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  • From: Richard Fellows <rfellows AT intergate.bc.ca>
  • To: "Corpus-paul" <corpus-paul AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>
  • Subject: Re: THi ELEUQERIAi in Gal 5:1
  • Date: Thu, 10 Jun 1999 22:30:21 -0700


Mark wrote:

<<I suggest then that the issue turns on the "identity" for these gentile
addressees who claim to be (and whom Paul regards as) already the people of
God by faith in Christ: will they now be enslaved to another court of
reputation's manner of gaining this identity, thereby implying that they do
not already have it?

In other words, the freedom they have is to be known by God as his children
by faith in/of Christ apart from becoming children of Israel. The slavery
that Paul envisions is that of seeking the approval of another interest
group which maintains that to gain this identity they claim for themselves
in Christ they must complete the ritual process of conversion; i.e., become
proselytes.>>

Surely Mark is right here. Paul was teaching his converts that they could
consider themselves to be Abraham's seed. It is precisely that which upset
the 'false brothers' so much, for they felt that such an identity should be
reserved for the circumcised. I hope I have understood you here, Mark.

It seems to me that this understanding explains the rather difficult 'but'
at the beginning of 2:3. Paul is saying that even though he laid before
them the gospel that he way preaching among the Gentiles, Titus was
nevertheless not compelled to be circumcised. In other words, he made them
fully aware that his message was that in Christ Gentiles had the same
identity as Jews, yet they did not force Titus to meet the usual
requirement of circumcision. This understanding of the passage also makes
good sense of Paul's statement about the private nature of the meeting, and
of the infiltration of the false brothers.

Titus must have bought into this doctrine of Paul, and defined himself as a
'seed of Abraham'. The OUDE in 2:3 probably indicates that he was someone
who had particularly blatantly crossed (or demolished) the ethnic boundary
in terms of self-definition, while remaining uncircumcised. It also means
that the Galatians knew this about Titus.

Now, it is no coincidence that Timothy meets the description of Titus that
we get from Gal 2, for he and Titus were one and the same person. He saw
himself as a 'seed of Abraham' but could not get away with it in Galatia
because the Jews in that area knew that he was an uncircumcised Gentile
because they knew that his father had been a Greek. He was circumcised
because Paul wanted to take him with him and it was necessary for
missionary reasons to make him acceptable to the Jews. They would have
taken him to be a Jew if they had not known that his father had been a
Greek. How else are we to understand the reference to the father in Acts
16:3?

Carlton L. Winbery wrote:
>While Paul did not allow (re: Titus, not Timothy) gentiles to be made
>Jewish converts, he did maintain his own Jewishness (see Stendahl, Paul
>among Jews and Gentiles).

This distinction cannot be sustained. Neither Paul nor Luke nor anyone else
can have placed Timothy in a different category from other Gentile
believers. He was uncircumcised and had a Gentile father, and that made
him a Gentile. (See Shaye Cohen, 'Was Timothy Jewish (Acts 16:1-3)?
Patristic Exegesis, Rabbinic Law, and Matrilineal Descent, JBL 105/2 (1986)
251-268). It is thirteen years since Cohen's work was published and, as
far as I know, no-one has been able to refute it, so why do some people
still interpret Acts 16:1-3 in terms of matrilineal descent?

Richard Fellows
Vancouver
rfellows AT intergate.bc.ca





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