Ga-la-ti 1

Greeting

¹From Paul, an apostle sent not from any human source, nor through any human go-between, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised him from the dead, ²and from all the brothers and sisters who are with me, to the churches of Galatia. ³Grace and peace to you from God the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ, ⁴who gave himself for our sins to rescue us from this present evil age, as our God and Father willed. ⁵To him be the glory for ever and ever. Amen.^a

There is no other gospel

⁶I am astonished that you are so quickly turning away from God, who called you by the grace of Christ, and going over to a different gospel. ⁷But there is no second gospel. There are only some people who are unsettling you and want to twist the gospel of Christ into something else. ⁸But even if we ourselves, or an angel from heaven, should preach to you a gospel other than the one we preached to you, let that one be under God’s curse. ⁹We have said it before, and now I say it again: if anyone preaches to you a gospel other than the one you received, let that one be under God’s curse.

¹⁰Is it people I am trying to win over now, or God? Or is my aim to please people? If I were still out to please people, I would be no servant of Christ.

Paul’s gospel came from God, not from people

¹¹For I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that the gospel I preached is no human invention.^{b 12}I did not receive it from any human being, and nobody taught it to me. It came to me through a revelation of Jesus Christ.^c

¹³You have heard about the way I once lived in Judaism: how fiercely I persecuted God’s church and set out to destroy it. ¹⁴I was moving ahead in Judaism faster than many people my age among my own people, because I was far more zealous for the traditions handed down from my ancestors. ¹⁵But God set me apart from birth and called me by his grace, and when he chose ¹⁶to reveal his Son in me so that I would proclaim the gospel about him among the Gentiles, I did not at once turn to any human being for advice. ¹⁷I did not go up to Jerusalem to see those who were apostles before me. Instead I went away to Arabia, and afterward I came back to Damascus.^de

Paul’s first visit to Jerusalem

¹⁸Three years later I did go up to Jerusalem, to get to know Cephas, and I stayed with him for fifteen days. ¹⁹Apart from James, the Lord’s brother, I did not see any of the other apostles.^{f 20}Now, as God sees me, I am not lying in what I write to you. ²¹After that I went into the regions of Syria and Cilicia. ²²The churches of Judea that are in Christ still did not know me by sight. ²³They only kept hearing it said, “The man who used to persecute us is now proclaiming the faith he once set out to destroy.” ²⁴And because of me they glorified God.