1:1 | I PAUL, who am appointed and commissioned a messenger not by man but by Jesus Christ and God the Father (who raised him from the dead), |
1:2 | I and all the brothers with me send greetings to the churches in Galatia. |
1:3 | Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, |
1:4 | who according to the will of our God and Father gave himself for our sins and thereby rescued us from the present evil worldorder. |
1:5 | To him be glory for ever and ever. Amen. |
1:6 | I am amazed that you have so quickly transferred your allegiance from him who called you by the grace of Christ to another "gospel"! |
1:7 | Not that it is another gospel, but there are men who are upsetting your faith with a travesty of the gospel of Christ. |
1:8 | Yet I say that if I, or an angel from Heaven, were to preach to you any other gospel than the one you have heard, may he be damned! |
1:9 | You have heard me say it before and now I say it againmay anybody who preaches any other gospel than the one you have already heard be a damned soul! |
1:10 | (Does that make you think now that I am seeking man's approval or God's? Am I trying to please men? If I were trying to win human approval I should never be Christ's servant.) |
1:11 | I do assure you, my brothers, that the gospel I preached to you is no human invention. |
1:12 | No man gave it to me, no man taught it to me; it came to me as a direct revelation from Jesus Christ. |
1:13 | For you have heard of my past career in the Jewish religion, how I persecuted the Church of God with fanatical zeal and, in fact, did my best to destroy it. |
1:14 | I was ahead of most of my contemporaries in the Jewish religion, and had a boundless enthusiasm for the old traditions. |
1:15 | But when it pleased God (who had chosen me from the moment of my birth, and called me by his grace) |
1:16 | to reveal his Son to me: so that I might proclaim him to the nonJewish world, I did not at once talk over the matter with any human being. |
1:17 | I did not even go to Jerusalem to meet those who were God's messengers before meno, I went away to Arabia and later came back to Damascus. |
1:18 | It was not until three years later that I went up to Jerusalem to see Cephas, and I stayed with him just over two weeks. |
1:19 | I did not see any of the other messengers, except James, the Lord's brother. |
1:20 | All this that I am telling you is, I assure you before God, the plain truth. |
1:21 | Later, I visited districts in Syria and Cilicia, |
1:22 | but I was still unknown by sight to the churches of Judaea. |
1:23 | All they knew of me, in fact, was the saying: "The man who used to persecute us is now preaching the faith he once tried to destroy." |
1:24 | And they thanked God for what had happened to me. |