Galatians
The Book of Galatians: An Introduction
The short answer
Galatians (sometimes searched as "Galations") is the letter Paul wrote when he believed everything was on the line. Churches he had founded in Galatia were being told that Gentile believers needed to take on Jewish identity markers — circumcision above all — to belong fully to God's people. Paul's response is blunt, personal, and fierce, because for him this was not a side issue. It was the gospel itself.
The letter's urgency comes into focus in a real scene Paul describes in chapter 2. In Antioch, Jewish and Gentile believers had been eating together as one community. Then visitors arrived claiming a connection to James in Jerusalem, and Peter pulled back from the shared table. Even Barnabas — Paul's longtime partner in ministry among Gentiles — went along with it. To Paul, this wasn't a matter of dining etiquette. Withdrawing from the table said, in action, that Gentiles were second-class members of God's family unless they became Jews. Everything Paul writes in Galatians pushes back against that message.
But Paul doesn't argue only from the crisis at hand. He opens the letter by setting it against the widest possible horizon: Jesus "gave himself for our sins," he writes, to "deliver us out of this present evil age" (Galatians 1:4). Like many Jews of his time, Paul saw history divided into the present age of rebellion and death and a coming age of God's justice and peace. His startling claim is that the age to come has already broken in through Jesus' death and resurrection. That is why the table matters so much: if the new age has begun, then the one family of Jews and Gentiles united in the Messiah isn't a future hope to wait for. It is a present reality to live out — starting with who sits down to eat with whom.
What scholars say
In these excerpts, N. T. Wright reconstructs the scene behind Galatians 2:12–13 — Peter's back-and-forth over eating with Gentiles after visitors arrived claiming James's authority, with even Barnabas swept along — and explains what Paul means in Galatians 1:4 by 'the present evil age.' Together they answer why a dispute over shared meals carried, for Paul, the weight of a turning point in history.
“This seems to correspond directly to the problem mentioned in Galatians 2.12–13. There, Peter’s vacillating behaviour, eating with Gentiles one minute and withdrawing the next, was precipitated by the arrival of some people ‘from James’. If the letter was written before the Council, Paul would still not have known for sure whether they were saying what James had told them to say, or whether they were simply using his authority to say what they themselves had wanted to say. As Paul puts it sorrowfully, ‘even Barnabas’ – Barnabas, who had shared so much of his work precisely with Gentile converts, who had seen God’s grace at work among Gentiles in Antioch, who had supported Paul through thick and thin – even Barnabas was carried along with this play-acting, this putting on of a mask of Jewish separatism on top of the reality, which was a single fellowship consisting of believing Jews and believing Gentiles united in Christ (Galatians 2.”
“One of the key phrases here is ‘the present age’ (verse 2). In Galatians 1.4 Paul calls this ‘the present evil age’. Like many first-century Jews, he believed that world history was divided into ‘the present age’, characterized by rebellion against God and the corruption and death which result, and ‘the age to come ’, in which God would give new life to the world and humankind, bringing justice, joy and peace once and for all. Part of the point of Paul’s gospel is his belief that this ‘age to come’ had already begun in Jesus, and supremely in his death and resurrection .”
What it means for you
Galatians presses a question that never goes out of date: does our behavior match what we say we believe? Peter believed Gentiles belonged at the table, but under social pressure he acted otherwise — and Paul calls that out as a gospel issue, not a minor lapse. It's worth asking where we quietly withdraw from people God has already welcomed, and whose approval makes us do it.
The letter also reframes daily life. If God's new age has genuinely begun in Jesus, then belonging isn't something we earn by meeting the right group's standards. That conviction can free a reader from both anxious rule-keeping and the urge to gatekeep others.
In context
Galatians sits early in Paul's collected letters and reflects one of the first great controversies of the Christian movement: on what terms do Gentiles belong? Chapters 1–2 are autobiographical, defending Paul's gospel and recounting the confrontation at Antioch. Chapters 3–4 argue from Scripture that God's promise to Abraham always aimed at one family marked by faith, not law-keeping. Chapters 5–6 turn to freedom and life in the Spirit. The two passages framed here — 1:4 and 2:12–13 — anchor the letter's opening movement, joining its cosmic claim to its concrete crisis.