If t.he above ree.sonings, frci:rn de.ta which are confessedly in some degree problematical, appear, however, to be on the whole approvable, then we arrive at the result that the entire business of the Galatian trouble had been brought to a sa~isfactory conclusion before the apostle despatched his first letter to the Corinthians. This, as was above stated, he did probably about the Easter-tide of either the year 57 or the year 58. We may, therefore, assume it, to be probable that the Epistle to the Galatians was written some time in the winter months preceding that Easter, possibly as late as in the preceding January. As the Epistle was written after St. Paul had visited Galatia a. seconil time (eh. iv. 13), we are constrained to assign it to this third great journey of his; for it would be doing great violence to the probabilities of the case not to identify the two visits which the language of the Epistle presupposes with the two which are mentioned in the Acts. An earlier time in the journey has been assumed by some on the ground that the words, "so quickly," in eh.· i. 6- mean, "so soon after you werP called," or'" so soon after I left you." But the phrase probably means simply, "so quickly upon being tempted." See note in Zoe. The cast of thought and language in this Epistle has so marked an affinity to that in.the_ two ,Epistles to the :<;Jorin,thians a_nd the Epistle to the Romans that ,thii optical instinct protestsJoudly against a. longer interval being interposed between, its composition and that of any of the other three than the consideration of •other kinds of evidence renders necessary. If we suppose tha.t the Galatian letter was written three or four months before the Easter-tide on which, in great probability, the apostle wrote his First Epistle to the Corinthians, then, since we know that the following Easter-tide foll.rid him at Philippi (Acts xx. 6), after leaving Corinth, from which he_ had despatched his letter to the Romans, it follows that the whole noble 'quaternion was issued forth to the Church within little more than one year. It has been shown by. Bishop Lightfoot that the comparison of the manner in which identical topics are discussed in these letters severally makes probable, by this branch of internal evidence; the fact, which is attested also so far as the Epistles to the Corinthians are concerned by refereti.ces'ccinta.iued in them·to matters of personal history, that the Roman letter was written the latest of the four. That this is so is due to the character worn by the Epistle to the Romans, as being rather a calm a.nd delibe_rat!:l t.r~a~ise, _th~n a l~tter properly so called evoked by the exigency of particular emergencies. But. this method of argument appears to the present writer to become extremely precarious when it is pushed further than this, for determining the position in point of time of the Go.latian Epistle relatively to the two Epistles to the Corinthians. The strife which St. Paul, just at this juncture :xx lN'l'HODUU'l'lON 'l'O
of liis ministerial career, that is to say, during his third great missionary journey, was called to wage incessantly and strenuously wherever he went with J udaizers, with opponents or corrupters of the doctrine of our free justification through faith in Christ, and with impugners of his own properly apostolical authority, would inevitably have led to the formation in his mind, long before he left Ephesus, of a stock, so to speak, of considerations, phrases, and probative texts, ready to be severally produced in over-varying grouping, and with varying degrees of fulness in the propounding of 'them, according to the changing mood of the writer or the shifting entourage of circumstances. There is no ground for imagining that we have in Galatians or in 1 Corinthians, or in 2 Corinthians, any more than in Romane, token~ of the earliest presentment to his mind of any of these objects of thought. On the contrary, they must in all reason be assumed to have been ea.eh· one of them a good while before quite familiar to his consciousness. • •• '
OBJECT Alm CoNTENTS OF THE EPISTLE.
The apostle's object in the Epistle ie to recall the Galatians to the gospel whiob ,they had at the first received from himself-the unchangeable gospel of justification by the free grace of God, simply through faith in Christ, and not by ~eeds of the Law. To , this end he finds it necessary to make it.clear that he had rec~ived from Chris~, and from no man, alike his function as apostle and the message which, as such, he'had to deliver,-two points inseparably intertwined. • [This was necessary because, in the earlier part of his ministry in Asia _Minor, when acting ,vith Barnabas, and even again whl!n acting with Silas, be had borne 'the function of an apostle from men; whereas in the present stage of his ministry he had bean· compelled openly to assert, what had all along been the fact, that he was an apostle delegated immediately from Christ, without in this respect. any human intermediation at all On these two points, namely, the two distinct, senses. of the word" apostle," and the circumstances now leading St. Paul to openly assert his apostleship in the higher sense, the reader ie referred to the two dissertations which close the Intr~-- duction.J •• The first chapter is taken up with tha proof of the two points above indicated; the • second with their illustration. Ch. i. 1-5. The greeting-clearly distinguished in this respect from the greeting in his two earlier Epistles, those to the Thessalonians-insists upon his apostleship as being of the highest character, while it also devoutly and adoringly holds forth to view the redemptive work of Christ, the great remedy, as the apostl«1 feels, for the ,evils. which he has now to encounter. Vers. 6-10. "The gospel ye received from me is unchangeable; when in yow midst, I told you, and now repeat it, that he that perverts its main essence, whatever , his station, must expect nothing less than destruction as an BCCursed thing." Vers. 11, 12. "For I received it directly from God." • , Vers. 13, 14. "It was no part of my early education; I was then an eager Judaist, persecuting the disciples of this gospel." Vere. 15-17. ".And after God had revealed it to me, I had recourse to no human creature for instruction, but forthwith gave myself to its proclamation.'' Vers. 18-24. "Three years after, not earlier, wishing to acquaint myself with Cephas, I Tisited him at Jerusalew, a11d was his guest a fortnight; but saw no other THE EPlSTLE TO TiIE GALATIANS. :xxi