Quotes from Stephen J. Patterson

That is what it's about—being a child of God. Ethnicity (no Jew or Greek), class (no slave or free), and gender (no male and female) count neither for you nor against you. We are all children of God.

This creed claims that there is no us, no them. We are all one. We are all children of God.

So, an ancient Christian credo declaring solidarity across ethnic lines, class division, and gender difference sounded a little unbelievable to someone who had come to see the Christian church as more a symbol of social ills than of starry-eyed utopian dreams.

The apocalypse never came, and it's not going to come. This idea belongs to the world of ancient mythology, and it wasn't a very good idea to begin with. In it the Jewish God of shalom becomes a violent overlord, and the Prince of Peace becomes a supernatural warrior, a fire-breathing monster who lays waste the earth, its forests, its animals, and all but a remnant of its people -- the chosen few. How many have believed they were the few! (pg. 250)

The creed was originally about the fact that race, class, and gender are typically used to divide the human race into us and them to the advantage of us. It aimed to declare that there is no us, no them. We are all children of God. It was about solidarity, not cultural obliteration.

If that all makes sense, the original credo would have read something like this: For you are all children (sons) of God in the Spirit. There is no Jew or Greek, there is no slave or free, there is no male and female; For you are all one in the Spirit. This is my best guess on how the original creed went, but it is by no means the only way to imagine it.

Everyone agrees that the three dyads in verse 28 are its central feature, its basic claim. Baptism exposes the follies by which most of us live, defined by the other, who we are not. It declares the unreality of race, class, and gender: there is no Jew or Greek, no slave or free, no male and female. We may not all be the same, but we are all one, each one a child of God.

In baptism they were committed to giving up old identities falsely acquired on the basis of baseless assumptions—Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female—and declared themselves to be children of God.

Slaves, women, and foreigners were all essentially the same to ancient men—contemptible. They were all other.

So Paul did not create the baptismal creed embedded in Galatians 3:26–28. The creed, then, must have preceded Paul. But there is not very much in the New Testament that precedes Paul. His voice is the first voice we hear from the nascent Christian movement. That makes Galatians 3:26–28 one of the oldest statements of faith in all of the New Testament, perhaps even the first such statement in all of Christian history.