Galatians 2:16 is at the heart of Paul’s argument in Galatians. At Antioch, Peter had stopped eating with Gentile believers. Paul reminds him what both of them already know:
We ourselves are Jews by birth, not Gentile sinners. Yet we know that no one is justified by works of the law; a person is justified only through faith in Jesus Christ. So we too have believed in Christ Jesus, in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law, because no human being will be justified by works of the law.
Most of this sentence raises no doubt about meaning. One phrase does.
Two ways to read “the faith of Christ”
The phrase is διὰ πίστεως Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ, and word for word it says “through faith of Jesus Christ”. When Greek puts a person’s name after the word for faith, it can mean two things:
- faith directed to that person: faith in Jesus Christ, or
- faith that person has: the faithfulness of Jesus Christ, his own faithful obedience to God, shown in his death.
Paul uses the phrase twice in this verse, and the question has divided careful scholars for a generation. Both sides have good arguments, and the record for the verse sets them out.
For “faith in Christ”: the middle of the verse says just that, in words that cannot be read any other way: ἡμεῖς εἰς Χριστὸν Ἰησοῦν ἐπιστεύσαμεν, “we have believed in Christ Jesus”. In the next chapter Paul speaks of believers having faith as Abraham did (3:6–9).
For “the faithfulness of Christ”: read the first way, the verse says the same thing three times. And Paul does use the same construction elsewhere for someone’s own faith: “the faith of Abraham” (Romans 4:16), “the faithfulness of God” (Romans 3:3). On this reading, Christ’s faithfulness is the ground of justification, and “we have believed in Christ Jesus” is the believer’s answer to it.
What the translation does
Open Word Bible follows the first reading at every level, marks the decision uncertain, and gives “through the faithfulness of Jesus Christ” in a footnote. The Literal level shows that “in” is an interpretation of a phrase that has no preposition:
We [are] Jews by birth and not sinners from [the] Gentiles, but knowing that a person is not justified by works of [the] law except through faith in Jesus Christ, we also have believed in Christ Jesus, so that we might be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of [the] law, because by works of [the] law no flesh will be justified.
The record makes one more point that is easy to miss. Both readings agree on what matters most in the verse: a person is put right with God through Christ, and not by the works of the law. The question is where Paul puts the weight in this phrase, not whether faith or Christ matters.
The other decisions
The rest of the sentence carries several decisions shared by every language:
- Justified is a law-court word: God declares a person to be in the right, acquitted and accepted. Literal and Balanced keep “justify”, the word that ties this verse to Romans; Readable says “put right with God”.
- Works of the law means doing what the law of Moses requires, as the ground of being accepted by God. Food laws and circumcision were the issue in Antioch and Galatia, but Paul’s argument goes on to the whole law (3:10–12; 5:3).
- Except through faith could look as if works and faith together justify. The rest of the verse sets them against each other three times, so Balanced states the positive side as its own clause: “a person is justified only through faith”.
- No flesh echoes Psalm 143:2, a Hebrew way of saying “no human being”. Balanced and Readable give the meaning, since “flesh” in English would suggest the body.
Open Galatians 2 and tap verse 16 to see the whole record.