10) Galatians 3:1-5
O foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you? It was before your eyes that Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified. Let me ask you only this: Did you receive the Spirit by works of the law or by hearing with faith? Are you so foolish? Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh? Did you suffer so many things in vain—if indeed it was in vain? Does he who supplies the Spirit to you and works miracles among you do so by works of the law, or by hearing with faith— (Galatians 3:1-5, ESV Bible)
O foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you? It was before your eyes that Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified. (Galatians 3:1, ESV Bible)
Bewitched
Think of bewitched as simply meaning "put under a spell" or "brainwashed" or "convinced." In our modern vernacular, he says, "Idiots, who has brainwashed you?"
A question: What is the folly of the Galatian God-fearing Gentiles that makes Paul say, "O foolish Galatians"?
Another question: In what sense have they been bewitched, put under a spell, or brainwashed?
And one more question: "Who is the bewitcher?"
Before answering these questions, consider the traditional Christian answer to them. In conventional Christian theology, the situation in Galatia is fairly straightforward. In Paul's absence from Galatia, the Christians have fallen under the influence of "the Judaizers." The Judaizers have somehow persuaded the Christians (Jews and Gentiles both--it makes no difference; they are all Christians) that the law of Moses is not abolished. The Judaizers have managed to dupe the gullible Galatians into believing this absurdity with the result that some of the Galatians have been backsliding, so to speak, into legalism. Some of them have gone so far as to consider circumcision, and others might be keeping ritual observances such as the Sabbath and the biblical holy days; perhaps some are concerned even about the Bible's food laws. To Paul, any keeping of the law is the opposite of what it means to be a Christian. He rebukes the Galatian Christians for being so gullible. He calls them foolish and says, "It was before your eyes that Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified. So how could you possibly be observing the law after this?" Then he rhetorically asks, "Who has bewitched you?" although he knows very well who has bewitched them: those dastardly Judaizers. That is the conventional Christian explanation regarding those unfortunate, bewitched fools in Galatia.
That explanation does not work for Messianic Judaism because Messianic Judaism maintains that the gospel does not abrogate the Torah, that Christianity does not replace Judaism, and that Christians do not replace the Jewish people. Christians in Galatia (Jews and God-fearing Galatians alike) were already a part of Judaism and had, in fact, never left Judaism. They worshipped on the Sabbath when Paul first found them and were doing so when he left them. They had never heard of a grace-versus-law dichotomy, nor had they heard of this Christianity-versus-Judaism dichotomy. Nor had Paul heard of these things. And they could not have considered themselves as a part of the Christian religion in antithesis to Judaism because that antithesis did not yet exist. The traditional Christian explanation of Galatians 3 is anachronistic; it does not fit the historical situation. If the Epistle to the Galatians had been written a century or two later, that explanation could work well. Of course that is how it has been read for most of Christian history, but that was not the situation when Paul wrote his epistle to the Galatians.
The Bewitchers
The bewitchers to whom Paul referred in Galatians 3:1 were the "influencers" of chapter one. The influencers might have been Jewish people within the synagogue, or they could have been people who came into the community from outside. In my opinion, most likely they were believers. It is probable that the influencers were not themselves born Jewish, but they were men and women who had become proselytes, either before or after becoming believers. They themselves used to be Gentiles. They had to jump through the conversion hoop to achieve Jewish status, and the new Pauline gospel bothered them. Why should the God-fearing Gentiles be allowed to forego conversion? "Look, I had to do this; you should have to do this, too!"
They rose up against Paul and against his credentials and against his gospel. They conducted Bible studies in Galatia. They said, "Let's go over Genesis 17 again," and they studied the covenant with Abraham which introduces circumcision. They pointed out how every male in Abraham's house had to be circumcised. They preached hard on Exodus 12:49; they preached hard on Numbers 15:29. They convinced the God-Fearers in Galatia that salvation in Yeshua was a good starting point but not enough.
Now we can answer the questions about Galatians 3:1. The bewitchers were the influencers. They bewitched the God-fearing Galatians by convincing them of the validity of their argument- a position which may have been the majority opinion among believers in that day. The folly of the Galatians is that they fell under the influence of the influencers.
Publicly Portrayed as Crucified
How exactly was Christ portrayed as crucified before the eyes of the Galatians? It sounds like Paul arrived in Galatia, pulled out a projector and a screen, and showed them the "Jesus" film! How did he accomplish this public portrayal of Christ's crucifixion? The Greek word here for "publicly portrayed" is “prographo,” meaning “graphically depicted." That makes it sound less like Campus Crusade's Jesus film and more like Mel Gibson's film The Passion.
When he publicly portrayed Christ Jesus crucified to them, he did not read the New Testament; it did not yet exist. He did not say, "Let's turn to the book of John." Instead, he said, "Let's turn to Psalm 22; let's look at Isaiah 53; let me show the suffering of the servant of the Lord." He showed them Scriptures; he publicly demonstrated in the Tanach that the Messiah had to suffer.
Let me ask you only this: Did you receive the Spirit by works of the law or by hearing with faith? Are you so foolish? Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh? (Galatians 3:2-3, ESV Bible)
The Spirit and the Torah
It seems that Paul set the Holy Spirit and the Torah in opposition to one another, again creating an antithesis, a dichotomy:
Holy Spirit = good
Torah = bad
The conventional church perspective does explain the passage as an antithesis between the Spirit and the Torah. An evangelical or charismatic Christian perspective stereotpes the dichotomy. Prior to bewitchment under the Judaizers, the Christians in Galatia gathered together on Sunday mornings. They met together and took communion. That's as much ritual as they did. Then they sang a few praise choruses. There was a fellow with a guitar. They experienced manifestations of the Holy Spirit. Then the Judaizers came. They start shaking their legalism and Torah stuff around and quenched the Holy Spirit. That's the picture: Holy Spirit versus the Torah.
Paul was not saying this. Remember that "works of the law" refers to those specific signs that define Jewish identity. First and foremost, circumcision is the mark of legal conversion to become Jewish, followed by full obligation to the other identity-marking commandments.
Paul's argument in Galatians 3:2 can be amplified as follows:
When you believed on the Messiah and confessed the name of Yeshua, you received the Holy Spirit. There were signs; you saw miracles. And your spirit within you testified to a transformation. You experienced the intersecting of God's Spirit with your life, manifesting in your midst. All of this happened while you were still uncircumcised Gentile God-Fearers. If you received the Holy Spirit (the sign of the new covenant and the sign of your salvation) while you were still a God-fearing Gentile, then it should be obvious that your obligation to the commandments that identify a person as Jewish is not and cannot be a prerequisite to salvation.
Peter employed exactly the same logic when he saw the Holy Spirit poured out on the God-Fearer Cornelius and the people of his household. He said, "Who are we to deny them baptism?"— even though they were Gentiles. Paul was saying nothing more; he was not—God forbid—placing the Spirit of God and the keeping of Torah in antithesis to each other.
The prophets predicted the giving of the Spirit in the Messianic Era. God will pour out his Spirit to enable us to walk in his commandments. So it says in Ezekiel 36:27: "And I will put my Spirit within you and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules." The Holy Spirit and the Torah work together, not against one another. (For more related to this, read the Introduction to Galatians—Why Should the Gentiles Remain Gentiles? section.)
Paul asked the Galatians, "Are you so foolish? Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh? Did you suffer so many things in vain-if indeed it was in vain?" (Galatians 3:3-4).
The "flesh" refers to the physical and the material. He asked, "Having begun with a spiritual transformation, are now looking for perfection through a physical transformation by becoming Jewish?"
Did you suffer so many things in vain—if indeed it was in vain? (Galatians 3:4, ESV Bible)
The Things They Suffered
What sort of things did the God-fearing Gentiles in Galatia suffer in vain--if indeed it was in vain? I believe they suffered stigmatization in the synagogue where they worshipped and stigmatization from the rest of the Jewish community when they bought meat and interacted with them on a regular basis. Their belief in Yeshua the Messiah was not the issue. Instead, their problem resulted from what their belief meant for them.
Mark Nanos suggests that the stigmatization God-fearing Galatians felt from the rest of the Jewish community resulted from their insistence that they were also covenant members, sons of Abraham, heirs of the resurrection and the world to come. They claimed to be of Israel but not Jewish- grafted in to the Jewish people, so to speak, but not Jewish.
Let's take this out of Galatia and put it in America. Suppose a Gentile Christian visits a synagogue in the local Orthodox Jewish community. A Gentile can do that. He does not need to be keeping a halachic Sabbath to do that. He can simply attend the synagogue as a visitor and a guest. He does not need to be keeping kosher. No one would give him any grief about that; they would not ask him what he had for breakfast. Nobody would care because he is a Gentile. The Jewish world does not expect him to be anything but a Gentile. He can go to an Orthodox synagogue and say, "I'm a Gentile; I'm a ben Noach; I keep the seven laws of the sons of Noah," and he would be welcome without further expectations. He would be a modern God-Fearer.
But if he started to say, "... And I'm a son of Abraham, too; I am a part of Israel, too; I have a share in the covenant, too," that would be problematic. The rabbi might explain, "If you want to be a son of Abraham and enjoy those privileges, there is a process that you have to go through." And if he refuses to consent to that process, and yet insists that he already owns the status on some spiritual level, his convictions might affect his participation in that community According to Mark Nanos, that's the suffering to which Paul referred. So Paul said, "If you're just going to go ahead and convert, then what was the point of all that stigmatization that you suffered in the first place?"
The Other Things They Suffered
They probably suffered acutely from the Gentile Roman community around them as well. Roman law required them to participate in idolatry, to worship the emperor, and to pay homage to the gods of Rome. Refusing to do so was a crime called "atheism." If you did not worship the emperor and the gods, you could be arrested as an atheist.
At the same time, Rome was liberal in its religious laws. The Romans allowed their subjects to worship whichever gods they preferred so long as they fulfilled their civic duty, showed up at the temple for the proper Roman feasts, and participated in a few perfunctory rituals. Roman subjects were only expected to bow down to the emperor once a year and bring a token sacrifice. You could even be a philosophical atheist or an agnostic and just go through the motions, so long as you submitted to the civic expectations.
Strong expectations of social conformity governed and ordered Roman society. Rome was not like America where everyone does as he sees fit and lives out his personal convictions. Social caste and civic duty defined all of Roman life. Failure to go through those motions of idolatry could bring persecution. It might get a person arrested, fined, or even imprisoned. At the very least, a person falling outside the normal social order would find himself ostracized by the larger society.
The only legal way to avoid worshipping idols, by Roman law, was by conversion to Judaism. Judaism was a legal religion. Jewish people were exempt from civic idolatry. That option must have been extremely attractive to the God-fearing Gentiles who were suffering persecution on some level from the pagan world around them. Paul asked his readers, "What was the point of suffering as a Gentile God-Fearer if, after suffering for your convictions, you are just going to convert to become Jewish?”
Does he who supplies the Spirit to you and works miracles among you do so by works of the law, or by hearing with faith— (Galatians 3:5, ESV Bible)
Paul drove his point home in Galatians 3:5. Paul expected the believer to experience the Spirit of God. God will supply us with his Spirit and will work miracles among us. We will know the Holy Spirit in our midst, experience him working miracles, wonders, and signs, and answering prayer. This is the regular result of an encounter with the supernatural. It was so self-evident to Paul that he uses it as the hinge of his argument.
We are supposed to be a spiritual people. We should be expecting the moving of the Holy Spirit in our midst-not at our behest, but as a natural part of what it means to be a Christian. Miracles are commonplace, matter-of-fact for us. God's Spirit is speaking to us, guiding us, helping us, revealing himself to us. We need to have eyes to see him, ears to hear his voice, and faith to experience those miracles in our lives.
Referneces
This lesson was curated from teachings from First Fruits of Zion “Holy Epistle to the Galatians.”