NOTES for Gal 2:3-5
All the first church communities included both Jews converted to Christ and recent pagans. And for Jews, as before, it was hard to sit at one table and break bread with the uncircumcised. One may think that this was not always a matter of religiosity in the pure sense. It is entirely possible that in principle, theoretically, many of those Jews who insisted on circumcision were ready to acknowledge that circumcision in itself was not essential for a Christian.
But precisely and only in general, in principle. When the matter concerned concrete church life, the same people could well insist that everyone be circumcised simply by custom, for peace in the community, in order not to trouble newly converted Jews. It would seem there is nothing terrible here. In fact that is how it would have been, if in the end the circumcised had not begun to insist on the spiritual significance of circumcision as such. But this the apostle could no longer accept.
Generally speaking, Paul did not demand any religiosity from anyone, just as he did not insist on its mandatory absence. He himself was and always remained a Jew, but he understood perfectly that religiosity in itself neither helps nor hinders Christian life, if, of course, it does not become an end in itself and if spiritual significance is not attributed to it which it does not in fact have. Yet in the Galatian church, judging by Paul's words, this is exactly what happened.
Circumcision there came, apparently under the influence of local Jewish teachers, to be viewed as something obligatory not only for Jews, but also for recent pagans who had accepted Christ. Circumcision began to be reinterpreted as a properly Christian rite and therefore obligatory for Christians; the opinion spread that the uncircumcised would not be saved and would not enter the Kingdom. Here the apostle naturally had to intervene, not because he was a principled opponent of circumcision, which would be hard to expect from a Jew who was not at all going to renounce his Jewishness, but because he considered any religious conditioning of a Christian's spiritual life to be its distortion or diminishment.