Paul, an apostle—not from men nor through man, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised him from the dead— 2 and all the brothers who are with me,
To the churches of Galatia:
In studying a New Testament epistle, it is advisable, even necessary, to say something about the people to whom the epistle was first written, and the circumstances and
time of its writing. There are two views as to the date and destination of the epistle.
Some think that 'Galatia' refers to the northern part of what we know as Asia Minor, and
others that it refers to the southern part of that land, the Roman province of Galatia. This
distinction is important for a number of reasons, particularly with regard to the date of
writing, for Paul visited the southern part - Antioch in Pisidia, Iconium, Lystra, Derbe, on
his first missionary journey, in AD 47/48. But he did not go near the northern part till his
second missionary journey (Acts 16:6; 18:23). Dependent, therefore, on which part of
the country he wrote to, the epistle must be dated either shortly after AD 47/48, and
therefore his earliest epistle after he had visited the northern regions.
One or two considerations help us to solve this question. The first is this: we know
that the great controversy raging in the epistle has to do with the Jewish legalisers - the
Judaisers, as they were called, that is, those who maintained that to be a good Christian
one had also to be a good Jew, observing the Jewish law - who were adding 'conditions'
to God's free salvation, and saying 'Except ye be converted after the manner of Moses,
ye cannot be saved'. We know that this very major issue came up for discussion in AD
49 in Jerusalem (cf Acts 15). Here, in the epistle to the Galatians, Paul is writing about
this very subject. But he does not even mention the decree promulgated by the apostles
in Acts 15; and this would surely seem to prove conclusively that Galatians was written
before that decree was promulgated, that is, before AD 49. And therefore, also, the epistle must have been written to the south Galatian Church, to those in Derbe and Lystra,
Iconium and Antioch.