How should we conceive of the Galatians? Were they guileless innocents who were just sitting there,

minding their own business, being good Christians, and then some monsters came along and poured

poison in their ears and they believed all of it and they got bewitched and they didn't even

mean to and they were under the spell of bad people?

Maybe. Or were they malicious malcontents who didn't like the way being Christians was working out and they wanted something different and they were bored of doing things God's way and through the grace

of Jesus. And so instead they went out looking for trouble and they found it. They found a competing message,

a competing gospel. And then they slurped it up like ravenous pigs at the theology slop trough.

That was pretty good. I actually really like the way that sounded. Well, today we're going to find out

and the way we're going to get to the bottom of things when we really want to know an answer is,

don't ask me. We're going to go and hear bottom of things when we really want to know an answer is don't ask me we're

going to go and hear from other smarter people and see what they made of this question of how we're to

conceive of the galatians whether this was something that happened to them they were bewitched and

bedeviled or whether this is something that they inflicted upon themselves intentionally with eyes

wide open.

And I want to see if any of these great minds of the past who have written about the book of Galatians over the millennia have anything to say about the nature of the bewitching that Paul references here in Galatians chapter 3 verse 1, you foolish Galatians. Who has bewitched you? Before your very eyes, Jesus Christ

was clearly portrayed as crucified. We'll see if anybody thinks that it was actual bewitching

with spells or witchcraft or incantations or tinctures or whatnot. So we're going to start with some

smart people who chimed in here over on the Patreon side, and I got a brilliant comment from

Tara the patron who wrote, I agree with the implication at the end there that the, ooh, scary

spellcasting brand of being bewitched and the more mundane, led astray through clever rhetoric,

bewitched, are not really that dissimilar at all. To your point,

that Paul's context merges paganism and intellectualism, perhaps more than we would anticipate.

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