Who Were the Galatians?

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily match my own. - Dr. Bart D. Ehrman

The Epistle to the Galatians is one of the most passionate and influential letters in the New Testament. In it, the apostle Paul fiercely defends his understanding of the gospel against rival Christian teachers and argues that Gentile converts do not need to adopt Jewish law to follow Christ. Yet, before we can understand Paul's arguments, we must first ask a more basic question: who were the Galatians?

Understanding the history, culture, and religious environment of Galatia helps illuminate why Paul's letter was written and why its message proved so controversial. By examining the origins of the Galatian people, Paul's missionary activity in the region, the conflict that prompted his famous epistle, and the letter's long reception history, I’ll paint a clearer picture of both the Galatian church and one of the earliest theological disputes in Christianity.

Who Were the Galatians?

Galatia was an area on the central plateau of Asia Minor (modern Türkiye). However, the borders of the region itself are still unclear and Paul never mentions the cities in which his addressees reside within his letter to the Galatians. The letter is addressed generally to multiple churches in the region, so those borders remain fuzzy. We do know, however, that its capital city was Ancyra (modern Ankara, which is the capital of Türkiye today).

The name of the region comes from a Greek term used for the Celtic tribes that lived in the region, Galloi. According to Hans Dieter Betz, three of these Celtic tribes, the Trocmi, the Tectosages, and the Tolistobogii, entered and settled in the region around 278 BCE.

What were the Galatians known for? They had a reputation primarily as fierce warriors. Betz notes that local rulers often hired them as mercenaries in their territorial wars, and that the Galatians took advantage of these opportunities to gain land for themselves. During this period, the Galatians absorbed Greek language and culture, so much so that some Greek sources called them “Greek-Galatians.” However, these Galatians were then defeated by the Romans in 189 BCE. Thereafter, the Romans used them to subdue Asia Minor as a Roman territory.

By the 1st century CE when Paul founded his Galatian churches and was writing to them, the Galatians whom Paul addressed were likely the same ethnic mixture of old Celts and Greeks commonly found in most Hellenistic-Roman towns. Since Paul seems to have favored visiting cities on his missionary journeys rather than rural places, these people probably all lived in Hellenized cities.

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Paul’s Mission to Galatia

In Acts 13, we read that Paul and his cohort Barnabas went to Pisidian Antioch, a Galatian city and trade hub, on Paul’s first missionary journey. Although he doesn’t mention the city in his letter to the Galatians, it is likely that Paul sent it there first to be copied and read in the churches of other Galatian cities. After visiting Pisidian Antioch, Acts says Paul went on to three other Galatian cities: Iconium, Lystra, and Derbe. For this reason, many scholars identify the recipients of Paul’s letter with the churches of Pisidian Antioch, Iconium, Lystra, and Derbe, though others maintain that Paul wrote to churches in northern ethnic Galatia.

Most scholars place Paul’s conversion just a few years after Jesus’ crucifixion which occurred around 30 CE (James Tabor, for example, places Paul’s conversion around 37 CE). However, most believe that Paul’s missionary trip and visit to Galatia happened around 47 or 48 CE. Betz writes that Paul’s theology in Galatians is much less analytical than that of the letter to the Romans. That characteristic  may indicate a date earlier than Romans, which was written in 56–58 CE. He notes that, unlike Romans, in the letter to the Galatians

This letter, then, was written at least seven years after Paul’s first visit to Galatia, and Paul has meanwhile heard about some problems in those churches.

The Epistle to the Galatians

The Galatian churches seem to have consisted mostly of Gentile members. We know this first of all because Paul says he was sent specifically to the Gentiles in Galatians 2:8. Moreover, in Romans 11:13, he explicitly calls himself “apostle to the Gentiles.” Also, Paul says in Galatians 4:8 that before he had introduced the Galatians to Christ, they “were enslaved to beings that by nature are not gods,” indicating that rather than worshipping in synagogues, they had been devotees of various Greco-Roman deities. So, why is Paul writing to them? What were the Galatians doing wrong?

Apparently, after Paul had left them, other Christian missionaries had visited the churches and the Galatians had therefore been “deserting the one who called you in the grace of Christ and… turning to a different gospel” (Gal 1:6). This “different gospel” involved following the requirements of the Jewish Law, including being circumcised, in addition to faith in Christ. The Galatians were apparently sympathetic to this idea, and Paul was horrified.

Although we don’t know for certain what Paul’s opponents said, Bart Ehrman speculates about their message based on Paul’s letter:

Modern Christians might see this argument as unreasonable after 2,100 years of Christian history, but we have to remember that, even in the book of Acts, there is a conference in Jerusalem about this very issue (see Acts 15): What should Gentile converts be required to do?

Who were these opponents of Paul? There is no way to be certain, but while some have speculated that they were either some of the original apostles or had at least been sent by them, Ehrman believes differently:

Paul then goes on to spell out his own Christian credentials, namely that he did not receive his gospel from the apostles, but from a direct experience of Christ (Gal 1:1, 11–12). His gospel says that fulfilling the “works of the law”—that is, keeping kosher, being circumcised, etc.—will not make anyone righteous. That can only be done through faith in Christ (or “the faithfulness of Christ,” which some scholars argue is what Paul meant by the Greek phrase he used,  pisteōs Christou).

We can’t know for certain how Paul’s Galatian churches reacted to this, but we do know that Paul’s type of Christianity ultimately prevailed in the region, while Christians who believed in keeping the dictates of the Torah eventually faded away from history.

So, what do we know about the Galatian churches after Paul’s death? 

What Became of the Galatian Churches?

We know that the churches continued to exist because they’re mentioned briefly in letters written after Paul’s death, specifically 2 Timothy 4:I0 and I Peter 1:1. Since both those letters are in theological agreement with Paul, we can only assume that the Galatian Christians ultimately came back to Paul’s gospel.

Moreover, there are ruins of church buildings in Galatia which date to between the 4th and 6th centuries, indicating that those churches remained strong and possibly even proliferated. For instance, ruins of the Church of the Archangel Michael at Germia (modern Gümüşkonak, Türkiye) are in the form of a late Roman basilica, showing that Christian churches thrived in the area well past persecutions and into the Christian era of the Roman Empire.

In other words, Paul’s controversy with the Galatian churches did nothing to harm his legacy in the region.

So, who are the Galatians today? They no longer exist as a separate ethnic group but were assimilated 1,500 years ago into the wider Anatolian and Mediterranean populations.

Reception History of Galatians

While many church fathers have written about the Epistle to the Galatians, perhaps the most controversial and consequential author to do so was the Protestant leader Martin Luther (1483-1546). Luther was an Augustinian monk in Germany who constantly struggled with doubts that he was doing enough to be saved.

At a moment of extreme anguish and hopelessness, Luther read Galatians 3:11:

For Luther, this verse would embody the doctrine of justification by faith alone, one of the cornerstones of the Protestant Reformation. He claimed that this verse, which quotes Habakkuk 2:4, proves that salvation is a gift received by faith, and that good deeds, which Luther conflated with “works of the law,” do nothing to achieve the goal of salvation. While many scholars see this as a serious misreading of Paul, it has long been a doctrinal pillar for many Protestant denominations.

Meanwhile, Galatians 3:28 has been read in modern times as an argument that baptism, which precedes this in verse 27, confers equality and unity:

This is a strong claim in our time, but in biblical times it would have been all but unthinkable. Erasing ethnic, gender, and class distinctions would have erased much upon which Greco-Roman society was based.

Adela Yarboro Collins writes about the verse’s implications for modern churches:

This interpretation of Paul, however, may not be what Paul intended, given his acceptance of the social structures of his time in his other letters. For instance, in the Jewish Annotated New Testament, Shaye Cohen points out that Paul tells women to remain subject to their husbands (1 Cor 11:3) and clearly accepts the slavery so common in his time in his letter to Philemon. Cohen writes, therefore, that Galatians 3:28 is likely a standard baptismal formula of the time. In fact, the only distinction Paul does not contradict in his other writings is the erasure of the line between Jew and Greek.

Conclusion

Many people who read Paul’s letter only think of it as a New Testament letter, but who were the Galatians? They emerged from three Celtic tribes who settled in a large region of Asia Minor. Initially working as mercenaries for local potentates, they eventually attained land of their own in the province and gradually assimilated to the Greek language and culture already established in Galatia.

If Acts is to be believed, Paul visited several Galatian cities on his first missionary journey in 47 or 48 CE. If so, he likely established small churches there and either visited again or regularly wrote them letters of instruction. The Epistle to the Galatians in the New Testament is one of them.

In that letter, Paul addresses the arguments of his opponents, Christian missionaries who have told the Galatians that as former pagans, they must fulfill the commandments of the Torah and become Jewish in order to follow Christ. Claiming direct divine authority, Paul vehemently disagrees. Since there are letters mentioning those churches from the period after Paul’s death and churches from the early Byzantine period as well, we can only conclude that Paul’s position won the day.

While Martin Luther read Galatians 3:11 and interpreted it to mean that good works were unnecessary for Christians if they had faith, modern readers have read his baptismal formula in 3:28 as a utopian eradication of any and all hierarchical distinctions. While this may be a valid reading for modern citizens of democracies, given Paul’s attitude toward the subservience of wives and slaves elsewhere in the NT, it is unlikely that this was his original intention.

By the way, if you found the topic of this article interesting, you might like Bart Ehrman’s online course Paul and Jesus: the Great Divide.