126 Introduction

it was formed more than a generation ago, when comparatively little was known of the internal geography of Asia Minor, or of its condition under the Cesars: whereas Professor Ramsay’s advocacy of the opposite view is founded on intimate acquaintance with the geography and history of the country during the first century. Again, Paul’s foundation of the four southern Churches and subsequent visits to them are well-attested facts, while he is not known to have visited the northern division at all. It had indeed little attraction for an educated Greek as a sphere of missionary enterprise, and held out little promise of success, for it was then inhabited mainly by an imperfectly civilised population of Keltic herdsmen and shep- herds. If the authenticity of the Acts be admitted, the earliest occasion on which Paul was within reach of Northern Galatia, and can have founded Churches there, was on his way to Troas and Macedonia. It has accordingly been suggested that he may then ’ have turned aside to preach amidst that people. But every stage of that journey was accomplished under the immediate guidance of the Spirit, and the silence of the narrative, written as it was by a fellow-Christian who accompanied the apostolic party from Troas onwards, is conclusive against that theory. That history leaves the reader virtually no choice but to identify the Galatian Churches with the four whose foundation it records. It is futile to object that the instability which the Epistle reproves in the Galatians was characteristic of a Keltic people, for it belonged as certainly to the populace of the southern cities, or that there may have been Jews and Greeks in the northern cities when history establishes the special preponderance of these elements in the southern. The further contention that the name Galatia was not extended to the southern division of the province save in official language ignores the fact that the province had been seventy-five years in existence and really furnished the only collective name for the heterogeneous races incorporated in it under the previous rule of Galatian kings. If it be urged again that Paul would not have designated his Churches by the name of the province, the answer is that throughout his Epistles he invariably groups his Churches according to provinces, whether Syria or Asia, Macedonia or Achaia. His reference in this Epistle to the Churches of Judza and to his ministry in Cilicia can hardly be reckoned an exception, for these were quasi-provinces governed independently by imperial procurators. Nor was this practice a mere accident of language: it faithfully reflected his deliberate policy of Church extension, suggested perhaps by the example of the Jewish Dispersion, who had; before