As a professor of theology at Wittenberg University, Luther lectured on the Letter of St. Paul to the Galatians from October of 1516 to March of 1517. With the help of his young friend Philip Melanchthon, working from student notes of the lectures, Luther began to convert the lectures into a proper commentary in March of 1519. Five Hundred years ago this month, Luther’s first commentary on Galatians was published.
The work was very popular. Unlike other commentaries of the time, Luther did not make much use of the four-fold method of understanding Scripture. He tried to determine the meaning intended by St. Paul in each passage. Rather than be content with working from Jerome’s Latin Vulgate generally used by the church, he returned to the original Greek. Like a sermon, he applied the text to the church of the day, not being especially kind to his theological opponents. Yet immediately Luther expressed his dissatisfaction with the work. Over the next decade, Luther would revise the commentary several times. When he lectured on Galatians in 1531, he started from scratch. The result was one of his best works, the Galatians Commentary of 1535.
Luther’s greatest insight in both commentaries have to do with reading the words of the letter with Christ as focus of its message. All of Scripture is about Christ, his work to redeem us by his sufferings and death on the cross. By our own works we cannot save ourselves because we are sinners and deserve damnation. But by God’s grace for the sake of Christ, we are forgiven our sins and granted salvation. With this commentary, Luther came closer to fully understanding the Gospel. Within a few short months, he would write three works in which he fully explains Lutheran theology for the first time.
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