NOTES for Gal 2:3-5
All the earliest church communities included both Jews who had turned to Christ and recent pagans. Yet Jews still found it difficult to sit at the same table and break bread with the uncircumcised.
We may suppose that this was not always a matter of religious observance alone. It is quite possible that, in principle, in theory, many of the Jews who insisted on circumcision were prepared to acknowledge that it was not in itself essential for a Christian. But only in general, only in principle. When it came to the actual life of the church, those same people might well insist that everyone be circumcised, simply as a matter of custom, for the sake of peace in the community, so as not to unsettle newly converted Jews.
There would seem to be nothing very wrong with that. Indeed, there would not have been, had the circumcised not eventually begun to insist on the spiritual significance of circumcision as such. And that was something the apostle could no longer accept.
Generally speaking, Paul did not require religious observance of anyone, nor did he insist that it must be absent. He himself was and always remained a Jew, but he understood perfectly well that religious observance in itself neither helps nor hinders the Christian life. Provided, of course, that it does not become an end in itself or have a spiritual significance attributed to it that it does not actually possess.
Yet, judging by Paul's words, that is precisely what happened in the Galatian church. Circumcision came to be regarded there—apparently under the influence of local Jewish teachers—as obligatory not only for Jews but also for recent pagans who had accepted Christ. Circumcision began to be reinterpreted as a specifically Christian rite and therefore as obligatory for Christians; the view spread that the uncircumcised would not be saved or enter the Kingdom. And here the apostle naturally had to intervene—not because he opposed circumcision on principle (one could hardly expect that of a Jew who had no intention whatever of renouncing his Jewish identity), but because he considered any attempt to make a Christian's spiritual life conditional on religious observance a distortion or diminution of that life.