Galatia

Galatia was never a city. It was a region of central Asia Minor, named for the Gauls who settled its northern part centuries before Paul, and later a Roman province built on top of that region and reaching further south than the old ethnic territory did.

Adam Clarke's note on Galatians 1:2 states the point plainly: there was neither city nor town of this name, and Paul's letter addresses every church he had planted across the whole province rather than one congregation in one town.

Paul healed a man who had been lame from birth, and the watching crowd concluded that the gods themselves had come down in human form. They called Barnabas Zeus and Paul Hermes, and the local priest of Zeus prepared to offer sacrifice to them.

Paul and Barnabas tore their own clothes in protest and rushed into the crowd insisting they were only men. Days later, in the same city, a mob stirred up by Jews from Antioch and Iconium stoned Paul and left him for dead outside the walls, and he got up and went back into the city before leaving the next day for Derbe.

Paul's question, "who has bewitched you," comes after he reminds them how eagerly they had first received him, as though he were an angel of God or Christ Jesus Himself, despite an illness that first brought him to preach among them. The rebuke reads as grief over a real relationship rather than cold argument.

John Chrysostom's homily on the letter reads Paul's tone this way directly: Paul argues not from what he has suffered for them, but from what they once did for him, asking how people who once honored him as an angel could now turn against the very message that first won them.

This is a real geography question, and this site's own sources do not settle it with named holders on each side. Galatia named both an old ethnic region in the north, around Ancyra, Pessinus and Tavium, and a larger Roman province that also took in the southern cities of the first journey: Pisidian Antioch, Iconium, Lystra and Derbe.

The question has long-named holders on each side. J.B. Lightfoot argued Paul wrote to the old ethnic region in the north, the North Galatia theory; W.M. Ramsay, drawing on his own survey of central Asia Minor, argued Paul wrote to the southern cities of the first journey, the South Galatia theory. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown's note on Acts 16:6 reads the churches of Galatia named in Galatians and 1 Corinthians as founded on the first journey, which points toward the southern cities. This page states the geography plainly rather than adjudicating between the two.

Paul says only that it was because of an illness that he first preached the gospel to them, and that despite it they did not despise or reject him. He does not name the illness anywhere in the letter.

His remark that they would have torn out their own eyes and given them to him has led some readers to guess at an eye ailment, but this is inference from that one line rather than something the text states. This page names what Galatians 4:13-15 actually says and does not assign a diagnosis beyond it.