18) Galatians 3:27-29
For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to promise. (Galatians 3:27-29, ESV Bible)
Have you ever heard it said that there is no longer Jew or Gentile because we are one in Messiah? What do people mean when they say that? From where do they get that notion? It comes from the end of the third chapter of the book of Galatians.
Neither Jew Nor Greek
Paul expressed a similar concept in the third chapter of the book of Colossians:
Put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator. Here there is not Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free; but Christ is all, and in all. (Colossians 3:10-11)
In addition, Paul said something similar in the second chapter of Ephesians, where he spoke of Jewish and Gentile believers combined into "one new man in place of the two, so making peace," that Messiah "might reconcile us both to God in one body" (Ephesians 2:15-16).
In summary, Paul taught that there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian or Scvthian; instead, we are one in Messiah as one new man. These sentiments run at the heart of Paul's theology; they express the heart of his unique gospel of Gentile inclusion.
(Some scholars suggest that Galatians 3:26-29 is not an original Pauline text and that he was quoting from an earlier baptismal creed of the early believers. I doubt very much that this is the case, unless it was a creed that Paul and Barnabas coined. At the time of the writing of Galatians, the rest of the Jewish believers did not yet concede a theology of "one new man." Instead, Paul's gospel of the Gentile inclusion was unique to him and his followers.)
In the church and in the Messianic Jewish movement, one often hears Paul's sentiment echoed: "There is no longer Jew nor Gentile, for we are all one in Messiah!" This is certainly a precious truth, and it is at the heart of who we are in the Messianic Jewish movement. That truth forms a critical and essential piece of our theology.
Before we unpack it, I would like to look at a few ways in which this truth is misapplied in the body of Messiah today.
One New Christian
In the broader Christian community, this text proves that Jewish people, after coming to faith, are no longer really Jewish. Instead, they have become a new thing: a Christian. Therefore, they need no longer practice Jewish rituals or matters of Torah like circumcision, dietary laws, Sabbath, calendar, and so forth. They may do so if they like in order to retain a cultural connection with their people, just as people of any culture can and do retain their own particular music, distinctive dress, and local customs after becoming Christians. In no way, however, is the Jewish Christian obligated to keep the Torah or to marry within the Jewish people or to raise Jewish children because, after all, there is no difference between Jews and Gentiles in Christ.
There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. (Galatians 3:28)
We can call this "One New Man Theology." The one who espouses One New Man Theology actually implies that there are no Jews in Messiah whatsoever. Jewishness is erased by Christ. The Messiah obliterates the identity of the distinctive people of Israel, the heirs of the forefathers, the people of the covenant.
For most of the last two thousand years, this is what happened to every Jewish person who became a believer. The Jewish person who becomes of Christian marries a Christian; she marries a Christian, or their children do, and within a generation or two, they are lost from the Jewish people completely.
This is ironic because Christianity always bemoans the fact that the Jewish people are so hard to reach with the gospel. Christians wonder why there are so few Jewish believers. "Where are the Jewish believers?" the Christian asks. Moreover, Christian missions to the Jewish people continue to focus on Jewish evangelism, yet it seems that Jewish believers are so rare. Generation after generation of Jewish missions talk about when the great harvest of Jewish souls will happen. Does no one notice the irony here?
Hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, and hundreds of thousands of Jewish people have come to faith in Messiah and become Christians over the last century and a half, but they are almost all gone, vanished. Over the last two thousand years, a steady stream of Jewish people has confessed Messiah, beginning with the generation of the apostles, but they are gone, too, like chaff in the wind.
They have left no enduring legacy. There is no Jewish form of Christianity or ongoing Jewish legacy of faith in Yeshua because, as soon as the Jewish people become believers, they are taught, "Now that you are a Christian, there is no difference between you and us, and you may marry our children, and our children may marry yours, and you no longer need to be Jewish or keep kosher, or keep Sabbath, or do anything that would preserve your identity as a Jew. You are no longer under the law."
For that reason, Jewish Christians are doomed to be swallowed by the church, stripped of their Jewish identity, absorbed into "Gentileness," and made into Gentiles. When Christians say, "There is no difference between Jew and Gentile in Messiah," they are really saying, "There is no Jew in Messiah." The "one new man" is always a Gentile.
Basic Darwinism
The result is Darwinian. It is basically natural selection, the survival of the fittest. Although natural selection probably cannot account for the origin of species as Darwin suggested, no one argues that natural selection determines basic outcomes of survival and extinction in nature.
Imagine that a certain species of toad once thrived, and among these toads, there were two types. One type of toad was afraid of snakes, and the other type of toad had no fear of snakes. This was just a genetic variable. A mother toad might give birth to a litter of toadlets, and half had a fear of snakes and half did not, just as some of your siblings have a different eye color than you.
For thousands of years, the toads that did not have a natural, built-in, instinctual fear of snakes kept getting eaten by snakes, and because they were eaten by snakes they rarely got the chance to pass their genetic data on to the next generation of toads. After several generations, no toads remained who did not have a fear of snakes. All the toads were all afraid of snakes because those who did not have a fear of snakes were eaten by the snakes. That process is called survival of the fittest--natural selection.
Now imagine the snakes bemoaning the fact that there are no longer any toads without a fear of snakes. Of course there aren't. The snakes ate them all.
A similar spiritual process of natural selection has been going on between Judaism and Christianity for two thousand years. Christianity is saying, "Why are the Jewish people so resistant to the gospel?" But not all Jewish people resist the gospel; it's just that Christianity swallows the ones who do not. The only ones who have survived and are still identifiable as Jewish are those who have internalized a resistance to the gospel. If their ancestors had not rejected Christ, they, too, would have been swallowed by the great Gentile collective called Christianity, and the family would no longer be Jewish.
This is a real problem with the One New Man theology. According to One New Man Theology, it's not that there is no longer Jew nor Greek, it's that in Messiah, everyone is Greek; there is no Jew.
One Law for Messianic Gentiles
Suppose that we simply reverse the values. In Messiah, there is neither Jew nor Greek because Gentiles are grafted into Israel. We are all one new man. Some Gentiles in Messianic Judaism interpret this to mean that, for all practical purposes, Gentile believers in Messiah are exactly the same as Jewish people. Both Jews and Gentiles have the same covenantal responsibilities, the same duties, and the same obligations. As one new man, both Jews and Gentiles are obligated to keep the whole Torah. Because of that, a Gentile is not really distinguishable from a Jew. This theology is popularly called One Law Theology." It is based on passages such as Exodus 12:49: "There shall be one law for the native and for the stranger who sojourns among you."
One Law Theology is the belief that Jewish people should keep the whole Torah, just as the Bible teaches, but Gentiles fall into the same category as Jewish people, so they should, too. In fact, the Gentile believers are obligated to do so because there is neither Jew nor Gentile in Messiah. We are all the same. Rather than Jews assimilating into the Gentile Christian identity, under One Law, Gentiles assimilate into Messianic Jewish identity.
This theology is similar to that of Paul's theological opponents in Galatia, except that the One Law Messianic Gentile never makes a legal conversion. He adopts the identity and obligations of a convert, but does not do so through the Jewish community.
One Law Theology has not had an eighteen-hundred-year run like One New Man Theology, but we can predict the results just the same. By making all Gentiles the same as Jewish believers but without becoming Jewish, we effectively accomplish the same results as the Christian One New Man Theology. One Law Theology neutralizes Jewish identity, dilutes it, and eliminates it. The Gentile believer has the same legal status as a Jewish person, and this opens the possibility for and probability of intermarriage. It erases any definable borders which could be used to define who is Jewish and who is not Jewish.
Sociologically speaking, One Law is the end of Jewish identity for Jewish believers. In its place comes a new pseudo-Jewish/Gentile identity in which differentiation between the two vanishes. As a One Law Messianic Gentile, for all practical purposes, I would be the same as a Jewish person. This spells extinction of a distinct Jewish identity for Jewish believers as surely as the other.
The "One Law" interpretation of "one new man" is exactly the same as the Christian interpretation, except for one difference:
One New Man Theology says, "Since we are the same in Messiah, Jewish believers need not keep the Jewish aspects of Torah anymore."
One Law Theology says, "Since we are the same in Messiah, we all need to keep the Jewish aspects of Torah."
Paul’s Rule for all the Churches
A moment's reflection should be enough to realize that this is an impossible interpretation of Paul. The holy apostle expends a great deal of his energy arguing that Gentiles do not need to take on the commandments which identify a person as Jewish (such as circumcision) and that Gentiles do not need to be Jewish in order to be reckoned as part of the people of God. Obviously, Paul himself made a clear line of distinction between Jewish and Gentile believers. In his worldview, Jewish believers are obligated to the covenant responsibilities incumbent upon them. Gentiles are also obligated to God's Torah, but not to those particular aspects of it which define a person as Jewish (such as circumcision). Paul drew that line of division in all his writings, especially in Galatians.
Messianic Jewish scholar David Rudolph refers to this as "Paul's rule for all the churches.":
Paul's Rule for All the Churches: Only let each person lead the life that the Lord has assigned to him, and to which God has called him. This is my rule in all the churches. Was anyone at the time of his call already circumcised? Let him not seek to remove the marks of circumcision. Was anyone at the time of his call uncircumcised? Let him not seek circumcision. (1 Corinthians 7:17-18)
Paul told Jewish disciples of Yeshua not to "remove the marks of circumcision." He was not speaking literally about some kind of surgical reversal (epispasm) as some have suggested in the past. The "marks of circumcision" simply mean the marks of being Jewish: circumcision of sons, Torah observance, the Sabbath, the biblical calendar, Levitical functions, the dietary laws, tzitzit, tefillin, mezuzah, and the practice of Judaism (albeit, "Messianic" Judaism). In other words, Paul told Jews not to assimilate into a Gentile identity or forsake Torah.
Oneness is not Sameness
Consider the "neither slave nor free" part. Paul said that in Messiah there is neither slave nor free, but in his epistles Paul instructed slaves to serve their masters faithfully, diligently, not begrudgingly. He told slave owners to treat their slaves honorably, and he told freemen not to become enslaved to another. Clearly, there is a difference. Even "in the Messiah," the slaves are still slaves, the freemen are still free, and they have different roles and responsibilities.
Consider the "male and female" part. Paul said that in Messiah there is no male or female. If that is the case, why do conservative Christians object to the prospect of same sex marriages? If there is no difference, what difference does it make? Clearly, men are still men and women are still women, even in Messiah.
Paul was alluding to the holy marriage of the first man and the first woman, Adam and Eve, of whom it says that "they shall be one flesh." Oneness is not sameness. Adam and Eve are one new man, so to speak, because the man shall leave his mother and father, cleave to his wife, and they shall be one flesh. Every marriage, spiritually and metaphorically speaking, results in one new man, yet within that "one flesh," distinct roles and identities still exist.
In Messiah, Jew and Gentile are one but not the same. As regards salvation and our standing in the Messiah, there is no difference between Jew and Gentile. As the Apostle Peter declared, "He made no distinction between us and them, having cleansed their hearts by faith" (Acts 15:9). Jews, Gentiles, men, women, slaves, and freemen have the same access to salvation through the same Messiah, but that does not eliminate our distinct identities and roles.
The Way it Might Have Been
Things might be different today if eighteen hundred years ago, instead of absorbing and assimilating Jewish believers into a homogenized Gentile Christian identity, the Christian church had insisted that Jewish believers maintain their Jewish identity, as the Scripture says. Imagine if Christianity had done this one small thing. Forget about Constantine, seven ecumenical councils, and all the rest of Christian history. Make this one small change, the only necessary change to the theological equation.
If Christianity had honored Jewishness, upheld it, reinforced it, and protected it in the midst of Christianity, everything would have evolved differently. The church would have always had a Jewish core. Imagine how things might look today if Christians had protected the Jewish identity of Jewish believers in their midst and encouraged Jewish families to remain Jewish. Suppose Christians had encouraged Jewish people to observe their covenant obligations and encouraged Jewish believers to remain Sabbath keepers. What if Christians had encouraged Jewish believers to remain Torah-observant within Jewish synagogues, Messianic synagogues, or otherwise. Imagine how things would be different. With that strong Jewish core, Christianity would look completely different today.
Eighteen hundred years of Jewish believers maintaining strong Jewish identity would have resulted in a large believing Jewish constituency. They might not constitute the majority of the Jewish community, but I think it is fair to say that the Jewish community would have just as many followers of Yeshua as non-followers. The entire Jewish community would have been forced to interface with the teachings of Rabbi Yeshua. At the very least, Jewish believers would be an integral part of both Christianity and Judaism.
Instead, because of the Christian theological insistence on sameness, Jewish believers are an endangered species. Ironically, the Christian insistence on sameness between Jews and Gentiles has actually put up a dividing wall between the Christian and Jewish community. Our insistence on sameness has been the greatest theological impediment of all to the advance of the gospel in the Jewish community. Jewish believers today are few and fading, as always, because we want to believe that oneness is sameness.
Jewish identity is precious. It is slipping away. Secular and liberal Jews are not preserving it. Messianic Jews are not preserving it. Hitler tried to exterminate the Jewish race. Where he left off, intermarriage and religious attrition work to finish the job.
Heirs of the Promise
Is it not time for believers to turn this thing around? Jewish believers should be proud of being Jewish and hold on to that identity. Gentile believers need to set aside their jealousy, and let the Jewish people be Jewish. We are one body, many parts. We all have roles to play.
For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you are Christ's, then you are Abraham's offspring, heirs according to promise. (Galatians 3:26-29)
We have put on the identity of Messiah. In respect to our standing in Messiah, we are all one. And if we belong to the Messiah, then we are Abraham's seed, heirs of the Abrahamic promise, according to the promise.
The promise which Abraham's seed inherits is this: "In your seed all nations will be blessed." The seed of Abraham is the nation of Israel, but according to Paul, the "seed" of Abraham is the Messiah. Paul says that if we are in this seed, then we are heirs according to the promise that all nations will be blessed in Abraham's seed. Even the Gentile believers become Abraham's spiritual seed, and Abraham is the father of both Jews and Gentile believers in faith; as it says, "I will make you a father of many nations."
Therefore, Gentile believers have a place at the table of Abraham through the Messiah. This is what Paul means when he speaks of Gentiles grafted in to the nation of Israel and joined into one new man with the Jewish people.
Referneces
This lesson was curated from teachings from First Fruits of Zion “Holy Epistle to the Galatians.”