Paul's letter to the Galatians: the theme is that of the letter to the Romans, the tone is that of the concluding three chapters of 2 Corinthians. In other words, "Death to the law, dammit!" The letter combines Paul's chief doctrine with more evidence of something resembling a personality disorder. You would not say that he is slow to anger. The converts, whether it be in politics or religion, tend to run a temperature, and casual readers, if there are any, must be relieved that most of these letters are brief. Dr Johnson said of Edmund Burke that anyone taking shelter with him in a doorway during a rain shower would comprehend before it passed that they were in the presence of genius. With Paul, you would venture back into the rain before being able to make such a determination.
The letter begins:
Paul an apostle--not from men nor through man, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised him from the dead--and all the brethren who are with me,
To the churches of Galatia:
Grace to you and peace from God the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself [etc., etc.] Amen.
The et ceteras are just meant to shorten the formulaic salutation that begins Paul's letters. What seems noteworthy is that the author's irritation could not here be restrained until the niceties were done. He's Paul, and he speaks for God. There cannot be a question of mere disagreement. The salutation complete, the body of the letter commences:
I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and turning to a different gospel--not that there is another gospel . . . . As we have said before, so now I say again, If anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to that which you received [from me], let him be accursed.
You see what I mean about preferring to be out in the rain.
The careful reader will be able to make out in the second chapter something about circumcision and a controversy about what the commentators now call "table fellowship,"--that is, who can eat with whom. The point of this brings us back to the fact, noted previously in connection with the letter to the Romans, that these early Christian communities were made of both Jews and Gentiles, with the result that the place of the Jewish law was somewhat ambiguous. Did the Gentile Christians need to be circumcised? Were the Jewish dietary laws in abeyance or not? That the Galatians had adopted, or were adopting, the wrong answers to these questions is what set Paul off. The wrong answers were Yes on circumcision and No on table fellowship between Gentiles and Jews. The Judaizers, in other words, had gained the upper hand in Galatia. Had they prevailed, Christianity, instead of becoming a world religion, would likely have been relegated to a sect within Judaism that either would or wouldn't have survived.
But Paul won. I don't think it's on account of the argument advanced in Galatians, for which the cliché about emitting more heat than light might almost have been invented. Paul huffs and he puffs but makes almost no sense at all. Exhibit A would be 3:10, when he's in the midst of ransacking the Old Testament for material with which to bolster his argument:
For all who rely on works of the law are under a curse; for it is written, "Cursed be everyone who does not abide by all things written in the book of the law, and do them."
The quotation is from Deuteronomy 27:6, where it means exactly what it seems to mean, which is exactly the opposite of what Paul seeks to prove. I mean to say that this passage, applied to the controversy between Paul and the Judaizers at Galatia, would require that the law be observed, that the Gentiles be circumcised, and that the dietary laws remain in force. Yet Paul cites it as if the words meant the exact opposite of their plain meaning. The reconciling commentaries aren't very persuasive but perhaps there are textual problems, such as a missing segment of the argument. No one really knows.
Frustrated by the mostly futile effort to comprehend the argument, you might turn to commentaries, which, if they're any good, will likely persuade you that it's worse than you'd thought. There's a kind of chicken-and-egg problem connected to the question of whether the text seems boring because it makes so little sense, or makes so little sense because the reader is too bored to extract meaning. I had assumed the latter but the former may actually be more plausible. Here is the scholar Norman Perrin on the aforementioned section on circumcision in chapter 2:
This passage is extraordinarily difficult to translate, probably because Paul is wrestling with the fact that he actually circumcised Timothy (Acts 16:3), and it is affecting his grammar....
I take this to mean it's hard to translate because it's impossible to understand what the text means. In a footnote to 4:25, Wayne Meeks, editor of the Norton Critical edition of The Writings of St. Paul, comments:
The text is uncertain, another major group of manuscripts reading "For Sinai is a mountain in Arabia"; copyists have evidently tried to help out Paul's limping allegory by adding notes.
Scanning Meeks's notes, one is struck by the deployment of "baffling" and "puzzling" and "hardly intelligible" and "ambiguous" and "grammatically incomplete" and "logically confusing," in addition to "limping allegory," to describe different portions of the relatively brief letter. Meeks was professor of religious studies at Yale so you can imagine what troubles await the non-specialist. I've given it my best so that you can skip Galatians and do a Sudoku.
Luther had a different opinion. Galatians is second only to Romans in the category of usefulness for his fixed idea, which is forcefully expressed at the conclusion to the third chapter:
Now before faith came, we were confined under the law, kept under restraint until faith should be revealed. So that the law was our custodian until Christ came, that we might be justified by faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a custodian; for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith. For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.
Not sure I understand that either, but, as it sounds bold and free, doesn't involve a tortured analogy, or betray the author's hurt feelings and high self-regard, we may trail off on a high note.
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