But when Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned. For before certain men came from James, he was eating with the Gentiles; but when they came he drew back and separated himself, fearing the circumcision party. And the rest of the Jews acted hypocritically along with him, so that even Barnabas was led astray by their hypocrisy. But when I saw that their conduct was not in step with the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas before them all, “If you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you force the Gentiles to live like Jews?”

We ourselves are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners; yet we know that a person is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ, so we also have believed in Christ Jesus, in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law, because by works of the law no one will be justified.

Galatians 2:11-16 ESV

In the whirl of everyday modern life, it is all too easy for us to treat food as nothing more than the gasoline of the body. We pack a quick lunch or swing through McDonalds simply because we need fuel to carry us through the afternoon. But that is not how the people of Jesus’ day thought at all.

In Judaism table-fellowship means fellowship before God, for the eating of a piece of broken bread by everyone who shares in the meal brings out the fact that they all have a share in the blessing which the master of the house has spoken over the unbroken bread.

We beheld a glimpse of this reality in Exodus 24, where Yahweh consummated His covenant with Israel by sharing a meal with Israel’s elders. And in the Gospels, we ought to recall the great scandal that Jesus provoked whenever He ate with sinners and tax collectors. The ancients understood that who we chose to eat with matters.  

I begin with this reminder because such table-fellowship is the context for understanding the gravity of our present passage, in which Paul recalls a time when Peter was guilty of pulling away from eating together with Gentiles. As we will see, this breach of gospel-shaped conduct threatened repudiate the gospel the very gospel that the apostles proclaimed.

REBUKING PETER // VERSES 11-14

For the last half of chapter 1 and the first ten verses of chapter 2, Paul has made a personal defense of his apostleship. First, he emphasized that he too received direct revelation from the Lord Jesus Christ, then his acceptance by the other apostles as being equal with them. Now to further defend his authority as an apostle and to transition into the primary matter of letter, Paul now recounts a time when he publicly rebuked the conduct of another apostle. And his rebuke was not toward Bartholomew, Thomas, or one of the other lesser-known apostles. He rebuked none other than Peter, their leader (called Cephas here, which is simply the Aramaic version of Peter).

Indeed, this conflict between the two most prominent apostles has rightly been seen as scandalous through church history. The early church fathers often tried their best to remove some of the great tension here. Sometimes arguing that this was a different Cephas than the apostle, which makes no sense to the logical flow of the letter. Or as Chrysostom argued, Peter and Paul set this scene up for the purpose of instruction, which also makes no sense narratively.

However, modern scholars often go too far into the opposite error, arguing that this battle between the apostles created a permanent schism between the two and may have even meant that Peter apostatized completely from the faith.

Let us do our best to avoid both pitfalls in our study. Contrary to the church fathers, this was a very grave situation between the two apostles, and Paul uses powerful language to capture its intensity. As Thielman notes:

“Opposed” (Gk. antithistemi) is a strong term that often appears in contexts of struggle against evil (Matt. 5:39; James 4:7; 1 Pet. 5:9). The perfect-tense participle “condemned” (kategnosmenos) envisions a metaphorical trial in which the judge has found the accused guilty beyond doubt (cf. Deut. 25:1 LXX).

So when Paul sets the scene by saying, But when Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned, he is communicating from the start the great seriousness of the situation.

Yet we do not need to go as far as modern scholars do. Indeed, many commentators paint Paul’s confrontation as a battle for the gospel, but that seems a bit much. What Paul is describing in these verses is not a battle but a rebuke. It would have been a battle if Paul and Peter stood in fierce debate for hours in front of the watching Antioch congregation. But that is not the scene that Paul describes. He describes the hypocritical conduct of Peter and the other Jews (even Barnabas), and then he relates his public rebuke.

I believe that Paul does not explicitly recount Peter’s repentance because he assumes that his readers have a high enough opinion of Peter’s character to know that he received the rebuke humbly. Indeed, I think John Brown is correct in seeing the directness of Paul’s rebuke as an indication of his respect and confidence that Peter would receive the correction. After all, Peter had not veered off into heresy. Paul was confident that Peter still fully acknowledged the truth of the gospel. The problem lay in Peter’s conduct. He was acting hypocritically because his conduct did not match his profession. Quite simply, we do Peter a great injustice by assuming that the disciple to whom Jesus said, “Get behind me, Satan!” did not humbly receive Paul’s rebuke here.

But why exactly did Paul rebuke Peter? Verse 12 gives us the problem in a nutshell:

For before certain men came from James, he was eating with the Gentiles; but when they came he drew back and separated himself, fearing the circumcision party.

While in Antioch, Paul observed that Peter freely ate with the Gentiles. Indeed, the verb συνήσθιεν (was eating) reveals that this was Peter’s pattern of behavior. He did not merely eat with the Gentiles once but repeatedly did so. From Paul’s words in verse 14, Peter may have even laid aside some of the Jewish eating customs while sharing these meals.

However, things changed whenever certain men came from James. Here Paul is referring to James, the brother of Jesus, who was one of the chief leaders of the church in Jerusalem. We can safely assume that James did not send these men with the purpose of causing a stir among the Christians of Antioch; rather, they were likely a group of messengers, bringing greetings from Jerusalem and taking greetings back to Jerusalem. Indeed, these men and this event may have at least partially caused the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15. For in verse 24, the apostles and elders wrote: “Since we have heard that some persons have gone out from us and troubled you with words, unsettling your minds, although we gave them no instructions…”

Whenever these men arrived in Antioch, Peter drew back and separated himself from the Gentiles. Again, these two verbs do not describe a sudden action, as if he saw the cool kids walk into the room and immediately left the losers’ table. No, this was a gradual shift in the apostle. He began by pulling himself away from the Gentiles, and soon he had completely separated from them.

He did this because he feared the circumcision party. Most commentators take this to mean that Peter simply caved into caring more about what the men from James thought about him than about standing firm in the truth of the gospel. That reading is certainly possible, and it brings with it a great warning about fearing men more than God. For if Peter could succumb to peer-pressure, any of us can do so as well. However, I think John Brown’s reasoning is worth considering:

I am disposed to think that Peter was afraid of their being so disgusted at seeing the unreserved intercourse of Jews and Gentiles, a thing so abhorrent to their prejudices, as to be tempted to renounce Christianity and revert to Judaism. This is a sentiment much more likely to influence the conduct of a man like Peter than a mean selfish fear of losing popularity among these prejudiced Jews. (85)

Peter may have even convinced himself that he was simply attempting to not be a stumbling block for these men and that he was only trying to become all things to all people. But by struggling to not offend the circumcision party, Peter was excluding the Gentiles. Although he believed that the gospel was for both Jew and Gentile alike, his actions were communicating that there were two classes of Christians: Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians.

Paul calls this behavior exactly what it is: hypocrisy. And Peter was not alone. And the rest of the Jews acted hypocritically along with him, so that even Barnabas was led astray by their hypocrisy. It seems that we should hear a great deal of sorrow in Paul whenever he says that even Barnabas walked away into this error. Ryken notes that “the word ‘hypocrite’ comes from the Greek theater, where actors wore masks to play their parts… Paul saw that Peter, Barnabas, and the others were putting on a charade. They did not really believe that the Gentiles were second-class Christians, but they were acting as if they did. Their actions were not consistent with their theology” (58). This is why Paul says that their conduct was not in step with the truth of the gospel. Thielman writes:

This serious miscommunication about the nature of the gospel was not a matter of Cephas’s active teaching and preaching, nor even, apparently, of any particularly dramatic action or stand on his part. He simply began to withdraw from the fellowship with Christians who were not like him. Even churches whose doors are obviously open to all kinds of people can compromise the truth of the gospel by not taking the time, trouble, and resources necessary to incorporate people of various backgrounds into the life of the church. It is possible to communicate through withdrawal from or neglect of those who differ from the majority that the gospel is really only for people who are like most other people in the church. This passage clearly teaches that this subtle but very common problem in the church is a serious distortion of the gospel and needs the corrective rebuke of the apostle Paul. (600)

PAUL’S REBUKE // VERSES 14-16

What was Paul’s rebuke exactly? No one can say for certain. Perhaps it is only verse 14, as the ESV, NET, and CSB take it, or it could be the remainder of the chapter, as the NASB, LSB, and NIV render it. Because Greek did not use quotation marks “it is impossible to determine where Paul’s reconstructed response to Peter ends and his response to the arguments of the rival teachers begins. What is clear is that a response appropriate to Peter in the situation at Antioch quickly expands its scope as a response appropriate to the situation in Galatia” (DeSilva, 40). Indeed, that is the reason why Paul has brought up this episode in Antioch; it applies to Galatians own situation.

Either way, Paul rebuked Peter’s hypocrisy by saying: If you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you force the Gentiles to live like Jews? Peter was able to enjoy living apart from the Jewish ceremonial law while he was with the Gentiles, but by separating himself from them, he was implying with his actions that they needed to keep those laws in order to have a place at the table with the apostles. That was what Peter’s hypocrisy communicated. His actions were declaring that there was one gospel for the Jews and another for the Gentiles.

In correction to this hypocrisy, Paul reminds us of the truth of the gospel in verses 15-16 (in fact, we might call these verses the summary of Paul’s central argument in the main body of Galatians):

We ourselves are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners; yet we know that a person is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ, so we also have believed in Christ Jesus, in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law, because by works of the law no one will be justified.

In verse 15, Paul is certainly not implying that only Gentiles are sinners. Rather, Paul, Peter, and the other apostles were Jews by birth, meaning they belonged by nature to the people of God. They were born with God’s divine revelation to humanity being taught to them, which is a privilege that the pagans did not have. In Romans 3, Paul affirms that Jews had an advantage over the Gentiles in that they “were entrusted with the oracles of God” (v. 2). However, in verse 9 of the same chapter, he writes, “What then? Are we Jews any better off? No, not at all. For we have already charged that all, both Jews and Greeks, are under sin.” The same sort of thing is happening here these two verses. Verse 15 acknowledges the privilege that the Jews had by having the Scriptures, but verse 16 affirms that they still needed to be saved through Christ.

Verse 16 is a magisterial verse that every Christian should have memorized. We should notice the dense repetition within, which ought to perk our ears and eyes into attention. Indeed, here we find contrasting triple repetitions. Three times Paul denies justification through works of the law, and three times affirms justification through faith in Christ.

But, first, what is justification, and why is it important to the discussion at hand? Justification means to be in right standing before God, of being righteous in His eyes. Indeed, in Greek, the terms righteousness and justification are the same word, δικαιόσυνη. So, as the ESV’s footnote states, the word justified in this verse could also be translated as counted righteous.

Job 9:1 asks, “But how can a man be in the right before God?” That is one of the chief questions that governs Paul’s theological thinking. We are sinful, but God is perfect. We are corrupt, but He is altogether holy. How then can we be justified or counted righteous in His sight? Who can repair the chasm that we have created between ourselves and the Holy One?

Before Christ rescued him, Paul would have answered “through the works of the law.” After all, he was a Pharisee who devoted himself to keeping the law as perfectly as humanly possible. But as a Christian, Paul now confessed that the works of the law could not justify anyone. F. F. Bruce notes that Paul may have been the single best person to make this point:

In making this affirmation, Paul was in a strong position: if any could base a claim on ‘works of the law’, it was he. His pre-Christian record, ‘as to righteousness by law’, was ‘blameless’ (Phil. 3:6). But he learned that even this record did not justify him before God; now his hope was founded on ‘not having a righteousness of my own, based on law, but that which is through faith in Christ’ (Phil. 3:9).

Even though the law itself is good, no one can keep it perfectly enough to be justified by it. The law shows us the will and character of God, shows us the depth of our sin, and shows us what obedience God expects of us, but it cannot justify. Because God is the eternal Creator, all rebellion against Him bears an eternal consequence, which means that we, as finite creatures, could not justify ourselves even if we had only committed one single sin. But, of course, we have committed more than one sin. Take a moment to honestly consider the Ten Commandments. How many have you successfully kept today? By the way, remember what Jesus said about murder and adultery beginning the heart. The stark reality is that if our righteousness is dependent upon our good works, then we are all in serious trouble.

Thankfully, there is a way for us to be counted righteous before God: through faith. Now much of the world around us would affirm the important of having faith in something, but Paul is not interested in faith as a disconnected idea. Faith itself does not save anyone because faith is the instrument through which we are saved. We do not give thanks to the scalpel for the successful surgery but to the surgeon. And like any tool, faith is only as good as what it is connected to, which is why the strength and size of someone’s faith is not nearly as important as the object of their faith.

For example, I can have an unshakeable faith that a string of stapled together sheets of paper would be strong enough for me to use as a bridge, but however strong or great my faith is, that paper bridge will fail me the moment I even begin to put weight upon it. But with a strong, sturdy wood bridge, I only need enough faith to actually walk across. I might do so with great fear that it would collapse underneath me, but my fears do not alter the stability of the bridge.

That principle applies spiritually. Many people have faith, and some even have great faith. But it is only faith in Jesus Christ that makes us righteous before God. There is some debate over how exactly to translate the words through faith in Jesus Christ. Todd Wilson suggests another rendering:

I prefer a variant translation of the second part of that verse: “through the faithfulness of Jesus Christ.” …I go with this variation simply because I think what Paul has in mind is here is the basis of justification, not the means of justification. He will speak to the means of justification in the very next clause (“so we also have believed in Christ Jesus…”). But right now he wants to contrast two competing bases for our justification: on the one hand, the provision of the Law with its works; on the other hand, the provision of Jesus Christ and his death. (78)

Of course, the faithfulness of Jesus is indeed the basis of our justification. As 4:4-5 says, Christ was “born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons.” He took on flesh and dwelt among us to obey the law as we ought to have obeyed. Then after living a perfect life without sin, He freely gave Himself over to die an undeserved death in our place, paying the eternal penalty for our sins. He alone has provided the basis of justification before God, and the means of justification is to believe in Christ, that is, to trust in Him. While good works are the fruit of our faith in Christ, they absolutely nothing to contribute to our justification. We are saved through faith alone in Christ alone.

And it is through that faith that we gather together around the Table before us. This pilgrim’s waybread is also a spiritual feast that is meant to set our eyes together upon Christ. In the cup, we have the symbol of Christ’s blood, which He sprinkled upon the heavenly altar on the true Day of Atonement to purchase our justification before the Father. And in the bread, we have a picture of His body, which was broken for us to make us into His body, the church. Therefore, this table of fellowship points to both the peace we have with God and with one another through faith in Christ.

As with the salvation that it is pointing to, faith alone is the condition of partaking of the Lord’s Supper (with baptism being the proper expression of that faith). Lay aside all else, your good works, your skills, your knowledge and intelligence, your ethnicity, your financial standing, your social class, etc. By the Lord’s grace, He works through all of those things in our daily life as Christians, but with regard to our justification in the sight of God, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”