Gentile Sinners

When Paul Called Gentiles “Sinners”: An Uncomfortable Word in Galatians

There is a small phrase in Paul’s Letter to the Galatians that has troubled me more and more the longer I reflect on it:

“We ourselves are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners.”
—Galatians 2:15

The difficulty is not simply the word sinners. Nor is the question whether Paul meant that Gentiles were immoral people. That would be too superficial an understanding of the passage. The real question is what Paul meant by calling Gentiles “sinners,” and how Gentile readers of his letter would have received that description.

There is another question that, to me, is even more disturbing. Why would Paul use such a word in a letter addressed precisely to Gentiles whom he was trying to persuade that they did not have to become Jews?

The immediate setting is the famous confrontation between Paul and Peter at Antioch. Peter had been eating with Gentile believers. When certain people associated with James arrived, Peter withdrew from the Gentile table. Paul considered this behaviour a serious contradiction of the gospel.

It is in recounting this confrontation that Paul says:

“We ourselves are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners, yet we know that a person is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ.”

The precise grammatical question of whether Paul continues speaking to Peter through verse 21, or turns at some point to his Galatian readers, has been debated since the early Christian period. Ancient commentators such as Chrysostom and later interpreters have taken different positions. But one fact should not be overlooked: the letter containing these words was being read by Galatian communities that were largely Gentile.

Paul was not writing a private memorandum to Peter explaining Jewish terminology. He was writing to Gentiles who were facing pressure from people who wanted them to adopt circumcision and enter the Jewish way of life. They were being told, in effect, that if they really wanted to belong to God’s people, they had to become Jews.

Paul’s answer was an emphatic no.

And yet these Gentiles read the expression “Gentile sinners.”

That is why the phrase deserves closer attention.

What does “sinner” mean here?

When we hear the word sinner, we often immediately think of an immoral person—someone who lies, steals, commits adultery, behaves wickedly, and so forth. But that is not necessarily the force of hamartōlos in Galatians 2:15.

The word can function within Jewish religious vocabulary as a designation for those who stand outside the Jewish Law and covenantal community. “Gentile sinners” therefore reflects a Jewish way of distinguishing Israel from the nations.

The contrast, then, is not simply:

Jews are good people; Gentiles are bad people.

It is closer to:

Jews belong to Israel’s covenantal world; Gentiles stand outside it.

This interpretation has a long history. Chrysostom understood the expression within its Jewish setting. Calvin likewise interpreted “sinners” in relation to the Gentiles’ exclusion from the Law. Later commentators such as Ellicott observed that “sinners” could function almost as a conventional designation for Gentiles in Jewish speech. Modern commentators have likewise recognized the Jewish covenantal background of the expression.

So historically, the explanation is not especially difficult. But explanation is not the same as justification. Suppose a society has historically used a derogatory name for another community. An historian can explain that this was the conventional word used for that community. That explains the word. It does not necessarily make the word appropriate for us to use.

This is where I find the comparison with the N-word helpful, though only as an analogy about language and social boundaries, not as a claim that the two words are historically or morally equivalent. Imagine a letter written to an African church in which a white writer referred to its members using the N-word. Even if the writer could explain that the word had once been common in the society from which he came, the people receiving the letter would understandably ask why he had chosen to use it when addressing them.

The position of the person being addressed matters.

The same word can sound very different when it is being described historically and when it is being used directly of the people concerned. A word can be historically intelligible and yet remain deeply uncomfortable when applied to those who are now being addressed.

That is what makes Galatians 2:15 so difficult for me.

The Galatians were not Jews. They did not possess the Jewish covenantal identity into which Paul himself had been born. They were Gentiles who had joined the movement centred on Jesus, the Jewish Messiah. And the crisis in Galatians was precisely about whether these Gentiles had to cross the Jewish boundary in order to belong.

Paul tells them that they do not need circumcision. They do not need to convert to Judaism. They do not need to adopt Jewish identity. Faith in Christ is sufficient. Yet in the midst of this argument, the Gentile reader encounters the words:

“Gentile sinners.”

Even if Paul was simply reproducing a conventional Jewish expression, one can imagine a Gentile reader asking: If I remain a Gentile, am I still a “sinner” in the religious sense? If becoming a Jew removes that designation, why are you telling me that I do not have to become a Jew?

That is not an unreasonable question.

Romans makes the tension even more interesting

The comparison with Romans makes the issue even more interesting. In Romans 3 Paul reaches a point where he says:

“There is no distinction, since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”

Here the category of sinner has been universalized. The issue is no longer simply that Jews belong to one religious world and Gentiles to another. Paul’s argument becomes that both Jew and Gentile stand in need of God’s grace.

Romans 2 is equally significant. Paul insists that God shows no partiality and that divine judgment is not determined simply by Jewish identity. There is therefore a remarkable movement in Paul’s thought. The Jew cannot claim righteousness merely because he is a Jew. The Gentile does not become acceptable merely by becoming a Jew. Both stand in need of God’s grace.

This is why Romans 3:23 provides an important counterpoint to Galatians 2:15. At the same time, we should not make the mistake of assuming that sinner therefore has exactly the same meaning everywhere in Paul’s writings. Context matters. Galatians 2:15 is embedded in the Jewish-Gentile controversy, whereas Romans 3 is part of Paul’s much broader argument about humanity, sin, Law, and justification. Nor should we make “sin” a universal religious category without qualification.

Christianity developed a powerful doctrine of sin, and especially in later Christian theology the idea that humanity is fundamentally marked by sin became central. But we should not assume that this represents all Jewish thought, still less all religions.

Even within Judaism, the relationship between Adam, human nature, sin, repentance, mortality, inclination toward evil, covenant, and divine judgment is considerably more complex than the later Christian doctrine of original sin.

This distinction matters when we read Genesis as well. Genesis speaks of the Fall in the story of Adam and Eve; the developed doctrine of “original sin” is a later theological formulation. The two should not simply be treated as identical. Otherwise, there is a danger of allowing the later doctrine to replace the more complex biblical picture—including the profound affirmation that human beings are created in the image of God. If that affirmation is taken seriously, human beings cannot be reduced simply to the condition of being “original sinners.”

The same caution applies when we move between religious traditions. If one tradition speaks of human beings as standing in a condition of sin before God, while another speaks of the deepest Self as untouched by sin, we cannot simply assume that both traditions are describing the same human condition in different words. Christianity, Judaism, and Hinduism developed within very different religious worlds. Their vocabularies of human nature, bondage, liberation, sin, and divine-human relationship cannot automatically be made interchangeable.

The irony within Galatians

What fascinates me most about Galatians 2:15 is that Paul appears to use the language of the very boundary that he is trying to overcome.

The old categories were Jew and Gentile, insider and outsider, covenant member and non-member, “us” and “them.” Paul’s revolutionary claim was that Gentiles did not have to cross the boundary by becoming Jews. In Galatians 3 he goes further:

“Those who are of faith are sons of Abraham.”

And then:

“There is neither Jew nor Greek… for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

This is an extraordinary transformation of the old categories. Yet the old vocabulary remains:

“Gentile sinners.”

Perhaps Paul was consciously reproducing the language of the Jewish world in order to make his argument from within it. Perhaps there is irony in his expression. Perhaps he was saying, in effect, that Jews, with all their supposed advantages, had discovered that Jewish identity itself could not justify them. That is possible.

Could a later scribe have inserted the word “sinners”? It is an intriguing possibility, especially because of the rhetorical difficulty of the expression. But there is no substantial manuscript evidence for such a correction. The Greek manuscripts strongly support the reading hamartōloi, “sinners.” Textual criticism therefore does not presently give us a way out. We cannot simply say that Paul never wrote it and that a later scribe added it.

The difficulty belongs to Paul’s wording itself.

Perhaps Paul simply made an unfortunate choice. I do not think we need to accuse Paul of hating Gentiles. That would go far beyond the evidence. Nor do I think we should say that because Paul was an apostle, every expression he used must therefore have been perfectly appropriate.

A great thinker can inherit the vocabulary of his culture. A revolutionary person can still carry assumptions from the world in which he was formed. And a theologian can make an unfortunate rhetorical choice.

Perhaps Paul was theologically ahead of his vocabulary.

That may be the most charitable—and historically most interesting—way to understand the tension.

Paul’s theology of Gentile inclusion appears to be larger than the particular expression he uses in Galatians 2:15. He tells Gentiles that they need not become Jews. He tells Jews that Jewish identity cannot justify them. He makes Abraham the father of believing Gentiles. He declares that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek.

And yet, in the midst of this argument, he describes Gentiles as “sinners.” I cannot simply erase that tension. Nor do I think we should.

Did Paul preserve his own uncomfortable words?

There is another possibility that interests me even more. Perhaps Paul did not try to hide the language he had used when confronting Peter. He recorded the confrontation as it happened, including the uncomfortable expression “Gentile sinners,” and then sent that account to communities that were themselves Gentile. If so, there is something remarkable about that transparency.

Paul could have softened the expression when recounting the incident to his Gentile readers. He could have avoided the word. He could have paraphrased himself in more acceptable language. Instead, he appears to have preserved what he actually said.

Perhaps he was simply being faithful to the event. Perhaps he believed that his readers were capable of understanding the historical and theological context in which he had spoken. Perhaps he did not feel the need to conceal an uncomfortable part of his own language in order to protect his authority.

If that is so, then Paul’s transparency itself may help explain why such words survived in the early Christian tradition. Perhaps, paradoxically, this honesty earned him greater respect among Gentile Christians than he might otherwise have received. He was not presenting himself as an apostle who had always spoken with perfect sensitivity. He was recording his own words, including words that could trouble those who heard them.

We cannot know whether that was Paul’s intention. But it offers a more interesting possibility than simply dismissing the expression as an accident or defending it as automatically appropriate because it came from an apostle.

A final reflection from an Indian perspective

For me, the issue becomes clearer when viewed from outside the Jewish-Christian world.

If one religious tradition says that human beings stand in a condition of sin before God, while another says that the deepest Self is never sinful, we cannot assume that both are talking about the same human condition. The words may appear similar in translation while carrying very different understandings of what a human being ultimately is.

That is why we should be cautious about using one tradition’s vocabulary to interpret another tradition’s anthropology. The same caution applies within Christianity itself: the later Christian doctrine of sin should not automatically be read backward into every Jewish use of the word sinner in the first century. So the question in Galatians 2:15 remains.

Paul did not have to call Gentiles “immoral” for the expression to be troubling. He called them “sinners,” and that is a religiously loaded designation. It places them on the other side of a boundary. And the extraordinary irony is that these were the very people whom Paul was trying to assure that they did not need to become Jews in order to belong to God’s new community.

I therefore find it more honest to say:

Paul’s theology was more inclusive than his vocabulary on this occasion. He may have inherited the language of Jewish boundary-making even while working to overcome the boundary itself. That does not make Paul a bad theologian. It makes him a human being shaped by his time. And perhaps there is a lesson here for every religious thinker.

We may reject the prejudice of our society while still unconsciously carrying its vocabulary. We may open the door to those whom our tradition once regarded as outsiders, yet occasionally use the very language by which they were kept outside. That is why Galatians 2:15 continues to trouble me.

Not because Paul called Gentiles immoral.

Not because a scribe may have corrupted the text.

And not because “sinners” must mean the same thing in every religion.

But because a great apostle, writing to Gentiles whom he was inviting into a new religious community, still used a word inherited from the old boundary to describe the people standing on the other side of it.

Perhaps Paul was theologically ahead of his age.

But on this occasion, perhaps his words had not quite caught up with his theology.

Ashram, August, 31, 2026