Gal. 1:11-24; Paul's Justification for his Ministry

"For I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that the gospel that was proclaimed by me is not of human origin; 12 for I did not receive it from a human source, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ. 13 You have heard, no doubt, of my earlier life in Judaism. I was violently persecuting the church of God and was trying to destroy it. 14 I advanced in Judaism beyond many among my people of the same age, for I was far more zealous for the traditions of my ancestors. 15 But when God, who had set me apart before I was born and called me through his grace, was pleased 16 to reveal his Son to me, so that I might proclaim him among the Gentiles, I did not confer with any human being, 17 nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were already apostles before me, but I went away at once into Arabia, and afterwards I returned to Damascus. 18 Then after three years I did go up to Jerusalem to visit Cephas and stayed with him for fifteen days; 19 but I did not see any other apostle except James the Lord’s brother. 20 In what I am writing to you, before God, I do not lie! 21 Then I went into the regions of Syria and Cilicia, 22 and I was still unknown by sight to the churches of Judea that are in Christ; 23 they only heard it said, ‘The one who formerly was persecuting us is now proclaiming the faith he once tried to destroy.’ 24 And they glorified God because of me."

I. Understanding the Apostle Paul

Whenever you study the message or life of the Apostle Paul, you need to keep two bedrock principles in mind. The first is that he spends a good deal of his ministry trying to explain and defend his authority. The second is that his ministry is engulfed in controversy from the first word he pens (most scholars think that Galatians is his first letter) until his final epistle. These are really the reverse and obverse of the same coin; by understanding them from the beginning we are able to study Paul's teaching or understanding of the Gospel from the most helpful "angle." In my judgment Paul is the most creative intellect in early Christianity, but this creativity was shaped in the crucible of controversy amid claims by his opponents that he was an illegitimate.

There are three reasons why Paul's apostolic legitimacy is questioned. First, he didn't share the temporal priority of the other apostles. He wasn't with the earthly Jesus. When one of the original Twelve betrayed Jesus and died (Judas), they replaced him, but the criteria of replacement included being with Jesus from the beginning (Acts 1: 21). Paul didn't "fit" that requirement. Second, Paul didn't share the same geographical scope of ministry. When he was called in Acts 9, he decided that the focus of his work would be in the Greek world--Asia Minor and Greece. He was not known in Jerusalem or, if he was, it was as a persecutor of the Christians. Third, Paul's message was different from those in Jerusalem. Because he saw himself as being sent to a different people and a different region, he had to "adapt" the Gospel to meet the needs of his hearers. But this evoked cries of "Foul!" from the folk in Jerusalem. Paul's major intellectual problem was how to preach the Good News of Jesus in a Greek audience--where the Jewish law may have been known but was not followed (except, perhaps, by a group of people called the "God-Fearers"). If Paul emphasized the centrality of the Jewish law for converts, he might not get a hearing among the Greeks; if he downplayed that same law, he would get attacked from the "right," so to speak. This was the lived world in which Paul's ministry was shaped.

II. Paul's Claims in Galatians 1

Paul's words in the passage for the morning become clear once the just-mentioned tensions are understood. He is struggling for his apostolic legistimacy and trying to justify why he has acted rather independently from the Jerusalem authorities. Paul will make at least four claims in this passage. The first has to do with his earlier (pre-Christian) life. He was a persecutor of the church. In fact, he uses the word "violently" here (v. 13) to describe that persecution. The Greek word is interesting. It is hyperbole, from which we get the English word of the same spelling. Hyper means "up" and "bolen" means to "throw or cast." Thus, the violence he visited on the Christians was what we might call an "over the top" violence.

The second thing he stresses is the unique revelation of Christ he was given. The basis of his Apostleship rests on his claim that he had a (private) vision of Christ which both changed him and empowered him to become an Apostle. The experience is narrated three times in Acts (9; 22; 26), and in each case there were witnesses to the event of Paul's losing his sight, but it was Paul alone who interpreted this event as a call to preach Christ. Thus, we can understand how Paul's experience, as well as his message, could have been questioned.

Here is what a skeptic could have said. 'Paul, this so-called conversion happened to you at a pretty convenient time. You probably perceived that your life as a persecutor was at a dead end and that you really could advance much further in your ambitious course by becoming a part of this new movement. You would have been the "Charles Colson" of the first century. You persecuted the Christians when they were small and powerless but then when you saw that your life was at a dead end, you cleverly switched sides to maximize your publicity.'

Paul could only say what Charles Colson has subsequently said: judge me by the fruits of my new commitment. But we can see how he was open to the kind of attacks that dogged him the rest of his life.

Third, and most important, Paul stresses in this passage his independence from the Jerusalem authorities, even as he acknowledges that he visited them. The passage reads almost like a defensive explanation, an alibi, a sort of response to the questions: "where were you on the night of the crime?" Paul's purpose in chs. 1 and 2 is to emphasize that even though he might have gone to Jerusalem a time or two, that the Jerusalem people added nothing to his message. Lest we miss the point, he says it twice. He mentions that after his conversion he didn't go up to Jerusalem (1:17), but he went off to Arabia and then Damascus. Then, when he made it to Jerusalem, he stayed with Cephas two weeks and saw James (1:18-19). What he is saying is that he wasn't around the Jerusalem Apostles long enough to be influenced by their message. Then, he went up to Jerusalem after 14 years (2:1). This means that Jerusalem wasn't even on his radar screen. He then says it again, this time even more vehemently: "those leaders contributed nothing to me" (2:6). Paul is treading a very narrow tightrope at this point. He must maintain that he is a legitimate Apostle and explain why he did go to Jerusalem, but he feels he must also declare that these central figures in early Christianity really offered nothing to him. Paul isn't really the person one wants to highlight at an ecumenical gathering; he is the independent Apostle.

But I think it is his quest for personal independence that led to his striking theological vision, a vision so unique and powerful that it has been the primary shaper of Christian theology to this day. Paul was a generative intellect. He was able to handle seemingly contradictory thoughts and fuse them with a tremendous personal energy that resulted in the letters of the New Testament. The later chapters of Galatians will show how he managed to do this. Here, in chapter 1, he lays the groundwork for his understanding of the Gospel--he was uniquely chosen and he is independent.

Finally, he mentions that those who heard of his conversion glorified God because of it. That is, others vouched for the genuineness of his conversion. It was not just an opportune change of opinion, as if he was running for President of the United States and decided he needed to shore up his conservative base by declaring a new-found commitment to a pro-life platform, or run on a platform opposing the Iraq War in order to appeal to the liberals among us. Paul wants to claim that his is a genuine conversion. His passionate message (and personal attacks) that follow thus flow from a heart that is now on fire with the Gospel.

That is what Paul is trying to argue. Are you convinced?

2688