1 Dr. Dave Mathewson: NT Lit. Lecture #19, 3/21/11 © 2011, Dave Mathewson and Ted Hildebrandt  Galatians  Alright, let's get started. Let's open with prayer, and then I think we left off in Galatians last time so we'll actually work through that book. You notice that we're getting towards the point where we have another exam coming up. It looks like that will be a week from today on Monday--next Monday. This Thursday night there is another optional but extra credit review session. I will give you more details as far as the time and the location by next class period. Hopefully for that I'll e-mail you as soon as I get it all figured out. The plan for this is Thursday night, a review session for extra credit, and then again a week from today will be exam number two. All right let’s open with prayer and then we'll finish looking at Galatians. Father, thank you for the break and the chance to get rested up and caught up, and Lord I pray that we will have found energy to make it through the rest of the semester, and I pray now that as we focus on just a small portion of your revelation that you will give us wisdom to think about it critically, to think about it historically, but to think about it in terms of how you continue to speak through this particular book to your people today. In Jesus name we pray. Amen. Alright, the book of Galatians we said was written most likely to a group of churches in the southern part of the province, the Roman province of Galatia, which would place it in the midst of a cluster of churches that Paul would've visited on one of his missionary journeys that took them through southern Asia Minor, or modern-day Turkey. We also suggested that the problem that Paul was confronting was a group that scholars have labeled Judaizers, that is, a group of probably Jewish Christians that were claiming that Gentiles needed to submit to the law of Moses--that is, for males that meant being circumcised, for everyone that meant keeping the Sabbath laws, keeping the food laws, especially those laws that marked one off as a member of the true people of the God, of Israel. So, Paul was facing a group of Jewish Christians who then were teaching, or had2 infiltrated the church in Galatia, and were telling the Gentile Christians that their faith in Jesus was not enough, but they also had to add observance of the Old Testament law. So the book of Galatians, then, will be Paul's attempt to persuade the readers not to follow that course of action, and instead to persuade them to trust solely in Jesus Christ. Now Paul is not going to suggest, therefore, that they don't need to rely on the law also, it really doesn't matter how they live or what they do, but Paul is going argue that the law of Moses should not and does not need to play a role in the lives of these Gentile Christians, and we'll see why he says that and what that entails. I think we also ended by looking at this. I said in Galatians, Paul sets up a contrast throughout the entire book, a contrast that I've represented by these two circles. These two circles can represent, in a sense, the contrast between the message of the kingdom that God, that Jesus offered in the Gospels, that men and women could already enter the kingdom and participate in it, even if not yet fully and in the complete manner. This would represent life under the control of, or within the sphere of this present world, that is characterized and dominated by sin and death, and a term that Paul uses, the flesh, which doesn't so much refer to my physical flesh, but refers to me as susceptible to sin as in my weakness, and under the influence of this present evil age. Paul also will place the law in this category, not because he thinks it's sinful or bad, but simply because it does not have the ability, ultimately, to overcome this situation. But, then, Paul constructs another sphere, or another realm of power or control or influence, that he says is characterized by life in righteousness and by God's Holy Spirit. It is a realm in which we experience the blessings of salvation in Christ. So Paul sees this, Paul sees humanity and life as being able to be divided into these two conceptual-type spheres. Again, one sphere characterized by life and death, that would be my life under the influence of this present evil age, of this present world, and a different sphere of influence that is determined by who I am in Christ and characterized by life and righteousness and having the Holy Spirit, and this contrast will run all the way through Galatians. One other thing to say about Galatians is when we read it, there has been a lot of interest in what kind of letter Galatians really is, and there's also been a lot of interest in3 reading Galatians in light of first century Greco-Roman speeches, or Greco-Roman types of philosophical speeches. For example, we actually have a number of rhetorical speeches is the word I was looking for, we actually have a number of handbooks that seem to discuss appropriate ways of constructing rhetorical types of speeches, from Aristotle and on into the first century. They describe the appropriate way of arguing a certain point. So, rhetoricians, in order to persuade someone or argue their point, would construct speeches according to certain patterns. Some scholars are convinced that Galatians was actually not just meant to be a written letter, but actually conforms to a typical first century rhetorical speech, and you can certainly see the validity in that, if Paul is trying to persuade his readers to not adopt the course of action proposed by the Judaizers, but to adopt the course of action that Paul is proposing. You can see where a rhetorical speech might be just the ticket, just the thing he'd want to use to persuade his readers. And within these so-called handbooks that we have available, from Aristotle on, and records of how these rhetorical speeches were often constructed, especially in the courtroom where someone would construct a speech of defense on behalf of someone, again there were appropriate schemes and movements within the speech. Here's an example of how this has been applied to Galatians. The first five verses of Galatians chapter 1 begin very similar to Paul's other letters, like an epistle would begin. However some have thought that the rest of Galatians actually develops like these first century rhetorical speeches in the Greco-Roman world. For example, most