Talk:Epistle to the Galatians

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[edit] NPOV dispute

User:CheeseDreams added the NPOV disclaimer to this article, which says "Please see its talk page." So what elements are disputed? – Quadell (talk) (help)[[]] 01:20, Dec 8, 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Title of this article

This article should be renamed "Epistle to the Galatians". All the other epistles have similar titles (Epistle to the Philippians, etc.). Right now, Epistle to the Galatians redirects to Epistle to Galatians, and this should be reversed.

Does anyone disagree?

yes i do disagree

By the way, I'm not volunteering to do this myself. A conscientious title-change requires changing all the pages that link to the old name. Currently there are 109 links to "Epistle to Galatians" and only 18 to "Epistle to the Galatians"! Lawrence King 1 July 2005 07:49 (UTC)

[edit] Authorship of Galatians

"From the mid-20th century to the present, virtually all Biblical scholars have accepted that Galatians is a genuine writing of Paul. See Authorship of the Pauline Epistles for more details." Lawrence King has tacked this onto the article. Does anyone think that this is an honest statement of the current view? --Wetman 9 July 2005 04:38 (UTC)

This is certainly honest even if it's wrong. If you take a look at the edits I have made to any religion-related pages, I am a fanatic for NPOV.
An excellent starting point when researching this is "Introduction to the New Testament" by Raymond Brown. Surveying the literature produced by academic scholars, Brown estimates that "80 to 90 percent" of scholars believe that 1 Tim, 2 Tim, and Titus are not by Paul (pg. 654), and that 80% of scholars believe Ephesians is not by Paul (pg. 621). In other words, Brown is no "fundamentalist" and he is trying to represent a scholarly consensus, not just his own views. Yet he is not aware of any scholars today who dispute the authenticity of Galatians (pg. 468).
Do you know of any scholars since 1920 who think Galatians is pseudepigraphal? Lawrence King 9 July 2005 18:37 (UTC)

'No, no!' said the Queen. 'Sentence first - verdict afterwards.'

'Stuff and nonsense!' said Alice loudly. 'The idea of having the sentence first!'

Rather than just announcing the decision, couldn't someone more knowledgable than I give the article a sentence or two just explaining how this consensus has been reached, for those of us from less authoritarian backgrounds. Why and how the conclusion has been reached is often more telling for us than the conclusion itself. Brown's assessment would make an excellent addition to this article. When doubters did doubt Galatians, what raised their doubts? Does Brown discuss them? Those "percentages" don't inspire confidence: if something has been "voted down" in this fashion, may we know what the question was? The linked article Authorship of the Pauline Epistles also just announces the verdict and does not in fact produce any of the promised details. --Wetman 21:32, 9 July 2005 (UTC)

Hopefully a third person will join in. In the meantime, I'll attempt to answer your question.
Ferdinand C. Baur was one of the pioneers of the historical-critical method. The main methods and criteria he introduced are still in use today. The most important of these are:
Language and style: the vocabulary, sentence structure, etc. For example, Ephesians uses extremely long complex sentences, unlike many other letters of Paul.
Contents and theology: What does the writer believe about the Law? ("abolished" in Ephesians, but not in Romans). What is the main emphasis? (faith, in Romans & Galatians; proper behavior in 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, Titus). Who was Jesus? Is Jesus returning soon? (1 Thess seems to say yes; 2 Thess seems to say no.) Are the leaders of the church important? (Galatians seems to disparage the church leaders; 1 Timothy teaches that bishops and deacons are important.)
Historical setting: We know quite a bit about Paul's life in Acts of the Apostles. Does this letter fit in with that? Galatians, Romans, the Corinthian letters, the Thessalonian letters fit very well in the framework of Acts. On the other hand, Titus and 2 Timothy mention visits to Crete and Nicopolis, plus an extra visit to Ephesus, and these aren't mentioned in Acts.
The difficult thing is to use all of these together. For example, suppose two letters use similar vocabulary. Does that mean they were both written by Paul? Or maybe they were both written the same non-Paul writer?
Around 1840, Baur concluded that only four of the letters bearing Paul's name were genuine. But Baur was only one person, and his application of his own methods was not perfect. Hilgenfeld (1875) and Holtzmann (1885) used the same methods as Baur, but reached different conclusions: they each concluded that exactly seven of Paul's letters were genuine. This wasn't a rejection of Baur, but rather a further development of his methods. Scholars had spent four decades analyzing the letters for vocabulary and history, and had learned more about them. In the late 20th century, scholars even did computer analyses of the vocabulary (what verbs, articles, terms were used). Although the letters aren't long enough for a truly reliable statistical study, the statistics suggest that the list of seven genuine letters is probably correct.
So today, nearly all scholars in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Germany, France, and the Low Countries agree that the letters 1 Cor, 2 Cor, Romans, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Philemon are genuine. These are usually called the "undisputed" letters in the scholarly literature.
Why these seven? They all share common themes, and a common emphasis, and common verbiage. Paul's teaching about the Jewish Law, about Jesus, about faith, and about other subjects in these letters is quite similar. They all fit into the journeys depicted in Acts.
Most scholars think the Pastorals (1 Tim, 2 Tim, Titus) were not written by Paul, and most scholars also think Ephesians was not by Paul. Even if you don't read Greek, you can read these letters in a fairly literal English translation (like the [New] Revised Standard Version or the [New] Jerusalem Bible), and you will see some of the differences.
Colossians is more disputed, since it has some features in common with Ephesians and other features in common with Philemon. 2 Thessalonians is an odd case, and is very disputed -- in terms of its vocabulary, it is very similar to 1 Thessalonians. But in terms of its theology, it seems to contradict 1 Thess about whether Jesus is returning soon. (It's possible to reconcile the two letters' teaching, so not everyone accepts this argument -- but on the surface, 1 Thess seems to say that Jesus will return soon with no warning, and 2 Thess seems to say that Jesus won't return until after a number of historical events take place first. It was mostly in reaction to this that some Protestants in the 19th century invented the idea of the "Rapture", which basically means Jesus returns twice -- once secretly and once publicly -- thus reconciling the two letters. There are other explanations as well, but many historians simply say that there is a contradiction here.)
This entire procedure is subject to criticism. It's possible that Paul didn't dictate his letters literally, but just gave a loose outline to his scribe -- in that case, a different scribe's writing would sound different, but by ancient standards Paul would still be considered the author because the ideas were his. It's possible that Paul went on an additional journey after the end of Acts, and the Pastoral letters refer to events during that journey. And it's possible that a really good forger could have imitated Paul's style perfectly, or that Paul's own style could have changed as he got older. It's possible his own views could have changed, so even if two letters disagree with each other they could both be by Paul. Based on these arguments, some critical scholars, such as Luke Timothy Johnson, agree with Baur's methods and yet still believe that Paul wrote all 13 letters bearing his name. But in general, Bible experts are divided into two groups: those who believe for scholarly reasons that Paul wrote the seven "undisputed" letters, and those who believe for religious reasons that the Bible can't be in error when it uses Paul's name and therefore all 13 letters are written by him. (Lawrence King)
Now that's what we should be reading in the article itself! --Wetman 08:24, 23 July 2005 (UTC)

[edit] unclear on antinomianism

I think that these two conflict a bit:

"He reminds the Galatians of the "law-free"[citation needed] gospel (see also Antinomianism), he has preached to them."

"Chapter 4 then concludes with a summary of the topics discussed and with the benediction, followed by 5; 6:1–10 teaching about the right use of their Christian freedom. For example, it is clear that some took "freedom in Christ" as justification of antinomianism."

- The second seems to assert that he is responding and correcting those who followed Antinomianism, whereas the first asserts that he preached it.

--Tmcw 03:26, 1 September 2006 (UTC)