I have a roughly six-month backlog of reader questions to work through, plus multiple years of emails that I am now beyond embarrassingly late on.1 Now that I’ve managed to finish the projects for which I was overdue,2 it’s time to start working through that backlog.

This means more posts of varying types for a bit; the shorter questions/responses will be batched together into single posts, while longer ones like this one will receive their own response.

I was reading through your new book and was wondering if you have read Tyler Stewart's book, The Origin and Persistence of Evil in Galatians (affiliate link), in which he goes through multiple passages in Galatians and argues that they have an Enochic background (i.e Gal 1:4; 2:16; 3:1; 4:4; etc) One of the other passages he covers is Galatians 3:19 and he argues for an Enochic background that is the sins of the watchers/corruption of the cosmos prompted the addition of the law as a protection (I don't want to go through the whole argument/conclusion but here are two excerpts):

"This inability of the law has already been linked with its alignment with flesh corrupted in the flood tradition (Gen 6–9) in Gal 2:16. Here Paul connects the law not just with flesh but also with angels. While the author of Jubilees uses angelic mediation of the law to bolster the law’s authority, it becomes for Paul a means of aligning the law with an age that is passing away in the arrival of Christ."

" According to Paul’s logic in Galatians, observing the Mosaic law was, before the arrival of the promise, the appropriate human response to the persistence of evil. The law offered protection in a cosmos corrupted by angelic rebellion. The law was never intended to deal with the origin of evil. It was only intended to curb its persistence in a corrupt cosmos with fleshy humans. The sending of the “Son of God” is a response to the origin of evil that reconfigures the appropriate human response to evil’s persistence. In Galatians 3:19–4:11, Paul explains the insufficiency of the law by marginalizing it as an adequate solution to the origin of evil. This reflects the influence of Enochic tradition."

Anyway, I was curious as to your thoughts on this view because you talk a decent amount in the book on Galatians 3:19 and also in your moral transformation lecture. In the book you seem to view the mediator as Moses (which is also what Tyler Stewart argues) but what are your thoughts on it being the Angel of YHWH, because that would explain the "God is one" phrase in Galatians 3:20, and it would also make sense of the mediation because the angel is YHWH and is also not YHWH at the same time (i.e how the son is God but not the father).

This is a great question. I haven’t read Stewart’s book, but I do think he’s right about how Paul frames the Torah as inadequate to address the cosmic problem of fleshy humans and a corrupted cosmos in general. I’m not entirely persuaded that this is distinctly “Enochic” (much less that a distinct “Enochic Judaism” can be isolated), but these themes do also appear in 1 Enoch and other related early Jewish literature, though there’s no direct reference to the Torah itself in 1 Enoch since that work is framed as predating the Torah.

I do think Paul uses the angelic mediation of the Torah to align the Torah with an age that is passing away, so Stewart and I are very much agreed there. As I understand it, Paul sees the Torah as established to govern and manage mortal flesh, and it is given to a disobedient and fleshly people at least partly for their protection.

But those who have received the spirit and are living “according to the spirit” are no longer functioning in the domain in which Torah was established to govern: the domain of the flesh. Instead, they now exist and function on the same level as the angels through whom the Torah was handed down—indeed, they will eventually even judge angels (1 Cor 6:3).

They are now spiritual like the Torah itself and therefore no longer fall under its jurisdiction, though they can bring themselves under its jurisdiction again by walking according to the flesh—thus the rebuke about “falling from grace” in Galatians 5:4.

As for the mediator of Gal 3:19 being a reference to the specific “angel of YHWH,” I don’t think that works, as Paul’s point is that the mediator who gave the Torah is a third party between the two parties involved in the promise and covenant. But if Christ is the mediator, then God is mediating on his own behalf (since God is One), so this new arrangement via the spirit effectively cuts out the middleman, putting the people receiving the spirit on the same level as Moses (or the angels) interacting with God directly rather than being removed from God’s presence by needing to go through a third party.