The Allegory of the Cross in Galatians

Abstract

In this article, I draw contemporary questions concerning the role of allegory in Galatians beyond deliberations over Paul’s view of Jewish Scripture toward a more fundamental insight: that Paul also “reads” Jesus’s crucifixion allegorically. In his reading of the Hagar story (Gal 4:21–31), Paul sees in each figure the lives of others, even whole peoples (past, present, and future), the mysteries of flesh and spirit, of this age and the age to come. The same kind of logic, I argue, underlies his view of the cross. Crucifixion too becomes symbolic of the inner life of spirit (5:24–25), the eschatological turning of the worlds (6:14–15), and the lives of all those—Jews, pagans, and Paul himself—caught up in its wake (2:19–20). This article thus develops an account of how Paul came to understand one man’s crucifixion to have implicated the whole cosmos, from the elemental structures of reality to the innermost depths of the heart: a radically universalized and interiorized—that is to say, allegorical—vision of the cross.