NOTES for Gal 2:1-10

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.

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.

It is interesting how specifically the Lord divides responsibilities, callings, and duties in the Church. Paul is called not simply to preach the Gospel, but to preach it to the Gentiles. The Lord distinguishes the particular grace of apostleship among the circumcised from that among the uncircumcised. These might seem like purely technical details: here we speak about this but not that, and there the reverse... Perhaps this reduction of the work to technical matters is precisely what the Lord does not want. The Apostle Paul says that Peter behaved inconsistently, first abandoning observance of Jewish rites and then beginning to “hide.” In a particular situation, one probably needs to decide clearly which system one lives within and not try to conform to two at once. The division of callings is important for this, among other reasons.