Galatians 1:11Meaning & Commentary from the Church Fathers

Obeying the voice from above, far from the land of Judea, the holy Apostle Paul proclaimed Christ in Galatia, where most of the inhabitants were pagans. Simple-hearted people accepted Paul's preaching, were baptized, and began to live as Christians. But as soon as Paul had formed a Christian community, or Church, in Galatia and left its borders, Paul's constant enemies came there. These were baptized Jews, who could not endure Paul because he did not offer his disciples the teaching of Christ together with Jewish rites, even circumcision. Many baptized Jews of that time thought that no one would be saved apart from Judaism. They thought that if a pagan wished to be a Christian, he first had to pass into Judaism, and only then into Christianity. But the Apostle Paul, though himself a Jew, did not teach this way. The baptized Jews came to the Galatians and told them that they were not fully Christians, since they had bypassed the Jewish Law. They said that Paul, who had converted them, was not a true and first-rank Apostle. They said that he did not teach as the other Apostles taught, who worked among the Jews. Therefore Paul's enemies urged the Galatian Christians to fall away from Paul's teaching. They told them to accept the Jewish rites and the doctrine held by those newcomers. Meanwhile, these rites constrained the conscience and deprived the Galatians of freedom. Freedom enlightened by Christianity is the highest good in the world. How often even now it happens that a Christian who has not fully assimilated Christ's teaching and the spirit of the Gospel stops at the mere rite of worship. He demands the same relation to Christ's faith from others. He even shows dislike toward a Christian who lives differently and views Christ's religion differently. Such “Old Believers,” with a shade of malice, and sometimes with fanaticism, are found in every confession. Observing the life of Christians, we notice that one part of people lives chiefly by externals. They live by rites of worship, fasts, pilgrimages, and visits to holy places according to vows, sometimes to the harm of family and public duties. Another part breathes chiefly with faith in Christ, exalted love for God and neighbor, and beneficence. Yet it does not abandon the rules of the Church concerning sacred Orthodox ritual life. “These things ought ye to have done, and not to leave the others undone” (Mt 23:23). In accusing the Galatians, Paul's enemies were not guided by Christian love for them. They were guided by malice toward their teacher and by attachment to their own narrow, one-sided, outwardly respectable life. And can one expect good sympathy toward others from those who spoke so wickedly of a holy man? The zeal of these unrestrained zealots for Judaism, though the fruit of false convictions, affected the Galatians. The Galatians, whom the Apostle calls foolish, were already ready to abandon the truth of the Gospel (Gal 3:1). According to the Jewish Law as interpreted by the false teachers, they had already begun to observe minute distinctions of certain days and months. They noted which days were heavy and which were light. They spent certain hours on those days with special care in rites and idleness. So among us some “keep Monday” and fast on that day. Some spend certain Fridays in idleness, without profit for the soul. They condemn others and quarrel with them, while thinking that by these Mondays and Fridays they especially please God. To the misfortune of their conscience, such superstitious people possess little books that they value above the Gospel and sound reason. Try to disabuse some of them about the falsity of these wretched books. You will meet in them the same zeal for their delusion as the baptized Jews showed in Galatia. They had been baptized, but not fully enlightened by Christianity. False teaching, by the charm of novelty, like an infection, secretly and imperceptibly drew sympathy toward itself among the Galatians. The Apostle learned of this while far from Galatia, namely in Ephesus. What does he do? He sends them a letter written with his own hand. In it he expresses his grief over the unfavorable reports about the Galatians' credulity. In it he was forced to defend his teaching and his rights. He had to prove, or point out, his equality with the other Apostles. He had to expose the narrowness of view among Judaizing Christians. In this same letter he lovingly instructs the erring Galatians, calling them brethren. In the passage read today he says: “I make known to you, brethren, that the Gospel which I preached is not according to man” (Gal 1:11). “For I neither received it from man, nor was I taught it,” for example, from the Apostles Peter or James, “but through the revelation of Jesus Christ” (Gal 1:12). Consequently, I too am an Apostle like the other Apostles. Though I was not Christ's disciple during His earthly life, Christ enlightened my eyes also. In a wondrous manner He revealed to me His whole will. My conversion to Christ, Paul seems to say, is truly a miracle. Who could have thought that I, a sworn enemy of Christians and a fiery defender of Judaism, ready to destroy all opponents of my conviction, would myself become a Christian? And not only a Christian, but an Apostle of Christ, a sufferer for Him, a prisoner, dishonored among men, and rejected by my own kin.

To this question we answer that those who can say, "Do you seek proof of Him who, as Christ, speaks in me?" (2 Cor 13:3), and, "It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me" (Gal 2:20), taught not so much themselves as God who lived in them.

He says to the saints: "I said, You are gods, and all of you are sons of the Most High" (Ps 81:6). Then He says of sinners: "But you shall die like men, and fall like one of the rulers."

Therefore, when Paul and Peter speak, who do not die like men and do not fall like one of the rulers, it is evident that they are gods. And those who are gods deliver a gospel that is not human, but divine.

Marcion and Basilides, and the rest of the heretical contagion, do not have the gospel of God, because they do not have the Holy Spirit. Without Him, the gospel they preach is human.

And here we must not think that the Gospel consists in the words of Scripture, but in its meaning. It is not in the surface sense, but in the innermost content. It is not in the outer leaves, foliis, of speech, but in the root of its meaning.

Of God it is said in the prophet: "His words are good toward him" (Mic 2:7). Scripture is useful to those who hear when it is not proclaimed without Christ, when it is not offered without the Father, and when the preacher does not suggest it to others without the Holy Spirit.

Otherwise, according to the word of Ezekiel (Ezek 8:18), the devil, speaking from the Scriptures, and all heresies prepare from it a convenient support for themselves, consuunt cervicalia, sewing a pillow, which they place under the elbow, cubitum, of people of every age.

Likewise I myself, who speak, if I have Christ within me, then I have a gospel that is not human. But if I am a sinner, then it is said to me: "God said to the sinner: Why do you declare My statutes, and take My covenant in your mouth? But you have hated instruction and cast My words behind you" (Ps 49:16-17), and what follows.

It is very dangerous to preach in the Church, because through perverse interpretation the Gospel of Christ can be made into a human gospel, or, what is worse, a diabolical one.

Between receiving and learning there is this difference. One receives the gospel when it is first suggested to him and is raised in him to the level of faith, so that he believes that what is written belongs to you. One learns when he clearly and distinctly understands what is set forth in it under the images of riddles and parables. He knows it not by human revelation, but by revelation from Christ, who revealed to Paul, or through Paul, in whom Christ speaks.

The very word apokalypsis, that is, revelation, is a word proper exclusively to Scripture. It is not borrowed from the Greeks from any secular wise man.

Therefore it seems to me that, as in other words which the Seventy translators rendered into Greek from Hebrew, so especially in this word, they strove to express the particular qualities of a foreign speech. They sought new words for new realities, and gave a meaning for when something secret and veiled, after the removal of the outer covering, became clear and was brought to light.

Here is an example to explain this. Moses conversed with God with unveiled face, that is, without a covering (Ex 33-34). But when he turned to the people, he placed a veil on his face, because the people did not have strength to look directly at his face (Num 4).

Likewise a veil was stretched before the ark of the covenant. When it was removed, what had previously been hidden was set out for view and, to use this very word, was revealed, revelabantur.

Therefore, if those accustomed to reading the works of eloquent secular writers begin to mock the novelty and artlessness of our speech, we will send them to Cicero's books on philosophical questions. They will see how great was the necessity there to use so many strange words that the ear of a Latin person had never heard. And this happened when he translated from Greek, a language close to us.

What, then, must those have endured who tried to express the particular qualities of difficult Hebrew turns of speech? And yet in so many scrolls of the Scriptures there are far fewer words breathing novelty than those which Cicero gathered in his small book.

Then, as we said at the beginning when interpreting the words, "Paul, sent not from men nor through man," so now his word can be understood covertly in relation to the Apostle Peter and the others who preceded Paul. It means that he, having Christ alone as teacher in the gospel, was moved by no law or authority, nullius pro lege et auctoritate moveatur.

Further, he points to that revelation in which, on the road to Damascus, he was counted worthy to hear the voice of Christ. Struck with blindness in his bodily eyes, he began to behold the light of the world.

They babbled that Paul received the faith and learned it from men, and not from Jesus Christ as Peter and the other Apostles did. To this proposal he brings proof, saying: "For you have heard of my former life in Judaism, how I persecuted the Church of God beyond measure and laid it waste. And I advanced in Judaism beyond many of my own age among my people, being exceedingly zealous for the traditions of my fathers" (Gal 1:13-14).

Have I not seen Jesus Christ our Lord?" (1 Cor 9:1). "Paul began his preaching five years after the Savior's death on the Cross." But how many years after His death and after His rising could Christ no longer appear to people? On the contrary, He can appear always, for He said, "I will love the one who is loved by My Father, and I will manifest Myself to him" (Jn 14:21). Above this He said, "You will see Me, because I live, and you will live" (Jn 14:19). "Saul, the cruel persecutor of the first disciples of Jesus." This very thing is astonishing. This very thing requires the miraculous appearance of Christ, which alone could transform Saul from a cruel persecutor into an apostle. "He renamed himself Paul and began his preaching by asserting that Jesus had personally authorized him for this in a revelation and vision on the road to Damascus." As though Paul preached more about himself, and before all else about himself, rather than about Jesus, "that He is the Son of God" (Acts 9:20). People first learned that he was Christ's "chosen vessel" not from him, but from Christ Himself in the appearance granted to Ananias, verse 15. "He did not know the spiritual essence of the teaching from Christ's immediate disciples." But he knew it through the revelations granted to him. "The beginning of Paul's preaching corresponds to the year 38 after the Nativity of Christ, and only in 41 did he come to see the Apostle Peter." We know this from the Apostle Paul himself, Gal 1:18. But this only confirms that he did not receive the Gospel from man and was not taught it by man, but through the revelation of Jesus Christ. "Fourteen years after this first visit, Paul again arrived in Jerusalem, but now to impose his teaching on the apostles." This was the teaching that the ceremonial law of Moses was not obligatory for Christians from the Gentiles. Does Tolstoy really think that it would have been more consistent with the spiritual essence of Christianity to preach the opposite? Thus Tolstoy boldly denies the divinely revealed dignity of the Apostle Paul's preaching. But the Apostle, who gave his very life for the Word of God, assures us of it with an oath, saying, "In what I write to you, behold, before God, I do not lie" (Gal 1:20). Whom, then, should we believe?

For I neither received it from man, nor was I taught it, but through the revelation of Jesus Christ." This statement of the Apostle himself about the appearances of Christ the Savior to him is extraordinarily important for us. Evidently these appearances were numerous and were probably accompanied not only by articulate sounds, but also by the sight of the Savior Himself. How greatly the dignity of the great Apostle of the Gentiles is raised by this! In the Epistle to the Ephesians he likewise declares that the mystery of Christianity was made known to him through revelation (Eph 3:3).

The Apostle speaks with special insistence that he did not receive the Gospel from man and was not taught it by man. Both forms of reception are very natural and ordinary, so one must not think that he condemns them. But because of special circumstances, namely because he was being belittled in comparison with the other Apostles, he was compelled to say that there is another way of knowing Christ. Moreover, it is the highest way: His personal revelation. The Apostle Paul was deemed worthy of this, and through it became equal in title with the chief Apostle Peter. Since the revelations granted to the Apostle were sealed with a character of mystery, he does not disclose them here. He remembers the danger of offering pearls to those who cannot value them. "See," says St. John Chrysostom, "how he proves from things above and things below that he was a disciple of Christ. Christ Himself, without human mediation, graciously opened to him the understanding of all things." To this blessed Theophylact adds: "The same One revealed the Gospel to me who also taught the other Apostles with Peter." "He speaks of this in order to set it against the slanders of his opponents. He shows that in this also he is not inferior to the other Apostles. For as they received the teaching from the Lord Himself, so he too had Him as teacher." According to blessed Jerome, there is this difference between receiving and being taught. The one who receives the Gospel is the one to whom it is first instilled, who is brought only to faith in it. But the one who is taught is the one who comes to know all its mysteries. To this, Theophan adds: "He speaks as if to say, I did not receive it ready-made from men, nor did I devise it myself. In this case, 'nor was I taught' means the same as: I did not invent it myself." The last thought is especially important because it refutes the conjecture of those who suppose that St. Paul's teaching is his personal view of the Gospel.

For us it is enough to hear such a word from the lips of the Apostles in order to believe that all their teaching is truly from above. For they were bearers of the fullness of truth and wholly offered themselves as a sacrifice to it. Blessed Jerome draws precisely this inference here: "The question is asked: is the Gospel received by the Churches of the whole world God's, or man's? We answer that when those who say of themselves, 'Do you seek proof of Christ speaking in me?' (2 Cor 13:3), and, 'It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me' (Gal 2:20), when such men speak, it is not they who speak. The Lord Himself speaks in them. Therefore, when Paul and Peter speak, they hand down the Gospel of God, not of man." "Brethren." Although he did not praise them, and knew that they had opened their ear to the speeches of false brethren, he still considers them to be in communion with him. He writes to them as brethren in Christ, of course in hope of correction and to move them toward it. Error does not yet cut off the one who errs from the society of those who hold the truth. Obstinacy in error does this. "The Gospel preached by me" does not mean simply the way he preaches it everywhere. It means as he preached it among you, in the form, sense, and meaning in which he handed it down to you and as you received it. He spoke similarly above, Gal 1:8-9: "we preached," "you received." The Apostle's gaze is confined to the Galatians alone. He disposes them to concentrate all attention on what they had been taught. For us, however, this is the same as if the Apostle had said, "the Gospel which I preach," for he preached the same thing everywhere. "That it is not according to man." If one looks at it abstractly, considering only its content, one cannot help concluding that it is not a work of human wisdom. This expression resembles the way we say: according to man, according to angels, according to God. Every class of beings has its own circle of proper attributes, powers and actions, means and ends, realities and possibilities. Judging by these, one can determine beforehand whether something belongs to a given class or not. This is what St. Paul now says. The Gospel preached by him does not belong to the circle of human works. It is beyond man's power, and one cannot expect that man could devise it by his own mind. "It was not composed according to human reasonings" (blessed Theodoret). "It is not according to man, because it is according to God, that is, according to divine revelation" (Oecumenius).