Jewish root, they take on obligations to God absolutely identical to Jewish obligations). Other parts of the book make Lancaster’s position clearer, but I tended to stumble a few times when I encountered these ambiguous paragraphs.
To be fair, Lancaster is providing a detailed, in-depth analysis to a very difficult and wholly misunderstood piece of writing. Paul wasn’t easy to understand and trying to get into his head and into the culture and language in which he lived in the 1st century of the common era, let alone write an entire book about it, is a major undertaking. While I think the book succeeds overall, the reader is going to have to exercise a certain amount of patience and not jump to conclusions. Getting the entire message of Galatians means reading all of Lancaster’s book (I had to take copious notes) before coming to any sort of conclusion. Bringing an open mind as well as a notepad is also essential.
I don’t doubt that many of the people who read this book will either try to ignore it or start an argument about what it says. Lancaster completely disassembles the traditional Christian understanding of the letter and rebuilds it an atom at a time. That doesn’t make for comfortable reading if you’ve been taught for most of your life that the Torah is slavery for the Jews and grace is freedom for the Christians. For the One Law supporters in MJ, the book will also challenge many of their assumptions and at a few points, Lancaster even directly confronts the OL assumptions. Lancaster makes it clear in many of his comments that Paul never intended for the Gentile disciples to take on the entire “yoke of Torah” and that the “Torah” for the Gentiles was the “Torah of the Messiah”.
If you consider all that “the bad news”, I’ve also got “the good news”. The good news is that, if you set aside your preconceptions of what you think Galatians says, and by inference, many of the assumptions you have about what it means to be a Christian or to be “Messianic”, you’ll be able to read Lancaster’s book as an adventure in learning and an exploration of what it must have been like to be among the first Gentiles, having recently come out of pagan idolatry, entering a world and a relationship with God that had only previously been accessible to the Jewish people.
Who is Paul? Where did he get his “gospel”? Who did he see as his Master, Jesus or the Jerusalem Council? Who were the “influencers” who were disturbing the Gentile believers in Galatia? How did Paul see his fellow Jews and Jewish converts? What was Paul’s unique solution to the puzzle of integrating the people of the nations into the community of faith in the God of Israel?
The answers to those questions can be found in D. Thomas Lancaster’s new book, The Holy Epistle to the Galatians. Click the link to find out more. You may not believe it now, but there are answers in this book that you need to hear.
Besides the review you’ve just read, I’ve commented on different portions of Lancaster’s book in other recent blogs. They include Building Fellowship, Knowing, Intermediaries, and The Tefillin and the Shoemaker. These blog posts include mentions of Lancaster’s book within the context of other topics and resources, but taken together, I think this material provides a rich understanding of not only what the book says, but how it applies to a life of faith and to the wider contexts of Christianity and Judaism.