justified by faith.

Paul may not have had the full theology worked out in Antioch. But his ongoing debates with both believing and non-believing Jews helped refine his argument over time. The biggest flash point after Antioch sparked his letter to the Galatians.

Paul and Barnabas founded the churches of Galatia in the years 46-48. Then he visited the churches again at the beginning of his “second” missionary journey around AD50. He may even have visited them a third time at the beginning of his third missionary journey around AD53. It is from one of these churches (Lystra) that he took one of his key young co-workers, Timothy.

Up to that time, these churches had been “running well” (4:7). However, some new voices had entered into the community. These were what we might call “Judaizers.” They were individuals who insisted that Gentiles must fully convert to Judaism in order to be saved from the coming wrath and be part of the kingdom of God. They were either Jewish believers by birth or Gentiles who had themselves converted to Judaism.

Paul is very angry with them when he writes Galatians. He probably would consider them “false brothers” as in Galatians 2:4. They want the Gentile Galatians to get circumcised. Oh yeah? Paul says. If they like circumcision so much, they should just cut their whole male organ off (5:12).

Paul’s struggle with these Judaizing elements in the church would leave traces in his next few writings—Philippians, 2 Corinthians, and especially Romans. The edge might have cooled down, but we just don’t really get the allusions to this conflict before, in 1 Thessalonians or 1 Corinthians. We only get the hint that he has taught his Gentile churches that “all things are lawful for me” (1 Cor. 10:23). In Galatians, he is in the thick of argument about this claim, and we can see him working out the details of that theology, which will culminate in Romans.

The core of his argument is in Galatians 2:15-21. Jewish believers know that keeping the Jewish Law is not enough to make them right with God. They know they need the “faithfulness of Jesus.” There is debate about this phrase in 2:16. I suspect Paul is making a play on words. In the first place, I wonder if he is referring to the faithful death of Jesus (cf. Phil. 2:8). He would imply that Christians of his day agreed across the board that the cross was essential for the restoration of God’s people.

In the last chapter, we saw that the cross was central to Paul’s preaching. We get some details in Galatians 3. Although it is hard for us to follow—because our worldview is different—Paul indicates that Jesus absorbed the curse of the world on the cross. Jew and Gentile alike were under a curse because of our sin (Gal. 3:10-14). Jesus took on that curse by being cursed on the cross. If we become incorporated “in Christ” by receiving the Holy Spirit, then our curse is removed and we can be right with God.

It is a difficult argument for us to follow. The bottom line is that trusting in Christ so that we are right with God is a different “system” than the Jewish Law. The Jewish Law only tells us that we have a problem. It cannot solve it. Only the faithfulness of Jesus and, to take the phrase a different way, faith in Jesus can make us right with God. We trust in what God did through Jesus. We get on the Jesus ship and we are shielded from the curse of the Law.

The Holy Spirit makes this happen. Without the Holy Spirit, as Paul will develop especially in Romans 6-8, we cannot hope to succeed against the temptations of our flesh. Without God’s Spirit helping us, we are destined to be moral losers. But the Spirit inside is like being plugged into God. “Walk in the Spirit and you will not fulfill the desires of the flesh” (Gal. 5:16). The fruit of the Spirit are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (5:22-23). This is the result we should get when we are plugged into God’s power supply.

There are other theories of when Galatians was written. A very popular one is that Galatians is the first letter Paul wrote, even before the Jerusalem Council. In this theory, the Jerusalem Council of AD49 cleared up all these debates. Very tidy and harmonious! However, it seems like more time has passed than that since Paul first founded these churches. He has arguably visited them more than once (4:13). They have believed long enough to have been running well for a bit (5:7). In Galatians, Paul often mentions being persecuted, which probably implies more time has passed. In the end, Galatians feels like it belongs more to Paul’s Philippians, 2 Corinthians, and Romans phase than to the time of 1 Thessalonians and 1 Corinthians.

Craig Keener's Galatians Introduction

I don't usually read commentaries from beginning to end, but it could happen with Craig Keener's new Galatians commentary. Here are thoughts on the introduction.

Introduction
I really liked his introduction and found myself in agreement with almost everything. Here are some notes:

• "Ancient authors did not always follow hierarchical outlines" (xlvii). I actually think Galatians has a pretty clear outline, but I take his point.
• Some argue that Galatians was more about "staying in" than "getting in." Not sure I agree with that.
• "Paul envisions gentile believers as spiritual proselytes." but not physical ones. Yes
• "Most scholars in Luther's day thought that Galatians abridged Paul's earlier argument in Romans, whereas most scholars today deem Romans the later, more mature work." (4) Interesting. I did not know this and the contrary seems so obvious today.
• Themes in Galatians: gospel, law, promise, Spirit. (6)
• A common median for the dating of Galatians is 51. (7) So Keener also dates it to about 50-52 (13, perhaps from Corinth then?). 
• He dates it to after the Jerusalem Council because he thinks the similarities between Galatians 2 and Acts 15 are too many for them to be different events. I agree in general. (e.g., 11)
• However, he fairly treats the theory that Galatians 2 relates to the famine trip of Acts 11. I agree with him and others like Lightfoot that the timing would be too scrunched for that.
• I personally prefer a date while Paul was at Ephesus, around the time of 1 Corinthians, ca. 54ish.
• Paul's audience is Gentile. His opponents probably Jewish. Keener favors a group of people connected with Jerusalem. (e.g., 25-26)
• He favors south Galatia. I came to agree between the first and second editions of my New Testament Survey book. Older commentators thought it was north Galatia because they only knew the classical references and early Christian commentators weren't aware of the Roman boundaries of a previous day. A large majority agree today. What clinched it for me was the common sense that Acts talks a lot about south Galatia.
• Interesting that Galatians would have filled up about half a standard papyrus roll. Two copies would have cost about 6.56 denarii or today $722.

For Patrons: Who were the Galatians?

Every week I do a special podcast/video on Patreon for those who contribute $5 a month to my ongoing podcast commentary on Acts and daily videos on the Greek. This week's post asks who the Galatians to whom Paul wrote Galatians were. Were they the "south Galatians" we meet in Acts or some "north Galatians" Paul visited on his second missionary journey. All the secrets of the universe are here. :-)

Seminary PL25: Leadership and the Gentile Mission

This is the eleventh post on church management in my "Seminary in a Nutshell" series. In this series, I first did a section on the Person and Calling of a Minister. Now this is the twenty-fourth post in a section on the Pastor as a Leader (see at the bottom).

The previous post in this series was on basic conflict resolution. This week continues with a case study from the New Testament church.
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1. At times the New Testament church is held up as the ideal church, as if all we need to do is get back to the way things were at the very beginning. There is probably a sense in which the book of Acts does give us somewhat of an idealized picture of the earliest church. Although Acts does mention some of the conflicts of the earliest Christian community, we know more details from elsewhere, giving us a sense that at times matters were messier than we might think if we only had the book of Acts. Acts, after all, was written as a certain "apologetic" for the true nature of the "Way," and indeed it reveals that true nature.

There were thus different groups in the early church, not quite denominations, but with a similar flavor. There was the Jewish leadership of Jerusalem, with fairly "conservative" figures like James and Peter. There was also a "more conservative" group in the church that we might call Judaizers. They believed that Gentile converts to faith needed to go the whole way and become Jews. Paul was far more "liberal" than these groups, teaching that Gentiles did not need to keep the parts of the Jewish Law that distinguished Jew from Gentile. Finally, there was a group "more liberal" than Paul who felt free to eat at pagan temples and perhaps did not consider the sexual legislation of the Old Testament to still be in force.

2. These varying positions were conflicts waiting to happen. Paul certainly came into continual conflict with the Corinthian church over various matters. He tries to resolve the conflicts with varying degrees of firmness. He was usually quite confrontational when it came to sexual issues, such as when he commands the Corinthians to hand over to Satan a man who was sleeping with his step-mother.

He was more tactful when it came to the question of food offered to idols. He believes that the food itself is morally neutral, that the issue of morality relates to the conscience of the person eating. If you believe such food to be unclean, then it is unclean to you and you should not eat it. Do not ask where meat comes from. Eat it with thanksgiving. If it is going to cause someone else's faith problems, do not eat it for their sake. And do not go to a pagan temple because that is a bad witness and there are demons there.

However, this was not, as we will see, the position of the Jerusalem church, especially James, the Lord's brother. What we learn from Paul here is that some issues are non-negotiable, while others require us to navigate differing understandings within the church. We find common ground and then respectfully act in accordance with our consciences on matters of disagreement.

3. On the other end of the spectrum, Paul came into conflict with Judaizers who tried to get Gentiles to convert fully to Judaism. On his own turf, he was quite firmly against this group, because he saw them as undermining his churches. It is important to realize that the individuals in Galatia who were urging circumcision were Christians. It was not non-believing Jews that were the target of Paul's attack in his letter to the Galatians, but people who believed Jesus was the Messiah.

As Paul's mission got fully underway, he stood rather strongly against this potential influence on his churches. In Philippians 3:2, he calls these Christians "dogs" and the "mutilation" (katatome), mocking them for not truly being the "circumcision" (peritome). In Galatians, he warns that those who get circumcised will "fall from grace" (Gal. 5:4). Once again, we see that there are some non-negotiables for Paul. On other matters he urges a freedom of conscience.

He was apparently more tentative at the very beginning. After his first missionary journey, on which his ministry to non-Jews seems to have gained full steam, he consulted with the church leadership in Jerusalem (Gal. 2:1-5). With great cleverness, he took his uncircumcised co-worker Titus. This tactic made the issue real--are you going to tell this young man, this God-fearer, that God will condemn him on the Day of Judgment? Look at his faith!

Paul wins this battle. James and Peter agree that Titus does not have to become a Jew. They did not "force" him to get circumcised (Gal. 2:3). However, the wording suggests that James at least thought it would be ideal for him to convert fully. A win for Paul. His theology is allowed. Therefore, he can do his mission work accordingly.

This is a reminder that different pastors reach different audiences, often with slightly different teaching and approaches. Sometimes we do this under the same organizational umbrella. Sometimes we do so under differing denominations. But the gospel is often enriched by this diversity. As Paul says in Philippians 1:15-17, Christ is still being preached, and that is a good thing.

Acts 15 gives us a picture of this issue being officially settled. We know from Paul's letter that not everyone agreed. But the Jerusalem leadership--James and Peter especially--agreed that Gentiles did not have to become Jews to be part of the church. There was an official position, despite some continuing individual disagreement. The church could move forward.

4. But Paul and the Jerusalem leadership would part company soon enough. The blow up would take place at Antioch, one of the most exciting churches of the second decade of Christianity (40s). By the late 40s, there were numerous Gentile believers there. They were fellowshipping freely with the Jewish believers at Antioch. It is from this church that Paul and Barnabas launched the first missionary journey.

Jerusalem hears about this vibrant church, and Peter comes up to visit. At first, he fully participates in the Jew-Gentile fellowship of believers. But James is worried about a slippery slope. They had decided that Gentiles did not need to keep the Jewish Law to be saved, but he was concerned that Jews would now think that they also no longer needed to keep it.

He seemed particularly concerned about the purity laws. Was the food prepared correctly? Where did the meat come from?

5. So Peter stops eating with Gentile Christians, and the other Jews at Antioch are pressured to do so as well. Paul vehemently disagrees. We are all justified by faith, not by these sorts of "works of Law." He comes into direct conflict with the church leadership, and calls what Peter is doing hypocrisy (Gal. 2:14). The unity of the body of Christ trumps the purity laws.

Paul may or may not have handled this situation well. On the other hand, perhaps it was important for him to stand up for Gentile believers publicly. Sometimes public confrontation is necessary to defend others, to keep them from being discouraged or demoralized.

On the other hand, Barnabas took a more conciliatory tact. Although he may have agreed with Paul theologically, he did not agree with Paul procedurally. Perhaps he was thinking that they would get together and talk the issue through. They could come to some compromise or arrangement. They just needed to slow things down and work things out.

Paul was presumably long gone before that happened. The letter of Acts 15:23-29 may give us the compromise. As long as Gentiles will not prepare meat by strangling, as long as there will be no blood in the meat, as long as the meat has not been sacrificed at a temple to some god, as long as the Gentiles themselves are not sexually immoral, then Jewish and Gentile believer can eat together.

Paul only agreed on the matter of sexual immorality. On the other issues he has a "Don't ask" policy. Do not ask where the meat came from. Eat it with thanksgiving. He and Barnabas would part ways when it came time for a second missionary journey.

6. But the gospel would benefit greatly from this split! Paul and Barnabas agree to disagree and they part ways. As a result, Paul ends up in Greece, writing the first books of the New Testament. Barnabas has a much less significant ministry close to home. So we see that this conflict vastly expanded early Christianity. The heart of Paul's mission took place outside of what was then the mainstream.

It is important to recognize that Paul and the Jerusalem church probably did not come to agreement on these points. In some ways they agreed to disagree. Acts 21 pictures James still trying to reel Paul in on the matter of his own keeping of the Jewish Law. Paul probably did continue to keep the Jewish Law in general, except when he thought it hindered the mission.

But Paul did not win the argument at Antioch. When he won the argument, he told us (e.g., Gal. 2:9-10). He says nothing of the sort about the blow up between him and Peter (Gal. 2:11-14). Paul does the bulk of his ministry presumably without the full support of the church's leadership.

Next Week: Pastor as Leader 26: Navigating Disputable Issues

Leadership in General

• Categories of Leadership
• Styles and Traits of Leaders
• How does God lead
• Leadership Pitfalls

Strategic Planning

• The Mission, Great and Small
• Identifying Mission
• Casting Vision
• Vision Statements
• Thinking Missionally
• Evaluating Strengths
• Identifying Core Values
• Setting Goals
• Leading Change
• Evaluating Progress/Resetting Goals

Church Management

• Managing the Church
• Leadership in the Early Church
• Leadership Structures in Church History
• Church Position Descriptions
• Leading Healthy Teams
• Good Communication
• Hiring, Recruiting, and Firing

Conflict Management

• Causes of Conflict
• The Third Mark of the Church
• Basic Conflict Resolution

The Assembly of God (Gal. 1:13)

Exploring a line of thinking this morning that I'm sure is sixty years old but not finding the paper trail.

1. In most of Paul's writings, he uses the word "church" (ekklesia) in regard to local assemblies, house churches. So he writes to the church, singular, at Corinth (1 Cor. 1:2) and Thessalonica (1 Thess. 1:1). But he writes to the churches, plural, in Galatia (1:2).

One interesting variation is in Galatians 1:13. Here he talks about persecuting "the church of God" in Jerusalem. There is something "ground zero" about this reference. It doesn't seem that he is referring to just another church--the church of God in Jerusalem. He was persecuting the church of God.

Nor do I think this is an abstract reference to the Church universal like we find in Ephesians or Colossians. In fact, this is one shift in these two letters from Paul's use in his earlier letters. In Galatians 1:13 Paul is not referring to "the Church" in a universal sense like Ephesians. [Indeed, it is a source of endless frustration to me how much discussion just mows over these sorts of revealing distinctions.]

No, there is something else going on here, a glimpse into primordial Christianity. I believe the earliest community in Jerusalem saw themselves in some way as the assembly of God.

2. Paul gives us a hint of what James, Peter, John, and others were thinking when he tells us they were known as "pillars" (Gal. 2:9). Pillars of what? Pillars of a temple, I presume (cf. Rev. 3:12).

Herein is a hint, I suspect, that the earliest Christian community saw themselves as a spiritual temple of sorts. Paul of course will use this imagery in 1 Corinthians 3:16 when he calls the Corinthian church a temple of God. He uses imagery of spiritual sacrifice more than once elsewhere (e.g., Rom. 12:1-2, 15:16; Phil. 2:17, 4:18).

So the earliest "church of God" in Jerusalem was a temple of sorts, it would seem. Was it a replacement temple? I think it is at least safe to say that it was a parallel temple. Yet what do we make of the picture in Acts of an early church that participated freely in the temple? It is true that this is "Luke" giving us a picture of an orderly community, so it would fit his thematic tendencies to omit temple critique (he lets Stephen slip by).

Perhaps there is a middle ground. Perhaps, like Jesus, like Stephen, like the Essenes, the earliest church had a critique of the temple. But perhaps they did not yet connect the dots to its complete replacement by the community. Critique short of replacement.

3. I mentioned the Essenes. I'll admit I find it hard not to think that there is some influence here. Not going in the same direction as Jesus, I don't think. He was on a path of inclusion. They were on a path of separation. But the earliest church was a mixture. There were Pharisees in it, for example (Acts 15:5). James clearly insisted on keeping purity rules (Gal. 2:12).

In short, I find no compelling reason to think that the earliest church might not have taken at least the language of Qumran in thinking of themselves as the definitive yahad of God and have also taken the sense of the Essenes that they were a kind of parallel temple.

Here is a relevant passage in 1QS: "The council of the community shall be established in truth. It shall be an everlasting plantation, a house of holiness for Israel, an assembly of supreme holiness for Aaron. They shall be eyewitnesses to the truth at the judgment, and shall be the elect of goodwill who shall atone for the Land and pay to the wicked their reward. It shall be that tried wall, that 'precious cornerstone, whose foundations shall neither rock nor sway in their place.' It shall be a most holy dwelling for Aaron with everlasting knowledge of the covenant of righteousness, and shall offer up sweet fragrance. It shall be a house of perfection and truth in Israel that they may establish a covenant according to the everlasting precepts.

"And they shall be an agreeable offering, atoning for the land and determining the judgment of wickedness, and there shall be no more iniquity. When they have been confirmed for two years in perfection of way by the authority of the community, they shall be set apart as holy within the council of the men of the community. And the interpreter shall not conceal from them, out of fear of the spirit of apostasy, any of those things hidden from Israel which have been discovered by him. And when these become members of the community in Israel according to all these rules, they shall separate from the habitation of ungodly men and shall go into the wilderness to prepare the way of Him, as it is written, 'Prepare in the wilderness the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a path for our God.'" (1QS 8.5-14)

It is very hard not read such passages and not eventually see a cumulative case for Essene influence on the early church, at least in language.

4. Even if we could make a plausible case for the impact of Essene language on the earliest believers in Jerusalem, we have no information to know exactly what the contours of that influence were. For example, it is easy enough to think that the earliest Christians saw themselves as an eschatological community. So here is the easiest point of contact with Qumran.

If parallel temple imagery was part of the Essenes' eschatological language, then it could be that they absorbed it along with the language of eschatological community. It would not thereby imply an end to the temple as an institution in itself, any more than the Qumran language implied the end of the temple as an institution. Those dots would not be connected until later, particularly after the temple was destroyed in AD70.

Some thoughts...

Leadership insights from Galatians 2

I know I've written repeatedly on this passage and Acts 15, but I went through Galatians 2 with a class in Indy this morning again. Here were my main leadership observations:

1. Paul and Barnabas take Titus, an uncircumcised person, with them to Jerusalem when they are inquiring about whether Gentiles need to be circumcised to be saved.  Brilliant!  It's much easier to give easy, dismissive answers about a group that is far off somewhere than when they are right in front of you and you can see the real consequences of your ideas.

2. P and B go privately before the issue goes very live and very public.  Brilliant!  Groups can get in a frenzy. It's much easier to get something passed if you've already got the stakeholders on your side ahead of time.

3. Jerusalem wants something--"ok, just remember the poor."  One thing a seasoned bureaucrat learns is that most committees feel like they need to change something. So the cynical might even put something obvious to fix in a proposal. That way the annoying person (you know who it is) gets to feel powerful and the proposal can move on.

4. James, Peter, and John probably still thought it was optimal for Titus to get circumcised, but they don't force him. Later on, James sends people up to Antioch to make sure the "give an inch, they'll take a mile" principle isn't in play, the slippery slope. James wants to make sure that, even though Gentiles can be saved, the Jews are still following the rules.

This is smart strategy on his part, although he turns out to be wrong on the issue...

5. ... which leads us to the realization that hindsight is 20/20.  It would not have been clear at all who was right at the time.  It's only because Paul's side of the story ended up in Scripture that we know he was in the right. At the time, most people probably thought he was wrong.

6. Even though Paul was in the right, he may not have gone about it the right way. He confronts Peter in front of everyone, calls him a hypocrite.  Probably bad form. Barnabas' approach may have been better--submit now, move for change in the long term (one step back, two steps forward).

7. God uses the rift. Paul probably loses the argument (he would have told us if he had won). He and Barnabas agree to disagree and Paul ends up going to Greece. Win-win.

My Explanatory Notes on Galatians Published...

If you do a search on this blog for explanatory notes on Galatians, a mess of posts from 2008 will come up, back when I was regularly teaching a course in Romans and Galatians.  I translated and blogged through all of Galatians verse by verse and provided what I called "explanatory notes." The name is of course an allusion to John Wesley's Explanatory Notes on the New Testament, which we are privileged to have not least because of an extensive sickness that pinned him down a bit in 1755.

My notes were like his in that they are brief interactions with small bits of text without footnotes.  I do indicate where I am interacting with the thoughts of others with words like "Some think...."  I think that's a little better than Wesley did, who only mentions his sources in the preface (like Bengel's Gnomon). But the main goal is to read the text inductively.

Another feature of my notes was that they were meant to explain rather than apply the biblical text. They are thus about explaining what Paul probably meant rather than going through the admittedly more pressing hermeneutical task of knowing how to apply his meaning to today.

I may go on to publish the similar notes I made on 1 Thessalonians, Philippians, and Hebrews back in those days.  I also started James and Romans once upon a time.  Perhaps I'll finish those if these notes seem interesting to people.

Here's the 143 page paperback, with original translation and notes ($6.49):



And here's the Kindle edition ($3.99):

Leadership and the Gentile Mission

If you want to know the kind of integration we are doing at Wesley Seminary, here is a vidcast lecture I did for the online leadership course. Students then evaluate the lecture. Do they agree or disagree with my analysis? What are some additional or different insights they might draw?

Here is the link: http://interactive.ihets.org/p58765278

Reflecting on Galatians (Mutiny 3)

The entries for this chapter draft have been:

The Setting of Galatians
The Message of Galatians

Mid-stream the dam of my mind broke and I surrendered the North Galatian hypothesis, due mainly to the prodding of Richard Fellows this past year. So the first entry above will be edited appropriately. Still many questions, of course.
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Reflections
Normally, those applying the book of Galatians immediately talk about the freedom we have in Christ from the oppression of our sin and failure. We do not have to worry about being good enough or smart enough, because God likes us. Certainly there is a lot of truth to these applications. Certainly we should be immensely grateful for a God who is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love (Jonah 4:2). As Paul says in Romans 4:7-8, quoting Psalm 32, "Blessed are those whose iniquities are forgiven, and whose sins are covered; blessed is the one against whom the Lord will not reckon sin."

At the same time, this teaching has often been presented in incorrect and unhelpful ways. For example, Paul has often been pitted against a legalistic Judaism that believed you had to earn your right status with God. Against this idea of "works-righteousness," they say, Paul comes with the revelation that you cannot be saved by your good works but by faith alone. Similarly, Martin Luther is championed by Protestants as setting the Roman Catholic Church straight, where he like Paul recognized the truth of justification by faith alone while the Catholics believed good works were necessary for salvation.

Again, there is some truth to these scenarios, although they do skew history a little. For example, the Jewish literature we have from the ancient world generally shows that Jews also believed it was only the grace of God that made a good relationship with God possible for them. They of course put a high premium on living a righteous life in response to God's grace, but so does the New Testament, if we are willing to listen to it. [1] The main difference is the centrality of Christ in procuring God's favor and the way Paul emphasizes the Holy Spirit as how one is empowered to live that righteous life.

The Roman Catholic Church has also dialogued significantly with the Lutheran Church in recent years and has acknowledged that justification is first and foremost on the basis of faith. [2] But it also insists that good works must follow for final salvation. When we get to 2 Corinthians in chapter 10 and then later come to Romans in our second volume, however, we will find that Paul himself says some similar things. Paul never actually uses the expression "justification by faith alone." That phrase comes rather from Martin Luther. [3]

Galatians does carry a warning to the legalistic. Legalism is not a matter of being conservative or being strict in your lifestyle. Legalism is an attitude that enjoys rules for their own sake and puts rules above the people they are meant to benefit. If Paul seems a little inconsistent, it is because he knows what God wants but brings different arguments at different times to get his audiences there. So he knows the Gentiles can be in by faith. He knows that Jewish and Gentile Christian should eat together. He wrestles to show these truths in the different situational arguments of his letters. [4]

One way we might summarize Paul's argument here is that people trump the rules, even sometimes the rules of Scripture. The purity regulations that drove the argument between Paul and Peter at Antioch were surely over how to play out the purity regulations of Leviticus. But the rule of the unity of Christians required that exceptions be made to those rules. Indeed, Galatians 4:9 seems shockingly to equate keeping the Jewish Law with enslavement to evil spiritual forces that hold power over the basic elements of the world.

Certainly Paul was an apostle, and we are not, but he shows at times a shocking liberty in the way he reinterprets Scripture to counteract his opponents. One of the most striking is his allegorical interpretation of Sarah and Hagar, the wife and concubine of Abraham respectively. Perhaps his opponents have used them as a parable of Jew and Gentile. Paul counters by allegorically considering Sarah the heavenly Jerusalem with Hagar the earthly one. Those who put too much primacy on the earthly city are enslaved like Hagar, while those who are part of the heavenly Jerusalem are free like Sarah.

Galatians is thus more than a reminder that God does not strictly judge us on how good we are but on our willingness to trust in His mercy. It is a reminder that, in our attempt to serve God, we can subtly find ourselves using Scripture and our traditions to undermine God's more fundamental purposes. The "fundamentalist" interpreters of the early 1800s had great biblical arguments why slavery was a perfectly legitimate Christian institution. Do not the household codes of Colossians and 1 Peter assume slavery and tell slaves to obey their masters? It was those like Paul who were able to see the more fundamental spiritual principles--more central than random verses--who pushed back against slavery. And so we have moved closer to the kingdom.

A similar battle is currently in play between those who believe God might call women to play any role of any kind in the church or the home. Once again, they have their verses in the household codes or in 1 Timothy. But there is little doubt in my mind as to where the church as a whole will move soon enough, following the more fundamental principle that "in Christ there is not male and female" (Gal. 3:28, my translation).

Another important principle we will return to both in this volume and the next is the importance of not allowing one's freedom to become an opportunity for sin. Galatians 5:16 is quite stark, "Walk in the Spirit and you certainly will not fulfill the desires of the flesh" (my translation). Here we find no pessimism of regular moral failure, no sense of sinning every day in word, thought, and deed. What we find rather is an optimism of the Spirit's power, that if we will only open ourselves up to the empowerment of the Spirit, we will find the fruit of the Spirit permeating our lives.

[1] Thus E. P. Sanders' famous line, keeping the Law for Jews was "about staying in, not getting in." We add to our list of books to master Paul the follow up to his first book, Paul, the Law, and the Jewish People (**).

[2] "Joint Declaration" ***.

[3] Indeed, the only place we find this expression is in James, which says that a person is not justified by faith alone (Jas. 2:24).

[4] Sanders put it this way, Paul argues from solution to problem. He knows that Christ is the answer, but he struggles to express the precise nature of the problem Christ solves. See his Paul (**).

The Message of Galatians (Mutiny 2)

To follow the chain back, see the previous entry of this chapter, The Setting of Galatians.

We continue with part 2 of chapter 8: "The Message of Galatians." Last night after long consideration, I finally conceded to myself that I need to give up the northern Galatia hypothesis. In any case, I can continue the chapter...
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So the situation Galatians addresses is a primarily Gentile audience being urged to convert fully to Judaism by undergoing circumcision. Those who are trying to convince them are most likely Christian Jews, perhaps one key person in particular, who has come to Galatia from elsewhere, quite possibly from somewhere in Palestine like Antioch. It is important to recognize that their detractors claim to be Christians, not non-believing Jews. They are like the Christian Pharisees of Acts 15:5. Paul would probably consider them "false brothers" (e.g., Gal. 2:4), but they think of themselves as believers in Christ and the Jerusalem church likely would as well.

The central issue at debate is circumcision. If the meeting we call the Jerusalem Council was widely known, it is a little strange that we would find missionaries of a sort who are teaching that the Gentiles should get circumcised. [1] But we remember that Galatians 2:3 says Titus "was not compelled" to become circumcised, meaning it was still likely James and Peter's preference. It would thus be understandable if some were telling the Galatians they should fully commit and go the whole way.

One of the more peculiar features of the situation was the fact that these missionaries were apparently claiming that Paul himself agreed with them or at least had submitted to the authority of Jerusalem. They were apparently telling the Galatians that Paul himself thought it preferable for them to become circumcised (Gal. 5:11). How they made such an argument is puzzling to us, since we so strongly associate Paul with the opposite position. Perhaps he and Barnabas were still somewhat tentative on the subject when they came through the area on the first missionary journey. After all, it was after the first journey that Paul made the visit of Galatians 2 to Jerusalem. And Acts tells us that Paul circumcised Timothy at Lystra on his second journey (Acts 16:3), which certainly could have given the impression that circumcision was the optimal scenario.

Whatever they specifically argued, the undermining of his mission clearly infuriated him. This situation was personal, and no doubt reminded him of losing the argument at Antioch. Now they were tampering with his churches in his territory. One of the noticeable features of Galatians is the fact that Paul does not have a thanksgiving section at its opening, like his other letters. Instead, he launches into the Galatians in astonishment that they are beginning to act as if God's gracious acceptance of them is somehow not enough. They are beginning to observe aspects of the Jewish calendar (Gal. 4:10) and even to consider circumcision (5:2).

Paul's counterargument is not only that no amount of such "works of Law" could make one right with God. He is arguing that such Jewish particulars have no impact on one's status with God at all, particularly if one is a Gentile. To the Gentiles, God was offering a remarkable gift. Through the faithful death of Jesus the Messiah, he was offering both Jew and Gentile the possibility of being right with God regardless of how much wrongdoing a person had previously done. To try then to earn God's favor by keeping the particulars of the Jewish Law was a slap in God's face, tantamount to a rejection of His grace.

We have fallen off the log perhaps with the majority in thinking that Paul might be at Ephesus on his third missionary journey as he writes Galatians, perhaps not too long after he wrote 1 Corinthians. While many argue Paul's theology of getting right with God may have been intact very early on in his ministry, it does not really show itself in 1 Thessalonians and hardly in 1 Corinthians. [2] But just after our placement of Galatians in our reconstruction, we hear verses like Philippians 3:9 and then 2 Corinthians 5:21, culminating in Romans. Indeed, Philippians 3 and 2 Corinthians 10-13 address similar issues that Galatians does. We have from Galatians on a deeper exploration of what it might mean to be incorporated in Christ. [3] We even hear of "new creation" in Galatians (6:15) and 2 Corinthians (5:17).

Acts tells us that Paul rented out one Hall of Tyrannus while he was at Ephesus (19:9). Is it possible that Paul ran something like a school of interpretation while he was there? Is it possible that some of the arguments in Galatians are a product of his teaching there? These suggestions are all speculation, but they are not impossible.

The Message of Galatians
The heart of the message of Galatians is thus about what, in fact, makes a person right with God. The argument of Galatians is very thick, perhaps the thickest in the whole Bible. But the basic point is that Jesus is the only way to be right with God. Arguments over whether Gentiles need to get circumcised or whether you need to observe certain days certain ways are ultimately irrelevant to being right with God. Trusting in what God has done through Jesus--that's the ticket!

Of course there are countless debates both between scholars and churches over the details. Paul would no doubt be both perplexed and amused. It might be worth it to take just a little time to spell out what Paul was likely saying so that we can avoid some of the arguments between Christian groups today over theology.

First, it is important to hear exactly what Paul is arguing over concretely. Paul says that no matter how many "works of Law" a Jew might do, it will not make them right with God. It will not "justify" you. Five hundred years ago, Martin Luther heard Paul saying very generally that no one could earn God's favor. No matter how many good "works" you did, you could not earn a right standing with God.

Luther was of course correct. Paul did believe you could not earn God's favor (e.g., Rom. 4:4-5). Whether you were a Jew or a Gentile, all had wronged God and others at some point (e.g., Gal. 2:17; Rom. 3:23), thus requiring Him to overlook our sins. In other words, we all need God's grace, His "unmerited favor."

At the same time, Luther slightly changed the focus of Paul's argument. Particularly in Galatians, Paul is not really talking about faith versus good works in general. He is talking about whether "works of Law," that is the Jewish Law, could gain you right standing before God. [2] In other words, it was things like circumcision, the purity rules of Leviticus, and sabbath observance that were in the "bubble" above his head, not good works like feeding the poor or clothing the needy. One of the documents found among the Dead Sea Scrolls has an argument over "works of Law," and the things it has in mind are squabbles between Jewish groups over what makes a person unclean, not good works.

What Paul is arguing over, therefore, is the parts of the Jewish Law that were most distinctly Jewish, the things that distinguished the Jews ethnically from other people. Around the world, people knew that Jews did not eat pork and did not work on Saturday. These were exactly the kinds of "works of Law" that Paul is targeting. These are the sorts of things at Antioch that got in the way of Jewish and Gentile believers eating together. Paul's main point in Galatians is that none of these things actually help a person get in right standing with God.

In fact, relying on such things can be a slap in Christ's face. Here God has offered a free gift through Christ's death on the cross. It is a gift so good, no one could possibly deserve it. Yet you are insistent on trying to pay for it, and you cannot accept the gift for what it is.

Peter and James apparently agreed that a person could not be in right standing with God apart from trusting in Jesus' death. Paul uses an expression in Galatians 2:16 that scholars debate over, but we think Paul is saying that both he and Peter agree that you could only be right with God if you trusted in the faithful death of Jesus on the cross that one can become right with God. [3] But where they disagreed is in the value of keeping the Jewish particulars of the Mosaic Law. Paul goes on to say that those particulars do not help a person be right with God at all, while Peter and others still saw them playing a role in "justification," in being pronounced right with God. Only trust in what God has done through Christ works.

Paul uses Abraham as his fundamental example of this principle: "justification by faith." Abraham was a superb example because Paul could use him both as a model for the justification of Jews and Gentiles. Paul interpreted Genesis 15:6 to say that Abraham had faith in God, and God considered him right with him as a result (Gal. 3:6). Thus Abraham was a model to Gentiles of how to be right with God. Have faith in what God has done through Jesus the Christ and God will consider you righteous, right with Him. Paul understood Genesis 12:3's promise that all the nations would be blessed through Abraham as a promise that they would get right with God through faith, with Abraham showing them the way (Gal. 3:8-9, 14).

Paul's opponents no doubt had some arguments of their own, and most think Paul is responding to some of them in Galatians. One of the key questions he needed to answer was what the purpose of the Jewish Law was. If it was not meant to show how to be in right relationship with God, then what was it for? Paul's answer is that the Law was like a child's guardian (Gal. 4:24) that watches over it until it comes of age.

So also, the Law served several functions before Christ came. For example, it taught us the difference between right and wrong (e.g., Rom. 7:7). Paul here has seemed to shift a little in what he is talking about. When he was talking about "works of Law," he seemed to be thinking of what many Christians think of as the ritual or "ceremonial" parts of the Jewish Law. [4] But now he is talking about the heart of the Law, what later Christians would call the "moral law." The fact that Paul can glide without notice between these various parts of the Jewish Law is the primary source of confusion over what exactly he meant.

Before Christ, we were all, Paul taught, under the power of Sin in the world. Before Christ, the Law pointed out our weakness in the face of this power (e.g., Gal. 4:3). But now that Christ has come, God's Holy Spirit is available to empower us to do what is right. We no longer need the instruction of our guardian, the Law. We have the power of the Spirit inside us to keep the essence of the (moral) Law.

Galatians thus turns to an exhortation to the Galatians not to let their freedom from works of Law to lead to sinful living. This is the tight rope Paul's theology walks. On the one hand, he argues that the Jewish particulars of the Law cannot make us right with God, nor were we able to live above sin before Christ. But now Christ has enabled us to receive the Spirit of adoption and sonship. Now if we walk in the Spirit, we will not fulfill the desires of the flesh (Gal. 5:16).

Works of law cannot make us right with God, but if we have the Spirit inside us, fruit will follow. The fruit of the Spirit are things like love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Gal. 5:22-23). Quite different are the works of the flesh, things like sexual immorality, strife, jealousy, anger, and so forth (5:19-21).

And so Paul closes his letter to the Galatians, likely to churches in south Galatia like Iconium, Lystra, Derbe, and Pisidian Antioch. He points out the hypocrisy of those urging them to get circumcised. They are not models of Jewish Law keeping. And Paul would know, since he was once a Pharisee who paid close attention to such things. But in the end, it is neither circumcision nor uncircumcision that matters before God, he claims. It is the new creation of the Spirit made possible through the cross of Jesus the Messiah.

[1] Even though we called them "missionaries of a sort," we are not insistent at all that the main reason they have come to Galatia is to further instruct Paul's converts. They might just as likely have come into the area on other business.

[2] Another article in James Dunn's The New Perspective on Paul is a classic here, "Works of Law," ***.

[3] The expression is "the faith of Jesus Christ." To understand the debate, you have to look at a phrase like "love of God." What does this phrase mean? Is it God's love, as in "The love of God led Him to send His Son"? Or is it our love for God, as in "Your love of God should lead you to serve Him better"? The phrase Paul uses, "faith of Jesus," could also mean either the faithfulness of Jesus or faith in Jesus.

The three main reasons I finally concluded that the first expression in Gal. 2:16 and Rom. 3:22 refer to the faithfulness of Jesus are 1) Otherwise these verses are quite redundant, Galatians 2:16 then referring to faith in Christ three times in the same sentence, 2) the parallelism between Romans 5:19--"through the obedience of one person many will be established as righteous" and finally, 3) 2 Corinthians 4:13, while the train of thought is hard to follow, seems to say that just as Jesus had faith and was resurrected, so we must have faith and be resurrected. It thus seems to substantiate the notion that Jesus' faith was indeed one of Paul's categories.

[4] It is significant to point out that a Jew, indeed Paul himself, would not not have categorized things this way.

Paul: Mutiny in Galatia 1

To follow the chain back, see the previous entry in this series, Disagreement and Disorder at Corinth: Spiritual Gifts and Worship.

Now to begin chapter 8: Mutiny in Galatia.
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The Setting of Galatians
Most scholars agree that Paul wrote 1 Corinthians to Corinth while he was at Ephesus in the mid-50s. Not so with Galatians--here we find significantly different theories about when and where it was written, and to whom exactly. Until the twentieth century, the vast majority of scholars thought it was written by Paul at about the time we are placing it, from Ephesus or even later in his missionary journeys. But developments in our knowledge of Roman governance at the time facilitated many to place Galatians earlier in Paul's ministry, and to a slightly different audience. Eventually, the majority of evangelical scholars in the mid-twentieth century came to date it as the earliest of Paul's letters in order to work out some tensions between it and the book of Acts.

The position of the majority of evangelicals, first championed by F. F. Bruce, is thus that Galatians was the earliest of the letters Paul wrote, written perhaps from Antioch in about the year AD48 to the churches he and Barnabas had founded on their first missionary journey. [1] This is an ingenious reconstruction and one that very tidily cleans up a number of conundrums. In this scenario, Paul and Barnabas have recently finished their trip to cities like Iconium, Lystra, Derbe, and a different Antioch in Asia Minor, in the south central part of what is now modern day Turkey. We now know that this region was actually part of what the Romans called Galatia at the time, south Galatia.

In Bruce's reconstruction, the private meeting of Paul with Peter and James (Galatians 2:1-10) had taken place even before the first missionary journey. Bruce had ingeniously noticed that Paul had already gone up to Jerusalem before that journey because of a revelation about a famine (Acts 11:30). So Bruce speculated that the revelation that inspired Paul's visit to Jerusalem in Galatians 2:2 was the same revelation. After all, both the visit in Galatians 2 and the visit in Acts 11 are Paul's second visits to Jerusalem.

So in this scenario, before his first journey, Paul received private assurances from Peter and James that uncircumcised Gentiles can be Christians. But he returns after the journey to continued controversy over the issue among believers. The conflict comes to a head when Paul and Peter have a knock down drag out at Antioch over whether Jewish and Gentile believers can eat together and the Jewish believers not be defiled in terms of the holiness codes of Leviticus. James apparently pressures Peter not to eat with Gentiles, while Paul stands in front of the church and so much as calls Peter a hypocrite.

Meanwhile, an already ticked Paul hears that certain Jewish missionaries have infilitrated the very churches he and Barnabas just founded (Iconium, Lystra, Derbe, Pisidian Antioch). They are telling the Gentile believers there that they need to go all the way and fully convert to Judaism in order to be saved from God's coming wrath. Paul goes ballistic. [2] He writes them in the strongest terms that "works of Law" like circumcision do nothing whatsoever to make them right with God.

The controversy finally reaches such a fevered pitch that James and the leaders of the Jerusalem church call a meeting of all the key parties involved, the so called "Jerusalem Council" of Acts 15. The key positions are heard. Certain Christian Pharisees present their position (Acts 15:5). Peter champions the position that Gentiles will be saved by God's grace just as Jewish believers will (15:11). Barnabas and Paul share stories of the Gentile conversions on their missionary journey.

Finally, James--the half-brother of Jesus--renders a verdict. Gentiles do not need to be circumcised to be saved. But they do need to do four things. They need to stay away from things that have come into contact with idols (like meat). They need to refrain from acts of sexual immorality. They need to drain the blood from animals rather than strangle them to death and in general stay away from blood.

In one respect, this is an odd list of fundamental requirements for Gentiles. Many have connected it to the basic expectation God has of Noah after the Flood (e.g., Gen. 9:4). The idea here is that God requires of Gentiles what He required of Noah, while he expects of Jews what He required of Moses. Again, an ingenious suggestion, although we favor the interpretation that sees these four prohibitions as a solution to the question of how Jew and Gentile believer can eat together, rather than one of basic ethical requirements for Gentiles.

And thus, the conflict over Jewish and Gentile relations is largely settled and Peter and Paul move forward in unity and in common agreement on such issues. We might call this reconstruction of the setting of Galatians the "early South Galatian hypothesis," because it sees the letter written to the southern part of the Roman province of Galatia in about the year AD48 just before a Jerusalem Council in AD49. It creates a tidy scenario that accounts for some tensions between Galatians and Acts while maintaining a harmonious and orderly picture of the progress of the early church. We thus understand why it has been the most attractive reconstruction among evangelicals.

However, it faces some serious problems when it comes down to some of the details of Galatians and, for this reason, most scholars in general have not adopted it. Four items in particular seem to make it problematic. First, Bruce was almost certainly wrong to equate the "revelation" that led Paul to go up to Jerusalem somewhat privately (Gal. 2:2) with the revelation that led to the famine relief trip ("gift" trip) of Acts 11:30. The Acts 11 revelation had to do with the famine. The revelation Paul mentions has to do with his understanding of salvation for the Gentiles.

Even more problematic is the timing. In order to make the timing work, Bruce had to take the expression "Then after fourteen years" not to mean fourteen years after his previous visit but fourteen years since he first experienced the risen Jesus. Otherwise Paul's visit in Galatians is pushed too late for the "gift trip." But this interpretation is counterintuitive. Is not Paul's basic point in Galatians 1 and 2 that he had had limited contact with Jerusalem? Is his point not that he did not visit them the first time until three years after his conversion and then not again until fourteen years after that first visit?

Yes, this reading does present a tension with Acts, where the gift trip would have been an intervening visit. But we encounter many such tensions between the biblical accounts, and extensive experience with them leads one to let them fall where they lie rather than insist on reconciling them all. It is almost always necessary to twist one or more of such texts into some far less than obvious reconstruction to reconcile them, which is not the most obvious way to show them respect. It shows a greater valuing of a certain idea about the text than a valuing of the text itself!

The practice with the most integrity is one that lets each text say what it most likely says rather than apply one's intellect to conceive of some less than probable reconstruction. In the end, such hypotheses often create a scenario that is not represented by any of the texts one is actually trying to reconcile. One has substituted the text of the interpreter for all of the texts in question! [3] In this case, however, it is conceivable that the two texts might be reasonably reconciled. Paul is, after all, talking in Galatians 2 primarily about visits having to do with discussion on theological matters, and it is conceivable that he might omit from such a list of visits one that involved no real interaction between him and the Jerusalem leaders on such issues.

So the more likely timing of Galatians 2:1 puts Paul's visit to Jerusalem in Galatians 2 at about the same time as the Jerusalem Council of Acts 15. Most scholars have thus concluded that the two events were one and the same. Paul would thus present the event as somewhat of a private meeting, while Acts would present the event as more of a public one. Here we hit the fundamental reason why many evangelicals have gone with Bruce. Acts 15 is different enough from Galatians 2 to require us to see one as a less straightforwardly historical presentation of the event.

But whether one thinks Galatians 2 was just before the "Jerusalem Council" or is a slightly different version of it, the most likely timing places the writing of Galatians some time after the Jerusalem Council. What this means is that the conclusion of Peter and James in Jerusalem, however it actually played out, did not resolve all the issues between Jews and Gentiles. Indeed, we come now to a third reason why the early dating of Galatians does not seem to fit Galatians. Paul mentions in Galatians 4:13 that it was because of a weakness of his flesh that he preached to them "the very first time." It is a relatively small argument, since it is possible we are reading too much into the word. But the most natural way to take this Greek word is that Paul has already visited the Galatians more than once. If so, then Paul would not have written Galatians until at least after his second visit there, which was after the Jerusalem Conference.

We thus reach the second reconstruction of the setting of Galatians. This reconstruction still sees Paul writing Galatians to the churches of South Galatia (Iconium, Lystra, Derbe, Pisidian Antioch) but sees him doing it at some point during his second missionary journey, probably while he was at Corinth. In this scenario as it usually plays out, Peter took a trip north to Antioch after the Jerusalem Council, whatever its precise nature. For a time, he fellowshipped with Gentile Christians just as Paul and Barnabas did.

Then James, nervous that their allowance to Gentiles would lead Jewish believers also to slack off in their keeping of the Law, sends some people to check on what was going on at Antioch. They convince Peter and Barnabas that they cannot slack off on purity concerns just because the Gentiles can be saved without following them all. Paul goes ballistic, as in the other scenario.

There are two key differences to this scenario from the previous one. The one is the fact that Paul seems to lose this argument. After all, he tells us earlier in Galatians 2 that James, Peter, and John agreed with him on the issue of circumcision. If Peter and Barnabas had given in to his argument at Antioch, Paul would have told us in Galatians. The end result is that Paul's argument with Barnabas in Acts 15:39 probably was about more than just whether to take Mark along on their next trip. We remember that Acts, in keeping with its general approach, completely omits this controversy at Antioch. We have good reason to believe that Paul leaves Antioch on somewhat tense, perhaps even bad terms with the Jerusalem church. We can still feel that tension even when he returns to Jerusalem in Acts 21:20-22.

A second curiosity with this approach is what to make of the letter Acts 15 pictures being sent as a result of the Jerusalem Conference. As we hinted above, its four prohibitions would actually solve the matter of Jew and Gentile believer eating together, at least in the minds of people like James, Peter, and Barnabas. If Gentiles would stay away from strangled meat with the blood still in it, from meat that had been sacrified at a temple, and from sexual immorality, then Jewish believers could eat with Gentile believers. The early Galatians scenario was nice and neat on this question, because it considered the Antioch blow up to have happened before the Council.

But if the blow up at Antioch was after the Council, then the letter becomes anachronistic--at least if it is addressing the question of "table fellowship," who you eat with. [4] If it is only giving a bare bones "Noahic" list of general requirements for Gentiles, then there is no tension. But if it is telling Gentiles how they must get and prepare food in order that Jewish believers might eat with them, then we are forced to see Acts 15 as a somewhat syncopated presentation of what was in history a more complicated and drawn out struggle. In either case, it is clear that Paul did not agree with the letter's position. As we have seen, Paul neither mentions the letter nor takes its position when he deals with the Corinthians on the subject of meat sacrificed to idols. One way or another, Paul's relationship with the Jerusalem church continued to involve some tension, even into his second and third missionary journeys. And we saw this fact in 1 Corinthians where Paul mentions some at Corinth who might say they are "of Peter" in a way that distinstinguished them from Paul (1 Cor. 1:12)

We mentioned four problems with the early South Galatia theory, but we have only mentioned three of them so far. The fourth is a difficulty not only for the first reconstruction but also for the second one we have just mentioned. Paul says in Galatians 4:13 that he first preached the good news to them because of a physical problem. He goes on to say how they would have been glad to give him their own eyes if they could have (4:15). Paul thus seems to have been passing through some part of Galatia when he encountered eye problems that led him to change his plans for an extended period of time.

It is difficult to fit this description of Paul's founding visit with the depiction of Paul's first missionary journey in Acts 13-14. South Galatia was hardly on the way between Cyprus and Antioch. To go there required intentionality on Paul and Barnabas' part. To be sure, some scholars have questioned whether Paul took exactly this path historically. Some even suggest Paul might have been in Greece some ten years earlier than Acts depicts. But these reconstructions seem highly speculative. We really have no reason to question Acts' itinerary at this point.

On the other hand, this founding visit might fit Paul's itinerary leaving south Galatia on his second missionary journey, where Acts says he went on to travel "through the region of Phrygia and Galatia" (16:6). Indeed, could some of the forbidding of the Holy Spirit Acts 16 mentions be its way of referring to Paul's need to stay relatively put in north Galatia because of eye problems? It was this region of north Galatia, where the modern city of Ancyra is located, that most Christians thought Galatians was written until the twentieth century. That is because for most of antiquity, only this area was actually called Galatia. The ethnic Galatians, although they were long gone by the time of Paul, had lived in this northern region.

However, we must reckon with the fact that the Romans expanded the territory in 25BC to include the southern area. The cities of south Galatia thus were thus part of Galatia as well. We have decided to fall off the log with Galatians primarily written to the northern territory, classic Galatia, but we have to admit it is a close call. We must face the odd situation, for example, that we do not know the names of any churches Paul founded in this area, while we know many names of churches he founded in the south. Nevertheless, as we will see, we think Galatians fits the general preoccupations of Paul while at Ephesus better than when he was at Corinth.

[1] Paul: Apostle of the Heart Set Free. **

[2] That Paul is infuriated when he writes Galatians should not be in doubt given his comment that he would be quite pleased if these individuals bent on circumcision would just cut their whole thing off (Gal. 5:12).

[3] The most notorious example is of course Harold Linsell's suggestion in The Battle for the Bible (***) that Peter might have denied Jesus six times, three before a first crowing and three more before a second. He applied his ingenuity and created a scenario that differs more from each gospel text than each of them actually differ from each other!

[4] And here let us add to our list of books one might read to master Paul the masterful collection of essays by James D. G. Dunn over the years called, The New Perspective on Paul (***). His essay, "The Incident at Antioch" is, in our opinion, the most definitive discussion to date on the blow-up. Dunn takes the second scenario position on Galatians, that it was written in the early 50s from Corinth to southern Galatia.

Paul Novel: Galatians 4

... Paul, Barnabas, and Titus returned to Antioch with a sense of triumph. Neither James nor Peter had forced Titus to be circumcised, and by their allowance, they had legitimized Paul's mission and message. Peter, not long thereafter, traveled to Antioch, realizing that the city was quickly becoming a center of the Way as influential as Jerusalem. He honestly rejoiced to see the thriving community of faith, with numerous assemblies meeting all over the city on the Lord's Day.

Paul was very hopeful for Peter's complete support at first. Paul made sure that all the Gentile assemblies invite Peter to their fellowships on the Lord's Day. He was initially somewhat reluctant, given that these were Gentile homes, often with Paul being the only other Jew. But he consented, not only because Paul was persuasive, but because he genuinely wanted to see them grow in faith.

The second or third Sunday Peter met in a Gentile assembly, he began to loosen up. The biggest issue was when he met with them to eat the Lord's meal. If he met in the morning for prayer, there was awkwardness of being in a Gentile home. But when he ate the love feast with them, there was the issue of impurity through the meal.

In general, Peter had not spent too much time in his life worrying about such things. He was a fisherman from Galilee, not a member of some Pharisee dining club or an Essene in a commune on the shores of the Dead Sea. Jesus had hardly worried about such things either, taking them into the homes of toll collectors and occasionally eating in the presence of prostitutes.

But not so with James. Jesus' free wheeling fellowship was one of the reasons he had resisted his ministry while he was on earth. And now he was conscious of a large group of believers in Jerusalem who were very sensitive to these sorts of issues. So when the rumors of Peter's incautious dining with Gentiles got back to Jerusalem, James immediately sent an urgent message back to him. One of those who returned with the messengers was none other than John Mark.

The thrust of the message was that Peter had to set the tone for Jewish believers because he was the apostle, the one who had seen the Lord. Maybe Gentiles could escape God's wrath by their confession of Jesus as Lord, repentance for their sins, and baptism in the name of Jesus' faithful death. But Jewish believers were still a part of the covenant God had made with Israel. God's expectation that they would keep the commandments was as firm as ever. Jesus had not changed that. Many believers in Jerusalem might be lost to the Way if they were to find that Peter was being so careless about his purity.

Here was his suggestion. If the Gentile believers would only adopt a few simple practices, then Jew and Gentile would be able to continue to eat together. For example, if they would make sure that the meat they served had not been sacrificed at a nearby temple, that was very important, given how much of the meat in the marketplace was defiled. Then if they would make sure that the animal was drained of blood, not strangled, then no blood would be among the meat.

Finally, Gentiles were notorious for their sexual immorality. If they would keep themselves pure in this way, and be careful about the way they acquired and prepared any meat for the Lord's meal, then it would be possible for Jew and Gentile to eat together. Of course in practice it would not be so simple. Peter would need to make sure not only that everyone present for the meal was clean, but that every member of the household in general was.

Peter tried to put on as good a face as he could, but frankly, it was embarrassing the whole way around. He had planned the coming Sunday to meet in one of the Gentile house churches. He tried to bow out as tactfully as possible at the last minute. When Paul heard of it, knowing that certain men had come that week from James, he suspected that something was wrong.

So he went to Peter, who had not planned to announce the new decisions quite so soon. But Paul's doggedness forced the issue, and all the elders of the city were called together the next evening. The church rejoiced that the Gentiles had received the good news of the Messiah and in their salvation. But Israel was the people of God, and God had given Israel the Law, in which he specified rules of purity and impurity. So the Jews could not eat with the Gentile believers unless they were willing to make their homes clean according to the Levitical laws.

Paul was outraged. He had suspected something was up, but requiring the Gentile believers to make their homes kosher? The absurdity of it all. He couldn't contain himself--didn't think God wanted him to.

"So you--you, Peter--are going to make the Gentiles keep the rules of kashrut? What a joke! What hypocrisy! You, keep the Law? You, who already live like a Gentile are going to force the Gentiles to live like a Jew?

"I've kept the Law. I've kept the Law like no one in this room has ever kept the Law. On my most impure day I kept the Law better than James on his most pure day. I've kept it better than anyone in the entire Jerusalem community ever has. But what I needed was the death of Christ. My attention to the minute works of the Law did not bring me God's favor.

"This is insincere. Worse, it is of the Satan. We all stand or fall before God on the basis of Christ's faithfulness and our trust in it, whether Jew or Gentile. To turn to anything else after the Christ has died for us, is to spit on his grace."

It was a tense moment. Barnabas finally tried to make peace. Paul's bluntness had not earned him any sympathy. If anything it had turned some who would have been sympathetic to the other side.

"Brother Paul," Barnabas said. "It seems little to ask for our Gentile brothers to take a little extra caution in preparing their meals. And even you have not approved of the sexual immorality we have encountered on our mission. No one expects you to change the way you fellowship with the Gentile believers. But this feels right to me and especially right for Peter, since he is as you have said yourself, the apostle to the Jews" ...

Paul Novel: Galatians 3

Barnabas and Paul returned to Antioch with a sense of triumph. They had left with the salvation of the Gentiles still somewhat of an experiment, a probability given what they had witnessed thus far. But they returned--Paul especially--with it established beyond reasonable doubt. God was going to save those Gentiles who confessed faith in Jesus as Lord and in God's plan through him, and God was going to do it without them needing to become Jews!

Any second guessing of Paul's calling was now gone. He had not had any appreciable success in Arabia. He had some success in Cilicia, but not nearly what he had hoped.

But Cyprus and Asia Minor had changed all that. It was his first dramatic success in the conversion of the Gentiles, especially Sergius Paulus. He had made inroads into the very household of Caesar! He was convinced that God had appointed him as apostle to the Gentiles, just as Peter was the apostle to the Jews.

All this is not to say, however, that everyone agreed. The very notion that he might be on any par with Peter seemed nothing but arrogant boasting to any who got wind of it. After all, Peter was the first disciple and the first to whom Jesus appeared risen.

John Mark had done Paul's reputation great damage when he returned to Jerusalem. He had shared Paul's Gentile-loving ways in whispered and not so whispered conversation. Paul's chummy behavior with a Roman proconsul was all the evidence anyone needed to know that Paul was simply an unprincipaled, power hungry man more full of ambition than with love for God or Israel. What business did a Jew have with such a Roman, the enemies of Israel and, indeed, those who had crucified the Lord Jesus?

Of course for every one who was genuinely outraged, there were two who were really only jealous of the power and status Paul had acquired. They would never be Roman citizens, only outcasts in the eyes of those in power. But Paul simply preached to the Gentiles more vigorously than ever.

After they returned, Paul began to think about new ways to come in contact with Gentiles, more subtle than the public preaching that almost got him killed in Arabia. It occurred to him that one of the elders at Antioch, a man called Silas, was a leatherworker, just like Paul's family back in Tarsus. Silas had a booth in the marketplace, where he sat in the morning and evening, repairing and selling various goods. Paul decided to join him and use the opportunity to bring the good news to any who might listen.

Within a day, he had his first convert, a young man of about twenty, named Titus. Titus introduced Paul to his family and within a few days his entire household became followers of the Way. They were Gentiles through and through and had never set foot in a synagogue.

Those were great days for Paul, in retrospect some of the most delightful of his life. One morning in prayer, soon after Titus' conversion, Paul understood from the Lord that he must go to Jerusalem with Titus, to show him to Peter and James. He and Barnabas would get their approval for the new phase of the gospel that God was now opening up.

They would see he was right. How could they reject Titus? It was obvious that the Holy Spirit was at work in him. God would show them. They would see that his mission to the Gentiles was simply the outworking of Jesus' ministry to sinners within Israel.

Once he had their approval, it would end once and for all the back-stabbing and grumbling about him as well. The assemblies of God would be united in purpose in a way that they had not since the earliest days. It was all so clear to Paul--to Jerusalem they must go!

Paul Novel: Galatians 2

... So it wasn't long until Paul convinced Barnabas that they needed to leave Antioch to spread the good news to the Gentiles elsewhere. Since Barnabas was originally from the nearby island of Cyprus, he suggested there. In his mind, Paul had already exhausted his home region of Cilicia, just to the northeast.

To help them on their journey, Barnabas suggested his cousin, John Mark, whose family were some of the first believers in Jerusalem. Indeed, Mark's household had provided the room where Jesus had eaten his last meal with Peter and the other disciples. And it was where the leaders in Jerusalem still met together in assembly, among several other house fellowships in Jerusalem. When Paul and Barnabas had collected enough supplies and had secured a ship, they left for Cyprus.

They saw almost immediate success among the Jews of the island. It helped immensely that Barnabas was so well known and liked among the Jews there. Barnabas and Paul--or Saul, as he was known in those days--were quite different people in many respects. In some ways they were virtual opposites. Paul was outspoken and aggressive, at times almost offensive. Barnabas was quiet, reserved, and assuring. Paul would tell you what you needed to do and what needed to be done. Barnabas was a good listener and was conciliatory. Sometimes it was hard even to know what he thought on an issue.

The confidence of the Jews of Cyprus in Barnabas an his family was so great that virtually the whole island believed, from Salamis in the east to Paphos in the west...

The success of the gospel among Gentiles, indeed, among Roman officials, not only confirmed Paul's sense of calling to non-Jews. It increased his drive to spread the good news to the whole world. If Paul had been driven before, he was now an unstoppable force. Although they had initially planned to return straight to Antioch, Paul now insisted they sail north to Pamphylia in Asia Minor. Paul had not gone any further west than the Cilician gates when he had preached in the region before. He saw this moment as a God-given opportunity to expand the good news to Pamphylia and then to Pisidia in the north.

John Mark was not pleased at all. He had been more than happy to go to Cypress with Barnabas leading the mission. After all, his distant relatives lived there. And he was enthused about spreading the gospel. He had actually met Jesus that fateful week before his crucifixion and had been enamored with the possibility that this might be the Christ.

Jesus had left an indelible impression on him. Just after Jesus was taken from the Garden of Gethsemane, a couple of the disciples came frantically to Mark's house, which was not far from a small prison where the high priest kept those arrested. Mark had run out to see what was happening, wearing only a linen shirt on. Astounded that the messiah could be arrested, he met up with them, coming up the long stairs on the south side of the temple, in the old city of David. When the guards saw him acting suspiciously, they reached for his shirt, and he only escaped by fleeing naked into the darkness.

But Mark was still somewhat unsure about what Paul was doing with the Gentiles. He was okay with them converting to Judaism. He was okay with the God-fearers in the synagogue. But he had serious questions about how agressively Paul was pursuing the Gentiles and proclaiming that the faithful death of Jesus could apply to them with only a baptism in water to show for it.

And Barnabas seemed less and less in charge of the mission. Sometimes it irritated Mark that Barnabas let Paul do so much of the talking. And Barnabas tended to go along with whatever Paul suggested, usually without asking some of the questions Mark thought should be offered.

And Paul was a hard task master. Mark was responsible for the bulk of their stuff and was at Paul's beck and call. Paul could sense Mark's resentment for the work, which made him push even harder. The long and short of it is that when they arrived on the shores of Asia Minor at Attalia, Mark took one look at the immense mountains to the north and grabbed a ship headed back east toward Antioch...

Paul Novel: Galatians 1

Well, my wife Angie has corroborated that I should keep my day job unless I put more gun fights into this thing. But I've committed to finish it, so I will continue! What I've posted here on previous Sundays has been chapter 8, the second chapter on 1 Corinthians.

So today we start chapter 9: Trouble in Galatia.
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The first two years of Paul’s stay in Asia was invigorating to him. Yes, he had been briefly imprisoned and had appeared before the Roman governor. But he had witnessed to Christ before the governor, a grand opportunity as far as he was concerned! And he had seen the gospel expand inland as far as Colossae. He was beginning to feel that itch to move, to entrust Ephesus to the care of others and push further west even beyond Rome into Spain.

The Corinthian church continued to present some difficulty, but Paul hoped that his most recent letter would bring the kind of peace and unity the church needed. Apollos had largely removed himself from the situation, submitting to Paul's authority. The two obviously were having an effect on each other's thinking. Apollos was less flippant about pagan temples, and Paul began to think more seriously about what might happen to the dead before the resurrection.

But Paul's equilibrium was startlingly thrown off balance when news arrived at Ephesus about certain goings on in the northern region of Roman Galatia. Paul and Barnabas had founded churches in the south of that Roman district less than ten years earlier, in the regions of Pisidia and Lacaonia. It was there in the city of Lystra that Timothy had believed in Jesus.

Then on a second trip through the area with Silas, Paul had found himself heading north by a somewhat bizarre route, only to end up in the area of Ancyra, in Galatia proper. This was the area where descendants of the warlike Galatians of old lived. It was while there that Paul became deathly ill. And even after he recovered, he found that he had lost significant sight in his eyes as a result of the fever.

He would not normally have spent so much time in an area where there was no great city, but he took the situation as a sign of God's will. For the next few months he brought the good news to the Galatians of the region, and many received the message with joy. Indeed, they treated Paul like he was an angel from heaven. Then when Paul decided his sight had returned as much as it would, he, Silas, and Timothy pressed on. He would struggle with his eyes the rest of his life.

Paul made a second trip through the region of north Galatia after he left Corinth the first time. It was during that trip that he urged them to set aside money on the Lord's Day for an offering he hoped to bring to the churches of Jerusalem. He hoped to bring it there by Pentecost the next year. Little did he know at the time that he would have to put off that trip and that, by the time he did take it, he would have lost the loyalty of the Galatians.

To understand the situation at Galatia, you have to go back almost ten years. Back then, Paul was preaching the good news everywhere he could in his home region, where Tarsus was. Remember, he spent three years in Palestine after he believed. That was in the area around Damascus and in Nabatean Arabia just east of it.

But after those first three years, Paul had returned to his home town of Tarsus, in Asia Minor. For almost ten years thereafter, Paul had used Tarsus as a base from which to preach the gospel in the surrounding region, the region of Cilicia. At the time he was still sorting out his calling. He worked mostly in whatever Jewish synagogues he could find, with mixed results. He also tried to reach out to any Gentiles who would listen to him.

Near the end of a decade there, he received an invitation to come to Antioch, a city in the northernmost part of Palestine, in Syria. It was only about a week's journey from Tarsus, to the east. There, he found a vibrant group of believers. Most of them were Greek-speaking Jews, but Gentile God-fearers had become an important part of the community too.

It was exactly the collection of God's people that Paul had pictured as part of the end of the age. There were not only Jews who believed that Jesus was the Messiah, but also many Gentiles flocking to Israel's God. Paul's only complaint was that Antioch was not actively seeking out the Gentiles. They were only receiving them as God drew them to their synagogues.

Still, the Christian synagogues there were awash with signs of the Holy Spirit. When they met together at dawn on Sunday morning, there was always a prophetic word that all acknowledged as authentic. People in their fellowship regularly experienced healings, and whenever they came across evil spirits, they were caused to flee. Paul almost felt that God's rule might break through at any time.

The believers were a glorious mixture of Jew, Gentile, rich, poor, not to mention Jews from all over the Diaspora. Barnabas was there, and it was he who had invited Paul to join the assemblies at Antioch. There was Simeon the black and Lucius of Cyrene, both of whom were from North Africa. One of the patrons of the community was a man named Manaen, who had actually grown up with Herod Antipas, the one who beheaded John the baptizer.

Perhaps the best known instance of the Spirit's working there was when the prophet Agabus foresaw that a famine was coming over the world. When it happened, the community of Antioch shared its abundance with the churches of Jerusalem. They sent a delegation with support from Antioch down to Jerusalem.

But despite the success of the gospel at Antioch, Paul could not forget his sense that the good news was for the Gentiles as well as the Jews. He could not get the prophesy of Isaiah out of his mind, that the Gentiles would rally to the Messiah. He could not forget the mandate of Isaiah to proclaim God's glory among the nations...

Galatians 2:16 Mini-Bibliography

We spent nearly all of Greek Galatians class today translating Galatians 2:16. Surely it is the most debated verse in the New Testament. Am I wrong?

It occurred to me that I always throw out a core bibliography when I go through Galatians 2:16 for whatever reason. I thought I would post it. Certainly, the key articles reflects my interpretive leanings. Obviously, James D. G. Dunn features high on my list of resources. Since most of the relevant essays now appear in one volume, The New Perspective on Paul, I list the older articles as they are situated in this volume.

"We who are Jews by nature and not sinners from the Gentiles..."
James D. G. Dunn, "The Incident at Antioch (Gal. 2:11-18)," in Jesus, Paul and the Law: Studies in Mark and Galatians, 129-82 remains, in my opinion, an excellent introduction to the basic context of Galatians 2:15-21, which I agree is indeed the proposition of the letter.

Since we know that a person is not justified...
What does it mean to be justified? In general, John Piper is too thoroughly ensconched in the Calvinist tradition to be a reliable original meaning interpreter of Paul in general, although as we might expect, he is a good scholar when the right conclusion fits within Calvinist parameters.

N. T. Wright is good on justification two-thirds of the time--on the law court and eschatological parts of it. His covenantal spin, however, continues to be the best illustration of the fact that we often formulate our key ideas when we are young in a PhD program, then become associated with those immature ideas, then spend the rest of our career defending them. A must read is his forthcoming response to John Piper on the topic.

Basically, you can trust a Bible scholar when they are critiquing another Bible scholar. You just can't trust us when we are selling material from our dissertations :-)

by works of law...
Here Dunn's mature statement in the long introduction to The New Perspective, "The New Perspective--Whence, What and Wither" (1-97), is in my opinion the best understanding of this phrase.

Also significant is his earlier piece, "Works of the Law and the Curse of the Law (Gal. 3:10-14)" from 1985 (New Perspective, 121-40), not to mention the article that put the name "new perspective" on the new perspective, namely, "The New Perspective on Paul" (1983--in New Perspective, 99-120).

except...
Should we translate the two words here in their normal sense or as "but." Dunn's "Incident at Antioch" above argues for "except."

through faith of Jesus Christ...
The two key articles here are reprinted in Richard Hays' signature volume, The Faith of Jesus Christ: The Narrative Substructure of Galatians 3:1-4:11. The two articles were originally presented in Kansas City at the 1991 SBL: Hays: "Pistis and Pauline Theology: What's at Stake" and Dunn: "Once More, Pistis Christou."

even we have placed our faith in Jesus Christ that we might be justified by Christ faith and not works of law...
All the key issues above are repeated here. Consult especially Dunn on works of law and Hays/Dunn on redundancy if one goes with an objective genitive throughout.

Since this is my blog, you'll forgive me if I sneak in my article here, "2 Corinthians and the Pistis Christou Debate, CBQ 70 (2008): 524-37," which suggests Paul may have a double entendre in mind in the final pistis Christou. Since that claim was not a part of my dissertation, you can trust it. :-)

for by works of law no flesh will be justified.
This quotation of Psalm 143 and Paul's modifications to it are well treated by Richard Hays in his book, Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul.

You could do a whole course on this verse, reading through this literature. It would actually be quite a good introduction to Paul's theology in the specific area of his interaction with the Jerusalem church. If twenty of you wanted to do an online graduate course on Acrobat in the Fall... :-)

Dunn's Historical Jesus summary of the day is a comin'.