As is Paul’s custom, he begins his letter to the Galatians fore-fronting the purpose of his letter in his very first sentence. Apparently, the Galatian believers have been hoodwinked into thinking that prestige begets popularity and influence begets importance, being distracted from the apostle Paul's initial influence in their lives, and quickly deserting him and Jesus whom Paul preached.
Apparently, there were some troublemakers among the Galatian Christians who wanted to make trouble for the Galatian Christians (1:7) by seeming to be influential in order to distort the gospel of Christ.
These trouble-makers appear to have put a spell on the Galatians (“who has bewitched you?” 3:1) by their false representation of themselves as influential people and lured the Galatian Christians away from Paul’s preaching in order to take them captive and enslave them to the Jewish law, specifically to the law of circumcision.
In light of Paul’s awareness of the fragility of the Galatians’ faith, from the beginning of the very first sentence Paul intends to re-establish his own importance and influence in their lives to win them back away from a distorted gospel, tweaked by Jewish law so that the truth of the gospel might be preserved for them in their daily lives.(1:5)
He begins his letter by contrasting the source of the Galatian authority as “those who seemed influential” (2:2, 2:6, 2:9), to his own authority as being received directly from Jesus the Messiah, and God the Father, who raised Him from the dead."
“Those who seemed influential” gained their sense of authority by the impressions that were imposed on them from the minds of man. They were esteemed in the minds of man, or were granted a sense of authority by a group of men, or with letters of recognition of the kind that Paul indicates in his second letter to the Corinthians (2Cor 3:1-3) or the kind that Paul himself previously secured from the Jewish Counsel leaders that gave him the authority to persecute the church in his former hateful days. (Acts 9:1-2)
But all is not as it seems. Not Paul. Paul receive his athroity as an apostle in the manner of man. He became an apostle in another (ἕτερος) way…
“Paul, an apostle—not from men nor through man, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised him from the dead”.
Paul received his authority as an apostle completely apart from any influence of man. No man bestowed or transferred authority onto him. Neither was his authority granted to him by an organized group. Man had no part whatsoever in Paul's authoritative position as an apostle of Jesus Christ and he lets the Galatian church know that in very specific terms in the very first sentence of his letter..."not from men nor through man, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised him from the dead”.
So, Paul establishes for his readers that he is an apostle of another kind. Not as the kind like “James and Cephas and John, who seemed to be pillars,” but in the kind that was derived on the Damascus Road when the man, Saul, met the resurrected Jesus face to face and received from Him, no mere man, his instructions to preach the gospel to the Gentiles. His apostleship derived directly from the resurrected Messiah himself.
This encounter with Jesus provided a very different kind of authority, one that James, and Cephas and John eventually recognized and acknowledged as "grace-given," and one that caused them to give “the right hand of fellowship to him, so that he and Barnabas should go to the Gentiles, and James and Cephas and John to the circumcised.”
It was this encounter with Jesus that shaped Paul’s thinking for the rest of his life and is the background for his letter to the Galatian church.
In my next blog, we will discuss Paul’s Damascus Road Experience as Background to Galatians
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