A Historical Commentary on St. Paul's Epistle to the Galatians

By W. M. Ramsay

Part 2

Historical Commentary

Chapter 57

The Unforgiving Phrygians (Gal 6:1-5)

The opening paragraph of Galatians 6 is occupied still with the same subject as the last two. Paul is looking quite away from the Judaic controversy. He is absorbed in the development of his own Churches and the special faults that they have to face. He saw one serious danger in that Anatolian people, easy-tempered and orderly in most things, but capable of going to any extreme in religious madness. Just as in later time, “that unpitying Phrygian sect” was apt to cry: —

Him can no fount of fresh forgiveness lave

Who sins, once washed by the baptismal wave —

so already Paul saw their tendency to unforgiving condemnation of him who had sinned, and warned them, “Brethren, even if a man be overtaken in any trespass, restore such a one in a spirit of meekness”. To continue the quotation: —

                                             She sighed,

The infant Church! Of love she felt the tide

Stream on her from her Lord’s yet recent grave.

And so Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians is an outline of Phrygian Christian history: he saw what was the one safeguard for his young Churches, and he urges it on them, in paragraph after paragraph — Love.

And what have the North Galatian theorists to say in illustration of this most characteristically Phrygian passage? Why, they are struck with the fact that a man in Corinth had committed a grave offence; Paul’s appeal to the Corinthian brethren to punish the offender “had been promptly and zealously responded to”; and “he had even to interpose for the pardon of the guilty one”. And therefore “the remembrance of this incident still fresh on his mind, may be supposed to have dictated the injunction” to the Galatians here. Because the Corinthians had been severe, therefore the Gauls must be warned not to be severe!

But that is not Paul’s method. When he warns the Galatians against a fault, it is not because the Corinthians had committed it, but because the Galatians were prone to it. If in any of his Epistles Paul is wholly absorbed in the needs of his first audience, it is in this to the Galatians. But so it was in all, more or less, with the exception of Romans; he speaks to the Church in Rome, not from personal knowledge, nor from report of their special circumstances (as to the Colossians), but in preparation for his own visit and from his experience in the Eastern Churches.

In the first four and a half chapters Paul is occupied specially in revivifying in the Galatians the impressions and the teaching of the first journey; from Gal 5:13 onwards he is repeating the warnings that we can imagine formed the burden of his preaching on the second journey. But everywhere he feels himself on Anatolian soil, and is speaking to a typically Anatolian, and in particular a Phrygian, people; and the best preparation for studying the adaptation of his words to his readers is to study the typical peasant of the present day, as he presents himself to the travellers that have observed him with sympathy and affection. He is called an Osmanli now — he does not call himself a Turk, and rather resents the name — but he has much of the old Phrygian character: pp. 33, 234.

 

 

Book Navigation Title Page Preface Table of Contents Religion in Asia Minor      ► Chapter 1      ► Chapter 2      ► Chapter 3      ► Chapter 4      ► Chapter 5      ► Chapter 6      ► Chapter 7      ► Chapter 8      ► Chapter 9      ► Chapter 10      ► Chapter 11      ► Chapter 12      ► Chapter 13      ► Chapter 14      ► Chapter 15      ► Chapter 16      ► Chapter 17      ► Chapter 18      ► Chapter 19      ► Chapter 20      ► Chapter 21      ► Chapter 22      ► Chapter 23 Historical Commentary      ► Section 1      ► Section 2      ► Section 3      ► Section 4      ► Section 5      ► Section 6      ► Section 7      ► Section 8      ► Section 9      ► Section 10      ► Section 11      ► Section 12      ► Section 13      ► Section 14      ► Section 15      ► Section 16      ► Section 17      ► Section 18      ► Section 19      ► Section 20      ► Section 21      ► Section 22      ► Section 23      ► Section 24      ► Section 25      ► Section 26      ► Section 27      ► Section 28      ► Section 29      ► Section 30      ► Section 31      ► Section 32      ► Section 33      ► Section 34      ► Section 35      ► Section 36      ► Section 37      ► Section 38      ► Section 39      ► Section 40      ► Section 41      ► Section 42      ► Section 43      ► Section 44      ► Section 45      ► Section 46      ► Section 47      ► Section 48      ► Section 49      ► Section 50      ► Section 51      ► Section 52      ► Section 53      ► Section 54      ► Section 55      ► Section 56      ► Section 57      ► Section 58      ► Section 59      ► Section 60      ► Section 61      ► Section 62      ► Section 63      ► Section 64