Paul has just announced (v. 11) that the gospel he preached is οὐ κατὰ ἄνθρωπον — not measured by any human standard. Verse 12 supplies the ground, and it does so by closing off, one at a time, the two normal channels by which a first-century teacher came to hold what he taught: he did not receive it as handed-on tradition, and he was not taught it. Against both, a single positive: διʼ ἀποκαλύψεως Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ.

Four things carry the weight.

1. οὐδὲ γάρ — not a bare “for.” The adjunctive καί-force in οὐδέ is ascensive: not even I, whose case might be thought the likeliest exception.
2. ἐγώ is written out, though the verb ending already carries the person. It is emphatic and contrastive.
3. παρέλαβον and ἐδιδάχθην are not loose synonyms. The first is the technical term for taking delivery of a fixed deposit of tradition; the second names formal instruction. Paul denies the transmission and the schooling.
4. The prepositions do the argument’s work. παρά + genitive (source, from a person) and διά + genitive (channel, through an event) are not interchangeable, and Paul had both available in v. 1 as well. He denies a human source and asserts a non-human channel.

One thing the verse does not settle: whether Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ names the one who gave the revelation or the one revealed. The Greek leaves it open, and so does this rendering.

Proposed — pending reviewJ. Louis Martyn, Galatians: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, Anchor Bible 33A (New York: Doubleday, 1997)

οὐδέ here is not simply the negative counterpart of καί joining two clauses. It carries the adjunctive force of the καί buried in it, and with γάρ grounding the preceding assertion the combination is confirmatory-ascensive: γάρ supplies the reason, οὐδέ raises the stakes. Compare Rom 8:7 (οὐδὲ γὰρ δύναται), 1 Cor 3:2, Gal 6:13.

The corpus policy already fixed at Gal 6:13 applies: render “for not even,” not “neither.” “Neither” presents what follows as a second parallel item in a list, which flattens the escalation. Here the escalation is pointed — Paul’s own case, which an opponent might treat as the one place where human mediation did operate (Damascus, Ananias, Jerusalem), is precisely where it did not.

Note the word order: οὐδέ takes clause-initial position and postpositive γάρ follows in second place. Preserve the order in the literal tier.

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Greek verb endings carry person, so an expressed nominative pronoun is marked. Here it is doubly so, standing immediately after the ascensive οὐδέ and before the prepositional phrase.

The contrast is not with the Galatians but with the agitators implied in vv. 6–9 and with the Jerusalem apostles named in vv. 17–19. Paul will use the same emphatic first person again at v. 13 (τὴν ἐμὴν ἀναστροφήν, with the possessive adjective rather than the enclitic genitive) and at v. 20. The autobiographical section of the letter runs on marked first-person forms.

Per standing policy, render the pronoun visibly — “not even I myself,” “I, for my part” — rather than absorbing it into the verb. Do not add emphasis words beyond “myself.”

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παραλαμβάνω is the receiving-end counterpart of παραδίδωμι, and in Paul the pair is near-technical for the transmission of a fixed deposit: 1 Cor 15:1, 3 (ὃ καὶ παρέλαβον … παρέδωκα); 1 Cor 11:23; 1 Thess 2:13; 4:1; 2 Thess 3:6; Col 2:6; Phil 4:9. Hellenistic Jewish usage of the same vocabulary for the handing-on of halakhic tradition is well attested, and Paul himself has just such a transmission in view three verses later when he speaks of τῶν πατρικῶν μου παραδόσεων (v. 14).

That is what makes the denial sharp. Paul does not say he learned the gospel badly or late; he says the transmission-channel was not the one by which he came to hold it. And he uses the identical verb at v. 9 (παρʼ ὃ παρελάβετε) of what the Galatians did receive — from him. The chain is: revelation to Paul, tradition from Paul to them.

The corpus gloss stands: “receive (as something handed on).” Do not render “learn” (that collapses it into μανθάνω) or “was given.”

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Proposed — pending reviewF. F. Bruce, The Epistle to the Galatians: A Commentary on the Greek Text, New International Greek Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1982)

ἐδιδάχθην is aorist passive, the agent unexpressed and the object elided. Greek permits both; English needs a bracketed “[it]” in the literal tier.

The verb names formal instruction — the relation of διδάσκαλος to pupil. Keep it lexically distinct from παραλαμβάνω, which Paul set beside it precisely because the two are different: one can receive a tradition without sitting under a teacher, and one can be taught without receiving a fixed deposit. Paul closes both doors.

A note on the passive. The corpus discipline on divine passives is to leave the agent unexpressed. Here the agent is not divine but human, and it is denied — the unexpressed agent is the one the preceding παρὰ ἀνθρώπου has already ruled out. Do not supply “by anyone” unbracketed; the force carries over from the first clause without needing to be written, which is exactly why the second clause is so compressed.

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The sequence οὐδὲ … οὔτε is formally irregular: οὔτε normally stands in a correlative pair (οὔτε … οὔτε), and a second οὐδέ would have been expected.

Whichever classification is adopted, the English must render both negatives and must not supply a third connective. Render “nor,” keep it clause-initial, and record the irregularity rather than smoothing it.

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Proposed — pending reviewJ. B. Lightfoot, Saint Paul's Epistle to the Galatians, 10th ed. (London: Macmillan, 1890)

παρά + genitive marks the source as a person who gives or hands over — the preposition of the one from whose hand something comes (cf. Phil 4:18 παρὰ Ἐπαφροδίτου, and Jas 1:5, 7 παρὰ τοῦ διδόντος θεοῦ). It is not ἀπό (bare origin), not ἐκ (derivation), not ὑπό (agency of a passive, which is what v. 11 has: ὑπʼ ἐμοῦ), and not διά (channel, which arrives in the second half of this verse).

The four-way distinction is load-bearing across the opening of the letter. In v. 1 Paul denies ἀπʼ ἀνθρώπων and διʼ ἀνθρώπου and asserts διὰ Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ. Here he denies παρὰ ἀνθρώπου and asserts διʼ ἀποκαλύψεως. The English must keep the prepositions distinguishable at every point, or the architecture of the denial collapses into a single vague disclaimer.

ἀνθρώπου is anarthrous and singular — qualitative, “a human being,” the category rather than an identified individual. Per standing policy on generic ἄνθρωπος, render “a man” in the literal tier to track the lexeme, “a human being” or “any human being” in reading tiers, and note the generic force. Paul writes the singular here against the plural ἀπʼ ἀνθρώπων of v. 1; the shift between plural and singular across the two verses is recorded, not levelled.

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ἀλλά is the strong clause-initial adversative, not the ascensive ἀλλὰ καί of Phil 1:18. It contradicts rather than extends, and per standing policy it is rendered plainly “but” and kept clause-initial — the abruptness of the pivot is the rhetoric.

No verb stands in the third clause. The reader supplies one from the preceding pair, and which one matters: if παρέλαβον is carried over, Paul says he received the gospel through a revelation; if a neutral verb of coming-to-have is supplied, the force is looser. Greek leaves the question open, and English should too.

The policy on elided verbs in a parallel limb (fixed at Gal 5:6, 5:17) applies: supply nothing unbracketed in the literal tier, and in smooth registers carry the sense by parallelism or by a colorless verb (“it came through …”). Do not write in “I received it by revelation,” which adopts one supplement and makes the climactic clause a restatement of the first rather than its replacement.

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Noun to ἀποκαλύπτω, already fixed in this corpus as “reveal / uncover” — ἀπό + καλύπτω, the removal of a covering from what is already there, not the production of new content. The noun is rendered “unveiling” in literal and modern tiers, “revelation” in liturgical register, and one English root must serve verb and noun throughout, since Paul uses the verb of the same event four verses later (ἀποκαλύψαι τὸν υἱὸν αὐτοῦ, v. 16).

The noun is anarthrous and singular. Both features matter. Anarthrous, it is qualitative: revelation as the mode by which the gospel reached him, not “the revelation” as a defined item in a list. Singular, it points to an event rather than a practice — contrast the plural ἀποκαλύψεις of 2 Cor 12:1, 7, which Paul there treats as a recurring category and declines to boast in. The traditional English “by the revelation of Jesus Christ” supplies an article the Greek withholds and should be confined to declared liturgical register.

On the LXX background: the verb family translates גָּלָה, and the image of uncovering the ear (1 Sam 9:15) and of the arm of YHWH being uncovered (Isa 53:1) keeps the veil-metaphor live. Retain it rather than abstracting to “God showed me.”

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The crux of the verse.

English can hold a bare genitive, so it does. Per the standing policy applied to πίστις Χριστοῦ, καρπὸς δικαιοσύνης, ἐλπὶς δικαιοσύνης, and στέφανος τῆς δόξης, the reading text keeps “a revelation of Jesus Christ” and the alternatives are flagged. Excluded from the main text: “a revelation from Jesus Christ” (adopts the subjective) and “God revealed Jesus Christ to me” (adopts the objective and recasts the construction entirely).

The word order Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ is retained as written per standing policy; the transposition in part of the tradition is scribal assimilation to the commoner order.

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Proposed — pending reviewHans Dieter Betz, Galatians: A Commentary on Paul's Letter to the Churches in Galatia, Hermeneia (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1979)

The verse is textually stable in substance. Three points worth recording:

• οὔτε (second negative). Read by the earliest witnesses; part of the later tradition substitutes the more regular οὐδέ. The harder reading stands, and the irregularity is not to be repaired in translation.
• Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ. A few witnesses transpose to Χριστοῦ Ἰησοῦ or read a single name. Transposition toward the commoner order is the characteristic scribal direction and is secondary.
• Minor variation in the position of ἐγώ in a small number of minuscules, levelling the emphatic word order. The marked order is original.

None of these affects the sense. The genuinely open questions in this verse are syntactic and lexical, not text-critical: the classification of οὔτε, the verb to be supplied after ἀλλά, and the direction of the genitive.

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The early commentators read the verse as an apostolic credential rather than as a general epistemology of revelation.

Chrysostom, in his homilies on Galatians, presses the force of οὐδὲ γάρ and the emphatic ἐγώ: Paul is not disparaging the other apostles but refusing the inference that his gospel is derivative of theirs, and so vulnerable to correction by men who claim their authority. Chrysostom also notes that Paul denies the two channels separately because the agitators might have conceded one while asserting the other.

Jerome, in his commentary on Galatians, takes the genitive as naming Christ the revealer and connects the verse with the Damascus narrative, reading v. 16 as Paul’s own gloss on it.

Augustine is the one who feels the 1 Cor 15:3 difficulty most directly, and his handling — distinguishing the gospel’s authorization from the facts of its content — is the ancestor of most later harmonizations.

Recorded as reception, not as lexical evidence (§11). The patristic consensus that Paul’s point is the independence of his commission is good contextual confirmation; the patristic resolution of the genitive is not, since the Fathers were reading a Latin or Greek text that leaves it as open as ours does.

Proposed — pending reviewJohn Chrysostom, Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, vol. 13 · Jerome, Commentarii in epistulam Pauli ad Galatas, ed. G. Raspanti, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 77A (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006)

The Vulgate reads neque enim ego ab homine accepi illud neque didici sed per revelationem Iesu Christi. Three things to note. Latin has no article, so per revelationem cannot show whether the Greek noun is articular — the English tradition’s “by the revelation,” descending from this, imports a definiteness the Greek lacks. Ab homine renders παρὰ ἀνθρώπου with the preposition of agency rather than of personal source, blurring the παρά/ὑπό/διά distinction Paul maintains. And neque … neque regularizes the Greek’s οὐδέ … οὔτε into a tidy correlative pair, which is the smoothing to be avoided.

The Peshitta supplies an object with the second verb, where the Greek elides it. This is a natural translational completion and not evidence for the Greek text.

Neither version can reproduce the genitive’s ambiguity in a way that helps: both render a simple construct-or-genitive phrase that is as open as the Greek, which is why the Fathers reading those versions could take it either way.

The verse is the hinge on which Galatians 1–2 turns, and its claim is about a specific gospel’s authorization, not about revelation in general.

Paul is not denying that tradition has a place; he positively commends it at 1 Cor 11:23 and 15:1–3, and he expects the Galatians to have received (v. 9) from him. What he denies is that the gospel he preaches stands downstream of a human transmission that could be audited by appeal to a higher human authority. If the agitators can show that Paul’s message came to him through Jerusalem, then Jerusalem can correct it. He forecloses the move at the root.

The argument runs through v. 1 (apostleship not ἀπʼ ἀνθρώπων nor διʼ ἀνθρώπου), through this verse (the gospel not παρὰ ἀνθρώπου), into vv. 16–19 (he did not go up to Jerusalem; when he did, it was three years later and for fifteen days), and on to 2:6–9, where the Jerusalem leadership adds nothing to him but recognizes what he already has.

Two observations that should be held without being overdrawn. First, the ἀποκάλυψις language places Paul’s experience in the register of prophetic commissioning — the ἀφορίσας … ἐκ κοιλίας μητρός μου of v. 15 is Jeremiah’s and Isaiah’s language (Jer 1:5; Isa 49:1), and the verse’s claim is of a piece with that. Second, the verse says nothing at all about how anyone else comes to the gospel; Paul’s whole point is that his case is the exception that establishes the gospel’s independence, and the Galatians’ case is the ordinary one of reception from a preacher.

Summarizing the choices the tiers embody, with what each excludes:

• οὐδὲ γάρ → “for not even.” Excludes “neither,” which loses the escalation.
• ἐγώ → rendered visibly. Excludes absorption into the verb.
• παρὰ ἀνθρώπου → “from a man” (literal) / “from any human being” (modern). Excludes “by man” (agency) and “from men” (adopts the v. 1 plural).
• παρέλαβον → “received.” Excludes “learned,” “was given.”
• ἐδιδάχθην → “was taught,” passive retained, object bracketed. Excludes “nobody taught me” in the literal tier (converts the passive to an active with a supplied agent).
• ἀλλά → “but,” clause-initial. No verb supplied unbracketed.
• διʼ ἀποκαλύψεως → “through a revelation,” anarthrous, with “unveiling” in the literal tier. Excludes “by the revelation.”
• Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ → bare genitive. Excludes both “from Jesus Christ” and “in which God revealed Jesus Christ.”