Four Greek words close the chapter, and they close it by taking the subject away from Paul. The whole of vv. 13–23 has been first-person autobiography under oath (v. 20): what Paul did, where he went, whom he saw, how long he stayed. The final clause turns the camera round. The subject is they — the Judean assemblies who had never seen his face — and the object is God.

Three things carry the weight:

• The imperfect ἐδόξαζον. Not “they glorified” as a completed episode but a sustained practice, matched to the imperfect of v. 23 (ἀκούοντες ἦσαν). They kept hearing, and they kept glorifying.
• ἐν ἐμοί. Not “because of me” and not “for me.” The preposition is left as a preposition, because the construction is the one Paul uses at Phil 1:30 and Gal 1:16 — the person in whom something is displayed or recognized. English “in me” reproduces the same openness.
• τὸν θεόν last. The clause’s final word is the one name Paul has been arguing for since v. 1. His apostolate came not from men but through Jesus Christ and God the Father; the chapter ends with the churches of Judea reaching the same verdict without ever having met him.

The argumentative point is not Paul’s modesty. It is evidentiary: the very communities whose apostles he had allegedly needed to consult (vv. 17–19) had no contact with him and nonetheless ascribed his change to God. That testimony is independent, and that is why it is here.

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

ἐδόξαζον is not “made glorious” but “ascribed glory to” — the LXX honorific sense of כָּבֵד, the act of publicly acknowledging worth. The corpus already fixes this at 1 Pet 4:16, where δοξάζω stands as the exact counterpart of αἰσχύνομαι in the ancient honor economy. The same discipline applies here: one English root must serve δοξάζω, δόξα, and their cognates so the glory-thread of this chapter (ᾧ ἡ δόξα, v. 5) stays visible.

The imperfect is the load-bearing feature. Paul could have written ἐδόξασαν; he wrote the durative. Rendered “they glorified God,” the clause reads as a reaction at the moment the news arrived. Rendered “they were glorifying,” it reads as what the Judean churches were habitually doing during the years Paul spent in Syria and Cilicia — which is precisely the stretch of time his opponents’ account of his dependence has to cover.

Excluded: “praise” (breaks the link to δόξα, and belongs to αἰνέω/ἔπαινος), “honor” (that is τιμάω), “thank God for” (imports εὐχαριστέω and supplies a construction the Greek lacks).

The preposition is the exegetical crux, and three construals are live.

The rendering keeps in me in every tier, because English “in me” is open in the same three directions that the Greek is. “Because of me” adopts (2) and quietly makes Paul the reason for the praise rather than the place of it — a shift with real theological consequence in a chapter whose argument is that Paul is not the source of anything. “Through me” tips instrumental, which the preposition does not support.

The emphatic ἐμοί rather than enclitic μοι is a further marked feature. Per corpus policy the emphasis is noted rather than overtranslated: no “in me myself” is added, but the phrase is kept in its Greek slot so the stress falls where Paul put it.

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)

Greek word order here is not neutral. The prepositional phrase stands between verb and object — ἐδόξαζον ἐν ἐμοί τὸν θεόν — so that the sentence, and with it the chapter, lands on τὸν θεόν.

That placement is worth preserving in English where idiom allows, and “they were glorifying God in me” does so only at the cost of reversing the Greek sequence. The literal tier therefore keeps the wooden order (“they were glorifying in me the God”) to display the construction, and the reading text reunites verb and object as English requires, with the displacement recorded here.

What must not happen is the common smoothing to “they praised God because of me,” which ends the chapter on Paul.

Three imperfects run through the last two verses, and they belong together:

• ἦσαν … ἀκούοντες (v. 23), periphrastic imperfect — they were continuously hearing;
• ἐπόρθει (v. 23), imperfect — the ravaging he used to do, matching ἐπόρθουν at v. 13;
• ἐδόξαζον (v. 24) — they kept glorifying.

The corpus policy on διώκω in the imperfect (“was persecuting / kept persecuting”) applies to its partner ἐπορθέω here: the durative-iterative force is what makes the contrast with νῦν εὐαγγελίζεται work. The same aspect governs v. 24. Flattening any of the three to a simple past collapses a sustained situation — years of report reaching Judea and years of acclamation going up — into a single news cycle.

Note also what the imperfects do not assert: no terminus. Paul does not say the glorifying stopped. Whether the Galatian crisis has now disrupted it is left unsaid.

The verse is textually stable in NA28 with no variant recorded in the critical apparatus of the major editions. The wording καὶ ἐδόξαζον ἐν ἐμοὶ τὸν θεόν is read by the early uncial tradition without meaningful division.

Two minor matters belong here rather than in the main discussion. First, the punctuation: the chapter division and the full stop after θεόν are editorial, since the earliest majuscules are unpunctuated. The clause is syntactically continuous with v. 23 (one καί joining two imperfect clauses under μόνον δέ), and the modern verse boundary should not be allowed to present it as a free-standing sentence. Second, the accentuation of ἐμοί as the emphatic rather than enclitic form is secure here by the presence of the preposition, which requires the accented form — so no editorial judgment is involved, unlike the accentual decisions flagged elsewhere in this corpus.

The force of the verse is forensic, and it depends on v. 22: Paul was ἀγνοούμενος τῷ προσώπῳ — unknown by face — to the assemblies of Judea. They had no acquaintance with him. Their only access to him was report (v. 23).

That makes their verdict useful to Paul in exactly the way an independent witness is useful. The counter-claim he is answering is that his gospel came παρὰ ἀνθρώπου (v. 12), mediated through the Jerusalem apostles. His reply has two halves: an itinerary showing minimal contact (vv. 17–21), and now the testimony of the very region whose churches would have known if he had been their pupil. They did not know him, and they ascribed what had happened to God, not to Jerusalem.

There is a further point in the verb’s object. Throughout the chapter Paul has been pressing one antithesis: οὐκ ἀπʼ ἀνθρώπων … ἀλλὰ διὰ Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ (v. 1), οὐ κατὰ ἄνθρωπον (v. 11), οὐδὲ … παρὰ ἀνθρώπου (v. 12), ἀνθρώπους πείθω ἢ τὸν θεόν (v. 10). The last word of the chapter settles which side of that antithesis the Judean churches came down on.

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

The Fathers consistently read the verse as evidence rather than as compliment. Chrysostom’s homilies on Galatians take the point to be that the churches who had most cause to resent Paul became his witnesses: he had been their persecutor, and their acclamation therefore cannot be attributed to partiality. Chrysostom also hears in the verse a lesson against jealousy — the Judean believers did not grudge the Gentile mission its apostle but gave glory for him — and he notes pointedly that they glorified God, not Paul.

Jerome, commenting on Galatians, takes ἐν ἐμοί closely with the ἐν ἐμοί of v. 16, so that the Son revealed in Paul is the same Paul in whom God is now glorified. That reading has the merit of preserving the verbal echo, and it is one reason the rendering here declines to resolve ἐν to “because of.”

The Latin tradition renders in me, which leaves the ambiguity exactly where the Greek leaves it — a better guide here than most later vernacular renderings, which tend toward the causal.

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)