father.  In view of this fact he asks (as we may render v. 16, after Ellicott, in perfect accordance with the idiom of the Greek):  “So then, am I become your enemy, by speaking to you the truth?” that is because in my recent visit I told you the truth.  According to this view the epistle belongs to the second group, and was written about A.D. 56 or 57.  Farther than this we cannot go in determining the time.  The place is uncertain.  It may have been Ephesus, or Corinth, which cities Paul visited in his third and last missionary journey, but it cannot have been Rome, as the subscription erroneously gives it.

The subscriptions are of no authority.  That to the present epistle probably had its ground mainly in chapter 6:17, where the writer was erroneously supposed to allude to the bodily sufferings that he endured in connection with his last recorded imprisonment.

17.  The occasion of this epistle, which gives also its design, was very specific.  The Galatian churches had begun well (chap. 5:7); but soon after Paul’s departure Judaizing teachers had drawn them away to the very form of error noticed in the Acts of the Apostles (chap. 15:1); “Except ye be circumcised after the manner of Moses ye cannot be saved.”  They sought to impose on all the Gentile converts circumcision as essential to salvation.  Thus they placed justification on a legal ground, and made faith in Christ a subordinate matter.  This error was fundamental.  Paul therefore attacks it with unsparing severity, with which, however, he mingles a wonderful tenderness of spirit.  His argument is for substance the same as that in the epistle to the Romans, only that it takes from necessity a more controversial form, and is carried out with more warmth and vehemence of expression.  It is a divine model of the way in which fundamental error should be dealt with.

18.  The epistle naturally falls into three divisions.  The first is mainly historic.  Chaps. 1, 2.  The false teachers had disparaged Paul’s apostolical standing, on the ground, apparently, that he was not one of the original twelve, and had not been called immediately by Christ to the apostleship, but had received his gospel from men.  It would seem also that they labored to make it appear that Paul’s doctrine respecting circumcision and the Mosaic law was contrary to that of Peter and the other apostles of the circumcision.  Paul accordingly devotes these two introductory chapters to a vindication of his full apostolic standing.  He shows that his apostleship is “not of man neither by man, but by Jesus Christ and God the Father” (chap. 1:1); that the gospel which he preaches he neither received of man, nor was taught by man but by the revelation of Jesus Christ (verses 11, 12); that, accordingly, upon his call to the apostleship, he went not up to Jerusalem to receive instruction from those who were apostles before him, but into Arabia, whence he returned