Unthinking Galatians. (3.1-6)

by Kent Leslie ✉️

You foolish Galatians! Ἀνόητοι/anó’iti, both here and in verse 3, means “not thinking.” It doesn’t so much mean stupid or foolish. It’d be better to translate verse 1 as “You Galatians aren’t thinking,” rather than make it sound like an insult. You realize calling your readers stupid isn’t gonna win them over!

Who has cast a spell on you…? The KJV has “Who hath bewitched you?” The word they’re translating as “cast a spell” or “bewitched” is ἐβάσκανεν/eváskanen, which means “to give [them] the evil eye.” To curse them. Because preaching an alternative gospel curses people, [Ga 1.9] and that’s what the Galatians were doing—cursing themselves by saying you can’t be Christian, saying God won’t save you, till you first do the good work of ritual circumcision. And any other hoops certain self-righteous people might wanna put on people, till they’re “clean enough” to be proper Christians. So really, who did cast a spell on them, to get people to believe this junk?

Before whose eyes. If an ancient speaker was really vivid at describing stuff, ancients would say it was the same thing as if they saw it themselves. So maybe Paul himself—maybe Barnabas, Apollos, or some other Christian evangelist, or all of them, over and over again—described Jesus’s death in gory detail, and made sure the Galatians knew just what had befallen our Lord.

Plus Romans didn’t only flog and crucify Jesus: They flogged and crucified plenty of people in Galatia too. All over the empire. On the way to every large city, along the side of the road, you’d see crosses with dead victims still on them—to follow the Law, the Jews took down the bodies as soon as the victims died, [Dt 21.23] but the gentiles didn’t. The Romans set up these crosses to terrify people into behaving themselves.

And sometimes the Romans crowned their victims with thorns, just like they did Jesus. What they did to him was a game the Roman soldiers played with many of their victims, called “the king’s game”: They dressed a convict as a king, and rolled dice to see who got to hail him. But of course, instead of saluting him, they slapped him around. (In Jerusalem, you can go to where the soldiers tortured Jesus, and see the king’s game etched into the pavement.)

So the Galatians had personally seen all the same stuff that Jesus had suffered, done to people in their province.

Did you receive the Spirit…? You realize Paul couldn’t ask this question unless the Galatians knew they had the Holy Spirit. And how do we know we have the Holy Spirit? Well, cessationists will say we know it intellectually—the bible says we received the Spirit when we believed! [Ep 1.13] But remember, Paul hadn’t written that part of the bible yet.

(Others will say we know it because we feel it in our guts. But you all know we can psyche ourselves into feeling just about anything we want, when we push really hard.)

So how’d the Galatians know they had the Spirit? Same way we do: The Spirit obviously did stuff among them! Verse 5, and work miracles among you. The Spirit empowered them to speak in tongues when they were baptized in the Spirit. Or still speak in tongues when they prayed. Or prophesy, cure the sick, discern stuff, or know stuff. In any event, that’s how you know you have the Spirit: He does stuff. If he does nothing, you don’t know we have him.

Sad to say, there are a lot of churches who have no idea whether the Spirit, whether God, is even real. They never expect him to move (and some of ’em really don’t want him to), so he doesn’t.

By the works of the law, or by believing…? We can ask the very same thing of ourselves. Did we get baptized by the Holy Spirit because we were such good people, or because we believed in Jesus?

Finishing by the flesh? By which Paul means ritual circumcision. The Galatians started their life in Christ by receiving the Holy Spirit… but now these legalists have convinced him that if they really wanna be Christian, they have to take a really sharp knife to a part of them that they should only treat nicely. I don’t get it either.

If in fact it was for nothing? Paul was trained in Roman-style rhetoric, and this is a rhetoric technique: Say something for impact, then take it back. “Did you experience so much for nothing?—but no, it wasn’t really nothing.”

By your doing the works of the law? Or is it by believing what you heard—? This is another rhetoric technique: Contrast a good thing and a bad thing, over and over again, till it sinks in that you want the good thing, not the bad thing.

Abraham believed God. Abraham’s faith was considered one of his greatest traits. Paul points out multiple times in the New Testament that Abraham’s righteousness is only connected with his faith in God and God’s promises. ’Cause Abraham’s works… kinda sucked. Read Genesis: Abraham didn’t do a whole lot of good works! More bad than good. His faith was also kinda immature. But he was trying, and God can work with immature faith.

This is the first of Galatians 3’s seven proof texts. It comes from Genesis 15:

Ge 15:6: Abram believed the LORD, and he credited it to him as righteousness.

The context is God promising Abram ben Terah (whom he hadn’t yet renamed Abraham), that even though he’s a 75-year-old shepherd married to his sister (eww, but true), and they have no kids, and they’re way past child-rearing age (even for back then), God’s gonna give him so many descendants he can’t possibly count them all, just like he couldn’t count all the stars. We could make a really good estimate; we have space telescopes and computers. But Abraham couldn’t possibly, and that’s the point. And Abraham trusted that promise, and adapted his entire life to seek that promise. As should we with God’s promise to give us his kingdom.