BY WHOSE AUTHORITY?

In this autobiographical passage, Paul speaks of his pre-Christian life, his conversion, and the events that follow. Why does Paul reveal all this? Since the central issue in Galatians is the true Gospel, Paul must make the case that the Gospel he proclaimed to the Galatians is the genuine version and that of his opponents’ is fraudulent. Paul wants the Galatians to know that he has received the Gospel directly from Christ and that his commission to preach it comes from God himself (cf. 1).

Immediately after his conversion, Paul began to preach the Gospel in Damascus and the region south of it, called “Arabia.” Only three years later, Paul had brief contact with Peter and James in Jerusalem, after which he went to the Roman province of Syria-Cilicia with Antioch as its capital. The difficulty with the long passage from 1:11 to 2:21 is how to line up its various events with those recorded in Acts. The events in verses 13–24 correspond broadly with those in Acts 9:1–31, and some seeming discrepancies should not distract us from the overall purpose of the account. Paul’s main point is that his message and commission are divine in origin and do not come from the mother church in Jerusalem.

When Paul wrote Galatians probably in the late 40s, there was no written Gospel—only the oral tradition about Jesus, supervised by the apostles as the original eyewitnesses. Hence, if Paul wants to succeed in persuading the Galatian believers to make a drastic U-turn, establishing the authority and authenticity of his message is of central importance, especially if his opponents claim authorization by the Jerusalem church, as was the case earlier in Antioch (see the report that “certain people came from James”; Gal. 2:12).

What evidence is there of your faithful proclamation and passionate defense of the one, true Gospel about Jesus Christ, as written in the four divinely inspired Gospels in the Bible?