Torah and gospel

Paul uses the Antioch incident to speak about Torah-observance in general: the issue is the validity of the Torah in grounding and defining “righteousness.” When read in this context, it becomes clear that the issue is not the subjective value of “works” as a misconstrued means of eliciting God’s favor (Luther), nor “human enterprise” that depends on human rather than divine initiative (Martyn), but the practice of the Torah as though it were the authoritative cultural frame of the good news. The qualifier νόμου (which generally in this letter means the Jewish Torah) gives ἔργα in Galatians their problematic connotations (cf. 3:2, 5, 10), because the Torah is no longer the definitive measurement of “righteousness” (value) that counts before God.—J. M. G. Barclay, Paul and the Gift, 374 (emphasis original)