GALATIA (Γαλατία, G1130). The word bears two senses in ancient history and geography. In its first and ethnic meaning, it signifies the kingdom of Galatia in the northern part of the inner plateau of Asia Minor, made up of parts of a territory formerly known as Cappadocia and Phrygia. The name derives from the fact that this area was occupied by “Gauls,” a Celtic people who, in one of the final movements of the two thousand-year-old folkwanderings of the Indo-European tribes, crossed the Hellespont at the unwise invitation of Nicomedes I, king of Bithynia, who sought allies in a civil war, and penetrated the Asia Minor peninsula in 278 b.c. After a typical period of raiding and plundering, the nomad invaders were finally pinned and contained in a tract of high territory extending from the Sangarius to a line E of the Halys. This was the achievement of Attalus I of Pergamum in 230 b.c. From this tribal area the Celts continued their petty harassment of their neighbors, and after the battle of Magnesia in 190 b.c., which marked the beginning of Rom. interest and dominance in Asia Minor, the Republic inherited the Gallic problem.

Rome sent Manlius Vulso to subdue the tribesmen, and he did so with effectiveness in a campaign of 188 b.c. With typical Rom. diplomatic skill, the Republic was able to use the Galatians as a check on the dynamic kingdom of Pergamum, and also to retain their allegiance when Mithridates of Pontus launched his strong attacks on Rome in Asia Minor. Galatia, as a tribal region, was organized on a Celtic pattern, the three ethnic groups Tolistobogii, Tectusages, and Trocmi, occupying separate areas, with distinct capitals—Pessinus, Ancyra, and Tavium respectively. Each tribe was divided into four septs or wards, each under a tetrarch. The combined council of the three tribes had provision for periodic meetings and retained collective jurisdicition in cases of murder. So coherent was their community, that its Celtic character survived into the empire, and Jerome is evidence for their retention of their Gallic speech into the 5th century. Part of Pompey’s organization of Asia in 63 b.c. appears to have been the establishment of a paramount ruler in Galatia. Deiotarus, tetrarch of the Tolistobogii of W Galatia, was of considerable help to Pompey in the third Mithridatic War. He was rewarded by Pompey in 64 b.c. with part of neighboring Pontus, and twelve or thirteen years later received from the Senate of Rome the district of Lesser Armenia and the kingship over the area of his control, together with the resultant royal title.

The Galatian king naturally followed Pompey in the civil war between Pompey and Julius Caesar, and was deprived of his territorial acquisitions by Caesar on his victory. In 45 b.c. he was accused before Caesar of various acts of insubordination, and was defended by the great orator Cicero, whose speech for the accused survives. Deiotarus had prudently befriended Cicero’s son, during the orator’s governorship of Cilicia. After Caesar’s assassination in the following year, Deiotarus regained control of his lost territory, and bought recognition from Antony. He supported Brutus and Cassius in the renewed civil war, again a wrong choice, but one hardly to be avoided when the “tyrannicides” lay across his communications with Rome. By a timely desertion to Antony at Philippi, Deiotarus retained his kingdom, and in 42 b.c., after murdering a rival tetrarch, he acquired all of Galatia and associated regions. These details of petty history are important because they mark the course of the evolution of the ethnic region of Galatia into the multi-racial Rom. province, and the freedom with which Rome habitually varied frontier lines to suit administrative expediency.

Deiotarus died in 40 b.c., and was succeeded by his secretary, Amyntas, who had commanded the Galatian auxiliaries of Brutus and Cassius at Philippi, and had shared in, or prompted, the desertion of the Galatian contingent to Antony. Antony rewarded Amyntas in 39 b.c. with a Galatian kingdom which ultimately included parts of Lycia, Pamphylia, and Pisidia. Amyntas accompanied Antony to Actium, when Antony and Octavian clashed in the final phase of the civil strife which saw the end of the Roman Republic, and history repeated itself. A Galatian prince was, by force of geographical and political circumstances, on the wrong side. Again, a timely desertion, this time before the actual armed clash of Actium’s decisive naval battle, won the favor of the victor. Octavian, soon to emerge from the long strife as the Emperor Augustus, confirmed Amyntas in all his royal possessions.

Amyntas died in a campaign against unruly highlanders on the mountainous southern marches of his realm. It was in 25 b.c. that Augustus, engaged in the long task of establishing the Rom. peace, and organizing its frontiers, seized the opportunity to convert Amyntas’ realm, augmented by parts of Phrygia, Lycaonia, Pisidia, and possibly Pamphylia, into a province called Galatia. The precedent of including slices of contiguous territory under Galatian control had been set by Pompey. Augustus’ principate merely adapted, adopted and applied precedents which had been established at least since the days of the great Pompey. Portions of Paphlagonia and Pontus were afterward incorporated into the province, which was normally governed by a praetorian legate until a.d. 72. In this year Cappadocia and Lesser Armenia were included in the Galatian provincial boundaries, and the augmented province was placed under consular legate. Another reorganization under Trajan saw Galatia again reduced in a.d. 137. Under Diocletian the province had shrunk almost to the old ethnic area of the original Galatian tribal lands. The chief cities in the 1st century were Ancyra and the Pisidian Antioch. Within the province of Galatia were also the other towns visited by Paul in his fruitful first journey into Asia Minor—Iconium, Lystra, and Derbe, all of which included large populations of Romans and other Italian expatriates, Greeks, and Jews.

The precise meaning of the term Galatia is of some importance in NT studies and involves a modern controversy which cannot be said to be completely resolved. It is beyond question from the full account given in Acts 13 and 14, that Paul visited urban centers in the southern part of the province, and established Christian communities there. On the very slender evidence of Acts 16:6, some have contended that he also visited northern Galatia, the habitat of the Celtic stratum of the population, and also established churches there. It was to these churches, marked by their volatile, excitable, Celtic congregations, that Paul addressed the strictures of his letter “to the Galatians.” The opening clause of Acts 16:6, of which so much is demanded, runs in KJV: “Now when they had gone throughout Phrygia and the region of Galatia....” W. M. Ramsay cogently demonstrated that the clause described a single area and is to be rendered “the Phrygian Galatic region.” Roman provinces were administratively cut into “regions.” Rome’s tampering with ancient boundary lines has been noted above, and was a feature of her government and organization in Asia Minor. Part of the onetime kingdom of Galatia was incorporated in the province of Galatia, as it was constituted after the death of Amyntas. Another part belonged to the province of Asia. It is reasonable then to interpret the opening clause of the verse under discussion as a reference to the section of Phrygian territory which was included in the new province of Galatia. This is an interpretation clearly supported by the rest of the verse concerning the constraint felt by the apostle not at that time to extend his activities into the neighboring province of Asia by moving westward from Pisidia.

This is not the proper place to discuss Acts 18:23 where the same geographical expression is encountered in reverse. R. J. Knowling has a lucid and sufficient comment upon it in EGT II. 341, where he quotes periodical lit. relevant to the controversy. A. Souter has also a brief clear statement (HDB p. 277). At any time epigraphy, in a rich archeological field, may provide evidence which will remove all perplexity. In the meantime, while the brevity of Luke’s account of Paul’s activity over considerable tracts of his ministry, and even his occasional complete silence, may be granted, it seems clear that the Galatian churches known to the NT were those founded in the more sophisticated and multi-racial parts of the province. Such foundations were certainly consonant with Paul’s obvious Gentile strategy. Christian communities may have been established in the northern Celtic reaches of the province at a comparatively early date, but if so their foundation must have been due to unrecorded diffusion from the more civilized S, and not to the personal penetration of the ethnic area by the apostle.

The strong consensus of modern scholarship would therefore agree that the Galatians addressed in Paul’s famous letter were the southern communities of his own planting, and it would follow that the “churches of Galatia,” of which Paul makes mention to the Corinthians (1 Cor 16:1) were the same group. Did Paul ever use the term Galatia in other than its Rom. sense? He was a self-conscious Rom. citizen, and used language from that point of view, not in a parochial sense. He may even be observed rejecting an available alternative term and turning a Lat. word into Gr. (“Illyricum,” Rom 15:19 is an example). The Galatians to his mind could not be the inhabitants of an ethnic area. They were the inhabitants of a province, and in his context the whole body of Christians from that area, regardless of race. It is on historical grounds rather than linguistic, and on the fact that there is no clear evidence either of a visit to N Galatia, or a facet of Pauline policy which would make such a visit likely, that it may be assumed with some confidence that the Galatians addressed were the Christian communities of Pisidian Antioch, Iconium, Lystra, and Derbe. A balanced brief review of the arguments arrayed for both N and S “Galatian Theories,” with due weight given to arguments advanced for the former, is to be found in R. A. Cole’s small commentary on the Galatian letter (pp. 16-20, Tyndale NT Commentaries).

It remains to mention the listing of Galatians among those to whom the first general epistle of Peter is addressed. The bearer of the letter obviously moved in a southward bending curve from E to W through the northern half of Asia Minor, the long deep tract of territory N of the Taurus Range. Facilities for travel were abundant, and the fact that church communities in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia were addressed reveals the active Christian life apparent in the peninsula. Nothing, however, can be deduced about the pattern of Galatian Christianity, for however deeply the faith may have penetrated northern ethnic Galatia, an epistle couched in terms so general, a circular, in fact, cannot be supposed to have omitted the strong Christian communities in the multi-racial S.

Bibliography W. M. Ramsay, Saint Paul the Traveller and Roman Citizen (1898); An Historical Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians (1900); F. Stahelin, Geschichte der Kleinasiatischen Galater (2 Auflage, 1907); W. M. Ramsay, The Church in the Roman Empire (1911); A. H. M. Jones, Cities of the Eastern Provinces (1937); R. A. Cole, The Epistle of Paul to the Galatians (1965); E. M. Blaiklock, Cities of the New Testament (1966).