Book: J. Louis Martyn, Galatians

Byhenry

If you read this blog at all regularly you will have seen a number of posts that reference J. Louis Martyn’s commentary on Galatians in the Anchor Bible Series. I have just completed a study through Galatians, using the Greek text and Martyn’s commentary. It’s very hard to rate commentaries, because there are so many possibilities for use, and if you describe a commentary as “good” you have to specify “good for what?”

In this case I’m going to put this in my top five. Those are: Leviticus (3 vols, Anchor Bible) by Jacob Milgrom, 1 Corinthians (NICNT) by Gordon Fee, Isaiah (OTL) by Brevard Childs, Exodus (OTL) by Brevard Childs, and now Galatians by J. Louis Martyn. Fee’s 1 Corinthians I regard as the best commentary I’ve found that is usable for a teacher/preacher who teaches non-scholars. Milgrom’s remains far and away the best scholar’s commentary that I’ve read. To place Martyn’s commentary in this group I would say that it is not as overwhelmingly thorough as Milgrom’s. To manage that it would have to carefully cite the history of interpretation starting with the church fathers and moving to the present. Martyn takes the history into account, but doesn’t
give you everything. To match Fee’s commentary, there would have to be more direct application. Martyn provides plenty of fodder for devotional use, but I found that when I tried to find a quote, I either couldn’t find any at all, or what I found had to be translated for a lay audience. That will make this commentary less useful for a working pastor or Sunday School teacher.

Having said all of that, the key benefit of Martyn’s work is simply that he provides a good cross section of his excellent insights on Pauline theology throughout, fitting Galatians into a pattern of Pauline thought, and suggesting avenues of interpretation that are creative, and very often quite convincing. If you can translate some of his thinking into comprehensible terms that can be used in a sermon, you’ll find them quite useful and profound.

Some of the key themes include:

  • The Jerusalem of today (Gal. 4:25) is the Jerusalem church in that it either supports or does not suppress the circumcision mission to the gentiles
  • Closely connected to that, Martyn refers to the teachers not as Judaizers, but as a circumcision based gentile mission
  • Paul sees the death and resurrection of Jesus in apocalyptic terms, an invasion of this world that invalidates old categories and creates new ones
  • Galatians is earlier in the sequence of Paul’s letters than often thought

With 577 pages of solid commentary, a study of Galatians with this book is not for the faint of heart, but it is worth the effort. If you then write sermons or lessons from it, you will get valuable training in explaining profound but difficult theological concepts to lay audiences. You may regard that as a penalty, but perhaps it is a benefit, a good spiritual discipline.

Those who accept inerrancy, and even those like me who don’t, may find the historical approach a little difficult to manage. Martyn espouses the idea that Paul’s letters are better sources for Paul’s life than Acts, relegating Acts to a supporting role (I discuss that here). My impression is that with a little bit more attention much of the Acts material can be reconciled plausibly and should be. I would accept that the Jerusalem conference as reported in Acts and as understood by Paul may be somewhat different. Paul’s discussion of the topic of food offered to idols in 1 Corinthians certainly makes it appear so, but I think that a good historical outline can be taken both from Paul’s letters and from Acts, and that those outlines are not too far apart. The “spin” is a bit different, but the bones match.

Obviously, I enjoyed my study of Galatians, and I wrote a number of notes, both here and on my wife’s devotional list, for which I’ve been writing quite a lot lately. Just to provide the flavor, here are links to the posts over the last few weeks that were inspired by Martyn’s commentary:

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Getting Literal, Eschatological, Apocalyptic, Even!

Byhenry

Well, last night my discussion of According to John covered a lot of other ground. In particular, I was looking at the eschatological use of “hour” and “now,” and I suggested that John has a fairly simple eschatology to go with his fairly simple soteriology. I’m not going to rehash all of this. The foundation…

3 Comments

  2. Anne,

    I worked on the text of the council for my project in undergraduate textual criticism, but that has been an unfortunate number of years ago. I haven’t applied that particular knowledge to reconciling the accounts of the council in Paul’s letters and Acts 15. I appreciate your link and will take a look.

    I simply didn’t think that Martyn spent enough time on the possibilities in Acts 15 before he declared the two irreconcilable.

    I’ve kept some significant notes on this and hopefully I’ll study it out a bit more and post on it later.

  3. Hello,

    On pages 268-269 in his book, Theological Issues in the Letters of Paul, J. Louis Martyn rejects the “first” reading of Galatians 5:17, according to which the thing that is frustrated by the Spirit is the desire of the flesh to do what is wrong, on the basis of two things: (1) He concludes that the phrase “ei de” (and/but if) in 5:18 makes 5:18, not coordinative with, but contrastive to, 5:17, when in fact this same phrase appears in Galatians 3:29 and 4:7 to make its clause, not contrastive to, but coordinative with, the preceding clause, which (3:29 and 4:7) serve as precedents for this phrase making 5:18, not contrastive to, but coordinative with, 5:17. (2) He concludes that “the note of an emphasized failure” in 5:17 is somehow inconsistent with 5:16, when in fact what is expressed in 5:16 is expressed with an emphatic negative (a double negative subjunctive): “… by Spirit you must walk, and desire of flesh YOU WOULD NEVER COMPLETE.” Thus, in 5:17, in coordination this emphatic negative in 5:16, Paul likewise uses a negative to say, “For the flesh desires against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh … SO THAT NOT, the things if ever you would desire, THESE THINGS YOU WOULD DO.” Paul is explaining in Galatians 5:13-18 how NOT to use one’s freedom in Christ as an opportunity for the flesh. Thus, there is no inconsistency in anything that Paul says in this text. What Paul says in Galatians 5:16-18 matches what he says in Romans 8:2, which is the opposite of what he describes in Romans 7:14-25. Nevertheless, J. Louis Martyn concludes that what Paul says in Galatians 5:17 correlates, not with what he says in Romans 8:2, but with what he describes in Romans 7:14-25. Thus, in this instance, J. Louis Martyn reaches a conclusion that makes no sense based on two reasons that make no sense. The portion of his book to which I am referring is found here:

    http://books.google.com/books?id=eNGA_ZR_E5YC&pg=PA270&lpg=PA270&dq=romans+7:19+and+galatians+5:17&source=web&ots=2gRRFM4eC4&sig=zvZ0s9cOeRRDeDvzcTMrsTKFEtg&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=10&ct=result#PPA268,M1

    Jim

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