In his introduction to Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians, noted Bible scholar, Rev. C. I. Schofield, makes this statement: “It had come to Paul’s knowledge that the fickle Galatians, who were not Greeks, but Gauls, ‘A stream from the torrent of barbarians which poured into Greece in the third century before Christ,’ had become the prey of the legalizers, the Judaizing missionaries from Palestine.”

Accounts of the sacking of Rome in 390 B.C. by the Gauls refer to the people involved as Celts. The Romans also called them Gauls (Galli) while the Greeks called them Galatians. (Galatae).

Celts, Gauls and Galatians appear to be synonymous terms.

The Celts were, in fact, Israelites who had been driven from their homeland by the Assyrians, trekked westward across eastern Europe and about 400 B.C. crossed the Alps to pillage Rome. They later ravaged the Balkan peninsula. They were turned back from southern Greece before Delphi about the year 279 B.C.

They crossed into Asia Minor and settled among the banks of the Halys River. Thus they became a buffer state between Bithynia and the kings of Syria.

They were subdued by the Romans who called them Gallo-Grecians, and regarded them as having become degenerate through intermarriage with other races. These were the ancestors of the Galatians to whom Paul wrote his well-known Epistle.