NOTES for Gal 2:6

Speaking about his apostolic ministry, Paul mentions certain well-known and worthy people who, however, demanded nothing from him besides the testimony he bore as an apostle. Apparently, in this case he is speaking of the other apostles, and above all of Peter, with whom Paul met and spoke more than once.

In this case Paul remains faithful to Christ and to his ministry: he says that with God there are no great or respected people; for Him, human respect and fame are worth nothing. At first glance this may seem strange: in every matter there are people who are more or less known, experienced, authoritative.

Such authority need not be inflated at all. But the point is that witness to Christ is not an ordinary matter. No special experience is usually required of a witness as such. What is required of him is only that he be an eyewitness of the events described, that he has seen with his own eyes what he is speaking about. The same was required of Paul, who understood this perfectly well. He knew that what he had to speak about fit into no human framework.

Of course Paul used the language and all the riches of his spiritual and religious tradition to tell about what had been revealed to him and about the One whom he had encountered on the Damascus road. But the apostle understood perfectly well that no tradition can contain this revelation whole. And if so, there can be no theology here, no doctrine, no theory at all. Of course, one can invent many theological schemes that in one way or another describe Christian revelation. And in creating them there really are people more or less experienced, more or less authoritative, more or less known.

But God does not need these schemes, and such activity has little to do with what He expects from His faithful. When it comes to witness, only one thing matters: did the witness see with his own eyes what he is speaking about? Applied to Christian witness, everything comes down to the question of whether the witness has the experience of living communion with Christ and of life with Him in His Kingdom.

Paul had such experience, and he was not chasing anything else. Judging by the fact that none of the people then authoritative in the Church demanded anything else from him, one may think that the other apostles agreed with him in this too. That is not surprising: despite all their human differences, all of them were first of all witnesses of Christ and inhabitants of the Kingdom. Everything else was secondary for them, and there was no point arguing about it.