Galatians 2v11-21

Addressing some common errors relating to Galatians 2v11-21

These issues were brought to my attention by a fellow believer and in order to address them, I decided to write a blog post about them.

The issues relating directly to the passage (Galatians 2v11-21):

1.    The Galatian believers were being encouraged not to go back to the ways of Judaism; they were being told (by the ‘Judaisers’) that they could only be true Christians if they followed the law (of Moses).

2.    V12 – certain men came from James – these must have been falsely claiming to have come from James (the leader of the congregation in Jerusalem), because we know what James thought about this issue from Acts 15

3.    James had a life-long difficulty in giving up the Mosaic rituals and regulations, as we see from Acts 21

4.    In Christ, we know that all foods are now clean; Peter should have known this, for he was present on the occasion of Mark 7 and he received the vision of Acts 10

5.    V15 – could be read ‘We who know the law (ie Jews by birth) were saved by faith not by keeping the law. The Gentiles also are saved by faith. Law keeping cannot avail to save a man, or cover our sins’.

6.    The Gentiles were being told they needed to keep the Jewish rituals before they could become Christians

7.    Peter had to forsake his Judaistic sympathies or he was making Christ a liar

8.    Peter and the rest were abandoning grace for law.

9.    V19 – A new believer dies in Christ; he is therefore free from any claim of the law upon him

10. To go back to the law would nullify grace and to follow the law would mean going back under sin; following the law denies the need for Christ’s death.

Of these comments, let me address #2, 5 and 6 first. It is absolutely true that both Jews and Gentiles are saved by faith (as was Abraham, whose children we become through faith – see Galatians 3v7 and 3v29). It is also true, in part, that the Gentiles were being told they needed to keep the ‘Jewish rituals’ before they could be accepted. I say ‘in part’, because it was not ‘Jewish rituals’ per se that were being encouraged by these people who came from James.

But first let me start by saying the people who came from James were indeed misrepresenting themselves. They had come from Jerusalem and were believers, which means they came from the congregation in Jerusalem that was headed by James. But they were not sent by James. To say they ‘came from James’ could well imply they had been sent by him, but in this instance means they came from James’s congregation. Although the meeting in Jerusalem mentioned at the start of Galatians ch 2 was not in fact the meeting recorded in Acts 15, James would not have sent people to tell the Galatians one thing, then later sent a message to the churches from the Council in Jerusalem saying the exact opposite. (Just to clarify, the meeting mentioned in Galatians 2 was recorded in Acts 11, not 15).

Secondly, the so-called ‘Jewish rituals’ were not so much about keeping the Mosaic law as they were about conversion to Judaism. Some Jewish believers were teaching that conversion (shorthanded in Galatians as ‘circumcision’) was necessary before a person could be accepted before God. The promises and the blessings had been granted to Israel as a nation. By the time of the first century, the Jews had decided that the only way in which a non-Jew could access the blessings of God, was by becoming a Jew – ie becoming a proselyte to Judaism. These men from James were taking this a stage further and insisting that Gentiles could not partake of the blessings of faith in Christ unless they first became Jews. So this passage is not about whether or not Gentiles should keep the Law, but whether or not Gentiles needed to become Jews before they could believe in Jesus and obtain the benefits of the Abrahamic covenant (the covenant between God and Abraham, based on faith, that promised blessing to all the nations of the earth). God had already shown that He was accepting Gentiles on the same basis of faith and not by conversion to Judaism (Acts 10). A proselyte was one who was a Gentile, who then underwent conversion to Judaism and then was accepted in all ways as a Jew, as if he had been born a Jew. Just as adoption makes a child a legal member of a family, so conversion to Judaism made a Gentile a Jew in all respects and a member of the Jewish family. In short, legally speaking, a converted Gentile was counted as if he had been born a Jew.

So let’s now address the other comments.

“ The Galatian believers were being encouraged not to go back to the ways of Judaism; they were being told (by the ‘Judaisers’) that they could only be true Christians if they followed the law (of Moses).”

1.    As I already stated, the Galatian believers were not being encouraged to follow the Law of Moses; they were being told they must be converted to Judaism, else they could have no access to the promises of God through the Messiah

2.    It is not the ‘Law of Moses’, but rather the Law of God as given through Moses. [This is not actually much of an issue, but in the interests of completeness, I have included it]. Therefore the rituals and regulations are not those ‘of Judaism’ but of God – the feast days are God’s appointed times (Leviticus 23v2), the Sabbaths are God’s Sabbaths (Ezekiel 20v12), the laws are God’s laws (Leviticus 26v3).

3.    The Galatian believers could not at all be discouraged or encouraged to ‘go back’ to Judaism. Before they became believers, they were Gentiles – the whole point of Galatians is addressing whether or not Gentiles needed to become Jews. As Gentiles, they were therefore pagans and so did not follow the Law of Moses in the first place. It is impossible to ‘go back’ to something you never did to begin with!

James had a life-long difficulty in giving up the Mosaic rituals and regulations, as we see from Acts 21

1. Not one Jewish person in the entirety of the New Testament was asked to ‘give up’ their allegiance to God’s law. On the contrary, those who came to faith in Jesus not only continued in their Judaism, but were known for being ‘zealous for the law’ (Acts 21). Gentiles who came to faith were grafted in to Israel (Romans 11v17-19), became part of the commonwealth of Israel (Ephesians 2v12-13) and were deemed the children of Abraham (Galatians 3v7, 29).

2. If this was true for James, then it was also true for Paul, who was Jewish, and a Pharisee at that, to his dying day. In Acts 23v6, Paul, having been arrested, stated ‘I am a Pharisee, the son of a Pharisee’. Note the present tense – ‘I AM a Pharisee’ not ‘I WAS a Pharisee’.

3. Peter likewise was Jewish to his death; there is no evidence in the entirety of scripture that indicates Peter ever abandoned anything ‘Jewish’. To say differently is to add to the plain sense of scripture.

4. Throughout Acts, we see Christianity referred to as a ‘sect’. A sect is a sub group of a larger group; in this case, it referred to those who believed that Jesus was the expected Messiah who remained within Judaism. There was no hint of abandoning Judaism, but rather a working within it.

5. A person who spoke against God’s law was deemed a false prophet: Deut 13v3-5

“If a prophet or a dreamer of dreams arises among you and gives you a sign or a wonder, and the sign or wonder that he tells you comes to pass, and if he says, ‘Let us go after other gods,’ which you have not known, ‘and let us serve them,’ you shall not listen to the words of that prophet or that dreamer of dreams. For the LORD your God is testing you, to know whether you love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul. You shall walk after the LORD your God and fear him and keep his commandments and obey his voice, and you shall serve him and hold fast to him. But that prophet or that dreamer of dreams shall be put to death, because he has taught rebellion against the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt and redeemed you out of the house of slavery, to make you leave the way in which the LORD your God commanded you to walk. So you shall purge the evil from your midst.

The phrase ‘Let us go after other gods’ by implication includes abandoning the true God and His ways. His ways were enshrined in the law. This is confirmed by what is given here as the corollary to abandoning God – ‘You shall walk after the LORD your God and fear him and keep his commandments and obey his voice.’ Thus we see that if someone who calls themselves a prophet is to teach the people not to follow God’s laws, then they are in fact a false prophet. This ties in perfectly with the words of Jesus in Matthew 5v19: ‘So then, whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do likewise will be called least in the kingdom of heaven’ (emphasis mine).

6. What does Acts 21 say in regard to this statement? Paul visited James some time after Galatians was written. This statement (in the sermon) was not made in relation directly to the letter to the Galatians, but made in support of the idea that James found it hard to give up his Judaism and renounce the following of the rules, regulations and rituals of the Mosaic law. With that in mind, let’s look at what was being said here. When Paul arrived in Jerusalem he had an audience with James, the leader of the congregation. It had been reported to James that Paul was teaching people who came to faith that they no longer needed to circumcise their children or to obey the Mosaic law. In his defence, Paul pointed out that thousands (myriad) of Jews had become believers and ‘all are zealous for the law’. In order to prove the point, Paul was asked to take four young men who had taken a vow. The fact that they needed to go to the Temple and to shave their heads indicates that this was the Nazirite vow they had taken. Paul was also encouraged to take the same vow himself and by this it would show those who were causing dissention that Paul himself lived in observance of the law (Acts 21v24). Paul actually did this, so what does it show? Does it show that James had not given up on his Judaistic rituals and regulations? Well, yes it does, but it does not show that he ought to have given them up. In fact, it shows that Paul also kept the law – unless he was being blatantly dishonest in keeping this vow and was just doing so for appearances! Some have suggested that James coerced Paul into taking this vow, but there is absolutely no hint that this is the case. Also, it is obvious that believing in Messiah in no way negated keeping the law, because many, many Jews had become believers and ‘all were zealous for the law’. Far from abandoning the law, they were upholding it more carefully and zealously. To say otherwise is reading something into the text that is not actually there and leaves one open to the charge of interpreting the scriptures to suit our doctrines rather than allowing the scripture to speak for itself.

7. If Paul abandoned the law, then he also contradicts himself multiple times in his letters, but one example will suffice. In Romans 3v31, Paul addresses this very issue:

Do we then overthrow (‘nullify’ or ‘make void’, in other translations) the law by this faith? By no means! On the contrary, we uphold the law.

Faith in Messiah does not nullify the law, but rather upholds it or establishes it (KJV). Does that sound like the law is to be abandoned, with its rituals and regulations? Not at all!

8. Jesus did not come to start a ‘new religion’ called Christianity – Christianity did not exist until around 250 years later. No, He came to show the true way to worship God, which was rooted in Judaism. God did not decide that Judaism was a mistake, or a false religion, and then set up something completely new.

In Christ, we know that all foods are now clean; Peter should have known this, for he was present on the occasion of Mark 7 and he received the vision of Acts 10

1.    Mark 7 is not about all food being clean. Those translations which include the words at the end as ‘thus He declared all foods clean’ are doing despite to the text. So let’s look at the actual text. The AV reads: ‘Because it entereth not into his heart, but into the belly, and goeth out into the draught, purging all meats?’ (Mark 7v19). Young’s Literal Translation has this same verse as ‘because it doth not enter into his heart, but into the belly, and into the drain it doth go out, purifying all the meats.' Those who suggest that ‘purging all meats’ is an addition to the text are mistaken. However, it has nothing to do with declaring all foods clean. What it does say is that if you eat with unwashed hands (which is the actual subject of the passage), then you are not going to be defiled by that food, because the food enters the stomach and passes through the digestive tract, and out into the toilet thus cleansing the food – from the dirt that might contaminate it from eating without washing your hands first! But there is a further meaning here – the Jews were fastidious about being ritually clean. For a Jew to eat food in the Temple required a certain level of washing for the sake of purity. Some Jews (the Pharisees in particular) had added traditions about hand washing to the eating of everyday foods in the home, saying a person had to be ritually clean before eating anything at all, even if the substance was actually permitted as food. Jesus was saying this is not necessary and was an addition to the Law of God. If Jesus had actually been saying that the laws of kosher were now done away with, the Pharisees would have stoned Him on the spot (notwithstanding that they had no jurisdiction to do so – cf the stoning of Stephen in Acts 7).

2.    Mark 7 needs to be read in conjunction with Matthew 15, which adds further detail to the account and clarifies what the issue actually was – eating with unwashed hands, not whether or not you could enjoy a pork chop!

3.    Acts 10 is likewise not about food. Not once, but twice, Peter explains what the vision was about and neither time did he refer to being able now to eat pork etc. The fact is, the animals in the vision were both clean and unclean (all kinds); the clean were made unclean by contact – contaminated by proximity. Likewise the Jews (considered clean in their own estimation) considered that if they had dealings with the Gentiles (considered unclean by the Jews), they would become contaminated and therefore made unclean. This was rabbinic tradition and was not mentioned at all in the Torah; in fact, it went against what the torah taught about Jews being a light to the Gentiles. God was showing Peter that Gentiles were not unclean, particularly those Gentiles who believed, as was the case in Galatia. Gentiles were to be accepted on the same basis – faith – as Jewish believers. There was to be no distinction (see Galatians 3v28)

Peter had to forsake his Judaistic sympathies or he was making Christ a liar

As already pointed out, Peter, Paul, James and the myriad Jews who believed did NOT forsake ‘Judaistic sympathies’. All they needed to ‘forsake’ was the erroneous rabbinical idea that Gentiles are unclean and could not therefore partake of the promises in Christ without first becoming legally Jewish.

Abandoning Judaism is more likely to make Christ a liar than following the faith He followed and walking as He walked. He Himself said that not the smallest point of the law would pass away till ‘all be fulfilled’ AND ‘until heaven and earth pass away’. ‘All’ has not yet been fulfilled (unless we have somehow missed the second coming). ‘Fulfil’ does not carry any notion of the meaning of ‘abolished’, ‘done away with’ or completed in such as way as to be obsolete. Instead it means to ‘fill up’ or to ‘give full meaning to’. This is why Jesus went on in this same passage to show that lust is the same as adultery and hate is the same as murder. He was showing that it isn’t just the outward keeping of the law that matters, but the attitude of the heart that also matters.

Peter and the rest were abandoning grace for law.

This would only be true if he was trying to earn his salvation through keeping the law – something Paul had done in the past, but once he came to faith in the Messiah, he realised he could never have been good enough in his own strength.

V19 – A new believer dies in Christ; he is therefore free from any claim of the law upon him

The example given was of a man convicted of murder, who receives the penalty for his crime (the death sentence), if he were to be resurrected, the law would have no hold over him. This is true to an extent – he cannot be tried and convicted of the same crime again, but (assuming resurrection) he could not then go out and kill anyone else! My own preferred analogy is of a driving offence, say, speeding. A person comes to court and is convicted of driving too fast, contrary to the speed limit. He is given a fine, which he cannot pay, so someone comes along and pays the fine for him. Can he therefore now go out and break the speed limit to his heart’s content? Of course not! As Paul says in Romans 3v31, ‘do we nullify the law through faith? God forbid! Rather we uphold the law’.

So what purpose does the law have for the believer? There are those who say the law has been nullified (contrary to Romans 3v31) and has no claim on any believer any more. This is not the case. The penalty for having broken the law no longer has any hold on us, but that does not mean we can do as we please, or that there is no longer any law for us as believers. 1 John has much to say about the purpose of God’s law:

1 John 2v3-6

And by this we know that we have come to know him, if we keep his commandments.  Whoever says “I know him” but does not keep his commandments is a liar, and the truth is not in him,  but whoever keeps his word, in him truly the love of God is perfected. By this we may know that we are in him:  whoever says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which he walked.

This echoes the words of Jesus who said ‘If you love me, keep my commandments’ (John 14v15). We show true love for God and echo the true love of God when we keep the law. The passage goes on to say that if we claim to abide in Him, then we should walk as He walked. How did He walk? He kept the law perfectly – and we should strive to do so too.

Of course, there are those who say that this does not refer to the law of Moses, but to the new ‘law of Christ’ – in other words, if Jesus didn’t say it, we don’t have to do it, because we follow the law of Christ and He made it so much more simple. Maybe such things were already being said in John’s day, but whatever the reason, he addresses this very thing in 1 John 5v2-3, where he speaks of the law of God, rather than the law of Christ:

‘By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and obey his commandments.  For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome.’

Please note that the ‘law of God is not burdensome’, which echoes Deuteronomy 30v11: ‘Now what I am commanding you today is not too difficult for you or beyond your reach.’

I do believe that John considered the law of Christ to be identical with the law of God in any event.

To go back to the law would nullify grace and to follow the law would mean going back under sin; following the law denies the need for Christ’s death.

Again, only if it is used as a means of salvation or justification. And also to repeat – no-one can ‘go back’ to something that was not theirs in the first place.

v.14 – the preacher did not address this point directly, but I will do so here because it helps our understanding of what Paul was saying to Peter.

But when I saw that their conduct was not in step with the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas before them all, “If you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you force the Gentiles to live like Jews?”

At first glance (and the standard Christian interpretation of this verse) is that Peter had abandoned everything to do with Judaism and had been living with Gentiles. The fact that the issue concerns eating together, it is assumed that the Gentiles were not eating according to the laws of kosher that the Jews adhered to and that Peter had no issue with this – he would eat non-kosher foods with the Gentiles until the Jewish believers arrived and then he refused to eat non-kosher foods and ate only with the Jews. Support for this view is taken from Mark 7 and Acts 10. But is this a correct interpretation? I suggest it is not! First see the points relating to Mark 7 and Acts 10 above.

It is always important to understand the Hebrew/Jewish context in which things were done, said and written in the New Testament. This particular verse contains a common phrase used in Hebraic thought – ‘live like a Gentile’. It was a term only used by Jews of other Jews and referred mainly to Jews who were associating closely with Gentiles, to the extent of eating meals with them. The Jews had decided that because you could never be sure if a Gentile had been in contact with a dead body, or eaten non-kosher foods, or were even serving non-kosher foods, then by association the Jew would become ritually contaminated. (See comments on Acts 10 above). It would therefore seem that the Jewish believers who had come from Jerusalem were saying that Peter was becoming ritually contaminated by eating with the Gentile believers. Peter therefore withdrew from this close association and had caused a rift amongst the believers in Galatia. The Jewish believers were separating from the Gentile believers and refusing to eat with them. This was causing some consternation and there were only two ways this rift could be healed – either Peter would need to return to eating with the Gentile believers as before, or else the Gentile believers would have to become Jewish converts in order that Jewish believers could have table fellowship with them. To force the Gentile believers into converting to Judaism was to ‘force (them) to live like Jews’. This was precisely what Paul had been teaching against and what Peter’s vision in Acts 10 had been about. Paul had been part of the tearing down of ‘the middle wall of partition’ between Jewish and Gentile believers and he most certainly did not want to rebuild it (Galatians 2v18). If the Gentiles had to become Jews before they could be believers in Christ, then that would be rebuilding that wall. The issue is not whether or not the Gentile believers needed to keep the law of God; it was entirely about whether or not Gentiles could be included in the Covenant of God purely by faith and without becoming Jews first.