Gospel and Torah at Galatia

That the Antioch dispute is the context for this line of argument indicates the importance of social experience in radicalizing attitudes toward the Torah. In eating with Gentiles out of loyalty to “the truth of the good news,” Jewish believers have found themselves looking like “sinners” in the eyes of the Torah, and that experience has brought to a head a clash of authority that Paul finds inherent in the Christ-event itself. That Paul is more ready than Peter to recognize this clash is a symptom of his greater exposure to the company of Gentile believers and the modified habitus thus formed. Although a Jew, he has lengthy experience of communities whose social intimacy and shared meals were apt to disregard Jewish customs and thus to suspend the authority of the Torah. His experience has created a disjunction in his cultural allegiance, matching and arising from the disjunctive effect of the Christ-event. As he expresses the matter here, because his incorporation into the Christ-event has executed his former self, his previously total allegiance to the Torah has been broken; a new identity has emerged, solely grounded in and oriented to Christ.—J. M. G. Barclay, Paul and the Gift, 385