DID YOU KNOW: Paul as the Author of Galatians

If you have not already, you will eventually come across people who deny the Bible was actually written by the apostles. They will claim the Bible was written hundreds of years after the time of Christ, and that the writers did not actually know Jesus or the men who walked with him.

What about Galatians? Well, Galatians is perhaps the book with the strongest evidence that it came directly from Paul the Apostle. It is generally regarded as the earliest of Paul's epistles and perhaps the earliest book of the New Testament altogether. How do we know Paul wrote Galatians?

• The book has been regarded as coming from Paul as far back as we have records from the Church fathers. We see the oldest records uncertain about some books (Hebrews, for example) but never about Galatians.
• The structure and tone of the letter matches that of the other Pauline books. You may have noticed in your own life that the same people tend to write different essays or letters in the same way, and this was certainly the case for Paul.
• The author shows a considerable concern for the question of whether Christians must be Jews. This is a question unique to the first century church, when Christianity was still emerging from the Jewish religion and was widely regarded as a sect of Judaism. It would not have been a concern of later writers.
• The book talks about the Council of Jerusalem (which quizzers from last year remember from Acts 15:2-29) and gives a different perspective on the proceedings than Acts does. (Though not inconsistent, as seen thru the eyes of a passionate observer.) A later forger would probably have relied closely on the book of Acts and tried to stay as close to the original as possible.

You can be confident that Paul indeed wrote Galatians, and that this first-century author is the same one discussed in Acts. The Bible is reliable.