3 - The Galatian crisis

Summary

The origins of the crisis

We have now traced the process in which Paul and other Jewish Christians at Antioch transformed what was originally a reform-movement within Judaism into a sect outside it. What has not yet been emphasized is the extent to which this decision was controversial within the church itself. Not all early Christians were as ready as Paul was to conclude that the Jewish people as a whole were irretrievably hard of heart, and that the attempt to gain converts should therefore be pursued outside the Jewish community and its way of life. Most Jewish Christians were not yet ready to abandon the original dream that the Jewish people as a whole would soon be united in their expectation of the coming of Jesus as the Messiah. They would have regarded Paul's preaching of freedom from the law to Gentiles as based on a disastrously false presupposition (that God had abandoned the Jewish people), and as gravely hindering their own mission. This disagreement came to a head in the controversy between Paul and the Judaizing missionaries who were achieving considerable success among his own converts in Galatia, and in the events which led up to it, described in Gal. 2. The essential issue in Galatians is thus whether the church should be a reform-movement within Judaism or a sect outside it.

This view is in contrast to one highly influential interpretation of Galatians.