Is it foolish (NRSV) Galatians or stupid (NAB) Galatians? It’s so hard to know and so hard for a Galatian to catch a break, one way or the other. Paul writes in a polemical style common among ancient writers, but jarring to our ears. It is hard to imagine a papal encyclical beginning with “stupid Catholics,” yet Paul snaps us to attention with this raw epithet. And then he asks, “who has bewitched you?” Paul uses the phrase to shake the Galatians up. He sees the Galatians in danger of walking away from the salvation they have gained in Christ. Paul asks if they received the Spirit through faith or through the “works of the law” (3:2). This antithesis is maintained throughout the letter, as is the antithesis between Spirit and “flesh” (3:3). It is clear that faith and Spirit adhere to those who follow Christ, while the “flesh” is associated with the “works of the law.” Yet, this law is the law of Moses, given by God; how can it lead to the “flesh”? And what exactly is the “flesh”? The flesh is not necessarily the physical body, but the whole person turned away from God. How could the law lead one away from God? Precisely it seems because faith in Christ leads to the Spirit – that is the simple diagram Paul draws. It is that concrete, or experiential – God works “miracles among them” (3:5)because of their faith in Christ not “works of the law” – and we should not lose sight of the experiences of the Spirit amongst the early Christians as the ground of their conversion. Paul then begins an exegesis of the accounts of Abraham in Genesis 12 and 15 – a spiritual, not literal, reading of these texts. This is not to say that Paul’s reading of language in these texts is odd. From the Septuagint, he reads that Abraham had faith and it was reckoned to him as “righteousness” (3:6; Gen. 15:6). The exegetical move he makes moves beyond the literal reading of these words, for Paul says that Christians who have faith in Paul’s day are descendants of Abraham by virtue of this faith (3:7). This means that Abraham, who received blessings and righteousness prior to the giving of the law of Moses, is the model and the father of gentiles who are found righteous now due to justification through Christ. “For this reason, those who believe are blessed with Abraham who believed” (3:9). Paul claims that the law is, in some way, a curse, for those who do not do all the things of the law are under a curse (3:10). It is a strange even circular argument, with which will not truly be done until we are finished with all of Galatians, but Paul seems to argue in this way: those who are “under” the law are under a curse because everyone is cursed who does not do all of the law (Deuteronomy 27:26); but the law does not justify, because the righteous live by faith (Habakkuk 2:4); and those who do follow the law, which they cannot follow completely, do not live by faith but by the works of the law (Leviticus 18:5) (3:10-12). As the citations from the Old Testament indicate, Paul is drawing on scriptural passages, as he has previously from Genesis, to prove his argument. While his argumentation might seem odd to us, it is common amongst Jewish interpreters of his day, who understood the whole scripture as intimately related regardless of its historical context or literal meaning. As scripture for us, Paul’s writings also challenges us to view the relationship of the scripture not simply in a historical context, but primarily in a theological and spiritual context. At this point we can simply say that a curse is related to the law – God’s law – and that Christ relieves us from the curse “by becoming a curse for us” through the crucifixion, in order that God’s promise and blessing to Abraham might now be poured out on the Gentiles (3:13-14). Through Christ, it is clear, one gains access to justification through faith, as promised to Abraham and witnessed in his own life. But why then the law? The question still resonates. How could God’s law have come to such a strange and negative end in the theology of Paul? John W. Martens

John W. Martens is an associate professor of theology at the University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minn,where he teaches early Christianity and Judaism. He also directs the Master of Arts in Theology program at the St. Paul Seminary School of Divinity. He was born in Vancouver, B.C. into a Mennonite family that had decided to confront modernity in an urban setting. His post-secondary education began at Tabor College, Hillsboro, Kansas, came to an abrupt stop, then started again at Vancouver Community College, where his interest in Judaism and Christianity in the earliest centuries emerged. He then studied at St. Michael's College, University of Toronto, and McMaster University, with stops at University of Haifa and University of Tubingen. His writing often explores the intersection of Jewish, Christian and Greco-Roman culture and belief, such as in "let the little children come to me: Children and Childhood in Early Christianity" (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2009), but he is not beyond jumping into the intersection of modernity and ancient religion, as in "The End of the World: The Apocalyptic Imagination in Film and Television" (Winnipeg: J. Gordon Shillingford Press, 2003). He blogs at  www.biblejunkies.com and at www.americamagazine.org for "The Good Word." You can follow him on Twitter @biblejunkies, where he would be excited to welcome you to his random and obscure interests, which range from the Vancouver Canucks and Minnesota Timberwolves, to his dog, and 70s punk, pop and rock. When he can, he brings students to Greece, Turkey and Rome to explore the artifacts and landscape of the ancient world. He lives in St. Paul with his wife and has two sons. He is certain that the world will not end until the Vancouver Canucks have won the Stanley Cup, as evidence has emerged from the Revelation of John, 1 Enoch, 2 Baruch, and 4 Ezra which all point in this direction.