04_Biblica_Aletti_Layout 1 08/07/13 12:56 Pagina 404 404 JEAN-NOËL ALETTI doing what the Spirit prompts him to do, and reciprocally, the Spirit prevents the same believer from following the solicitations of the flesh. Such a situation can be qualified as paralysis; still according to Dunn (and others with him), it is analogous to what is described in Rom 7,14- 25. This being said, today commentators, on the whole, admit to a dif- ference between Gal 5,16-25 and Rom 7,7-25, which is not speaking about the Christian but the man without Christ; they are also convinced that the context of Gal 5,17, in particular Gal 5,24, is not describing believers paralyzed by an interior struggle, because if they allow them- selves to be led by the Spirit, they are not yielding to the desires of the flesh: “And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires” 25. Indeed, the passage’s dynamic as- sumes that believers are able to be led by the Spirit and actually are; otherwise, the exhortation would no longer make sense: what would be the good of exhorting believers who were prevented from following the solicitations of the flesh as well as the promptings of the Spirit? However, because the immediate context of v. 17 assumes that the believers are able to escape from the slavery of the flesh and are able to be guided by the Spirit, exegetes have been compelled to in- terpret this verse in a different way, as witnessed by the second and third readings. As seen above, for the second, the struggle between the flesh and the Spirit has a positive result, namely preventing us from doing whatever we want, in other words, no matter what, or even from wanting to satiate all our impulses 26. The struggle between the flesh and the Spirit permits some options and excludes others. In short, this struggle prompts the believer to discern between what must be avoided (what is evil and thus harmful) and what must be pre- ferred (what is good and thus profitable). If, in this case, the Greek relative pronoun ἅ is given a distributive meaning (“all those things that”) or even a universal one (“absolutely all the things that”), it is nevertheless actually designating the evil orientations or impulses. A passage from Plato’s Lysis 27, in which some expressions are close to those of Gal 5,17, seems to favor this interpretation: Gal 5,24. Translation RSV. 25 In addition to BARCLAY, Obeying the Truth, 113, and the authors cited 26 in J. LAMBRECHT, “The Right Things You Want to Do. A note on Gal 5,17a”, Bib 79 (1998) 515-524, see the commentary of A. VANHOYE, Lettera ai Galati (Milano 2000) 136. Lysis, 207e-208a. Cf. RASTOIN, Tarse et Jérusalem, 234-243, in which 27 is found a commentary on the passage and an interesting comparison with © Gregorian Biblical Press 2013 - Tutti i diritti riservati