Galatians (International Critical Commentary) by Ernest De Witt Burton

Author:Ernest De Witt Burton [Burton, Ernest De Witt]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Published: 2014-09-26T04:00:00+00:00

(e) Evidence of his independent apostleship drawn from his conduct on a visit to Jerusalem fourteen years after the preceding one (2:1-10)

Following, as before, a chronological order, the apostle now narrates the circumstances of a very important occasion on which he came in contact with those who were apostles before him. At the outset he calls attention to the length of his absence from Jerusalem, fourteen years, during which, so it is implied, he had had no contact with the Jerusalem apostles; then to the fact that when he went up it was not at their command, but in obedience to divine revelation; then, indicating that the question at issue was then, as now in Galatia, the circumcision of the Gentiles who had accepted his gospel, he tells how he laid his gospel before the Jerusalem Christians, and in a private session before the pillars of the church, James and Cephas and John, since he recognised that their disapproval of his preaching might render of no avail his future work and undo what he had already done. Though, out of consideration for the opponents of his gospel of freedom from law, who had crept into the Jerusalem church for the purpose of robbing the Christians of their freedom and bringing them into bondage to the law, the apostles urged him to circumcise Titus, a Greek Christian who was with him, he refused to do so; and so far from his yielding to the authority or persuasion of these eminent men, whose eminent past did not weigh with him, as it did not with God, they imparted nothing new to him, but when they perceived that God, who had commissioned Peter to present the gospel to the Jews, had given to Paul also a commission to the Gentiles, these leaders of the church cordially agreed to a division of the territory and of responsibility. Paul and Barnabas were to preach among the Gentiles, Peter among the Jews, and the only additional stipulation was that Paul and Barnabas should remember the poor among the Jewish Christians, which thing, Paul affirms, he gladly did.

Then after fourteen years I again went up to Jerusalem, with Barnabas, taking Titus also along. 2And I went up in accordance with [a] revelation. And I laid before them the gospel which I preach among the Gentiles,—but privately before the men of eminence—lest perchance I should run or had run in vain. 3But not even Titus, who was with me and was a Greek, was compelled to be circumcised (4now it was because of the false brethren surreptitiously brought in, who sneaked in to spy out our freedom which we have in Christ Jesus, that they might bring us into bondage [that his circumcision was urged], 5to whom not for an hour did we yield by way of the subjection [demanded]), that the truth of the gospel might continue with you. 6And from those who were accounted to be something—what they once were matters not to me—God accepts not

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