-Apollos, for example-who from their earliest years had been familiar witb t,hose sacred writings which were able, as St. Panl reminds Timothy, to make men wise unto salvation through faith in Christ Jesns; so that when the way of God had been carefully exponnded to them, they would find themselves, under the Spirit's guidance, thoroughly eqnipped, as in fact Apollos proved himself, as men of God for rITery work of the ministry (2 Tim. iii. 16, 17). We cannot help feeling persuaded that it was in the main from this rank of converts that those presbyters were chosen. And obviously the same consideration applies to those who had been appointed to "teach in the Word" the members of the several Galatian Churches (eh. vi. 6). They too, we may confidently a.ssnme, were in most or many cases converts from the synagogue. The Ola Testament the on"ly Scriptures, and handled after the methods of Jewish sohools. Further, we mnst bear in mind that now and for some time later the only Scriptures which Sunday by Snnday furnished those sacred readings, which in the Christian assemblies, after the model of the sabbath services of the synagogue, formed the basis of expository comment and of exhortation, were the same as those refeITed to by the apostle in the passage just above cited, that is to say, they were the Scriptures of the Old Testament. In these their teachers searched for and found, and by these they delighted to illustrate, those truths relative to our Lord's personal history, which were embodied in the brief summary of Christian faith instilled into the mind of the Church (comp. 1 Cor. xv. 3, 4, "According to the Scriptures"). The histories of the Old Testament, its prophecies, its devotional utterances, the precepts of the Mosaic Law itself as illustrative of spiritual principles (1 Cor. ix. 9), were, we feel certain, each successive Lord's day presented to the view of the Christian brotherhood, by men of originally Jewish culture, but adding to that culture, and so qualifying it, the all-important elements of the truth of the gospel. Now, it is obvious to suppose that, in the hands of such teachers, the methods of Biblical comment and illustration would to a very great extent be the same as they had. been familiar with previously to their conversion, from their rabbinical education in the Jewish schools and from the synagogue preaching. It is, of conrse, not meant that these readings and expositions of the Old Testament constituted the whole of the service, or of even the public addresses, on the Lord's day. Without importing into onr conception of the Church life of just this time the features which mark it in the por- traiture given fifty years later by Pliny, in his celebrated letter addressed to the emperor from Bithynia, we are able, however, to form some notion of its nature from glimpses afforded by the Acts and the Epistles. And forming our judgment from these, we cannot doubt that the Holy Eucharist was celebrated at least every Sunday, and probably oftener; that more or less in connection with this, the feast called Love (Agape) was held, fur- nishing opportunity for religious converse; also that "psalms and hymns o.nd spiritual songs" were sung or chaxi.ted (Eph. v. 19). :Moreover, those yjjj INTRODUC'l'ION TO
who had gifts of prophesying and of speaking in tongues had opportunity given them of employing their gifts for the good of their brethren (1 Cor, xiv.); and prayers were offered up which all could take part in or express sympathy with. Tims the reading and expounding of the Old Testament Scriptures by no means formed the whole or even, perhaps, the ma.in part of t.he bnsiness of these fraternal assemblies. But neither, again, need we suppose that the reading of those Scriptures with instruction founded upon them was confined, as it perhaps was in the synagogne (Acts xv. 21), to one day in the week. In those days of early religious fervour, and of thirst for the "spiritual milk which was without guile," meetings for social worship and mutual instruction were, we may well believe, held from day to day and from house to house, at which there would be going on a perpetual repeating and inculcating of the ideas and words of Scripture, with still the same Jewish tincture in the mode of expression and of .tilustra tion. This had been going on now for some years. Now, when the apostle wrote this letter of his to the Galatians, this instilling into the minds of the Gentile converts of Christian truths clothed in the garb of Jewish thought had been going on, in some at least of the Galatian Chnrches, for not less than five or six years. By which time these disciples, with the quickness and vivacity of intelligence which then, as Cresar tells us, characterized the Gallic tempern,,ment, even as they do now, must have imbibed so much of Jewish theological thought Christianized as would qualify them readily to apprehend and assimilate any such trains of thonght and reasoning as those which we find in this Epistle. Their case was different from that of the Thessalonian believers when the apostle wrote his two letters to them: these last were not yet prepared to receive instruction couched in those forms-their conversion from heathenism was too recent; and accordingly in those two Epistles we do not find it. Bnt the Galatian converts stood in a different position, as did also the Roman Christians (Rom. vii. 1), and the Corinthian (1 Cor. x. 1, 11, and passim), and those to whom was sent the encyclical letter which we know as the Epistle to the Ephesians (Eph. iv. 2; v. 30; vi. 2); all-these, thongh mainly Gentiles, were become, by the time those letters were sent to them, familiar with the Scriptures of the Old Testament, and could be addressed as being so.
CHURCHES OF GA.LATIA.
In Galatia there does not appear to have been any one city which St. Paul made his head-quarters for evangelistic work in any such way as in Asia he made Ephesus his head-quarters, and in Achaia Corinth. We have no mention of Pessinus, or of Ancy:ra, or of Tavium. The Epistle is addressed to "the Churches of Galatia," as if there were a number of such Churches, no one of which, perhaps, contained so large a body of members as to give it a distinguishing pre-eminence among the rest. In those days, in 'l'llE EL'ISTLE 'l'O 'l'HE, GALATIANS. IX