Paul is under oath-pressure (v. 20) to show that his gospel came by revelation and not by human transmission. Verse 16b denied one thing — he did not consult σάρξ καὶ αἷμα. Verse 17 denies the specific thing his opponents presumably alleged: a trip to Jerusalem and an apprenticeship under the established apostles. Three aorists then give the itinerary he did follow: ἀπῆλθον away to Arabia, ὑπέστρεψα back to Damascus.

Four things carry weight. (1) The negation is continuative (οὐδέ), so v. 17 is the second limb of one denial, not a fresh sentence. (2) τοὺς πρὸ ἐμοῦ ἀποστόλους concedes their chronological priority while the whole argument denies that priority confers authority over him — a concession and a limitation in four words. (3) Ἀραβία means Nabataean territory, and what Paul did there is simply not stated; the text says only that he went. (4) πάλιν ὑπέστρεψα εἰς Δαμασκόν presupposes a Damascus that Galatians has never mentioned — a gap the reader is left to fill from elsewhere, and the clearest signal in the chapter that Paul is selecting, not narrating.

The verse is also the chief point at which Galatians and Acts 9 have to be read alongside each other, and the apparatus below keeps that question open rather than harmonizing.

Built onna28 · bdag

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

οὐδέ is continuative, not disjunctive: it carries forward the οὐ of οὐ προσανεθέμην (v. 16) rather than beginning an independent denial. The sequence across vv. 16-17 is therefore one negated statement with two limbs — I did not consult … nor did I go up — closed by the strong ἀλλά that introduces what he did instead.

Two consequences for rendering. The English must not begin a new sentence at v. 17 (the verse division is modern), and the connective must be rendered in every tier, per the standing policy that epistolary connectives are load-bearing and never dropped. ‘Neither’ is acceptable where English would otherwise read awkwardly; ‘and I did not’ loses the continuation.

Note also that οὐδέ here is purely coordinating, not the ascensive ‘not even’ fixed at Gal 6:13 (οὐδὲ γάρ). There is no γάρ, no escalation, and nothing in the context asks for one.

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Three compound verbs of motion in one verse, each with a live prefix, and English must keep them distinguishable.

ἀνῆλθον (ἀνά + ἔρχομαι) occurs in the NT only here, at Gal 1:18, and at John 6:3. ‘Go up’ is both topographically accurate (Jerusalem sits on a ridge and every approach climbs) and the settled idiom of Jewish travel language — one goes up to Jerusalem from anywhere, as the LXX ἀναβαίνω texts show (Ps 121:4; 1 Kgdms 1:3). Retain ‘go up’; ‘travel to’ deletes a prefix Paul reuses in v. 18 as the hinge of his chronology.

ἀπῆλθον (ἀπό + ἔρχομαι) focuses the departure rather than the arrival. Paul is not primarily reporting that he reached Arabia but that he left the scene — away from Damascus, away from the direction of Jerusalem. ‘I went away’ keeps the prefix; ‘I went’ flattens it.

ὑπέστρεψα (ὑπό + στρέφω) is the ordinary Koine verb for returning to a point previously occupied, frequent in Luke-Acts and used by Paul only here. Its presupposition is what matters: one cannot return to a city one has not been in. See the section on πάλιν.

The three prefixes map the argument spatially — up (not taken), away (taken), back (taken). A rendering that levels them to ‘go … go … come back’ loses the shape.

Built onbdag · bdf

Paul uses the Hellenized, declinable neuter plural Ἱεροσόλυμα at 1:17, 1:18, and 2:1, and the indeclinable Semitic Ἰερουσαλήμ at 4:25-26. The distribution is not random: the Hellenized form names the geographical city he did or did not visit; the Semitic form names the city under theological description, set against ἡ ἄνω Ἰερουσαλήμ.

English has one name for both, so the distinction is recorded rather than rendered. But it should be recorded, because it shows Paul handling the city in two registers within one letter, and a reader tracking either the travel narrative or the allegory benefits from knowing which form stands where.

Note also that the neuter plural form is treated as singular in sense; the plural morphology reflects a Greek reanalysis of the Semitic name and carries no reference to multiple places.

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A prepositional phrase in attributive position — article, phrase, noun — so that πρὸ ἐμοῦ functions as a defining modifier of ἀποστόλους. The literal tier should display the construction woodenly (‘the before-me apostles’) and smooth registers resolve it to a relative clause.

Two features are doing argumentative work.

First, Paul concedes the fact of priority. He does not say the so-called apostles, or those reputed to be apostles (contrast the οἱ δοκοῦντες of 2:2, 6, 9, which is a different and cooler formulation). He grants without qualification that there were apostles before him. The whole weight of the chapter is that this chronological priority does not translate into a chain of authorization through which his gospel came.

Second, ἐμοῦ is the emphatic genitive rather than the enclitic μου, matching τὴν ἐμὴν ἀναστροφήν at 1:13. The extra weight is recorded in apparatus rather than overtranslated with ‘my own’.

Built onbdf · na28

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

First-century Ἀραβία in a text of this period and provenance means the Nabataean kingdom — the territory south and east of Damascus, with its capital at Petra, ruled in the 30s AD by Aretas IV. It is not the modern Arabian peninsula, and §9 requires that the ancient referent be carried in the note rather than the rendering.

The realia matter in two directions. Nabataea was populated, urbanized, and commercially busy; it was not a wilderness. And Damascus itself stood within or adjacent to the zone of Nabataean influence, which makes the Arabia-Damascus movement geographically short rather than an expedition.

Paul also names Arabia in Gal 4:25 as where Sinai is, which has tempted readers toward a Sinai pilgrimage here. The two uses may or may not be connected; 4:25 locates a mountain, 1:17 reports a journey, and nothing in either verse links them.

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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.

The single most informative word in the verse is πάλιν. A return (ὑπέστρεψα) reinforced by again presupposes that Paul had been in Damascus before — and Galatians has not said so. The reader of this letter alone learns, only here and only by inference, that the events of vv. 15-16 happened in or near Damascus.

This is a deliberate feature, not an oversight. Paul is not narrating his conversion; he is proving a negative about Jerusalem. Everything not bearing on that negative is omitted, including the city where it all began. The gap is the clearest evidence in the chapter that we are reading a selective legal brief rather than a memoir.

Per the standing πάλιν policy, the adverb stays in its Greek slot and its scope is not resolved by relocation; here it modifies ὑπέστρεψα unambiguously, but the English should not be rearranged to make the point for the reader.

Δαμασκός itself is declined as a feminine second-declension noun. Paul’s only other reference to the city is 2 Cor 11:32-33, the basket escape under the ethnarch of Aretas — which is the sole external datum we have for his situation there.

Built onbdag · bdf

All three verbs are aorist indicative. The aorists are complexive: each journey is presented as a single completed whole, with no attention to duration or internal process. This is precisely what a chronological argument requires — Paul is placing events on a line, not describing experiences.

The absence of any temporal marker inside the verse is equally deliberate. Contrast v. 18, which opens Ἔπειτα μετὰ ἔτη τρία — Paul supplies a measurement exactly where his argument needs one (the gap before Jerusalem) and supplies none for Arabia. Whether the Arabian period was weeks or most of three years is simply not stated, and no rendering may suggest otherwise.

εὐθέως in v. 16 governs the negated προσανεθέμην and, by the continuation of the negation, reaches into v. 17 as well: the immediacy attaches to what he did not do. It does not time the departure for Arabia.

Built onbdf · na28

The verse is textually stable in the critical tradition; NA28 prints it without brackets and without significant variation affecting sense.

Two minor matters are worth recording. The spelling Ἱεροσόλυμα is uniform in the Galatians travel passages across the major witnesses, with no tendency to assimilate toward Ἰερουσαλήμ — which supports treating the distribution within the letter as authorial rather than scribal.

Some witnesses read ὑπέστρεψα against a variant ἐπέστρεψα (‘I turned back’), a common interchange of preverbs in the manuscript tradition. The sense is not materially affected, and ὑπέστρεψα is both better attested and the ordinary Koine form for returning to a place. Scribal interchange of ὑπο-/ἐπι- compounds is frequent enough that no exegetical weight should rest on it.

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Acts 9:19-26 reports that after the Damascus encounter Saul spent days with the disciples in Damascus, preached in the synagogues, was the object of a plot, escaped over the wall in a basket, and came to Jerusalem. Acts mentions no Arabia and gives the impression of a short interval before the Jerusalem visit, qualified only by the vague ἡμέραι ἱκαναί (9:23).

Galatians 1:17-18 reports Arabia, a return to Damascus, and three years before Jerusalem.

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Proposed — pending reviewJ. B. Lightfoot, Saint Paul's Epistle to the Galatians, London: Macmillan, 1865.

The Arabian journey drew early attention precisely because Paul says so little about it. Chrysostom, commenting on Galatians, reads the Arabia note as evidence of Paul’s zeal to go immediately to the most untaught peoples rather than as a retreat — the mission reading, in other words, was already the patristic default in the Greek East, not the solitude reading that later dominated.

Jerome, in his commentary on Galatians, is likewise interested in the chronology as proof of apostolic independence rather than in the Arabian interval as a spiritual episode.

The reading of Arabia as a Sinai retreat on the Elijah model (1 Kgs 19:8) is a later development, resting on the juxtaposition with Gal 4:25 rather than on anything in this verse, and it should be recorded as reception rather than offered as exegesis (§11).

The verse has also had a long afterlife in discussions of apostolic authority: Reformation-era readers pressed οὐδὲ ἀνῆλθον as evidence that Paul’s commission did not pass through an ecclesiastical chain, while readings in the opposite direction emphasize τοὺς πρὸ ἐμοῦ ἀποστόλους as Paul’s own acknowledgment of a prior and recognized apostolic body. Both are drawing real inferences from the verse; neither is what the verse sets out to say.

Proposed — pending reviewJohn Chrysostom, Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, vol. 13.