Ver. 17. I
bear the marks of the Lord Jesus in my body, by the stripes and wounds I
have received for preaching the gospel. Wi.—Formerly it was not unusual to
stamp certain characters on the bodies of soldiers, fugitives, and of
domestics, purposely to distinguish them. —— There are three principal parts in
this epistle. The first is the history of the vocation of S. Paul, c. 1 and 2;
the second is on justification and the abrogation of the law; the third is an
exhortation to persevere in Christian liberty, to avoid its abuse, and to
perform the various duties of a Christian. (George Leo
Haydock, Haydock’s Catholic Bible
Commentary (New York: Edward Dunigan and Brother, 1859], Logos Bible
Software edition)
17. St Paul orders that there be no further
disputes on these matters. ‘The marks of the Lord Jesus’ are almost certainly
the marks of the ill-treatment he had already received in Galatia during his
first missionary journey; cf. Ac 14 passim. (Dom B. Orchard, “Galatians,”
in A Catholic Commentary on Holy Scripture, ed. Bernard Orchard and
Edmund F. Sutcliffe [Toronto: Thomas Nelson, 1953], 1118)
“the marks”: το στιγματα, or “the stigmata,” although Paul is not
talking about a miraculous stigmata but the scars and bruises he sustained from
the physical assaults from the Jews, such as those detailed in 2Co 11:24-25:
“Of the Jews five times did I receive forty stripes, save one. Thrice was I
beaten with rods, once I was stoned…” As such, no one will henceforth “be
troublesome” for Paul because he, in this epistle, was forced to go for the
jugular and cut off the head of the serpent so that it would not rise again.
Indeed, after this letter, we hear no more of the Judaizers in Galatia. Paul
set the record straight once and for all. (Robert A. Sungenis, Commentary on
the Catholic Douay-Rheims New Testament Exegeted from the Original Greek and
Latin, 4 vols. [State Lina, Pa.: CAI Publishing, Inc., 2021], 3:470 n. 176)
