Sec. a. The Dispute in Antioch. 161
Paul alone stood firm. The issue of the situation is not described by Paul ; he had now brought down his narrative to the situation in which the Galatian defec- tion arose ; and his retrospect therefore came to an end, when he reached the familiar facts (p. 185 £). We must estimate from the context the general argument and what was the issue. Obviously, the rebuke which Paul gave must have been successful in the case of Peter and Barnabas ; the immediate success of his appeal to their better feelings constitutes the whole force of his argument to the Galatians. The power of his letter to them lies in this, that the mere statement of the earlier stages of the controversy is sufficient to show the impregnability of his position and the necessity of his free and generous policy : the narrow Judaising tyranny was self-con- demned ; Peter was wholly with him, and so was Barnabas ; but the victory had been gained, not by listening to the older Apostles, but by obeying " the good pleasure of God, who called me by His grace to preach Him among the Gentiles". If the hesitation of Peter and Barnabas had resulted in an unreconciled dispute, the force of Paul's argument is gone : he has urged at great length that the older Apostles were in agreement with him, and accepted him as the Apostle called to the Foreign Mission, as they were to the Jewish Mission ; and, as the climax of his argument for equality of privilege, he says : " Peter and even Barnabas wavered for a moment from their course, when the gravity of its consequences, viz., the supersession of the Judaic Law, was set plainly before them by some of their friends ; but I pointed out Peter's error in one brief appeal from his present wavering to his own past action ",
11
1 62 The Apostolic Council. Chap. VII.
From this analysis we see that the issue of the situation implied in Gal. II 11-14 is described in Acts XV 2, 7 : Barnabas joined Paul in combating the Judais- ing party, and Peter championed the cause in emphatic and noble terms at the subsequent Council in Jerusalem. That follows naturally on the interrupted narrative of the Epistle : the history as related in Acts completes and explains the Epistle, and enables us to appreciate the force of Paul's argument and its instantaneous effect on the Galatian Churches.
It is an interesting point, that Peter used at the Council the argument in favour of freedom with which Paul had pressed him in Antioch. Paul said to him, " In practice thou, a Jew, livest as do the Gentiles ; how then compellest thou the Gentiles to act according to the Jewish Law ? " Struck with this argument, Peter puts it in a more general form to the Council, " Why put a yoke on them which neither we nor our fathers could bear ? " It is true to nature that ho should employ to others the argument that had con- vinced himself.
It must, however, be confessed that while Galatians leads up excellently to Acts, and gains greatly in force from the additional facts mentioned there, Acts is silent about the facts narrated in Galatians. The eye- witness's narrative gains from the historian and stands out in new beauty from the comparison ; but here Acts seems to lose by being brought into juxtaposition with the narrative of the eye-witness. To our conception the omission of all reference to the wavering of Barnabas and Peter appears almost like the sacrifice of historic truth, and certainly loses a picturesque detail. But the
Sec. a. The Dispute in Antioch. 163
difference of attitude and object, I think, fully explains the historian's selection amid the incidents of the con- troversy. For him picturesque details had no attrac- tion ; and the swerving of all the Jews except Paul from the right path seemed to him an unessential fact, like hundreds and thousands of others which he had to leave unnoticed. The essential fact which he had to record was that the controversy raged, and that Paul and Barnabas championed the cause of freedom.