The Epistle to the Galatians (Black’s New Testament Commentary | BNTC)

Top Highlights

“In short, the letter makes clearest and fullest sense if we see it as a response to a challenge from Christian-Jewish missionaries who had come to Galatia to improve or correct Paul’s gospel and to ‘complete’ his converts by integrating them fully into the heirs of Abraham through circumcision and by thus bringing them ‘under the law’.” (Page 11)

“The issue expressed in ‘works of the law’, in other words, was not whether membership of the people of God entailed various obligations (Paul had no doubt that it did), but whether it entailed an in effect sectarian interpretation of these obligations, whether it entailed obligations designed to exclude others, whether it entailed that Jew remain distinct from Gentile (similarly Rom. 3:20—see my Romans 153–5, 210, 213; also ‘Works’ 219–25, 237–41; also ‘Once More, Works’).” (Page 137)

“‘Works of the law’ would mean in principle all that the faithful Israelite had to do as a member of the chosen people, that is, as distinct from ‘Gentile sinners’.” (Page 136)

“in Hebrew thought ‘righteousness’ was more a concept of relation.” (Page 134)

“to be righteous was to live within the covenant and within the terms it laid down (the law)” (Page 134)