Galatians 2

Paul says, "Through the Law I Died to the Law." What is that supposed to mean? Take a look at the mystical implications of Paul's death to the law as a death to relying on Jewish identity for salvation. 

Evangelicals often point out that we are saved by grace, not by works, but most people do not have a clear idea of what the Bible means when speaking of the "works of the law." This teaching from Galatians offers an exploration of the terms "justification," "works of the law," and "faith in Jesus Christ" as employed in the Pauline Epistles.

Did Paul really rebuke Peter "to his face"? In Galatians 2:11-14, Paul recounts how Peter, on his visit to Antioch, separated from the God-fearing Gentile believers and incurred Paul's sound rebuke. Get the story behind the story. 

For the last eighteen hundred years, the church has triumphantly declared that the gospel has cancelled the Torah and that Gentile Christians have replaced the Jewish people. Those dogmas stem from a failture to understand the distinction between Peter's apostleship and Paul's apostleship. As the apostles endorse Paul and send him out as the "apostle to the Gentiles," they do so with one caveat: "Remember the poor ones!" Find out the surprising meaning behind that single instruction. 

Paul complains that "false brothers secretly brought in ... slipped in to spy out our freedom ... so that they might bring us into slavery" (Galatians 2:4). Who are these false brothers? In what sense are they false? In what sense had they been secretly brought in? What was the freedom in Messiah on which they were spying? These and more questions are answered as Paul brings Titus to a meeting with three top-ranking apostles to seek an endorsement for his gospel to the Gentiles.

Was Paul a  Lone Ranger and John Wayne type of apostle who heard directly from God, or did he honor higher authorities? In this episode, Paul goes up to Jerusalem to submit his gospel of Gentile inclusion to the authority of the apostles, fearing that he may have been running his race in vain. 

"I set before them (though privately before those who seemed influential) the gospel that I proclaim among the Gentiles, in order to make sure that I was not running or had run in vain." (Galatians 2:2)

Does Galatians 2 contain an alternate version of events at the Acts 15 Jerusalem Council. Many scholars think so, but a careful look at the story in the book of Acts suggests otherwise. After an absense of more than a decade, Paul journeys to jerusalem in the company of Barnabas and Titus with a collection for famine relief. 

People who keep the Sabbath and eat kosher are weak in faith, but the strong in faith treat every day alike and eat anything. That's the conventional interpretation of Romans 14. Take a second look at this passage from Paul's Epistle to the Romans and consider a Messianic Jewish intepretation that turns the conventional one upside down. 

Was Paul an apostate to Judaism and a traitor to the Jewish people? Reason Sixteen in the book Twenty-Six Reasons Jews Don't Believe in Jesus states that "Paul was the Source of Christian Opposition to the Jewish Law," but the allegations against Paul go much further, accusing him of being a Gentile, of being a closet Sadduccee and of collusion with Rome. This teaching challenges the pseudo-scholarship of popular anti-Paul writers.