Today’s message from Galatians 2:15b-21.
The setting: Paul, the Pharisee-turned-evangelist, is very worried that someone has come in behind him to change the message from one of life-changing good news (gospel) to one of religious particularism (another gospel which is no gospel).
Paul’s Revelation
He makes it clear that the message he has been spreading through the world did not come to him from a human source, but “by revelation of Jesus Christ.” Not that he had not, after his remarkable meeting with Christ on the Damascus road, checked in with those who had known Jesus during his earthly ministry; he had, and had found that his message was consistent with theirs.
Someone’s been messing with the message!
Some of the new believes in the Church at Jerusalem have not yet understood the scope of the message that gave them life, and want to impose additional conditions on the new-found faith of their non-Jewish counterparts out in the wide world, of whom the Galatian churches form a part.
This “other gospel which is not a gospel” makes the claim that while faith in Christ is a good start, it is incomplete without the entire traditional package — we would now call it the “judeo-Christian tradition” — including rules about circumcision of males, dietary practices, and all the other things that go with their (superior [?]) religious tradition.
Later in the letter, Paul says that his Galatian friends have been “bewitched” by this alternate message: one that relies on “the works of the law” rather than “the faith of Jesus Christ.”