The sentence is unfinished. Verse 15 is a temporal clause whose main verb does not arrive until v. 16 (εὐθέως οὐ προσανεθέμην), and the English must not close it off. Paul has just given his résumé of advancement in Judaism (vv. 13-14), and the δέ turns the page: against the record of a man outrunning his contemporaries stands a single divine good pleasure.

Three things carry the weight.

First, Paul does not name God. The subject of εὐδόκησεν is supplied by a participial phrase — the one who set me apart … and called — and the identification is left to the reader. This is deliberate reticence of the same kind he uses elsewhere in the letter, and the English should not repair it by inserting ‘God’ into the main clause.

Second, the language is prophetic-call language, drawn almost word for word from Jeremiah and Isaiah in the Greek. Paul is not describing a conversion to a new religion; he is claiming a commission of the same order as the prophets’, and that claim is the argument of vv. 11-24: his gospel came neither from men nor through a man.

Third, ἐκ κοιλίας μητρός μου places the setting apart before Paul existed to deserve or resist it, and διὰ τῆς χάριτος αὐτοῦ names the channel of the call. Together they strip the preceding résumé of any standing: the man who was advancing was already appointed, and the appointment ran on grace rather than on zeal.

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.

εὐδόκησεν is the verb of sovereign good pleasure. The corpus already fixes the noun εὐδοκία as ‘good pleasure’ where God is the subject (the LXX equivalent of rāṣôn), with ‘goodwill’ reserved for human referents. The verb follows: where God is subject, it denotes gracious, unforced resolve — the voice from heaven at Mark 1:11 (ἐν σοὶ εὐδόκησα), the Father’s pleasure that the fullness dwell in Christ (Col 1:19), the pleasure to save through the folly of the proclamation (1 Cor 1:21).

Two renderings are available and both are defensible: ‘was pleased’ and ‘saw fit’ / ‘chose’. ‘Was pleased’ preserves the LXX register and the link to the noun; it is retained. ‘Decided’ and ‘determined’ are excluded — they flatten a word of delight into a word of policy. ‘Was happy to’ is excluded in the other direction, as modern and sentimental.

The aorist is complexive: one whole act, not a process of divine deliberation. Paul does not say when the good pleasure arose, only that at a certain point it issued in action.

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ἀφορίσας is ἀπό + ὁρίζω (‘mark off by a boundary’): to separate out from a larger body for a purpose. The verb carries both a negative face (separation from) and a positive one (designation for), and context decides which dominates.

The LXX uses it heavily for cultic setting apart — the Levites separated from the people (Num 8:11, 14), the firstborn set apart to YHWH (Exod 13:12), the portions lifted off a sacrifice. The NT keeps both faces: hostile exclusion (Luke 6:22; Gal 2:12, of Peter withdrawing), eschatological division (Matt 25:32), and commissioning (Acts 13:2, ἀφορίσατε δή μοι τὸν Βαρναβᾶν καὶ Σαῦλον).

Paul uses it of himself twice: here and at Rom 1:1 (ἀφωρισμένος εἰς εὐαγγέλιον θεοῦ). In both the sense is designation for a task, and the perfect at Romans makes the standing result explicit.

Render ‘set apart’. ‘Separated’ is acceptable in liturgical register but in modern English leans toward the negative face alone; ‘chose’ and ‘selected’ discard the boundary-image; ‘appointed’ anticipates the call rather than naming the setting apart.

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This is Septuagint language, and Paul’s readers who knew the Greek scriptures would have heard it.

• Jer 1:5 LXX: πρὸ τοῦ με πλάσαι σε ἐν κοιλίᾳ ἐπίσταμαί σε, καὶ πρὸ τοῦ σε ἐξελθεῖν ἐκ μήτρας ἡγίακά σε, προφήτην εἰς ἔθνη τέθεικά σε — “before you came out of the womb I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations.” The combination of pre-natal designation and a commission εἰς ἔθνη is exactly Paul’s, and v. 16’s ἐν τοῖς ἔθνεσιν completes the echo.
• Isa 49:1 LXX: ἐκ κοιλίας μητρός μου ἐκάλεσεν τὸ ὄνομά μου — the Servant, called from his mother’s womb. The phrase here is verbatim, and καλέσας follows in Paul’s next clause.
• Isa 49:5 LXX: ὁ πλάσας με ἐκ κοιλίας δοῦλον ἑαυτῷ.

Paul is not quoting; there is no citation formula and no exact extended agreement. He is speaking in the idiom of the prophetic call narratives, which is a stronger move than quotation would be. He does not say he is like Jeremiah; he describes his own commissioning in the words Scripture uses for such commissionings and lets the inference stand.

This matters for the argument of the chapter. The question under dispute is the provenance of Paul’s gospel (v. 11: οὐκ ἔστιν κατὰ ἄνθρωπον). If his apostolate was fixed before his birth, no human conferral — whether by the Jerusalem apostles or by the agitators’ authorities — can be its source or its validation.

On the preposition: ἐκ here is best taken as marking the terminus from which, i.e. from birth onward, which is how the LXX uses it in these texts (cf. Ps 21:11 LXX; 70:6 LXX). A spatial-literal ‘out of the womb’ (at the moment of emergence) and a temporal ‘from before birth’ (the setting apart antedating the birth) are both available. The Jeremiah parallel, where the designation plainly precedes formation, weighs toward the second; the Greek itself does not settle it.

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

καλέσας is the divine effectual summons, not an invitation. The corpus fixes κλῆσις as ‘calling / call’ on the ground that in Paul it is always God’s summons (Rom 11:29; 1 Cor 1:26; Eph 4:1), never an occupation or an offer, and fixes ὁ καλῶν as ‘the One who calls’, with God the referent in every Pauline instance.

The tense is significant against Gal 1:6, where Paul used the aorist participle τοῦ καλέσαντος ὑμᾶς of the Galatians’ own calling. The same word and the same tense are now used of himself, which binds his commissioning and their conversion to one divine act.

The object is unexpressed. Greek lets καλέσας stand bare, carrying over με from the first participle. English requires an object, and it is bracketed in the literal line.

The relation of the two participles is worth marking. They are not two events in sequence so much as one designation and its historical execution: the setting apart precedes Paul’s existence, the call lands in his life. Whether the καλέσας refers specifically to the Damascus road or more broadly to the whole act of summoning is not stated.

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διά + genitive is intermediate agency and must stay lexically distinct from ἐκ (source), which Paul has just used in the same clause, and from ἀπό. The chapter has already built an argument on precisely these prepositions: v. 1, οὐκ ἀπʼ ἀνθρώπων οὐδὲ διʼ ἀνθρώπου ἀλλὰ διὰ Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ; v. 12, διʼ ἀποκαλύψεως. The reader must be able to see that Paul keeps saying ‘through’.

χάρις is rendered ‘grace’ per the standing entry: no English word but ‘grace’ carries the unearned-favour sense together with the concrete gift, and ‘favour’ is transactional, ‘kindness’ drops the gift.

The placement is argumentative. Paul has just itemized what he advanced by — zeal, ancestral traditions, outstripping his contemporaries (v. 14). The channel of the call was none of these. The articular τῆς χάριτος with the possessive is specific: his grace, the grace he has.

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A single article ὁ governs both ἀφορίσας and καλέσας, joined by καί. Per standing corpus policy (the same construction at Phil 3:3), one article over a coordinated participial series marks a single composite referent standing as the subject. English must not repeat the article — ‘the one who set me apart and the one who called me’ manufactures two agents.

The participles must also stay participial in the literal and study tiers. Converting them to finite verbs (‘God set me apart … and called me’), as the Latin and Syriac versions effectively do, dissolves the construction by which Paul defers and withholds the divine name: the main verb εὐδόκησεν arrives before its subject is described at all, and the subject is never named.

Both participles are aorist, antecedent to or coincident with the main verb depending on how one construes the sequence. Per standing policy on unmarked adverbial and substantival participles, nothing is added in English to mark relative time beyond what the forms supply.

δέ is postpositive and here adversative in effect: it sets the divine good pleasure over against the career of vv. 13-14. Per §10 the particle is rendered, never dropped — the argument structure of epistolary material is load-bearing, and dropping δέ here leaves two paragraphs where Paul wrote one sentence with a hinge.

‘But’ is correct. ‘Now’ (continuative) understates the contrast the content supplies; ‘however’ over-formalizes. Note that the contrast is not between the particles but between the content of the clauses: δέ is mild, and the sharpness comes from the collision of ἐδίωκον / προέκοπτον with εὐδόκησεν.

Verse 15 contains no main clause. ὅτε δὲ εὐδόκησεν … is subordinate, and its apodosis is at v. 16: ἀποκαλύψαι τὸν υἱὸν αὐτοῦ ἐν ἐμοί … εὐθέως οὐ προσανεθέμην σαρκὶ καὶ αἵματι. The infinitive ἀποκαλύψαι supplies the content of the good pleasure, and the finite verb of the whole period is προσανεθέμην.

The modern verse division falls inside the sentence and must not be allowed to close it. The English therefore ends with no full stop, marked by a dash in the literal tier and left open in the reading text. Any rendering that supplies a verb (‘…it pleased God’ as a complete statement) repairs a suspension that is part of the rhetoric: Paul builds the subject-description at length before saying what God actually did, and then what he himself did not do.

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NA28 reads ὅτε δὲ εὐδόκησεν ὁ ἀφορίσας με without a named subject. A substantial body of witnesses — including some early and widely distributed ones — inserts ὁ θεός after εὐδόκησεν, and the Byzantine tradition carries it; the Latin (cum autem placuit ei qui me segregavit) reads without it, as do the principal Alexandrinian witnesses.

The shorter reading is to be preferred on two grounds. Transcriptionally, the addition supplies a subject that the sentence conspicuously lacks, and scribes supply subjects far more often than they delete them; the corpus has already had to record this direction of smoothing repeatedly (Jas 4:6; 5:15; Phil 4:6). Intrinsically, the reticence is Pauline and purposeful — the divine name is withheld through two participles and arrives only by inference.

Any English rendering that puts ‘God’ into the main clause reproduces the variant rather than the text. Where English idiom strains without a named subject, the capitalized ‘the One who …’ is permitted, and the supplement is recorded.

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Read inside the argument, v. 15 is a provenance claim before it is anything else. The section runs from v. 11 (οὐκ ἔστιν κατὰ ἄνθρωπον) to v. 24, and every clause in it is evidence: not from men, not through a man, not taught, not up to Jerusalem, not conferring with flesh and blood. The setting apart from the womb belongs to that chain. If the commission predates Paul’s birth, it cannot have been conferred by the Jerusalem pillars, and the agitators’ appeal to superior authority has nothing to attach to.

Two cautions follow.

First, the verse is not framed as a conversion narrative and should not be rendered or glossed as one. There is no μετάνοια vocabulary here, no language of turning (ἐπιστρέφω), no confession of error. There is a good pleasure, a setting apart, a call, and a revelation. Paul describes a commissioning.

Second, while the verse is unmistakably about divine initiative antecedent to anything in Paul, it is being deployed to settle a question about apostolic authority, not to state a doctrine of election in the abstract. The corpus policy on anachronism applies: later dogmatic use of this text is reception, and belongs in a note on reception rather than in the rendering.

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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. · Krister Stendahl, Paul Among Jews and Gentiles, and Other Essays, Philadelphia: Fortress, 1976.

Chrysostom, commenting on Galatians, takes the setting apart from the womb as proof that the whole of Paul’s life, including the years of persecution, lay under a prior divine appointment — God knew in advance the use he would make of him, and the delay was in the calling, not in the choosing.

Jerome, in his commentary on Galatians, reads the clause alongside Jer 1:5 and Isa 49:1 and treats the three texts as one pattern of prenatal designation to prophetic office.

Augustine makes the verse a standing proof-text for grace prior to merit, pairing it with Rom 9 — the designation cannot rest on works, since it precedes any works whatever. That reading is a genuine inference from the text, but it is the use the fourth and fifth centuries made of a verse Paul wrote to settle a question about where his gospel came from; it is recorded here as reception.

Note also that none of these readers found the absence of an expressed ‘God’ a difficulty — they supply the referent by inference, as the Greek expects.

Proposed — pending reviewJohn Chrysostom, Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, vol. 13, ed. Philip Schaff, Buffalo: Christian Literature Company, 1889. · Jerome, Commentary on Galatians, trans. Andrew Cain, Fathers of the Church 121, Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2010.