(17) The Apostle has done. He will not dally with these vexatious attacks upon himself and his authority any more. He dismisses them with an appeal which ought to be final. He points to the scars of wounds which he had received in his Master's service. The branding-irons of Christ, he says, have imprinted these upon me. They show that I, like the slaves of a heathen temple, am devoted and consecrated to His service. They are my credentials, and I shall produce no others. My assailants must leave me in peace.

The marks.--The stigmata, or marks inflicted with branding-irons, such as those which show that a slave is attached to a particular temple or to the service of some particular deity. Branding was applied in some other cases, but especially to temple slaves. Those with which the Galatians were most familiar would be engaged in the worship of Cybele.

There does not seem to be evidence to connect this passage directly with the incident of the "stigmata" in the life of St. Francis of Assisi, but it would seem very probable that the use of the word, which was left untranslated in the Latin versions, suggested, whether by a more or by a less distant association, the idea which took so strong a hold upon his mind that in a moment of extreme spiritual tension the actual marks of the Passion seemed to imprint themselves upon his body.

Of the Lord Jesus.--The true text is simply, "of Jesus."

Verse 17. - From henceforth (τοῦ λοιποῦ). This genitive form is found, in the New Testament, only here and in Ephesians 6:10, where the Textus Receptus reads τὸ λοιπόν. As being less ambiguous, it is chosen in preference to τὸ λοιπόν, because this latter word is also used in the sense "finally," as in Philippians 3:1; Philippians 4:8, as well as for "henceforth," as in Matthew 26:45; Hebrews 10:13. The meaning of τοῦ λοιποῦ is illustrated by Aristophanes, 'Pax.,' 1050, "You shall never dine henceforth (τοῦ λοιποῦ) any more in the Prytaneum;" and Herod., 3:15. Let no man trouble me (κόπους μοι μηδεὶς παρεχέτω). The phrase, κόπους πραέχειν, "cause trouble, or annoyance," occurs also in Matthew 26:10; Luke 11:7; Luke 18:5. Obviously the apostle refers to such trouble as was now accruing to him from the endeavours of the Judaizing party to pervert his Galatian disciples. On him fell the "anxiety of all the Churches" (2 Corinthians 11:28). In any of his Gentile Churches, the defeat of the work of the gospel by Judaizing perversion was a "worry" which touched him to the very quick. There is nothing to warrant the supposition that he alludes to assaults made in particular upon his apostolical authority, such as he had often occasion to deal with, as, for example, at Corinth. None such have been referred to in this Epistle, though he has found occasion to complain of the alienated affections of his converts. For I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus (ἐγὼ γὰρ τὰ στίγματα τοῦ Ἰησοῦ [Receptus, τοῦ Κυρίου Ἰησου] ἐν τῷ σώματί μου βαστάζω); I am one who bear branded on my body the flesh-marks of Jesus. The ἐγὼ is inserted with emphasis. Being such as he here describes himself, he had a claim upon his brethren to be spared unnecessary annoyance. The Greek word stigma here employed denotes a mark on the flesh, either by puncture, its proper sense, with a hot, sharp instrument, very often with hot needles (see Prudentius's lines quoted by Grotius in his note on the χάραγμα, mark, in Revelation 13:16), or more summarily by simply branding without puncture. It served sometimes as a mark of permanent ownership, as upon horses or cattle (Liddell and Scott, sub verb. στίζω). In respect to slaves, it was not considered humane to brand them, except for punishment, or as security in particular cases against running away. Hence στιγματίας, brandling, designated a scoundrel or a runaway slave; as Aristophanes, 'Lys.,' 331; 'Av.,' 760. Others besides slaves were sometimes branded in ignominious punishment: Aristophanes, 'Ran.,' 1507; Herod., 7:233. Thus we have in Æschines (38, 26), ἐστιγμένος αὐτομόλος, "a branded deserter." Vegetius (quoted by Facciolati, sub verb. stigma), writing three hundred years later, states ('Do Re Milit.,' 1:8; 2:5) that, in the Roman army, raw recruits had to be proved fit for service before they were allowed to have the tattoo put upon them. After due trial, they were "punc-turis in cute punctis milites scripti et matriculis inserti." But this testimony does not establish the fact of such usage prevailing in the Roman army in St. Paul's time; though it is quite supposable that then, as now, soldiers might sometimes tattoo on their arm or hand the name of a favourite general. Instances are cited of consecration to a particular god being signalized by stigma. Herodotus, writing five hundred years before, says of a certain temple of Heracles, on the Egyptian coast, that if a servant, belonging to any man whatever, took sanctuary in it, and put upon himself sacred stigmata, giving himself to the god, no one could touch him (2:113). In 3Macc. 2:29 mention is made of a "mark of Dionysus" ivy leaf being, by means of fire, put upon the body of Jews in Egypt in the time of Ptolemy Philopator; but this would seem to have been intended rather as a barbarous indignity, because especially abhorrent to their religious feelings, than as an actual consecration of them to Dionysus as his "slaves." But that it was in some cases employed to signalize a "sacred slave" is attested by Philo, 'De Mon.,' 2. p. 221, M; and Lucian, 'De Dea Syr.,' § 59, as cited by Bishop Lightfoot, who remarks that "such a practice could not have been unknown in a country which was the home of the worship of Cybele." An example more familiar to the apostle's mind might, perhaps, be cited from Isaiah 44:5 (Septuagint), ἐπιγράψει χειρὶ αὐτοῦ Τοῦ Θεοῦ εὐμί, "shall write upon his hand, I am God's," which rendering Gesenius ('Thes.,' in verb. kathabh) consents to accept. But if this rendering be the right one, it may yet be doubted whether it means writing by puncture; for γράμματα στικτὰ appear in Leviticus 19:28 to be forbidden; unless, indeed, the prohibition be taken to refer to idolatrous tattoos only. But even thus the use of such in idol-worships has a further confirmation. It appears, however, to be a strong objection to our supposing the apostle to be here alluding to either the stigmata of consecration or those of other ownership, that such would infer no more suffering than would attend simple tattooing; whereas it is plain that the apostle alludes to marks which evidenced the undergoing of inflictions of extraordinary severity. The word stigma had passed into Roman usage, being employed both in a literal sense and also in a figurative one of a "stigma," as we also speak, cast upon a person's character as by a poet's lampoon. Thus Martial ('Epigr.,' 12:62) writes, "Frons haec stigmate non meo notanda," "This forehead to be marked with a stigma not of my affixing," where the word frons indicates a close adherence to the original notion of a slave's forehead branded. Suetonius ('Caes.,' 73), "Catullum, a quo sibi versiculis de Mamurra perpetua stigmata imposita non dissimulaverat, satisfacientem eodem die adhibnit coenae." Reviewing the evidence now adduced as to the manner in which the term was used, we observe that the words "brandling" and "branded" (στιγματίας and ἐστιγμένος) were used to describe a person made infamous to open view by brand-marks put upon his person. It was natural that the word stigma would thus acquire the sense of a mark of patent infamy left upon a man's person by some corporal abuse which he had been subjected to, without any other qualifying idea. Now, it appears most probable that it is in this sense that the apostle here uses the word. The term points to those scars, seams, perhaps long-continuing sores, which the long course of ever-recurring hardships and ill usage, through which he had passed, must have left upon him - patent evidence to all who looked upon him of the manner in which his fellow-men regarded and treated him; this only, apart from any qualifying idea, whether of ownership, or of military allegiance, or of religious consecration. It is in this general sense that Chrysostom appears to have read the clause; and this general sense satisfies all the requirements of the context. A strong light is thrown upon this matter by what the apostle, near about this same time, wrote to the Corinthians, in 2 Corinthians 11:22-27. The passage, as indeed does the whole Epistle, with much also of the frmer Epistle addressed to the same Church, betokens a strong feeling at this particular time resting on his mind, of the grievous, countless, hardships which marked his career - a feeling, very supposably, just then freshened by some very painful experiences recently gone through, from the effects of which his bodily form was still suffering. "In stripes above measure,... in deaths oft. Of the Jews, five times received I forty stripes save one; thrice was I beaten with rods, once was I stoned, thrice I suffered shipwreck, a night and a day have I been in the deep." Such are some particulars which he specifies; and the enumeration is very suggestive with reference to our present point. Could he have undergone that "stoning" at Lystra, after which he was dragged out of the city as dead to be left to lie without burial, and have carried away no enduring disfigurement? Whether any marks would be likely to remain upon him from the five Jewish whippings, we cannot tell; but we may be assured that the three floggings inflicted with the cruel vitis of the Roman soldiery must have scarred his flesh with seams of permanent disfigurement. Perhaps while he wrote, sores remaining from some one of those eight punishments were making themselves painfully felt. These judicial inflictions, however, severe as some of them may have been, were nevertheless regulated by law and custom. There were m all probability other, much more barbarous and altogether unregulated, violences, which came often upon him from the brutality of mobs, from the assaults of "robbers," from accidents in shipwreck. It could not fail but that his person presented, wherever he went, conspicuously to view, tokens that he was one wont to be both regarded and dealt with as if he were, no doubt deservedly, a wretched outcast; in his own forcible, most deeply pathetic phrase, περικαθάρματα τοῦ κόμου πάντων περίψημα "as the filth of the world, the offscouring of all things" (1 Corinthians 4:13). The apostle's enemies taunted him with the contrast which subsisted between the solemnity and power - would-be power they meant - of his letters, and the meanness and feebleness of his personal appearance and his personal address (2 Corinthians 10:1, 10). His personal presence may, originally and by natural make, not have been calculated to bespeak respect. But whatever disadvantages he lay under originally, must, beyond all question, have been vastly aggravated by the bodily hard ships to which he had been subjected. These must have left effects (this, perhaps, being the "stake in the flesh" which be groaned under - "Satan's messenger to buffet him," the fruits, certainly, of Satan's working in the hearts of godless men) which he felt to be not only fraught with personal humiliation in whatever intercourse he held with his fellow-men, but also likely greatly to mar his efficiency in his ministerial work. The only consolation remaining to him was that, in the utter extinction of all self-love, he rejoiced to know that Christ's grace had, in this enhanced feebleness of his instrument, the clearer field wherein to manifest its own Divine potency (2 Corinthians 12:9, 10). "The flesh-marks of Jesus." This may be understood as meaning that they were incurred in Jesus' service. In part it may be so taken; but the relation expressed by this genitive appears to go deeper than that. The apostle means, the marks which disfigured the body of Jesus as now reproduced in his body. The genitive is used in just the same way as it is in the strikingly similar clause in 2 Corinthians 4:10, "always bearing about in the body the dying of Jesus (παντότε τὴν νέκρωσιν τοῦ Ἰησοῦ ἐν σῶ σώματι περιφέροντες), where ' ἡ νεκρωσις τοῦ Ἰησοῦ means apparently "the deadness or corpse-condition of Jesus" (compare the use of the Greek noun in Romans 4:19); the state of Jesus' νενεκρωμένον σῶμα, while yet hanging a corpse on the cross. By s strong hyperbole, prompted by the intense feeling then on his mind of his own bodily sufferings and the almost ever-present imminency of death (comp. vers. 7-12 of the same chapter), the apostle, in those words, refers to "Jesus' corpse-condition" as reproduced in his own bodily condition, adding the expression of his assured conviction that all was to this end - that "the life also of Jesus," that is, the life which Jesus himself lives, should be all the more clearly manifested by what he was working in the world, in and through a body apparently so death-bound as the apostle's was. The use of the phrase, thus interpreted, coheres well with the feeling which, in the writing of this Epistle, was very near to his soul, of his being "crucified along with Christ." The phrase, then, glances at those swollen, livid, blood-flecked, wales and bruises (τῷ μώλωπι αὐτοῦ, 1 Peter 2:24:) which the Roman scourging that immediately preceded his being handed over for crucifixion must have left on his sacred flesh - no part spared - the entire frame pervaded alike with disfigurement and with torture. To the body of his adorable Lord at that hour - to the human consciousness of every thoughtful spectator, defaced, shorn by the dis-honouring whip of the dignity properly connate with a human body, and made utterly vile (for this should seem to have been the symbolical meaning and intent of that customary preliminary of crucifixion) - and, at length on the cross, presenting to open view those brand-marks of degradedness, the apostle feels his own body to be, in the treatment it had received and the condition to which it had been reduced, in no small measure assimilated. Not only was he in spirit joined unto his Lord and one spirit with him; but in body likewise was he (so to speak) joined unto his Lord, and one body with him; being deeply "taught" in the lesson of what was meant by being "a sharer of his sufferings, while day by day becoming more conformed to the fashion of his death" (Philippians 3:10); clothed with Christ in this sense also; clothed with the Crucified One. The verb βαστάζω, as here introduced, may be distinguished from the περιφέροντες of 2 Corinthians 4:10, by presenting the notion of one's carrying something in thought separable from one's self, instead of being (so to speak) commingled with one's own being. "I am carrying, and can offer to your view, the brand-marks of Jesus." Chrysostom catches this view, perhaps carrying it out somewhat far, in his animated comment, "He saith not, 'I have,' but I carry;' like a man priding himself on a trophy and ensigns of a king." The use of the same verb in Acts 9:15, "to bear my Name before the Gentiles and kings," clearly illustrates its import here. This closing verse is withal no piteous appeal for commiserating sympathy. The tone of "from henceforth," betokening the feeling of one who has made up his mind not to be trifled with, precludes the notion of his mood being one of mere self-pity and tenderness. Far more does the apostle hereby make claim to share with his Lord in that mingled sentiment of reverence and deferential, sympathetic compliance, which the disciple of Christ might be expected to entertain towards his Lord, crucified for him; such a sentiment as would prompt him to lighten, if he might, his burden and pain, to take part in his enterprise, to help forward his designs. Those brand-marks would cry out in loud protest against a fellow-disciple's antipathy, tergiversation, or disesteem.

Parallel Commentaries ...


From now on
λοιποῦ (loipou)
Adjective - Genitive Neuter Singular
Strong's 3064: From now on, henceforth, finally. Genitive case singular of the same as loipoy; remaining time.

{let} no one
μηδεὶς (mēdeis)
Adjective - Nominative Masculine Singular
Strong's 3367: No one, none, nothing.

cause
παρεχέτω (parechetō)
Verb - Present Imperative Active - 3rd Person Singular
Strong's 3930: From para and echo; to hold near, i.e. Present, afford, exhibit, furnish occasion.

me
μοι (moi)
Personal / Possessive Pronoun - Dative 1st Person Singular
Strong's 1473: I, the first-person pronoun. A primary pronoun of the first person I.

trouble,
κόπους (kopous)
Noun - Accusative Masculine Plural
Strong's 2873: From kopto; a cut, i.e. toil, literally or figuratively; by implication, pains.

for
γὰρ (gar)
Conjunction
Strong's 1063: For. A primary particle; properly, assigning a reason.

I
ἐγὼ (egō)
Personal / Possessive Pronoun - Nominative 1st Person Singular
Strong's 1473: I, the first-person pronoun. A primary pronoun of the first person I.

bear
βαστάζω (bastazō)
Verb - Present Indicative Active - 1st Person Singular
Strong's 941: Perhaps remotely derived from the base of basis; to lift, literally or figuratively.

on
ἐν (en)
Preposition
Strong's 1722: In, on, among. A primary preposition denoting position, and instrumentality, i.e. A relation of rest; 'in, ' at, on, by, etc.

my
μου (mou)
Personal / Possessive Pronoun - Genitive 1st Person Singular
Strong's 1473: I, the first-person pronoun. A primary pronoun of the first person I.

body
σώματί (sōmati)
Noun - Dative Neuter Singular
Strong's 4983: Body, flesh; the body of the Church. From sozo; the body, used in a very wide application, literally or figuratively.

the
τὰ (ta)
Article - Accusative Neuter Plural
Strong's 3588: The, the definite article. Including the feminine he, and the neuter to in all their inflections; the definite article; the.

marks
στίγματα (stigmata)
Noun - Accusative Neuter Plural
Strong's 4742: A mark or brand. From a primary stizo; a mark incised or punched, i.e. scar of service.

of Jesus.
Ἰησοῦ (Iēsou)
Noun - Genitive Masculine Singular
Strong's 2424: Of Hebrew origin; Jesus, the name of our Lord and two other Israelites.


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NT Letters: Galatians 6:17 From now on let no one cause (Gal. Ga)