Today, I am reading and commenting on  Galatians 1-6.

I have struggled to follow what Paul says in the first two chapters of his letter to the Galatian Believers.  One could easily interpret what he wrote as being disparaging of the Apostles who followed Jesus when He was on earth.  However, that would be to misunderstand what Paul means to say here.  Paul emphasizes that he did not learn the Gospel he taught from the other Apostles.  Rather, he learned it from the Holy Spirit and his study of the Jewish Scripture.  Nevertheless when he and the original Apostles, those who learned the Gospel directly from Jesus, compared notes, they discovered that they were preaching the same message.  I suppose one of the reasons I never fully put that together before is because I never read it trying to understand the argument Paul to which Paul was responding.  As I read this I realized that those whose arguments Paul was attempting to counter had built their case against Paul, and the Gospel he taught, on two contradictory claims.  The first part of the claim was that Paul was teaching falsehood he had been taught by the original Apostles, who had invented it themselves.  The second part was that Paul was teaching something different than the true teachings of the Church.  Paul never addresses the contradiction between these two claims, he merely demolishes both of them.  Further, the way Paul addresses both arguments tells us that the arguments were never made as direct claims.  Instead, those who made them did so by assuming they were true and proceeding from there.  Paul exposes the logical inconsistency by demolishing both claims.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.