Papyrological Commentary on Paul’s Letter to the Galatians

The aim of the project Papyrological Commentary on Pauls Letter to the Galatians is to illuminate and interpret, for the very first time, this New Testament text with the help of documentary papyri, ostraca and wood or wax tablets. This material provides us with the best access available to the thoughts and expressions of average people throughout the Roman Empire, among them the potential first readers of Galatians. Private and business letters, documents from the Roman administration, all kinds of deeds and contracts, tax receipts and other artefacts show us a vivid picture, not only of the life of the elite but also, and even more so, of the relations of people who made their living on a much lower level. The author of Galatians, Paul of Tarsus, discusses for the first time and most prominently in this letter a concept of the Law, and in particular the Jewish Tora. Documentary papyri and related material illustrate not only the perspective of the legal authorities but also that of groups and individuals who had to abide by the laws and regulations as well. In this regard, special attention will be paid to legal documents of the Jewish community from the Egyptian village of Herakleopolis. Divine sonship of Christians, on the other hand, raises the question how the papyrological evidence on adoption may shed new light on Pauls metaphorical language. The family documents of two Jewish women that have been preserved near the Death Sea, for sure illumine the general obligations to minors in a multicultural (Graeco-Roman-Jewish) society. Besides issues like those, a continuous verse-by-verse and word-by-word commentary can be expected to underscore several traditional interpretations of certain passages or terms of the Letter to the Galatians, falsify others, present alternatives, and in some cases, even suggest new ones. Methodologically, the whole project is dedicated to the comparison of two groups of texts, biblical texts on the one hand and texts from ancient everyday life on the other. Such groups of texts may only be compared if both are part of the same historical context but independent of each others impact (which means that only non-Christian papyri are to be compared with the Christian texts of the New Testament). Moreover, both groups of texts have to originate from a similar time or time-span, share a similar geographical origin as well as the same genres and semantic fields, and both must have been produced under similar cultural, legal, and social conditions. The final goal of the project is to produce a monograph that is supposed to be published as a volume in the well-established series Papyrologische Kommentare zum Neuen Testament (PKNT).

Papyri from everyday life in Greco-Roman antiquity offer direct access to the linguistic, economic, social and religious world of the population of the time. Insights that go beyond the local and regional characteristics of Egypt and the Levant (the core areas for papyrus finds) can also be applied to the Roman province of Galatia. Therefore, a comparison of the papyri with the Letter to the Galatians by Paul of Tarsus best illustrates how the Galatian communities to whom this letter was addressed might have understood Paul's letter. The research project focused on the form and formulas of the letter as well as important topics such as slavery, adoption, wills and inheritance, the relationship to Judaism, Paul's opponents and the use and meaning of individual terms. The results of the research project will be published in fall 2025 as volume 5 of the renowned series "Papyrologische Kommentare zum Neuen Testament - Papyrological Commentaries on the New Testament" under the title "Galatians." The chapters of the volume, written in English, are by members of the research project as well as internationally recognized scholars of New Testament Studies and of Papyrology.