Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast, and we're kind of at this cool little pivot point here as we're going through this season on the book of Galatians. We're right in between the end of chapter two and the beginning of chapter three, or really verse one of chapter three. And I've been using this verse that says, You foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you before your very eyes, Jesus Christ, was clearly portrayed as crucified. I've been using this verse as an excuse to go and look at what smarter people than me have to say about the situation that's unfolding here in the book of Galatians, about who these people are, about what mistake it is that they've made. I mean, why are they foolish? What does it mean that you were bewitched? Are they responsible for forgetting the gospel message they received and chasing after something that is no gospel at all? Or is it something that just happened to them and they got put under a spell or an enchantment? Well, I am far from the first person in the history of Christianity to be obsessed with the book of Galatians, both because of the implications of the book for understanding the whole New Testament, but also because of the implications for me and my own walk with God, my own trying to figure this stuff out. Whole but just tons of other people have thought about this book very deeply and written about it. Some of the greatest minds in the history of the church. And over the last few days, we've been going down this fun rabbit hole of seeing what many of those brilliant minds from across the centuries have done with this question of what's going on here in Galatians and what is Paul calling out on the part of these people. So we've looked at Charles Spurgeon, Martin Luther, John Calvin, and today we are going to go east and much further back in time, where we are going to hear from John Chrysostom, the Archbishop of Constantinople. He was in charge in the late 300s and early 400s, the leading voice of Christianity in the Eastern Mediterranean, Greek-speaking world. And he wrote a commentary on the epistle to the Galatians. And so I went and looked up what he had to say about the passage we're looking at, Galatians 3, verse 1. He says this Let not Paul calling the Galatians foolish surprise you, for it's not a transgression of Christ's command not to call one's brother a fool, but rather a strict observance of it. Whoa! Well, he took that in a really interesting direction, didn't he? I didn't even think about that. You foolish Galatians. But remember, Jesus said that you're not supposed to call people fool. Where is that? It's in the Sermon on the Mount, right? A second. A second. I brought a Bible in case something like this happened. We're learning together in real time how we do things. It is the hatred, murder. Yeah, here it is. It's Jesus talking about, yeah, you've heard it said, but I tell you it's in the middle of those. Uh Matthew 5, 21. You have heard that it was said to people long ago, do not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment. But I tell you that anyone who's angry with his brother will be subject to judgment. Again, anyone who says to his brother, Raka, is answerable to the Sanhedrin. I don't know exactly what that word means, but it apparently does really mean it's Aramaic. Is answerable to the Sanhedrin. But anyone who says, You fool, will be in danger of the fire of hell. It is crazy that we've been lingering on this verse for a week, and it never even crossed my mind until I've read John Chrysostom right now to you that this would actually be an issue or a tension. I mean, he legitimately is saying, You foolish Galatians. I don't know. Seems like it's a little gentler and a little more paternalistic here on the part of Paul. I think it's meant as an exhortation. I don't know. Let's see how John Chrysostom sorts it out and if he tries to get Paul off the hook here. Let not Paul calling the Galatians foolish surprise you, for it's not a transgression of Christ's command not to call one's brother a fool, but rather a strict observance of it. For it's not said simply, whoever shall say to his brother, You fool, but whoever shall do so without a cause. Ah. So Chrysostom is saying that Jesus is talking about just flippant cruelty and hatred, not just the use of the word itself. He goes on, and who more fittingly than the Galatians could be called a fool, who after so great events adhered to past things as if nothing else had ever happened? If on this account Paul had to be called a reviler, Peter may likewise, on account of Ananias and Sapphira, be called a homicide. Oh wow, he's getting so deep into all the different New Testament stories here. This is complex. But as it would be wildness to do so in that case, much more in this. So his point is it was God's righteous judgment against Ananias and Sapphira in the book of Acts that caused them to be killed when they lied to the Holy Spirit and tried to wreck the early church. That wasn't Peter's fault. That was God's judgment. So Chrysostom is saying here that it's God's judgment against the Galatians, that they're being called foolish, because indeed they are being foolish. This isn't a statement of hatred, it's a statement of correction. Okay, I see what he's doing. Cool. I hadn't even, like I said, thought about that tension. But let's get to the witchcraft stuff and the beguilement and all of that. What do we have next here? Okay, he goes on. For after he had shown that they had rejected the faith and made the death of Christ to be without a purpose, Paul introduces his reproof, which, even as it is, is less severe than what they deserved. Note how Paul doesn't say who has seduced you or who has perverted you or who has philosophized you, but rather who hath cast an envious eye on you. Oh, interesting. Chrysostom, who is more of a practitioner of the Greek and the Eastern world, he's digging deep into that word that Paul uses here about bewitching and getting way down to the core of it, which is this idea of an evil eye or almost like possession that can happen by like this old ancient pagan Greek notion of making eye contact with the evil spirit or allowing it in. Almost how people in the Middle Ages, or I guess later than the Middle Ages, the rumors about vampires, you remember this? Like they can't come into your house unless you willfully let them in. If they seduce you and let them in, then the vampire can come in. That that concept of being bewitched and staring down the evil until eventually your guard goes down and you let the evil in voluntarily wasn't a new concept invented by Bram Stoker when he wrote Dracula. That's tapping into very old ideas about the relationship between beguiled people and the evil and the act of the individual being bewitched or allowing or participating with the bewitching by opening their eyes to it and in doing so welcoming it in. And even Jesus seems to acknowledge this idea is still in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew chapter six, when he's talking about the eyes being the lamp of the body, and if your eyes are good, then your whole body will be full of light, and then conversely, if your eyes are bad, your eye your body will be full of darkness. I think that's the same kind of stuff that Chrysostom is drawing on here, and that old legends drew on. And so he's kind of painting a picture of these Galatians being like deer in the headlights, staring into the thing, getting the kind of little swirly eyes, like what was the name of the snake? Uh, Ka in the jungle book. You could remember the animated jungle book, you could make the swirly eyes, and then your eyes would start to swirl, and then you get all enchanted and things would happen. I mean, it's kind of that image that Chrysostom is painting here, and he's pointing out Paul didn't say the Galatians got seduced or perverted or outphilosophized. He's saying they got bewitched, envious-eyed. And then Chrysostom tips his hand that Paul is kind of taking it easy on them in this regard, Chrysostom writes. Thus Paul is tempering his reprimand with somewhat of praise, because it implies that their previous actions had excited jealousy, and that the present occurrence arose from the malignity of a demon whose breath had blasted their prosperous estate. Oh, what an interesting read. He's saying they did so well that they put a target on their back for these malicious spiritual forces who wanted to come and do damage to them. This is a very sophisticated interaction with the text that we're getting from Chrysostom that I did not see coming. Well, that was fun. All right, I had just a couple more little quick ones here, and then we need to be done with this exercise and move forward with Galatians 3. Theodoret of Cyrus. This is not Cyrus like Cyrus the Great. This is a town in Syria that was founded by one of Alexander's generals. It would have been General Seleucus. So this is a guy who was associated with Antioch. His maybe parents. I looked this up. I knew this once. Either he or his parents had some kind of blindness malady that was cured. So this is a dude who's writing in the 400s who has kind of a lot in common with the Apostle Paul in that regard, connections with Antioch, blindness and healing and all of that. And he has just a little remark that's been preserved here about Galatians 3 1. He writes, the way Paul frames things here in Galatians chapter 1, quote, indicates the Galatians' previous zeal for piety and manifests the fatherly affection of the Apostle Paul. He grieves over them for their loss of, I like this phrase, wealth accumulated. Theodoret reads it and he's like, You had something special and you gave it away for nothing. You traded an amazing inheritance for a garbage inheritance. It's just sad that you made such a bad deal that you got taken advantage of and that you were so foolish. I just thought that was an interesting way to phrase that from this less well-known church father from way back in the day. Finally, I went and found a brief remark here from Saint Jerome, the guy who translated the scriptures into Latin. He's the dude behind the Vulgate. He's an interesting character because he's a saint in the Catholic Church, and sometimes Catholics really like the stuff that Jerome says. Other times they're like, ah, you know, that there's friction there between him and the church. But no matter what you make of Jerome, I mean, he's a guy who spent a lot of time around the Bible thinking about this stuff, and here's what he had to say about Galatians 3, 1 and the whole enterprise of what's going on here in the book of Galatians and what this conversation is. Jerome writes, we have to expound this quote from Paul, quote, who has bewitched you in a way that is worthy of Paul, who, even if he can be rough in his speech, is not so in his understanding. It must not be interpreted in such a way as to make Paul legitimize the witchcraft that is popularly supposed to do harm. Rather, he's used a colloquial expression, and as elsewhere, so here he's adopted a word from everyday speech. In the same way as tender infants are said to be harmed by witchcraft, so too the Galatians, recently born in the faith of Christ and nourished with the milk, not solid food, have been injured as though someone has cast a spell on them. Interesting. So Jerome is saying this was inflicted on the Galatians primarily. He views them as victims of what these outsiders, these interlopers, did to them. But he would also say that they weren't truly beguiled or bewitched. Jerome is very cautious. He doesn't like the idea of Paul legitimizing that power in any way. So he kind of wants to retreat from that and be like, hey, Paul's just using an expression here. I've enjoyed these last few days. I think this has been fruitful. I know it's different than what we normally do, but it seemed in order because I genuinely didn't know what to make of the word bewitched here. And just going and looking up the original Greek didn't answer the question for me. I wanted to get a better sense of is Paul really saying somebody did a thing to you and therefore maybe you don't totally have culpability? Or is he using an expression here and saying, no, this is disobedience. You disobeyed God by rejecting this thing that you were given that is true and exchanging it for this false thing that these false apostles brought to you. In the end, I think I'm with the ancient scholars who say it's kind of both. Something did happen to them. They were acted upon. I really appreciate Chrysostom's remarks that part of the reason they got subjected to this test is because they initially had done so well. There's kind of a compliment in there. But clearly they did not pass the test when the pressure got turned up. And now Paul is coming to sort things back out. Whether he literally means they were bewitched or not, I suppose I'm coming to the conclusion is irrelevant. Either way, something was done to them and they have ownership of what happened here. They're morally culpable, and the people who did it to them are morally culpable. Also, as we're going to read as we go along, this is correctable. So we probably aren't going to need to linger too much longer into Galatians on what they got wrong, and then we'll be ready to make the pivot into how to get it right from a firm historical, biblical, theological foundation. This is fun. I would love to hear your thoughts on it. I would love to hear which of these thinkers we've read from over the last few days that you maybe resonated with the most. And if you would be okay with me ever doing a jaunt like this again, because again, I know it was a little bit different. All right, that's a lot today. We'll wrap it up there. We'll keep moving forward in Galatians 3 next time around. I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.