Galatians 3: The Schoolmaster Wasn't the Teacher

Caleb read over my shoulder on Tuesday night while I had Galatians 3 open on the counter. He got as far as verse 24 and asked if the schoolmaster was the guy with the ruler. I told him sort of, and then stood there knowing I had no idea what I meant by it. That's the picture I've carried since Primary too, a man at the front of a room with a ruler and a low opinion of everybody's handwriting.

Paul meant someone else.

What did a schoolmaster actually do in Paul's day?

The Greek word behind "schoolmaster" is paidagōgos, and it doesn't mean teacher. In a Greek or Roman household it was the person, often a slave, who was put in charge of a boy through his growing-up years. He walked the boy to school and carried his things. He corrected him on the road and kept him out of the places a boy goes when nobody's looking. The teacher taught, and the paidagōgos got the child to the teacher in one piece.

Read verse 24 again with that in mind.

Wherefore the law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith.

Galatians 3:24

"To bring us unto Christ" is a delivery job, and the law in that picture is the escort, with a route and an end to the route. The destination and the lesson are somewhere else. Verse 25 says so plainly: "But after that faith is come, we are no longer under a schoolmaster."

Paul says the same thing again at the start of chapter 4, and it helps to hear it there. "The heir, as long as he is a child, differeth nothing from a servant, though he be lord of all, but is under tutors and governors until the time appointed of the father" (Galatians 4:1-2). That's a boy who owns everything and still can't leave the yard without somebody walking him. Nobody enjoys being supervised, and no boy in those houses looked forward to the paidagōgos showing up. But nobody thought the man was wicked, either. The family had hired him on purpose. He was doing a real job for a boy who needed it done.

I think that's the part we skip when we read this chapter as a verdict on the law. Paul calls it ours and a custodian and says it was leading somewhere, all within a few verses. Verse 23 puts the custody side starkly, "we were kept under the law, shut up unto the faith which should afterwards be revealed." Shut up isn't a gentle phrase. A child kept inside the gate is also a child who's safe from the road.

Why does Paul keep going back to Abraham?

Galatians 3 opens with Paul in a mood, saying "O foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you" in verse 1 and asking by verse 3 whether they really are that foolish. If you read Galatians 1 and the letter with no thank-you in it you know he skipped the usual thanksgiving. Two chapters on, the patience has run out.

What he does with the anger is the interesting part, since he reaches back past Moses to Abraham and leaves Sinai alone. "Even as Abraham believed God, and it was accounted to him for righteousness. Know ye therefore that they which are of faith, the same are the children of Abraham" (Galatians 3:6-7). Whoever was telling the Galatians they needed circumcision and the law to be fully in were treating Sinai as the beginning of the story. Paul says the story starts earlier and the order matters.

Verse 8 goes further, and Latter-day Saints probably read past it faster than other readers would. "The scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the heathen through faith, preached before the gospel unto Abraham." The gospel was preached to Abraham. We tend to agree with that without thinking, because Abraham 2:10 already tells us that "as many as receive this Gospel shall be called after thy name, and shall be accounted thy seed." So when Paul says in verse 29 that those who are Christ's are Abraham's seed, a reader of the Pearl of Great Price has heard it before. A reader in Galatia, with teachers at the door saying otherwise, had not.

Then comes the argument about timing, which is the part I find most like a man arguing a contract case. Verse 15 grants that even a human covenant, once confirmed, can't be cancelled or added to by someone else. The promise to Abraham was confirmed. And verse 17 does the arithmetic: the law came "four hundred and thirty years after," so it "cannot disannul" what came first. If the inheritance were by the law, verse 18 says, "it is no more of promise: but God gave it to Abraham by promise."

Verse 16 loses me a bit, because Paul hangs something on the fact that scripture says "seed" and not "seeds," singular for Christ, and I can follow the move without being sure I'd have made it.

Verse 20 I can't explain at all.

"Now a mediator is not a mediator of one, but God is one." Commentators disagree about it, and I've read enough of them to stop quoting any. Verse 19 is clearer, and it's the one that answers the obvious question: "Wherefore then serveth the law? It was added because of transgressions, till the seed should come to whom the promise was made." It was added, and the same verse gives the date it stops: till the seed should come.

Does Galatians 3 mean works don't matter?

This is where I slow down, because the chapter has sentences that sound, taken alone, like we can quit trying. Verse 10 says everyone "of the works of the law" is under a curse, and it quotes the reason: "Cursed is every one that continueth not in all things which are written in the book of the law to do them." Verse 11 says no one is justified by the law, and "the just shall live by faith." Verse 12 adds that "the man that doeth them shall live in them," which is a fair description of how a law works. You live by it if you keep every bit of it.

The weight of that curse sits on "in all things," and nobody I know of has continued in all things. A standard that complete shows you exactly where you stand, which fits the job verse 19 gave the law when it said "because of transgressions." Then verse 13 turns on one word: "Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law."

What kept me at the counter longer than usual was how the Book of Mormon handles the same ground. Nephi, who obviously isn't against works, writes this:

And, notwithstanding we believe in Christ, we keep the law of Moses, and look forward with steadfastness unto Christ, until the law shall be fulfilled.

2 Nephi 25:24

Keeping the law and looking past it in the same sentence, and nobody there seems to think one cancels the other. Two verses earlier he'd said "it is by grace that we are saved, after all we can do" (2 Nephi 25:23), a verse that gets argued about plenty, and I don't plan to settle it here. Set beside Galatians 3, it tells me Nephi's people weren't weighing how much law against how much grace. The law pointed toward Christ, and they walked that way carrying it.

Abinadi fits too, and I'd never lined him up with Paul before. In Mosiah 13 he tells the priests of Noah that "salvation doth not come by the law alone" (verse 28) and that the law was given to a people "quick to do iniquity, and slow to remember the Lord their God." Then comes the description of what the law was built to do: "a law of performances and of ordinances, a law which they were to observe strictly from day to day, to keep them in remembrance of God and their duty towards him" (Mosiah 13:29-30). If you wanted one verse of the Book of Mormon that describes a paidagōgos, I'd pick that one. Strict, daily, supervising, and aimed at remembering.

It's why the burnt offering in Leviticus 1 stayed with me last week. The man bringing the animal killed it himself. Nobody was handling it for him. A system that makes you do the hard physical thing with your own hands, every time, so you don't forget what's being asked, is a custodian doing its work.

There's one more verse in this section I want to flag as my own reading. Verse 3 asks, "having begun in the Spirit, are ye now made perfect by the flesh?" I take "flesh" there to include circumcision, because that's what the Galatians were being pushed toward, but Paul could be saying more than that. I'd be careful about leaning on my reading of a single word.

What does "neither Jew nor Greek" mean in this chapter?

Verses 26 through 28 are the ones people quote, usually without the verse before them. "For as many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ" (Galatians 3:27). Put on is the language of a coat. Then the list.

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.

Galatians 3:28

I used to read that as a nice general sentiment, and it isn't general at all. Back in chapter 2, Paul tells the story of Peter eating with Gentiles until certain men came from James, and then withdrawing "fearing them which were of the circumcision" (Galatians 2:12). Other Jews followed him. Even Barnabas did. That was Antioch and not Galatia, so the letter goes to the churches of Galatia. But a man who had just watched Jews and Gentiles split at one table, and then writes "neither Jew nor Greek," probably has that table somewhere in his head.

I'd go slowly on what it claims, since Paul keeps speaking as a Jew in this very letter. He writes in 2:15, "We who are Jews by nature, and not sinners of the Gentiles." He doesn't think Jewish identity disappeared at baptism, and I don't think he's announcing that slavery or the difference between men and women has been wiped from the earth. The verse is about standing in Christ, and I'd leave it there.

Verse 29 is where the chapter lands. "And if ye be Christ's, then are ye Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the promise" (Galatians 3:29). Being Christ's comes first and the place in Abraham's family follows from it. I'd guess the teachers in Galatia pressed the family side first, though the chapter never says so and I'm inferring it from how hard Paul argues the other order.

Frequently Asked Questions

Was the law of Moses a bad thing Paul wanted gone?

No, and he says so himself in verse 21 when he asks whether the law is against God's promises and answers "God forbid." It was added for a reason and did that job, and then the job ended. A custodian who's finished isn't a failure.

Why would God give a law that was only going to last a while?

The text gives two reasons, and verse 19 says it was "added because of transgressions," and verse 24 says it was meant to bring people to Christ. Abinadi adds a third in Mosiah 13:29, that the people were slow to remember. I think that's enough of an answer without needing the law to be permanent to be worthwhile.

Does verse 28 mean there's no difference between men and women?

I wouldn't push it that far, because the verse says all are one in Christ Jesus, which is a claim about standing before God and about who belongs at the table. It doesn't say a man and a woman have the same calling or that nobody is a Jew anymore, and Paul himself still talks like a Jew in chapter 2.

Is Galatians 3 a problem for people who believe in keeping commandments?

It can feel like one, mostly in verses 10 through 12. I read those as Paul describing a standard no one meets alone, and then verse 13 answers it. The Book of Mormon prophets keep their commandments and say the same thing, so I don't see the two pulling apart.

— D.