Paul is still proving the point he swore to in v. 20: after his call he had no contact with the Judean churches that could have made him their protégé. Verse 22 states the fact negatively — he remained unknown by face to them. Verse 23 supplies the one thing they did have: a report, repeatedly heard, which Paul then quotes.

Three features carry the argument:

1. The periphrastic imperfect (ἀκούοντες ἦσαν) — not one piece of news but a rumour circulating over time. Hearsay, not acquaintance.
2. The quoted report in the first person (ἡμᾶς, ‘us’) — Paul lets the churches speak in their own voice, which is both vivid and tactically shrewd: the testimony to his independence comes from the very people the agitators would appeal to.
3. The ποτε … νῦν … ποτε frame — a then/now reversal formula, with the astonishing object standing at the centre: the thing he was destroying is the thing he now announces.

The verse is also where Paul’s vocabulary turns the knife. He uses εὐαγγελίζομαι of himself with τὴν πίστιν as its object — an object it takes nowhere else in his letters — and he repeats πορθέω from v. 13, where he had used it of his own career. The Judean believers’ report and Paul’s own autobiography use the same unusual word.

What the verse does not say is equally deliberate: it names no city, no congregation, no mediating figure. The only link between Paul and Judea is a sentence travelling by itself.

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

μόνον is the adverbial accusative neuter functioning as a restrictive discourse marker, and per corpus policy it is always rendered and kept clause-initial where English permits (cf. Gal 2:10; 5:13; 6:12). Its force here is to clip off the one exception to the negation of v. 22: they did not know him by sight — only this, that they kept hearing.

The δέ is mildly adversative, completing a οὐ … δέ correlation that spans the verse boundary. Per §10 the particle is rendered, not dropped; and the verse division must not be allowed to split one sentence into two, since ἤμην δὲ ἀγνοούμενος (v. 22) and μόνον δὲ ἀκούοντες ἦσαν (v. 23) are the two halves of a single contrast.

A secondary question is the scope of μόνον: does it restrict the content of what they heard (they heard nothing but this), or the mode of their knowledge (they knew him only by hearsay)? The adverb does not decide, and either way the argumentative payload is the same.

Built onbdf · bdag

Present participle plus imperfect of εἰμί — a periphrastic imperfect, and the construction is the point. Paul had the simple ἤκουον available and chose a form that foregrounds duration and repetition. The parallel construction in v. 22 (ἤμην … ἀγνοούμενος) shows this is a stylistic feature of the paragraph rather than an accident.

English must mark the durative-iterative force: ‘they kept hearing’ or ‘they were hearing’. A simple past (‘they heard’) collapses a circulating report into a single announcement and loses the implication that Paul’s reputation reached Judea while Paul himself did not.

Per the standing ἀκούω entry, the verb stays an auditory verb: not ‘they learned’, not ‘they understood’, not ‘they knew’. They had a sound, not a face.

Built onbdf · bdag

The ὅτι is recitative: it introduces the report in the words in which it circulated, which is why the following clause has first-person ἡμᾶς rather than the third person that indirect discourse would require. NA28 accordingly capitalizes Ὁ and punctuates as direct speech.

Two cautions. First, the capitalization and the quotation marks are editorial judgment, not manuscript evidence: the earliest majuscules are unpunctuated and unaccented in the relevant sense. Second, the recitative reading is nonetheless secured by the grammar rather than by the punctuation — the shift of person is the evidence, and it cannot be undone without rewriting the pronoun.

Per corpus policy ὅτι after verbs of declaration may be rendered ‘that’ by default, with punctuation as direct quotation legitimate where the clause is a recognizable formula. Here the first-person pronoun makes the quotation reading all but certain, so both renderings keep it as speech.

Built onbdf · na28

The first-person plural is the most rhetorically loaded word in the verse. Paul is not reporting what the churches thought about a third party; he is quoting them speaking of themselves as the victims — ‘the one who was persecuting us’.

The effect is twofold. It is vivid, in the manner of reported speech generally. And it is argumentatively efficient: the witnesses to Paul’s non-dependence on Jerusalem are the Judean congregations themselves, who knew him only as a name attached to a reversal. They had no claim on him because they had never met him.

It also quietly concedes the worst of his past. Paul does not soften the report; he lets the sentence stand with himself as its subject and his hearers’ community as its object (cf. §5 — describe, do not launder).

διώκω is object-determined in this corpus: ‘persecute’ with a hostile personal object, ‘pursue’ with a goal. Here the object is ἡμᾶς and the sense is fixed.

Two features of the form matter:

• The articular participle makes this a designation, not a description of an incident. In the mouths of the Judean churches Paul had become ‘the persecutor’ — a standing identity. English ‘the one who was persecuting us’ keeps the participial shape; ‘our persecutor’ is permitted in smooth registers with the compression noted.
• The present tense is durative and is governed temporally by ποτε, not by the time of speaking. This matches the imperfects of v. 13 (ἐδίωκον … ἐπόρθουν): a sustained campaign.

The concordance link to Gal 1:13 and 1:22 (τὴν ἐκκλησίαν τοῦ θεοῦ … ταῖς ἐκκλησίαις τῆς Ἰουδαίας) must stay visible: the churches now reporting are the churches he was hunting.

Built onbdag

Two lexical decisions collide here, and both are load-bearing.

εὐαγγελίζομαι is deponent middle with no reflexive force; per corpus policy the εὐαγγελ- root stays visible in the literal tier (‘proclaim the good news’), with ‘preach the gospel’ permitted in smooth English. The present tense is durative: an activity under way at the time the report circulates.

πίστις as direct accusative object of εὐαγγελίζομαι is unparalleled in Paul. He elsewhere proclaims τὸ εὐαγγέλιον (1 Cor 15:1; 2 Cor 11:7), Christ (Gal 1:16), or the word; here the object is ‘the faith’. The articular noun, with no genitive qualifier, pulls toward the content-sense — fides quae, the thing believed, the message — which is what one can ravage and then announce.

Built onbdag · bdf

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

πορθέω is sack-and-destroy vocabulary: in classical and Hellenistic Greek it is what an army does to a city — plunder, lay waste, raze. Its only NT occurrences are Gal 1:13, Gal 1:23, and Acts 9:21, all of Paul’s pre-call activity, and the lexical choice is startling precisely because it is military. He did not merely oppose; he conducted a campaign of devastation.

The word must therefore keep its violence in English. ‘Ravage’ and ‘lay waste’ are the right register; ‘destroy’ is acceptable in smooth registers with the loss of the sacking-image noted. Excluded: ‘harass’ and ‘trouble’ (far too light, and ‘trouble’ is spent on ταράσσω at Gal 1:7), ‘oppose’ (names a stance, not an assault), and any abstraction (‘tried to stamp out’) that discards the image.

The imperfect ἐπόρθει is either durative (he was engaged in ravaging it) or conative (he was trying to destroy it). The two are not far apart in effect, and English ‘was ravaging’ holds both. What is excluded is a simple past (‘destroyed’), which asserts success the imperfect does not claim, and a perfective ‘had destroyed’, which would make the faith’s survival inexplicable.

The repetition of this rare verb from v. 13 is deliberate: Paul’s own account of his career and the Judean churches’ report of it use the same word. That coincidence is part of the argument — he is not softening in his own telling what they said of him.

Built onbdag · bdf

Proposed — pending reviewRichard N. Longenecker, Galatians, Word Biblical Commentary 41 (Dallas: Word, 1990)

The report is built on a then/now reversal with the temporal adverb stated twice, bracketing the νῦν:

ποτε persecuting — νῦν proclaiming — the faith he ποτε was ravaging

This is the Pauline τότε μέν … νῦν δέ pattern (Rom 6:20-22; Gal 4:8-9; Eph 2:11-13; 5:8; Col 1:21-22) in a compressed, non-correlative form. Per standing policy on stacked and repeated temporal markers (cf. πάλιν ἄνωθεν, Gal 4:9; ἔτι μᾶλλον καὶ μᾶλλον, Phil 1:9), the repetition is Koine emphasis and not redundancy to be trimmed: both occurrences of ποτε must be rendered, and the second one — which could have been omitted without loss of information — is what makes the sentence land.

Note also the word order. ποτε is enclitic and sits after ἡμᾶς rather than before διώκων, so the Greek reads ‘the one persecuting us formerly’. Keeping the adverb in its Greek slot preserves a slight delay before the reversal; relocating it to the front for smoothness (‘the one who formerly persecuted us’) is permitted in reading tiers but the placement should be recorded.

Built onbdf · bdag

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

The verse is stable. NA28 prints no variation unit of consequence, and the Greek tradition is essentially uniform.

What is editorial rather than textual is the presentation:

• The capital on Ὁ and the quotation punctuation are the editors’ judgment that ὅτι is recitative. The grammar (first-person ἡμᾶς) supports it, but the majuscules supply no punctuation and the reader should know which is evidence and which is inference.
• The verse boundary itself is a medieval division, and it falls inside a single sentence (vv. 22-24 are one period). Any English rendering that closes a sentence at the end of v. 22 has repaired what Paul left continuous.

Built onna28 · metzger-tc

The Vulgate reads tantum autem auditum habebant quoniam qui persequebatur nos aliquando nunc evangelizat fidem quam aliquando expugnabat.

Two observations:

• auditum habebant (‘they had hearing’) is a reasonable attempt at the periphrastic imperfect, and preserves the durative force better than most English versions, which flatten to ‘they heard’.
• expugnabat for ἐπόρθει is a good guide: it is a siege-verb (‘was storming, was taking by assault’) and keeps the military image that English ‘destroy’ drops. Where modern renderings soften πορθέω, the Latin is closer to the Greek.

The Peshitta likewise renders the hearing as continuous and uses a destruction-verb for ἐπόρθει. Neither version helps with the πίστις question: Latin fidem and Syriac both carry the same act/content doubleness as the Greek, which is why the Fathers writing in those languages never had to choose.

Built onmetzger-tc

Chrysostom (Hom. in Gal. 1) fastens on the rhetorical function: Paul produces the Judean churches as witnesses precisely because they were strangers to him, so that the testimony cannot be suspected of partiality. He also notes the force of the quoted first person — Paul does not spare himself, and the confession of having ravaged the church is left standing in the mouths of its victims.

Jerome (Comm. in Gal.) presses the ποτε/νῦν frame as the pattern of grace: the glory in v. 24 is directed to God and not to Paul, because the change was not his achievement. He also takes πίστιν in the content-sense, as the fides once attacked and now preached.

Augustine, in his treatment of this chapter, reads the verse as evidence that the gospel Paul preached was recognizably the same gospel the Judean believers held — otherwise the report would have produced alarm rather than praise. That is an inference from v. 24 rather than from v. 23 itself, but it is a legitimate one and it bears on the πίστις question: whatever ἡ πίστις is, the churches recognized it as theirs.

The patristic reading is uniformly that the verse is Paul’s evidence, not Paul’s boast.

Built onmetzger-tc

Proposed — pending reviewJohn Chrysostom, Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, vol. 13 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1889) · Jerome, Commentary on Galatians, trans. Andrew Cain, Fathers of the Church 121 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2010)

Summary of what the renderings commit to and what they leave open:

Not adopted in any tier: ‘the Christian faith’ (anachronistic designation), ‘tried to destroy’ in the reading text (adopts the conative and drops the image), ‘our former persecutor’ (dissolves the participle), ‘they only heard’ (flattens the periphrastic imperfect).