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God Sent His Son
In conjunction with the upcoming Second Edition of The Jesus Puzzle, the present study offers a comprehensive examination of the passage in Paul’s letters which, it could be said, most suggests that he has a human Jesus in mind. This is Galatians 4:4-7, containing the double phrase “born of woman, born under the Law.” (I capitalize the word because Paul is referring to the Jewish Law of the Hebrew Bible, the Torah, not to law in general.) There are two different ways to approach this passage: one, accepting the double phrase as authentic to Paul; the other, questioning its authenticity and judging it as a likely interpolation. We will look at the passage as a whole, for regardless in which direction we lean, there are some surprising things to discover about it.
4
Then in the fullness of time, God sent [exapesteilen] his Son, born of woman,
born under the Law,
5 in order that he might purchase freedom
for the
subjects of the Law, so that we might attain the status of sons.
6 And because you are sons, God (has) sent
[exapesteilen] into our hearts the Spirit
of his Son, crying ‘Father!’
7 You are therefore no longer a slave but
a son,
and if a son, then also by God’s act an heir.” [
“God sent [the verb exapostellō] his Son.” This verb of sending is used in the Old Testament in connection with the sending of spiritual beings, such as angels, or personified Wisdom as in the Wisdom of Solomon 9:10. The basic form of the verb, apostellō, is regularly used to denote the sending of the Holy Spirit. (The verb and its variants can also be used to speak of ‘sending’ a person.) The identical form of the verb in verse 4, “God sent his Son,” is used in verse 6 to say that “God sent into our hearts the Spirit of his Son.” This is an aorist tense, placing both these actions in the past.
Some translations of the verb in verse 6 render it in the perfect tense: “God has sent into our hearts…” but this is misleading. The question is, are the two thoughts, the two “sent” actions, more or less contemporary? Might they essentially be complementary parts of the same process? By using a perfect tense in verse 6, translators set up a “God sent…God has sent,” sequence, as though the second is completely separate and later than the first, the former representing the advent of Jesus and his life on earth, the latter the installation of his Spirit into Paul’s converts a generation after his passing. And no doubt such a translation has been influenced by that assumption. But if the two ‘sendings’ are essentially contemporary, Paul would be relating both to the time of his own activities: the sending in both cases would then relate only to the Spirit of the Son, so that we could take both in the context of the revelation of Christ by God to Paul and his congregations—as including the wider circles of contemporary Christ belief.
This would then represent the arrival of the spiritual Christ within the current phenomenon of divine revelation about him and Paul’s concept of “Christ in you.” This spiritual knowledge and presence of Christ would be part of the situation in Paul’s time, a knowledge and presence which have brought with them a new freedom from the Law, and by which those who are “in Christ” have achieved the “status of sons.” There need be nothing here that refers to an historical life or act of Christ on earth (or even a sacrificial act in the heavens). Let’s see how well such a reading can be supported.
We
should not
ignore the fact that Paul has failed to refer here to any event of
death and
resurrection, historical or mythical. It is not, “God sent his son to
die on
I have dropped the contentious “born” phrases temporarily, so that we can see the main train of thought in the sentence. Note that the antecedent of “he” (the one who purchases freedom) could grammatically be either God or the Son. Usually, it is the Son who is assumed to purchase freedom, but this may well be a significant misreading.
What Paul is focusing on in this passage is the specific transition of the believer from being under the Law to being free of it; from being a “slave” to being a “son.” (Paul has a very negative view of the biblical Torah—though he seems not to want to abolish it completely, but to transform it in Christ—and feels that its traditional application is repressive and soul-destroying.) This in fact has been his entire focus in the preceding chapter 3 of Galatians. And at what point has this transition from Law to freedom, from slave to son, taken place? The fact is, it has not been at the point of Jesus’ sacrificial act, regardless of whether that was historical or mythical. Paul locates it at quite a different point. Here is his thought a few verses earlier:
25 Now that faith has come, we are no
longer under the supervision of the Law.
Thus,
even when
Christ had performed his act of sacrifice, whether historical or
mythical, we
were still under the Law, still slaves, not yet sons of God. All this
was to
change only at the time when faith was brought to the new believer,
through the
preaching of Paul and other apostles of the Christ.1
1 Paul often talks as if he were the
first to receive the revelation about Jesus the Son from God (as in
Gal. 1:16),
but while he might have liked to think of it that way, it is clear that
he was
not the first. The Christ cult existed before him, and in 2 Corinthians
11:4,
he speaks of other “spirits” (referring to revelations from the Holy
Spirit)
which other “ministers of Christ” (11:23) have received. Of course, he
thinks
his own received revelation is superior, the proper one, and it could
well be
that the sophistication of his own christology was a quantum leap
beyond that
of any predecessor.
Once more, we see this exclusive focus on the apostolic movement as being the key moment of the present time—seemingly its only moment—with Jesus suspended somewhere in an indeterminate dimension, communicating with humans and having the consequences of his shadowy acts brought into the light and into effect only with the preaching of the gospel by the likes of Paul. To call it curious—this relegation of the vivid events of Calvary and the empty tomb to some opaque no man’s land from which they never seem to emerge into focus—would be an understatement, though it is, of course, consistent with the regular practice of the epistles.
If
we allow the
thought of
2 Paul seems to have some concept of
the Law applying to gentiles. At least, he is taking into account the
view of
his fellow Jewish Christians that gentiles who join the faith must
submit to
the Law, which is something he is fighting tooth and nail, quite apart
from his
desire to set aside the Law for all, Jew and Greek.
The Work of
God
If
verse 4 is not
a reference to the Son’s acts themselves, but to God’s
act in sending the revelation of his Son and making the
benefits of his sacrifice available, all the elements of this passage
fall into
place. First, it must be pointed out that Paul, of course, also
envisions, and
elsewhere states, that it is Jesus’ act of sacrifice which has brought
freedom
from the Law. A short time earlier, in Galatians 3:13, he has said
“Christ
brought us freedom from the curse of the Law by becoming for our sake
an
accursed thing.” This is the primary act which is drawn on by God when
he
brings about the application of that freedom. But what is the specific
point of
this application? It is not stated to be the actual time of the
sacrifice. As
just outlined, the passage from
This, in fact, is the manner in which all the epistles describe the salvation workings of the present time. It is all God’s work, revealing Christ and making available the benefits of his sacrifice. This is why no role is ever given to Jesus in the present except to have himself “manifested” (all those revelation verbs) and enter into Paul and his converts. It is why his acts are never introduced as part of the present scene. Instead, those acts, performed at some unspecified time, have created a deposit placed in heaven’s bank, an account kept hidden by God “for long generations” but now revealed. This account has now been opened for withdrawals, with the PIN number given out to those who have adopted faith in Christ Jesus. We find this fully in keeping with the thought in verse 7: “So you are no longer a slave, but a son; and thus by God’s act, an heir.” Here it is stated to be God who has performed the act which makes the believer a son, not Jesus, and this parallels and confirms the meaning in verse 4, in which it is God who has “purchase[d] freedom for the subjects of the Law,” not Jesus. Thus it has not been the death and resurrection which are the immediate cause of that freedom, and so the “God sent his Son” in verse 4 does not imply a reference to the life which contained such events, but rather refers to God drawing on those acts to put the available freedom into effect by revealing the Son and what he had done (a revelation achieved through a new reading of scripture). God relies on Paul and others like him to elicit the necessary faith.
To put it another way, since it is God who has done the purchasing of freedom, and in the time of Paul, this pulls God’s act of ‘sending’ the Son in verse 4 into Paul’s time. This, then, could only refer to a sending in a spiritual sense—the new knowledge and presence of Christ—which is what Paul goes on to say in verse 6: “God sent the Spirit of his Son.” Thus none of it is a reference to an arrival of Jesus on earth in the past. This does not, in itself, rule out some previous arrival on earth, but such a thought is not present in these verses. And it must be admitted that to take this spiritual sending as referring to the actual point of revelation of the Son, with no life preceding it, would be the natural assumption, given its perfect fit with all the epistles’ talk about Christ being “manifested” in their own time, with him having been part of God’s secret/mystery hidden for long generations, with the looked-for “arrival” of Christ from heaven containing no suggestion that he had been here previously, and so on.
This puts verse 6 in its proper relationship to verse 4. While the two thoughts are more or less contemporaneous, the second is something of a corollary and extension of the first. By revealing Christ and making the benefits of his spiritual-world sacrifice available to believers who now become free of the Law, God has created adopted sons. With Christ, God’s heavenly Son, now “in you” (within “our hearts”) in spiritual form, that “Spirit of his Son” is expressing its hosts’ new relationship with God by “crying: ‘Abba, Father!’ ”
Paul, in this entire passage, presents God as sending his Son, not in terms of any arrival on earth, but in the sense of his revelation to humanity. This fits with every other reference in the epistles to the ‘coming’ of Christ in the present time, offering a “now” figure who speaks from scripture rather than a “then” figure of the past. That an entire movement from its beginning and for over half a century could have adopted such language and created such a picture if an historical Jesus had recently existed and whose memory lived on in their minds is quite impossible.
In the
Fullness of Time
All this is further supported by another overlooked phrase, the very first words of verse 4: “Then in the fullness of time…” (literally, “when came the fullness of time [to plēroma tou chronou]”). What is that time? Certainly Paul does not here say, nor ever says, that it was a certain number of years ago, that it was at the time of an identifiable person or period in history which could locate Jesus on earth for us. Still, there is some validity to the idea that Paul is simply voicing the general thought that God did whatever he did when he had decided it was time to do so, and this is what the phrase serves to say. But this still leaves the anomaly of what specifically that “fullness of time” has been applied to. Again, in light of what we have determined about the ‘sending,’ that it was the time of revelation, the time of the preaching by apostles like Paul, this makes the “fullness of time” refer to that preaching movement, conducted under the influence of the Holy Spirit.
Nor can we shift the “sending” back into Christ’s time while leaving God’s “purchasing of freedom” until later, in the time of Paul and faith, and thereby rescue verse 4 for a more traditional interpretation. This would create an awkward and unlikely sequence of ideas: “In the fullness of time a few decades ago God sent Jesus to earth to undergo death and resurrection, in order that God in my (Paul’s) time could purchase freedom for believers and make them sons.” If that were the case, the death and resurrection in the recent past would have been the focus of God’s “freeing from the Law,” not Paul’s later missionary work (see further below). The “now that faith has come” (3:25) is Paul focusing on himself and his own time. (Referring to a past “faith” that was in response to Jesus’ historical death and resurrection would have been too oblique; any reference to the past would have been to the saving events themselves.) Moreover, it is ruled out by another passage in the Pauline corpus. Even though the epistle of Titus, one of the Pastorals, was written probably half a century later, it still preserves much of Paul’s thought. In its opening verses, the writer, presenting himself as Paul, has this to say:
before the beginning of time [pro chronōn aiōniōn],
3 and now at the proper time [kairois
idiois] he has revealed his word
[
[i.e.,
Paul] by the command of God our Savior.
3 This is
only the most blatant
indicator that the writer of the Pastorals knows of no historical
Jesus, which
strengthens the case I have suggested in Appendix 1 for regarding 1
Timothy
6:13, with its reference to Pilate, as an interpolation. But even
failing that,
Robert Price, in his The Pre-Nicene New
Testament, has presented the Pastorals in a pattern of composition
which
would allow my observation to stand and yet retain
But let’s go back to Galatians 3:23 and
consider more fully the curious way Paul presents things. “Before faith
came,
we were held prisoner of the Law until faith should be revealed.” In
the
context of an historical crucifixion some decades earlier than Paul was
writing,
this would be a perverse thought. If Jesus dying on the cross was the
necessary
act (and it was) which brought about the setting aside of the old Law,
surely
any idea that the Law still held sway even after
that historical event had happened would be unnatural. Rather, the Law
would
have ceased to have any force, any life in it, from that point on, even
if the
message about this cessation was yet to be brought to people, even if
people
only assumed that they were still
under the Law until informed otherwise by Paul. Yet Paul, in
4 Paul’s
silence on the Law’s demise at
the time of the crucifixion itself seems to change somewhat in later
epistles
written in his name, although the texts are not perfectly clear on the
point.
Ephesians
The
observations
thus far are valid quite apart from the absence or presence of “born of
woman,
born under the Law.” But they do have a bearing on the question of
whether
those phrases should be in the text, or whether they are
interpolations. If the
sending of the Son in verse 4 does not refer to the arrival of the
person Jesus
on earth, but only to a spiritual manifestation in the time of Paul,
then the
idea of Christ being “born of woman” would be immaterial—even if an
historical
Jesus had existed. The “born” idea would have no relevance to what was
being
said around it. By the same token, “born under the Law” would be
equally
irrelevant to what was being discussed. Within the context of the
Galatians
passage itself, neither of these features would play any direct role.
Christ is
not being presented as the one who abolishes or purchases freedom from
the Law.
That is God himself. (It is “God’s own act,” as the NEB emphasizes it.)
But
could it be claimed that this act by God was made possible by Jesus
being sent
to earth in the past and being “born of woman, born under the Law”?
First of
all, these would be quite secondary to the death and rising which is
the primary
act which bestows salvation. (Why did Paul not put these events forward
instead
of the woman/Law features?) In what way would being born of woman and
born
under the Law be items worthy of highlighting as important in this
context? It
would go without saying that if Jesus had lived on earth and been
crucified as
a human being on
If
“born of woman”
is thus to be set aside, “born under the Law” would almost certainly
have to go
with it. But even without that, what could “born under the Law” itself
have
contributed to the primary act of death and resurrection? Nothing
evident. And
if one tried to see any relevance for it in relation to the discussion
of the
abolition of the Law, that too is hard to come by. In what way is Jesus
having
been “born under the Law” a useful or working part of the mechanism by
which
God has freed believers from it, which is what this passage is all
about? It is
the death and rising which is the salvific act drawn on by God. It did
not
require Jesus to have been subject to the Torah himself. If it did,
Paul should
have been led to spell out that relevance, especially since it would
have been far
from obvious to his readers (just as it is far from obvious to us).
-- ii --
One of the most thorough analyses of this passage was made by Edward D. Burton in 1924, in the International Critical Commentary series. He, of course, was not a mythicist, but some of the observations he made on various elements of these verses help to cast the mythicist viewpoint, and what I have said above, in a favorable light.
First
of all, the
two qualifying phrases, “born of woman, born under the Law” (genomenon
ek gunaikos, genomenon hupo nomon)
are descriptive of the Son, but not specifically tied to the ‘sending.’
For
those phrases,
The myths of some savior gods, such as Dionysos, had them ‘born of woman’ (Semele, in his case), and while such mythology was originally cast in an earthly setting implying an earthly woman, its attraction into the Platonic cast of turn-of-the-era philosophy might have transformed her into a mythical counterpart to the earthly Semele. It’s a tricky question, but it does enable us to suggest the possibility that Paul’s “woman” was similarly mythical. And to suggest that the idea was prompted by scripture.
Isaiah 7:14
“A young woman is with child, and she will bear a son…”
This
is a passage
which, despite its context clearly linking the woman and her child with
the
time of the prophet, was widely regarded as prophetic of the Messiah.
If Paul
felt compelled to interpret this as a reference to his spiritual
Christ, he
would not have refrained from stating it (even if he didn’t understand
how it
could be that the spiritual Christ could be “born of woman”). Perhaps
he simply
assigned it to the world of myth and God’s “mysteries”—which were
unfathomable
anyway, and had to be accepted on the basis of scriptural revelation;
just as
he accepted that the spiritual Christ was of David’s stock because
scripture
said so. Why he would choose to introduce that mythical element here,
especially without explanation, can only be a matter of speculation. In
the
context of Galatians 4, there seems no practical necessity for either
phrase,
which becomes one of the arguments for interpolation.5
5 By the time of Irenaeus, Christian
thinkers had come up with a reason for Christ being “born of woman.” In
Against Heresies, Bk.V, 21, Irenaeus
explains that, since man was conquered by the serpent (Satan) in the
Garden of
Eden through a woman, Eve, it was fitting and necessary that a man born
of a
woman who was a descendant of Eve would overturn that conquest and
conquer
Satan. Could this idea have been in Paul’s mind, leading him to offer
this type
of parallel? After all, he uses paradigmatic parallelism in Romans
6:1-5, in
having the convert’s ‘death’ in baptism parallel Christ’s, and his
future
resurrection guaranteed by Christ’s own. But this is quite different
from that
of Irenaeus. Paul’s parallel is between the believer and Christ (as it
is in
the fundamental mystery cult relationship between savior and devotee).
And if
Christ “born of woman” is meant to be in parallel to the believers
being “born
of woman,” this would add another dimension to the parallel
relationship, one
which Paul never lays out, unless it be understood as part of the
general
pattern of “likeness” so often stressed by the early writers (as in the
Philippians hymn and Hebrews 2:15; compare the Ascension of Isaiah
9:14-15).
Yet taking on the “form” and being only in the “likeness” of a man is
not the
same as saying that he became an actual earthly man (something the
epistles
never explicitly state: there are other forms of “man” in the
philosophical
thinking of the time), much less that he was born in the human way
(something
Paul never explicitly tells us by using the common verb for being born,
gennaō). If Paul were being consistent
with early Christian expression here, we would have to see him as
regarding the
‘birth’ from woman as equally a “likeness,” which would render such a
birth and
such a woman mythical, something relating to the metaphysical
dimension,
revealed by scripture. This would be in keeping with the fact that he
does not
tell us who this woman was. Still, it remains odd that he would have
brought up
this parallel solely within the context of Galatians 4 where, as we
have seen,
it would not have been pertinent to the discussion. Another reason to
lean
toward interpolation.
But back to Edward Burton. He suggests that “the motive for the insertion of the [second] phrase is doubtless to emphasize the cost at which the Son effected his redemptive work” [p.218]. The problem is, the desire for such an emphasis is not to be detected anywhere else in Paul’s writings. If the “cost” (inferring a negative connotation) of the Son’s redemptive work included the fact that he had to be born in human flesh and be subject to the Law, and Paul wanted to emphasize this, he would surely have chosen (or been forced) to talk about that life, with its disadvantages and demands, more than he does—which is to say, not at all. The suffering and death of Christ cannot simply be included in such a category, for they are never identified as taking place on earth, in actual human flesh. Moreover, this would be to unjustifiably rule out the idea that gods could suffer and die, something which is patently not the case given the mystery cult myths. (And it would be begging the question.)
EXCURSUS: Distinguishing Between the Spirit of Father and Son
In
regard to the question of distinguishing between the two ‘sendings’ in
verses 4
and 6,
In
the orthodox interpretation, which Burton follows, verse 4 is speaking
of the
actual entry of the incarnated Christ into the earthly world and what
he did there,
which itself brings about—or enables—the sonship of those who come to
believe
in him; whereas verse 6 speaks of his “Spirit” in a post-incarnation
supernatural
sense. That this is mistaken is inadvertently supported by an
intriguing
observation by
Thus
it is no wonder that
“Apparently the apostle Paul, while clearly distinguishing Christ from God the Father…and less sharply distinguishing the Spirit from God…is not careful to distinguish the Spirit [i.e., the Holy Spirit] and Christ, yet never explicitly identifies them.”
Incidentally,
we should note the similar situation remarked on by scholars (see The Jesus Puzzle, n.16) that the early
church supposedly made no distinction between “words of the Lord” as
spoken by
Christian preachers like Paul out of inspiration from Christ in heaven,
and
words spoken by Christ on earth. There is no distinction because there
are none
identified as the latter in the epistles; scholars simply assume them
to be if
they resemble those in the Gospels. Without such identification, they
all
become “words of the Lord” from heaven, or else, when unattributed to
Jesus,
they are simply moral pronouncements coming from a general pool of such
things.
“Born” or
“Arise”: Ginomai vs. Gennaō
“Had the apostle desired to express the idea of ‘born’ in both phrases, he could have done so unambiguously by the use of gennēthenta.”
Here
we come to a
significant point of contention between historicists and mythicists. As
The question becomes, why did Paul not use gennaō if all he meant was that Jesus was born in the normal human way? What would lead him to use ginomai instead? First, we need to consider a few statistics.
Furthermore, what do we find when we examine the Pauline usages of the two verbs throughout his letters, and compare them with usages in the wider record? (I will in most cases refer to the main verb itself, rather than the specific form in which it appears.) The results are illuminating:
Two: Consider other epistolary usages of ginomai: 1 Corinthians 15:45: “Adam became [ginomai] a living soul.” Here it cannot be the meaning “born,” since Adam was created by God, not born of anyone. In 1 Corinthians 1:30, Paul speaks of Christ Jesus “who is made [ginomai] for us wisdom.” Hebrews 1:4 speaks of Christ “becoming [ginomai] so much superior to the angels.” Of himself, ‘Paul’ says in Eph. 3:7 “I became [ginomai] a minister of the gospel.” There is a certain consistency here. The usage of ginomai in this area is directed at “becoming,” not being “born.” So what should we make of the fact that in relation to Christ, Paul gravitates to ginomai?
Three: When Paul does want to directly
and unmistakably express “born” what does he
use? Outside of his two references to Christ, always gennaō:
Romans
Four: In none of the other epistles is
the verb ginomai used for “born.” Not
in Hebrews 11:23, not in 1 John
Five: In all cases (about two dozen) where the Gospels express the idea of being “born” they use either gennaō, the adjective gevvētos, or the verb tiktō (to bear). In no case do they use ginomai. When they refer specifically to the birth of Jesus (four times in Matthew, twice in Luke), they use gennaō, or tiktō once in Luke. John uses ginomai twice in the Prologue: “all things were made [egeneto] through him” (where it hardly means “born”), and “the Word was made [egeneto] flesh” (where it has the same meaning of “made” rather than “born”).
The strong implication is that, if the key phrases in Paul are his own voice and not an interpolation, Paul must have had in mind something different in regard to Christ than simply being “born” in the normal sense. If all he meant was the latter, then he should have had no reason to choose ginomai in those isolated cases.
Further, when we consider the usage of the entire phrase “born of woman,” we see the same imbalance. In the Septuagint the phrase occurs three times in Job and once in Sirach; in the Gospels twice. Some usages in the later apologists have to do with quoting Matthew and Luke. Every one of these phrases uses gennaō (or the Latin equivalent). The only exceptions are those which quote Paul’s use of ginomai. It is often claimed that Paul used the phrase because it was so common. If it was so common, why did he not use it in the common form? The very fact that something is common should lead one to use it if one means the common thing. If it was found in scripture and Paul was taking his cue from there, why did he change the verb as used in scripture? The fact that Paul changed the key element of the phrase should lead us to conclude that he was avoiding using it in its normal form because he meant something different from the normal understanding.
Or
else, he didn’t
write it all.
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“Born of Woman, Born under
the Law” as an Interpolation
So far we have been analyzing this passage while adopting the assumption that “born of woman, born under the Law” could have been authentic to Paul. If we abandon that assumption, would the problem be solved? Is there evidence and argument available to make the solution of interpolation acceptable and even persuasive?
First,
let’s see
how the passage would read if those phrases were dropped. And in fact,
a
context does exist in which those phrases do not appear. Not in the
form of any
extant manuscript of Galatians which does not contain them, yet
something
pointing to that very thing. The following is a reconstruction of the
passage
from the version of Galatians used by the ‘gnostic’ Marcion in the mid
second
century. Although a copy of Marcion’s document is not extant, scholars
have
reconstructed most of it from passages in Tertullian’s Against
Marcion in which Tertullian, in great detail, takes Marcion
to task for adulterating the “true original” of Paul’s letter. From
that work,
Marcion’s version of Galatians 4:3-6 has been put together as follows.6
6 Taken from The Center for Marcionite Research Library. The translation is by Daniel Jon Mahar, from “English Reconstruction and Translation of Marcion’s Version of To the Galatians”.
As
a man I say,
When we were
barely-born,
We were enslaved
Under the elements
of the cosmos.
But when the
fullness of time came,
God sent forth his
Son,
That he might
purchase those under law,
And that we may
receive adoption.
God sent forth the
Spirit of his Son
Into your hearts,
crying, “Abba, Father”.
In Book V, chapter 4, Tertullian is going step by step through the opening verses of Galatians 4. He quotes, “ ‘But when the fullness of time was come, God sent forth His Son—’ ” then stops and makes a few comments on God’s control of ‘time,’ its ages and days. He resumes:
“But for what end did He send His Son? ‘To redeem them that were under the Law…and that we might receive the adoption of sons,’ that is, the gentiles, who once were not sons.” [Translations of Tertullian taken from Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol.III]
The phrases “born of woman, born under the Law” are passed over without comment—if indeed they were in Marcion’s epistle. (If they were not, it would never have crossed Tertullian’s mind to think that the phrases in his own copy, half a century later, might have been added and that Marcion’s version represented the original.)
We know that Tertullian’s own copy (in Latin) contained them because he appeals to the phrase “born of woman” in another place (On the Flesh of Christ, 20), where he says:
Were the phrases “born of woman, born under the Law” in Marcion’s earlier copy or not? It might seem curious either way, that Tertullian did not comment on them if they were present, or did not castigate Marcion for removing them if they were not. Yet the conundrum is fairly easily solved by Tertullian himself. After addressing verse 3, and before he goes on to verse 4, he says: “But indeed it is superfluous to dwell on what he has erased, when he may be more effectually confuted from that which he has retained.” Thus, if “born of woman, born under the Law” was missing in Marcion, Tertullian’s silence on that ‘erasure’ would fit his stated intention not to dwell on such things. Whereas, if the words were present, his silence would go against his stated intention to address the things Marcion retained. Thus, if we can judge Tertullian by his own words, “born of woman, born under the Law” was not present in Marcion’s version of Galatians.
But
there remains
the question: did Marcion in fact excise the phrases? They could be
said to go
against Marcion’s doctrine that Jesus was not “born” of anyone, but
descended
from heaven as a fully grown (docetic) man; and since Marcion had even
less use
for the Jewish Law than Paul did (he rejected all things Jewish as
originally
belonging to his conception of Christianity), these two phrases would
have been
prime candidates for the cutting-room floor. The issue cannot be
settled one
way or the other. All we can say with some degree of confidence is that
the
Galatians used by Marcion which Tertullian was addressing did not
contain “born
of woman, born under the Law.”7
7 The
radical view that none of the
Pauline epistles are authentic, but were in fact written in their
original
forms by Marcion himself—co-opting a supposedly dim and legendary
figure of
almost a century earlier as a preacher of his own theology—would mean
that such
originals did not contain the phrases. This radical view is a complex
question.
Its leading exponent today is Herman Detering of
Textual
Corruptions
But in addition to the observations made earlier, that the analysis of the surrounding text would make “born of woman, born under the Law” irrelevant to it and not likely to have been included by Paul, there is another consideration which works in favor of interpolation. For this, we must go to a groundbreaking and influential book published in 1993 by Bart D. Ehrman, The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture. Ehrman’s exhaustive study of the extant texts of the New Testament led him to realize that over the course of the early centuries from which we have a surviving record—beginning after the year 200—numerous amendments and insertions were made by Christian scribes to many passages. As Ehrman says in his Introduction:
Ehrman
“explores
the ways proto-orthodox Christians used literature in their early
struggles for
dominance, as they produced polemical treatises, forged supporting
documents
under the names of earlier authorities, collected apostolic works into
an
authoritative canon, and insisted on certain hermeneutical principles
for the
interpretation of these works….It was within this milieu of controversy
that
scribes sometimes changed their scriptural texts to make them say what they were already known to mean.
In the technical parlance of textual
criticism…these scribes ‘corrupted’ their texts for theological
reasons”
[p.xii].8
8 In view of the extent of forgery even
within the New Testament (the polite term is “pseudonymity”), in view
of the
vast catalogue of apocryphal writings purporting to recount the “Acts”
of this
or that apostle, forged letters from Pilate to Rome, correspondence
between
Paul and Seneca, a letter even from Jesus himself to an Edessan king,
and the
scribal amendments Ehrman has revealed (not that others were not aware
of some
of them earlier), not to mention the notorious Christian character of
the
extant “Testimonium” in Josephus, we should regard forgery and
amendment as the
name of the game in early Christianity and adopt it as the default
position. To
a great extent, suspicion needs to be brought to everything textual,
including
and especially as late as Eusebius, the Church historian under
Constantine to
whom we owe so much of our knowledge of the early ‘history’ of
Christianity. That
Matthew and Luke, as we shall see, made wholesale changes to their
sources (Mark
and Q) is there for all to see, and to think that this wasn’t done to
the
epistles and other writings through the century and a half when we
entirely
lack manuscript evidence is plainly naivete and special pleading.
Ehrman creates a picture of orthodox Christians tampering with all sorts of passages, scribal emendations done for the purpose of making it clear that Jesus was such-and-such in opposition to heretical doctrines like adoptionism, separationism, and especially docetism. Although these observations are based on variant manuscript readings coming from the third century and later (since we have no manuscripts earlier than about the year 200), Ehrman was able, by comparison with citations from second and third century commentators like Irenaeus and Origen, to make certain deductions about emendations that could have been made as early as the first half of the second century.
It is certainly the case that if contentions within Christianity could induce scribes to alter and insert words in the later period, there is nothing to prevent them from having been doing the same in the second century. “Born of woman” would be a natural insertion in Galatians (perhaps around the middle of the century, to counter the claims of docetists like Marcion and others and their appropriation of Paul) in order to make the point that Jesus was in fact a fully human man from a human mother. Why Paul, on the other hand, would have needed to make this obvious point is not so clear, especially if he wrote long before docetism came along whose views would need counteracting.
In a section entitled “Christ: Born Human” in his chapter “Anti-Docetic Corruptions of Scripture,” Ehrman has pointed out [p.239] that Galatians 4:4 was indeed a passage that was a favorite for amendment. The Greek “genomenon ek gunaikos” was occasionally changed to “gennōmenon ek gunaikos”—from the verb ginomai to gennaō, the latter being the verb that everyone (including Tertullian) has acknowledged was the plainer word for being born in the human way. Similarly in Latin manuscripts, says Ehrman, “factum” (made) was changed to “natum” (born). Clearly, such later scribes, faced with Gnostic doctrine that Jesus had not been born a real human but only in the semblance of one, that he had passed through Mary without taking on any of her human substance, felt that the verb ginomai was not explicit enough and substituted gennaō. (Ginomai did ultimately survive and became part of the received text.)
If later scribes were amending these important texts, earlier ones could well have introduced the entire phrase in the first place during a period when Jesus was struggling to emerge from mythical to historical, or from docetism to flesh and blood humanity. Later, scribes in some communities felt that the initial insertion was not graphic enough, not ‘human’ enough, and so changed ginomai to gennaō, facio to nascor. This, by the way, would indicate that the two verbs were not regarded as interchangeable and that ginomai was not the strongest verb to convey the idea of being born in the human way.
But,
one might ask,
if “genomenon ek gunaikos, genomenon hupo
nomon” was from the start
a scribal interpolation to make the case for human birth and human
nature in
Christ, why did the initial interpolator choose ginomai
instead of gennaō?
Why not put in the more ‘natural’ verb from the start? The answer to
that is
partly speculative. Perhaps one scribe had a little different feeling
than
another scribe about the relative meaning of each verb. Nuances can
also change
over time. When a later scribe was looking for a way to make the case
for human
birth stronger, it may have struck him that this would be a change for
the
better. It has been suggested that using ginomai
would have been ‘more literary’ than using gennaō.
On the other hand, Tertullian himself offers a feasible explanation, as we have seen. Recall the passage in On the Flesh of Christ, 20, quoted earlier:
As
a final
consideration on whether Paul was likely to have written “born under
the Law,”
we ought to examine his attitude about what being under the Law meant
to him in
the first place. To his way of thinking, it was entirely a negative
condition,
useless for salvation, an enabler of sin. God needed to free believers
from it.
“No human being can be justified in the sight of God for having kept
the Law:
Law brings only the consciousness of sin,” Paul says in Romans
Romans
7:7 - “Is
the Law identical with sin? Surely not. Yet I would not have known sin
except
through the Law. I would not have known lust except for the Law saying:
thou
shalt not lust.” (We can be quite sure that Paul had in mind actual lust and not the milder “coveting” which
translations prefer to use. He alludes to something more graphic in
Romans
If all of this was liable to raise confusion in his readers (and how could it not?), it is perplexing that Paul would be even tempted to state Jesus’ subjection to the Law in Galatians 4:4, especially since it would have served no practical purpose. The more Paul would call attention to Jesus’ status under the Law, supposedly to say that he was like us, the more the anomaly would work against him. And if in many important respects Jesus was not like everyone else who was under the Law, this would go against the alleged purpose for saying it in the first place.
Here we have an identical situation to that which I have pointed out in regard to Paul’s concept of “living kata sarka.” If living in the flesh, as Paul so consistently emphasizes, is full of corruption, temptation, sin, contrariness to God, even ‘death’ (figuratively speaking), the question had to arise as to how an historical Jesus who ‘lived in the flesh’ was not a party to all this. Why does Paul never give a hint of any awareness of such a conflict, either in regard to Jesus ‘living in flesh’ or being ‘born under the Law’? The simplest answer is that he had no idea of his Jesus living in (earthly) flesh or being born under the Law. Again, the anomaly seems to have sailed over the head of the scribe who made the interpolation. For Paul, it was so endemic to his way of thinking and preaching, it could not have failed to impress itself upon him, and he would have had to deal with it. It would have been an itch he couldn’t help but scratch.
In Romans 2:17-24, Paul sets up the perfect opening to elucidate Jesus’ distinction from everyone else born under the Law. Consider the passage and try to imagine the spirit of Jesus standing at Paul’s side and hearing what he is saying to certain Jews who are ‘born under the Law’:
There is not a word anywhere from Paul about how Jesus the teacher behaved while being “born under (or subject to) the Law.” Moreover, with Jesus supposedly looming in the background, he could have been brought forward by Paul to illustrate how this particular Jew “instructed in the Law” had shown how to properly behave even in such circumstances and not dishonor the profession and the name of God.