I’ve been posting on Paul’s letter the Galatians, and thought that I might point out a way that the letter completely changed my understanding of Paul, years ago now when I was doing research for my book  How Jesus Became God.

I have to admit, that for many years I was puzzled by Paul’s Christology–his views of Christ. All the various things he said about it didn’t seem to add up to a coherent whole to me, even though I thought and thought and thought about it.  But I finally found the piece that, when added to the puzzle, made it all fit together.

I think now I can make sense of [pretty much] every Christological statement in Paul’s letters.  This not because I myself finally figured it out, but because I finally read some discussions that actually made sense, and saw that they are almost certainly right. Here’s what I say about it in the book.

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Many people no doubt have the same experience I do on occasion, of reading something numerous times, over and over, and not having it register. I have read Paul’s letter to the Galatians literally hundreds of times in both English and Greek. But the clear import of what he says in Galatians 4:14 simply never registered with me, until, frankly, a few months ago. In this verse Paul calls Christ an angel. The reason it never registered with me is because the statement is a bit obscure, and I had always interpreted it in an alternative way. Thanks to the work of other scholars, I now see the error of my ways.

In the context of the verse Paul is reminding the Galatians of how they first received him when he was ill in their midst, and they helped restore him to health.  Paul writes:

Even though my bodily condition was a test for you, you did not mock or despise me, but you received me as an angel of God, as Jesus Christ (Gal. 4:14).

I had always read the verse to say that the Galatians had received Paul in his infirm state the way they would have received an angelic visitor, or even Christ himself.  In fact, however, the grammar of the Greek suggests something quite different.  As Charles Gieschen has argued, and has now been affirmed in a book on Christ as an angel by New Testament specialist Susan Garrett, the verse is not saying that the Galatians received Paul as an angel or as Christ; it is saying that they received him as they would an angel, such as Christ.  By clear implication, then, Christ is an angel.

The reason for reading the verse this way has to do with the Greek grammar.  When Paul uses the construction “but as … as” he is not contrasting two things; he is stating that the two things are the same thing.  We know this because Paul uses this grammatical construction in a couple of other places in his writings, and the meaning in those cases is unambiguous.  For example, in 1 Corinthians 3:1 Paul says: “Brothers, I was not able to speak to you as spiritual people, but as fleshly people, as infants in Christ.”   The last bit “but as…as” indicates two identifying features of the recipients of Paul’s letter: they are fleshly people and they are infants in Christ.  These are not two contrasting statements; they modify each other.  The same can be said of Paul’s comments in 2 Corinthians 2:17, which also has this grammatical feature.

But this means that in Galatians 4:14 Paul is not contrasting Christ to an angel; he is equating him to an angel.  Garrett goes a step further and argues that Galatians 4:14 indicates that Paul “identifies [Jesus Christ] with God’s chief angel.”

If this is the case, then virtually everything Paul ever says about Christ throughout his letters makes perfect sense.  As the Angel of the Lord, Christ is a preexistent being who is divine; he can be called God; and he is God’s manifestation on earth in human flesh.

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In my book, from this point on, I show how Paul’s understanding that Christ was an exalted angel who became a human and then was exalted even higher, to a level of equality with God, makes sense of everything he says about Jesus, based on that key to all passages-christological in Paul, Philippians 2:5-10. (For a discussion, see A Fuller Exposition of the Christ Poem in Philippians)