Paul’s gospel in HIS first Century context

It is not always recognised that Paul’s letters are the oldest witnesses to the life and times of the early Jesus-movement available to readers today. They precede the earliest Gospel (Mark) by at least a decade and several decades in the cases of the other Gospels.

The first thing one notices when focusing on Paul’s own context is that his gospel is hammered out within a polemical environment (2 Corinthians 11:1–13; Philippians 3:1–11). Most of Paul’s adversaries feared that his gospel to the Gentiles (Galatians 2:2; Ephesians 3:6) would “change the customs that Moses handed on to” the Jews (Acts 6:14). These opponents were particularly zealous of God’s choice of Israel as His people to the exclusion of all other nations. Every book of the Torah affirms God’s sworn promise that the descendants of Abraham, and they alone, would be His chosen people (Genesis 17:7; Exodus 6:7; Leviticus 8:2; 26:12; Numbers 15:4; Deuteronomy 14:2) and His special or treasured possession (Exodus 19:5; Deuteronomy 4:20; 7:6; 14:2; Psalm 135:4).

Paul may assert that “circumcision [Jew] is nothing, and uncircumcision [Gentile] is nothing” (Galatians 5:6; 6:15; 1 Corinthians 7:19), but for his opponents circumcision was everything; it was the tangible guarantee that Jews were the custodians of the promised seed. Paul rather grimly wished that they might accidently mutilate their testicles (Galatians 5:12) and thus disqualify themselves from belonging to the people of God (Deuteronomy 23:1). Yet the fact is that many Christian Jews stood by their exclusive relationship with God; for them the only means of becoming a child of Abraham was by birth as a Jew (circumcised on the eighth day, Luke 2:21; Philippians 3:5) or by circumcision as an adult in the case of a pagan.

God’s sworn covenant to Abraham and to his heirs included three promises: “I will make you exceedingly numerous”; “I will give to you and to your offspring after you the land” of Canaan; and “I will . . . be God to you and to your offspring after you” (Genesis 17:2–7). Circumcision was integral to these covenantal promises, and its obligation could not be stated more forcefully: “So shall my covenant be in your flesh an everlasting covenant. Any uncircumcised male who is not circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin shall be cut off from his people; he has broken my covenant” (Genesis 17:13b–14).

Paul’s opponents had a multitude of texts that supported the election of Israel as God’s people, so Paul was forced to be more selective and to use his texts more creatively. His first key text was Genesis 15:6 (“And he believed the LORD, and the LORD reckoned it to him as righteousness”), which referred to Abraham’s response to God’s promise of an heir from whom a multitude would descend as the stars of heaven in number (Genesis 22:17). Abraham trusted God to fulfil His word that he and Sarah, despite their advanced years, would produce an heir. Trust put him into a right relationship with God.

Paul quotes Genesis 15:6 in Galatians 3:6, and the next verse clarifies his meaning: “so, you see, those who believe are the descendants of Abraham” (v7). It is crucial to Paul’s gospel that “believed God . . . reckoned . . . as righteousness” is inclusive of Gentiles as recipients of all God’s promises to the Patriarchs. Paul emphasises this strongly in Galatians 3:

• •“God would reckon as righteous the Gentiles by faith” (v8a).
• “All the Gentiles shall be blessed in you [Abraham]” (v8b).
• “in order that in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles” (v14).
• “in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith” (v26, italics added).
• “There is no longer Jew or Greek” (v28)
• “And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise” (v29).

Thus, being a descendant of Abraham and an heir of the covenant promises is neither a birthright nor a right procured by circumcision, but a privilege granted to those, both Jew and Gentile, who emulate the trust in God that Abraham manifested in Genesis 15:6.

In Romans 4 Paul takes his use of Genesis 15:6 a step further in two important ways. First, he notes that Abraham was uncircumcised when he put his trust in God’s promise; circumcision is not mandated until two chapters later (Genesis 17:10–14). Paul states his conclusion very clearly: Abraham “received the sign of circumcision as a seal of the righteousness that he had by faith while he was still uncircumcised. The purpose was to make him the ancestor of all who believe without being circumcised and who thus have righteousness reckoned to them, and likewise the ancestor of the circumcised who are not only circumcised but follow the example of the faith that our ancestor Abraham had before he was circumcised” (Romans 4:11,12).

Second, Paul conjoins Genesis 15:6 and Psalm 32:2 by focusing on the verb that is common to them both, namely, “reckoned” (logizomai, which is used seven times in Romans 4:3–11). By bringing Psalm 32:1,2 alongside Genesis 15:6, Paul makes it clear what he understands by the phrase “reckoned as righteousness”; it means “blessed is a man to whom the Lord shall certainly not reckon (logizomai) sin” (Romans 4:8, author’s translation), which in context means “whose iniquities are forgiven and whose sins are covered” (v7). CK Barrett rightly notes “that the reckoning of righteousness is virtually equivalent to the non-reckoning of sin and differs little from forgiveness”.¹

Again Paul is adamant that the blessings pronounced in Psalm 32:1,2 include the Gentiles: “Is this blessing, then, pronounced only on the circumcised or also on the uncircumcised? We say, ‘Faith was reckoned to Abraham as righteousness’”; a faith or trust that is available to Gentiles as well as Jews. The Gentiles “were circumcised with a spiritual circumcision” (Colossians 2:11). Hence, “a person is a Jew who is one inwardly, and circumcision is a matter of the heart, by the Spirit” (Romans 2:29). The words “reckoned to him as righteousness” apply also “to us who believe/trust in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead” (Romans 4:22–24).

Paul’s second key reference is found in Genesis 18:18 (see also Genesis 26:4), which he quotes in Galatians 3:8: “And the scripture, foreseeing that God would reckon as righteous the Gentiles by faith, declared the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, ‘All the Gentiles shall be blessed in you’.” The first half of this verse sums up his point drawn from Genesis 15:6 in Galatians 3:5,6, but the final clause is a close quotation from Genesis 18:18 (LXX). For Paul this promise to Abraham of him being a blessing to the Gentiles (see Genesis 12:3) is equivalent to the gospel which was preached beforehand to him (proeuēngelisato, v8).

Genesis 22:18 is a close parallel to Genesis 18:18 but with a vital addition: “and in your seed shall all the nations (ethnē) of the earth be blessed” (author’s translation). The word “seed” becomes here an important part of Paul’s defence of his gospel to the Gentiles. Paul notes that the noun “seed” is singular and to his mind it thus points to “one person, who is Christ” (Galatians 3:16).² The temporal references in Galatians 3 focus on the fulfilment of “every one of God’s promises” (2 Corinthians 1:20) in and through him: “until the offspring [seed] would come to whom the promise had been made” (v19); “before faith came” (v23); “until Christ came” (v24); and “now that faith has come” (v25). Thus for Paul, Christ is the climax (“the fullness of time”, Galatians 4:4) of the covenantal promises and Israel is the “parenthesis” not the church as many Christian groups assert.

From Galatians 3:23 through to 4:8 Paul alternates between the first person plural, “we/our” (3:23,24 [twice], 25; 4:3,5,6) and the second person plural, “you” (3:26,27 [twice], 28 [twice], 29 [twice]; 4:6,8,9 [twice]). Why does he do this? During his altercation with Peter (Galatians 2:11–17), Paul emphasises that both Jews by nature and Gentile sinners are put right with God “through faith in Jesus Christ” (Galatians 2:16) and thus he continues to address “we Jews” and “you Galatians/Gentiles” in the passages cited above. It was Jews who were kept separate from the Gentiles by the Mosaic Law, which acted as a 24-hour minder “until Christ came” (3:26) and it was the Galatians who “did not know God” (4:8), but now in Christ “there is no longer Jew or Greek” (3:28), “for in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith” (3:26); “if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring [seed] heirs according to the promise” (v29, see 3:8).

It is incredible how Christians are able to read Paul’s letters and not notice how vital it was for his gospel that the Gentiles be included into the people of God. Christ died so “that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace, and might reconcile both to God in one body through the cross, thus putting to death that hostility through it. So he came and proclaimed peace to you who were far off [Gentile] and peace to those who were near [Jew] for through him both of us have access in one Spirit to the Father. So then, you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints [Jewish Christians] and also members of the household of God” (Ephesians 2:15–19).³

1. 1. C K Barrett, Freedom and Obligation: A Study of the Epistle to the Galatians (London: SPCK, 1985), 24.
2. It is a generalised singular, but it did begin with one person—Isaac.
3. Ben Witherington, The Letters to Philemon, the Colossians, and the Ephesians: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary on the Captivity Epistles (Grand Rapids, MI/Cambridge, UK, Eerdmans, 2007), 261.

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Dr Norman Young lectured at Avondale College (now University) for 31 years (1973-2004). In retirement, he still enjoys studying and writing the occasional article.