Epistle to the Galatians - The New Testament

¹ From Paul, an apostle appointed not by human beings nor through any human being but by Jesus Christ and God the Father who raised him from the dead,

² and all the brothers who are with me, to the churches of Galatia.

³ Grace and peace from God the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ

⁴ who gave himself for our sins to liberate us from this present wicked world, in accordance with the will of our God and Father,

⁵ to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen.

⁶ I am astonished that you are so promptly turning away from the one who called you in the grace of Christ and are going over to a different gospel-

⁷ not that it is another gospel; except that there are trouble-makers among you who are seeking to pervert the gospel of Christ.

⁸ But even if we ourselves or an angel from heaven preaches to you a gospel other than the one we preached to you, let God's curse be on him.

⁹ I repeat again what we declared before: anyone who preaches to you a gospel other than the one you were first given is to be under God's curse.

¹⁰ Whom am I trying to convince now, human beings or God? Am I trying to please human beings? If I were still doing that I should not be a servant of Christ.

¹¹ Now I want to make it quite clear to you, brothers, about the gospel that was preached by me, that it was no human message.

¹² It was not from any human being that I received it, and I was not taught it, but it came to me through a revelation of Jesus Christ.

¹³ You have surely heard how I lived in the past, within Judaism, and how there was simply no limit to the way I persecuted the Church of God in my attempts to destroy it;

¹⁴ and how, in Judaism, I outstripped most of my Jewish contemporaries in my limitless enthusiasm for the traditions of my ancestors.

¹⁵ But when God, who had set me apart from the time when I was in my mother's womb, called me through his grace and chose

¹⁶ to reveal his Son in me, so that I should preach him to the gentiles, I was in no hurry to confer with any human being,

¹⁷ or to go up to Jerusalem to see those who were already apostles before me. Instead, I went off to Arabia, and later I came back to Damascus.

¹⁸ Only after three years did I go up to Jerusalem to meet Cephas. I stayed fifteen days with him

¹⁹ but did not set eyes on any of the rest of the apostles, only James, the Lord's brother.

²⁰ I swear before God that what I have written is the truth.

²¹ After that I went to places in Syria and Cilicia;

²² and was still unknown by sight to the churches of Judaea which are in Christ,

²³ they simply kept hearing it said, 'The man once so eager to persecute us is now preaching the faith that he used to try to destroy,'

²⁴ and they gave glory to God for me.