Galatia #87

Galatia was a region in the central highlands of Asia Minor, in modern Turkey, and later a Roman province. Its name comes from the Gauls, a Celtic people who migrated into the area in the third century BC. It appears in the New Testament as the destination of Paul’s letter to the Galatians and is mentioned in several other passages, including Acts 16:6, Acts 18:23, 1 Corinthians 16:1, and 1 Peter 1:1.

Biblical Significance

Paul’s letter is addressed “to the churches of Galatia” (Galatians 1:2), and it is one of the most passionate in the New Testament. Paul is astonished that the Galatians are so quickly deserting the gospel he preached, and he rebukes them as foolish for beginning by the Spirit and now trying to finish by human effort (Galatians 1:6-9; 3:1-3). Teachers had arrived insisting that Gentile believers must be circumcised and keep the law of Moses. Paul answers that people are justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law, drawing on the example of Abraham (Galatians 2:16; 3:6-9). He concludes that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female (Galatians 3:28), and he urges believers to stand firm in freedom and to walk by the Spirit (Galatians 5:1, 16-26). Paul also recalls that he first preached to them because of a bodily illness, and that they had welcomed him as if he were an angel of God (Galatians 4:13-14).

Where exactly these churches were is a long-standing scholarly question. The North Galatian view holds that Paul wrote to the ethnic Galatians in the north, around Ancyra, and connects the letter with the travel notes in Acts 16:6 and 18:23. The South Galatian view holds that he wrote to the churches of the Roman province, which extended south and included Pisidian Antioch, Iconium, Lystra, and Derbe, the cities evangelized on the first missionary journey (Acts 13:14 to 14:23). Each position has capable defenders, and the message of the letter is unaffected either way. The date of the letter and its relation to the Council of Jerusalem (Acts 15) depend partly on which view is taken.

Today

Ancient Galatia now lies within the borders of Turkey, and its old capital, Ancyra, is the modern capital Ankara. Because the region’s boundaries changed several times, there is no single site to visit, but the cities of southern Galatia, such as Pisidian Antioch and Lystra, can be explored in various stages of excavation. Galatians remains one of the most important sources for understanding the early Christian debate over the place of the law of Moses in the church.