Galatians 1:1–9
1 Paul, an apostle—not from men nor through man, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised him from the dead— 2 and all the brothers1 who are with me,
To the churches of Galatia:
3 Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, 4 who gave himself for our sins to deliver us from the present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father, 5 to whom be the glory forever and ever. Amen.
6 I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel— 7 not that there is another one, but there are some who trouble you and want to distort the gospel of Christ. 8 But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed. 9 As we have said before, so now I say again: If anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you received, let him be accursed.
1 Or brothers and sisters. In New Testament usage, depending on the context, the plural Greek word adelphoi (translated “brothers”) may refer either to brothers or to brothers and sisters; also verse 11
Section Overview: The Letter’s Opening: Paul’s Concern for the Galatians
Letters in the Greco-Roman culture of Paul’s time opened with the name of the sender, the name of the recipient, and a greeting. In private correspondence, letter authors elaborated on these simple elements only rarely. Official correspondence, however, might highlight the authority of the sender. Paul follows the pattern of official correspondence in his letters, elaborating on his name to describe the authority he holds to instruct the letter’s recipients. This strategy makes sense in light of the responsibility God has given him of founding and instructing communities across the world that worship God through his Son Jesus Christ and in the power of the Spirit (Gal. 1:15–16; Rom. 15:14–21; Eph. 3:7–10).
The opening of Galatians hints that Paul’s authority is under scrutiny, and perhaps attack, from a group of people “troubling” the Galatians with a twisted form of the gospel that actually runs counter to the authentic gospel Paul initially preached in southern Galatia (Gal. 1:7–9; 5:10, 12). This false teaching is so unsettling to Paul that he skips his usual prayer of thanks or praise to God at the letter’s beginning. Instead, he dives directly into a stern warning against any “gospel” that de-emphasizes the generous, free, and undeserved nature of God’s initiative in reconciling his people to himself through the death of Christ.
Section Outline
I. The Letter’s Opening: Paul’s Concern for the Galatians (1:1–9)
A. The Sender: Paul, the Apostle (1:1–2a)
B. The Recipients: Christian Assemblies in Galatia (1:2b–5)
C. An Apostolic Warning (1:6–9)
Response
Each of the three parts of this passage underlines an important theological point. First, Paul’s emphasis on the divine origin of his apostleship (1:1–2a) implies the divine authority of Galatians itself as Holy Scripture. Occasionally interpreters of the letter have tried to reconstruct a sympathetic portrait of the false teachers or have implied that Paul was trying to use his rhetorical skill to defeat his political rivals. Christian historians should certainly attempt to understand what motivated the false teachers and seek to reconstruct an intellectually honest portrait of them. In the end, however, if we believe that God commissioned Paul to be an apostle and revealed the truth of the gospel to him, we must allow his letter to the Galatians to instruct us and must seek to live by its instruction.
Paul’s description of the false teachers and his resistance to their teaching does not bend the truth for political gain but is God’s Word and therefore the truth. Much more is at stake for Paul than winning an argument and keeping a group of people on his side. He hopes to prevent their following a path that would lead them away from their only hope for peace with God. A sermon series, class study, or personal study of the letter might appropriately begin with the reminder that Galatians is Holy Scripture, written in Paul’s capacity as an apostle and therefore carrying invaluable instruction on how we as Christians should think and live.
Second, Paul’s summary of the gospel (1:3–4) emphasizes that peace with God comes through the gift of Christ’s redeeming death. This gift was utterly free to human beings, who, because they were in a state of sinful rebellion against God, had not only done nothing to merit it but in fact deserved destruction instead (1:4). The principle that reconciliation with God is absolutely free—a matter of God’s grace—is the essence of the gospel and is the principle Paul defends in Galatians.
People who believe in some form of transcendent being or beings seem to struggle constantly with the question of what they can do to get these powers on their side and keep them there. Perhaps giving some money to a good cause, going to a worship service every now and again, offering some sacrifice, avoiding certain activities on certain days, saying certain prayers, or observing certain religious habits on a regular basis will appease God or the gods and keep them from interfering in one’s life. The gospel of God’s free grace is the joyful news that such an approach to God is completely wrong. There is one God. He is good and gracious, and he has provided for peace with himself and eternal blessing through his Son, Jesus Christ.
Third, Paul emphasizes in his warning to the Galatians that this gospel of God’s free grace (1:5–9) is so important that anyone bringing a message that deviates from it, even someone very persuasive and attractive (e.g., an angel, Paul himself), should not gain a hearing among Christians. Various movements sweep through evangelical Christianity from time to time—financial planning methods, child rearing strategies, new approaches to evangelism, and so on. Christians should evaluate such movements by the criterion of their conformity to the gospel of God’s free grace. A teacher or teaching saying something else, no matter how attractive or delightfully presented, is on the wrong track and poses a threat to the theological purity of the church.
Or brothers and sisters. In New Testament usage, depending on the context, the plural Greek word adelphoi (translated “brothers”) may refer either to brothers or to brothers and sisters; also verse 11
1:1 Nine of Paul’s thirteen canonical letters begin with a reference to his identity as an apostle, and he often comments on receiving his apostleship from God, just as he does here (e.g., 1 Cor. 1:1; 2 Cor. 1:1; Eph. 1:1; Col. 1:1; 1 Tim. 1:1; 2 Tim. 1:1). There is nothing unusual, then, about Paul’s beginning Galatians this way. More unusual, however, is the emphasis he places on how he did not receive his apostleship. He insists that it neither arose from any human source nor reached him through any human channel. The reason for this emphasis becomes clear as the letter’s argument develops. Paul seeks to deny, probably in the face of misrepresentations to the contrary, that he received his commission to preach the gospel from the other apostles. Rather, he received his apostleship independently of them—from God himself (Gal. 1:11–12, 17, 19).
Paul used the word “apostle” (Gk. apostolos) to refer to someone sent on a special mission (2 Cor. 8:23; Phil. 2:25), most often to someone who has seen the risen Lord Jesus (1 Cor. 9:1; 15:7–8) and received a commission from God to bear witness to the gospel (Rom. 1:1, 5). Apostles, alongside a group of NT prophets, were the foundation of the church (Eph. 2:20; 3:5; 4:11; cf. 1 Cor. 12:28–29). The NT canon preserves for all later generations of Christians these apostles’ foundational proclamation and interpretation of the gospel.
1:2 Despite Paul’s emphasis throughout the first section of Galatians on God alone as the origin of his apostolic authority, he does not consider himself a solitary giant towering above others and unanswerable to anyone else. So, before arguing for his independence from the Jerusalem apostles (1:10–2:14), he makes certain that those receiving this letter know that “all” his brothers and sisters in Christ in his current location join him in what he is about to say.
Paul writes to “the churches” located in the Roman province of “Galatia.” These were probably churches Paul and Barnabas had founded on Paul’s first missionary journey in the southern part of the province, located in such towns as Pisidian Antioch, Iconium, Lystra, and Derbe (Acts 13–14). The term “church” (Gk. ekklēsia) in the Greco-Roman world of the first century often referred to an “assembly” of people, whether a spontaneous gathering (e.g., Acts 19:32) or a particular group with a set purpose (e.g., Acts 19:39). The Septuagint used this term to refer to the group of God’s people gathered, for example, to hear God’s law at the foot of Mount Sinai (Deut. 4:10) or to hear King Solomon dedicate the temple (1 Kings 8:14). This gathering could be called “the assembly [ekklēsia] of the people of God” (Judg. 20:2). Since elsewhere in his letters Paul can refer to an assembly of Christians as “the church [ekklēsia] of God” (1 Cor. 1:2; 2 Cor. 1:1; cf. 1 Thess. 1:1; 2 Thess. 1:1), he probably thinks of Christian churches as closely related to the OT assemblies of God’s people for instruction and worship.
1:3 Paul begins ten of his thirteen letters as he does here, with a reference to the “grace” and “peace” he hopes will characterize his readers. In seven of these ten letters, he describes the source of that grace and peace exactly as he does here, as from God and Jesus. This is, then, a standard greeting for a Pauline letter.
Each key term in this greeting, however, will play an important role later in the letter. “Grace” refers to God’s generous, costly gift of redemption from sin through the death of his Son, the “Lord Jesus Christ” (2:21; cf. 3:13; 4:4–5; 6:14). His Son’s redeeming death was the means God used to become the “Father” of believers, and they are all now his adoptive children (4:5). God gives “peace” to believers in the sense that God’s powerful Spirit enables them to live in peace with one another (5:22; 6:16). Paul wants the Christians in Galatia to experience all of these blessings, but as he will quickly say, they are in danger of deserting God’s gracious invitation to experience them (1:6).
1:4 Paul continues to describe the “Lord Jesus Christ” with a series of clauses focusing on Christ’s work of rescuing believers from sin and evil. The phrase “for our sins” foreshadows Paul’s more detailed explanation of the substitutionary nature of Christ’s death in 3:13, where he says that Christ became “a curse for us.” The reflexive phrase “gave himself” shows that Christ willingly reconciled believers to God in this way. The atonement, then, was not a matter of a powerful father inflicting punishment on an unwilling child but of Christ, who is equal with the Father, willingly participating in the Father’s will for the rescue of his children (cf. 4:4–7).
The Septuagint uses the term “deliver” (Gk. exaireō) in descriptions of God’s rescuing his people from danger and difficulty (e.g., Ex. 18:4; Ps. 50:15), and Luke could use it to describe God’s freeing his people from slavery in Egypt (Acts 7:34). Paul uses the term in a similar way here.
Through Christ’s atoning death, God rescues his people from the sin and evil that dominate “the present . . . age.” Like many Jews of his time (cf. 2 Esd. 7:50), Paul divides history into two ages, “the present age” and “the age to come.” Chaos, suffering, and oppression characterize “the present age” because it is in rebellion against its Creator (Rom. 12:2; 1 Cor. 2:6, 8; 2 Cor. 4:4; Eph. 2:2; 2 Tim. 4:10). In his mercy, however, God will usher in “the age to come” (Matt. 12:32; Mark 10:30; Heb. 6:5; cf. Eph. 1:21), the time of the “new creation” that Paul mentions in 6:14–15 (cf. 2 Cor. 5:17; Rom. 8:18–25). Paul implies here that the atoning death of Christ was the point at which the present age began to pass away and the age to come began to dawn.
1:5 At the mention of God’s name, pious Jewish and early Christian writers sometimes broke into a brief doxology, ending in “amen.” When this happens, it often occurs at or near the end of a section (e.g., 4 Macc. 18:24; 1 Clem. 32:4). Paul does this fairly frequently (Rom. 11:36; Eph. 3:21; Phil. 4:20; 1 Tim. 1:17; 2 Tim. 4:18). His use of a doxology here probably indicates that he is grateful to God for the gospel he has just summarized in Galatians 1:4 and is now drawing the first part of the letter opening to a close.
1:6 Paul typically follows his greeting in his letters with a thanksgiving or benedictory prayer. Here, however, he surprisingly abandons any such positive discourse and instead expresses his own surprise at how quickly the Galatian believers have started to turn aside from the gospel. Ancient Greek speakers could use expressions of astonishment (“I am astonished [thaumazō] that . . .”) rhetorically in both formal speeches (Demosthenes 18.159) and concerned letters (P.Oxy. 42.3063, line 11), but there is no reason to think that Paul does not mean what he says here. The letter displays emotion (4:11–20; 5:12), and Paul’s expression of astonishment here probably reflects real shock and disappointment.
The present tense of the verb “you are . . . deserting” (Gk. metatithesthe) shows that the Galatians have not completed their apostasy. They are, however, well on the way (4:11; 5:2–4), which is why Paul’s letter expresses such emotion and alarm. Paul gives the first hint of exactly what their error entails with his claim that they are deserting the initiative God took (“called you”) when Christ reconciled them to God as a free, wholly undeserved gift (“the grace of Christ”).
1:7 Greek speakers often used the term “distort” (metastrephō) for a dramatic change from something positive to its negative opposite: good into evil (Sir. 11:31), drinkable water into blood (Ps. 78:44 [LXX 77:44]), light into darkness (Acts 2:20), the joy of a wedding into the mourning of a funeral (Amos 8:10 LXX; 1 Macc. 9:41). The word could also mean to “twist, pervert,” as when someone tells an insulting joke by “twisting” the meaning of a word (Aristotle, Rhetoric 1412a 33). Paul uses the word here to refer to twisting or perverting the gospel into something that has a superficial resemblance to it but in its substance is as different from the gospel as night is from day. This “different gospel” (Gal. 1:6) is a distortion of the gospel “of Christ” because the good news of God’s initiative in reconciling people to himself revolves around Christ and especially his substitutionary death for sinners (2:21; 3:13; 4:4–5).
1:8–9 Here Paul uses hyperbole to highlight the importance of distinguishing how one feels about a messenger from the truthfulness of a message itself. The Galatians would be inclined to like and trust both “an angel from heaven” and the apostle they had originally “received . . . as an angel of God, as Christ Jesus” (4:14). Furthermore, it was highly unlikely that either an angel or Paul himself would show up in Galatia bearing a message opposite to the gospel the Galatians originally received. Even in these situations, however, the Galatians should judge the messengers by the truthfulness of the message they preached, not the reverse.
The Galatians seem to have liked those who were troubling them with “a different gospel” (1:6) enough that they “made much” of them and were disturbed by the thought that these attractive teachers might exclude them from their fellowship if they did not follow their teaching (4:17–18). Here Paul tells the Galatians that no matter how attractive these teachers may be, the Galatians should not follow them if their message contradicts the gospel. This principle is so important to Paul that he repeats it twice for emphasis.
“Accursed” translates a Greek term (anathema) that in non-Jewish culture referred to a votive offering set up (anatithēmi) to appease a god. The Septuagint, however, used the term to describe what was “devoted” (Hb. herem) to God, often in the negative sense of what was contrary to God’s purposes and thus should be destroyed or banned (Num. 21:3; Deut. 7:26; Josh. 6:17). Paul is not calling for any sort of violence against the false teachers, something that would contradict the principle he articulates elsewhere of leaving repayment, vengeance, and ultimate judgment to God (Rom. 12:17–21; 14:10–12; 1 Cor. 4:4–5). Rather, he is calling for the sort of exclusion from fellowship that elsewhere he hopes will result in the restoration of those excluded (1 Cor. 5:3–5, 13; 2 Thess. 3:6, 14–15).