3. LETTER TO THE CHURCHES OF GALATIA. Paul saw that his vision of the Church that should unite the civilised world was a vain dream, if it were to be bound by the fetters of Judaism ; and he felt, as soon as he heard of this defection, that it must be met at once. If these Churches, his first foundations towards the west, were to pass under the party of slavery, his work was ruined at its inception : the blow to his policy and his influence was ruinous. One of the arguments by which the change had been produced was especially galling to him : his efforts at conciliation were taken advantage of to distort his motives, and to represent him as inconsistent and temporising, and his attempts to soothe the prejudices of the Judaistic party were treated as attempts at compromise. Hence he bursts forth at the outset in a strain of terrific vehemence (which I purposely give as far as possible in Lightfoot's language) : " Though we {i.e., Silas and I), or an angel from heaven, should preach unto you any gospel other than that which we preached unto you, let him be accursed. As we have told you before, so now once more I say, if any man preacheth unto you any gospel other than that which ye received, let him be anathema. What ! does my boldness startle you ? Is this, I ask, the language of a time-server ? Will any one say now that, careless of winning the favour of God, I seek to conciliate men, to ingratiate myself with men ? I speak thus strongly, for my
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language shall not be misconstrued, shall wear no semblance of compromise " {Gal. I 8-10). And towards the end of his letter he returns to the same point : " What ! do I, who have incurred the deadly hatred of the Judaisers, who am exposed to continual persecution from them, do / preach circumcision ? If so, why do they persecute me ? Surely what scandalises them in my teaching, the crucifixion with its atonement for sin, has been done away with, if I have, as they say, taken to their method, and begun to preach circumcision " (V 11).
Satisfied with the vehemence of the first outburst, and the sarcasm of the second, Paul wastes no argument to prove that he has been consistent throughout. He knows that the Galatic Churches cannot really believe that part of his adversaries' arguments : they feel in their hearts that he has always been true to the first Gospel ; and he proceeds to remind them of its origin and its hold on them, in order to enforce the conclusion that they must cling to the first Gospel, whoever it be that preaches any other. His argument, therefore, is directed to show that he came among them in the beginning with a message direct from God : " the Gospel which was preached by me is not after man" (I 11): "it came to me through revelation of Jesus". Then he proceeds to show, by appealing to the facts, that he had not had the opportunity of learning anything from the recognised pillars of the Church. When it pleased God to reveal Jesus in him, bitter enemy of the Church as he was, he "conferred not with flesh and blood,"" but went away for solitary meditation into Arabia. He was made by God His Apostle to the Nations years before he conferred with any of the Apostles. Twice at a later date did
1 86 History of the Churches of Galatia. Chap. VIII.
he go up to Jerusalem, in one case remaining fifteen days and seeing only Peter and James, in the second going up at the Divine command to help the poor at Jerusalem (II 10) — on which occasion, as a matter of fact, no injunction was laid on his Greek assistant Titus to accept the Judaic rite — and receiving the recognition of his Apostleship, but no instruction, from the heads of the Church (p. 56 f.).