Paul has just finished a salutation with a doxology and an ἀμήν (1:5). Every other letter he writes turns at that point to thanksgiving — εὐχαριστῶ τῷ θεῷ μου (Phil 1:3; Rom 1:8; 1 Cor 1:4). Here there is none. Instead: Θαυμάζω. The first word after the Amen is astonishment, and ancient readers trained on the letter form would have heard the omission as loudly as the word.

Four decisions carry the verse.

1. μετατίθεσθε is present, not aorist: the defection is under way, not accomplished. And the middle/passive form is morphologically undecidable — are the Galatians shifting themselves, or being shifted? Paul says later that someone is doing the shifting (vv. 7, 3:1, 5:7-10), which keeps the passive reading alive; but the ἀπό-phrase names the party deserted, which pulls toward the middle.
2. ἀπὸ τοῦ καλέσαντος names a person, not a doctrine. The desertion is from God, and the substitution of a gospel is secondary to the abandonment of the one who summoned them.
3. ἕτερον is the counterpart-word, not ἄλλος — and v. 7 immediately denies even that: ὃ οὐκ ἔστιν ἄλλο. The concession is made and withdrawn inside two clauses.
4. ἐν χάριτι Χριστοῦ is the sting. What they are leaving is not a rule but a gift; and the phrase binds this verse to the salutation (χάρις, 1:3) and to the benediction (6:18), so that the whole letter is bracketed by the word the Galatians are walking away from.

The verse ends with a comma, not a stop. The sentence runs on into v. 7, which qualifies the concession just made, and no English rendering should close it here.

Base sense is to wonder at, be amazed — used of admiring wonder (Luke 7:9), of perplexed astonishment (Mark 15:44), and of indignant surprise. The Hellenistic letter tradition supplies a further datum: θαυμάζω ὅτι / πῶς is a recognized formula of reproach in the papyri, the writer registering surprised displeasure at the addressee’s conduct. That register fits here exactly, standing where a thanksgiving should be.

Rendering must keep the astonishment and refuse to convert it into either a compliment or a flat rebuke. ‘I am astonished’ holds the reproach without stating it; ‘I am amazed’ has weakened in modern English toward admiration; ‘I am shocked’ overshoots; ‘I cannot believe’ is register collapse.

The ὅτι is a complementizer giving the content of the astonishment, not a causal particle. Rendering ‘because’ would make the clause the ground of an emotion already named and would loosen the grip of the sentence.

Built onbdag · bdf

μετά + τίθημι: to put in another place, transfer. The NT range is transfer of remains (Acts 7:16), removal of a person (Heb 11:5, of Enoch), a change of priesthood and therefore of law (Heb 7:12), and, in the middle, turning God’s grace into something else (Jude 4). The LXX supplies the political-military sense: in 2 Macc 7:24 Antiochus urges the youngest brother μεταθέμενον ἀπὸ τῶν πατρίων — to change sides from the ancestral ways — and the verb is at home in Greek historians for defection and changing allegiance.

That is the register. The word names a transfer of allegiance, and the ἀπό … εἰς frame makes it a crossing from one party to another. Any rendering that reduces it to a change of mind loses the defection.

Excluded from the reading text: ‘are turning away’ (drops the transfer and the two termini), ‘are deserting’ (adopts the military sense and supplies a verdict the verb only implies), ‘are abandoning’ (makes the ἀπό-phrase a direct object), ‘are changing your minds’ (relocates a change of side into a change of opinion).

Present tense is durative and the aspect is load-bearing: Paul does not say the Galatians have gone over (aorist), but that the going-over is happening. English must mark it progressively.

Built onbdag · muraoka-lxx

The form is identical for middle and passive, and the choice is exegetically consequential.

The corpus policy on permissive middles (ἐνέχω, Gal 5:1; περιτέμνω, Gal 5:2-3; πλανάω, Gal 6:7) is to render in a way hospitable to both and flag the alternative. The reading text adopts the middle (‘you are … shifting away’), the study tier marks the passive, and the literal tier keeps a form that shows the ambiguity.

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)

ταχέως is fixed elsewhere in this corpus as temporal ‘soon’ in Pauline travel notices (Phil 2:19, 24), with ‘quickly’ reserved for speed of action. Here both readings are genuinely live.

The two are not sharply separable in Greek, and no chronological conclusion should be built on the adverb alone. ‘So quickly’ is retained because English ‘quickly’ admits both readings in the same way.

οὕτως here intensifies the following adverb rather than pointing back anaphorically (BDF on οὕτως as a degree-marker with adjectives and adverbs; cf. Gal 3:3 οὕτως ἀνόητοί ἐστε). Per the standing οὕτως policy the directionally neutral English ‘so’ is kept, and it is not expanded into ‘in the manner just described.’

Built onbdf · bdag

The glossary already fixes ὁ καλῶν / ὁ καλέσας as God’s effectual summons, never an invitation merely offered, and records that the referent in Paul is uniformly God (Rom 4:17; 9:11-12; 1 Thess 2:12; 5:24; Gal 1:15; 5:8). Two points are specific to this verse.

The aorist. Gal 1:6 has the aorist participle (a completed summons now being deserted); Gal 5:8 has the present (ὁ καλῶν ὑμᾶς — the call still in force while they are being talked round). The corpus policy requires the tense to be marked in English at both points rather than levelled to ‘who called you.’ Here ‘the One who called you’ is correct precisely because the summons is past and the defection present.

The referent. Greek names no subject. Patristic and modern readers have differed over whether ὁ καλέσας is God or Christ; the Pauline pattern is decisive for God, but the proximity of Χριστοῦ in the same clause has always kept the question faintly open. The capital in ‘the One who called you’ marks a divine referent without naming which person, which is as far as the Greek goes.

What must not be supplied is a noun: ‘from God, who called you’ resolves what the participle leaves as a designation by function. Equally excluded is reading ἀπό as attaching to the gospel rather than the person — the construction names a person deserted, and this is the heart of the verse. Paul does not say they are shifting from a doctrine.

Built onbdag · silva-becnt

χάρις is fixed in this corpus as ‘grace’ throughout, spanning Hellenistic benefaction-favor and LXX חֵן/חֶסֶד, and by metonymy the gift itself. The phrase is anarthrous and qualitative; English supplies the article in smooth registers only.

The force of ἐν is open.

The corpus policy for ἐν + dative with abstract nouns is to keep ‘in,’ which preserves the ambiguity, and to flag the alternatives rather than tipping instrumental with ‘by’ or deciding it with ‘through.’ That policy governs here. That Paul writes διά at 1:15 for the same relation is a real argument for means but not a decisive one, since he is capable of both.

The genitive Χριστοῦ is most naturally source or possession (the grace Christ gives, or that is his); it is not resolved, per the standing policy on bare genitives.

Built onbdag · bdf · silva-becnt

The phrase is among the less stable in the letter’s opening.

• ἐν χάριτι Χριστοῦ — the reading of NA28, supported by the great majority of witnesses, including the earliest majuscules and the Byzantine tradition.
• ἐν χάριτι (omitting Χριστοῦ) — read by P46 and a small number of witnesses, including part of the Latin tradition.
• ἐν χάριτι Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ — an expansion in some witnesses, of the ordinary kind this corpus elsewhere records as scribal fulness (cf. the Χριστοῦ Ἰησοῦ / Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ transpositions at Phil 1:1).

Built onna28 · metzger-tc

The corpus fixes ἕτερος as ‘other (the other party)’ — the counterpart over against what one has, not merely an additional item of the same kind, which is ἄλλος. Gal 1:6-7 is the place in the NT where the distinction is most clearly exploited by an author: ἕτερον εὐαγγέλιον, ὃ οὐκ ἔστιν ἄλλο.

That sentence is the control on the rendering. Paul grants the designation ‘gospel’ in v. 6 and withdraws it in v. 7. The grant is formal, almost ironic — a different gospel, as they call it — and the English must leave the irony audible without asserting it.

Excluded: ‘another gospel’ as the base rendering (English ‘another’ now reads as one more of the same kind, which is precisely ἄλλος and is what v. 7 denies); ‘a so-called gospel’ and ‘a different kind of gospel’ (supply the withdrawal before Paul makes it); ‘a perverted gospel’ (imports μεταστρέψαι from v. 7).

εὐαγγέλιον is anarthrous here against τὸ εὐαγγέλιον τοῦ Χριστοῦ in v. 7; the article-shift is recorded rather than levelled.

Built onbdag · bdf · silva-becnt

The verse is built on a pair of prepositions naming the two termini of the transfer, and they must be rendered distinctly and kept in their slots.

ἀπό + gen is separation, per the standing corpus policy that keeps it distinct from ὑπό (personal agency), ἐκ (source), and διά (means). Here it names the party deserted. It must never be rendered ‘by’ — the Koine drift that licenses the agency-reading at a few sites (Jas 5:4) has no foothold where the object of ἀπό is the one being left.

εἰς + acc names the destination of the shift, which is the resulting adherence rather than a place. The pair is asymmetrical in a way worth seeing: what is left is a person, what is adopted is a message. That asymmetry is the verse’s sharpest rhetorical feature, and English renderings that supply a noun on the first side (‘from the gospel of God’ ) or a person on the second destroy it.

The verse ends in a comma. The sentence runs into v. 7 without a break, and no English rendering may close it here — per §10, the suspension across the verse boundary is argument structure, and the verse numbering is modern.

Built onbdf · bdag

Pauline letters follow a fixed sequence: salutation, then thanksgiving or blessing, then body (Rom 1:8; 1 Cor 1:4; Phil 1:3; 1 Thess 1:2; Phlm 4; and the εὐλογητός form at 2 Cor 1:3; Eph 1:3). Galatians alone moves from the doxology straight to Θαυμάζω.

This is not an incidental feature of style. The thanksgiving section in Paul regularly previews the letter’s themes and establishes warmth with the addressees; its absence here leaves the reader standing in the gap where that warmth should be. The effect is intensified by what the first words supply instead: astonishment, speed, defection.

It matters for the rendering only in one respect — the register of θαυμάζω must be allowed to carry the weight of the omission. A rendering that softens it toward puzzlement (‘I wonder why’) or formalizes it toward rebuke (‘I must reprove you’) both lose the force of a letter that begins where a thanksgiving should be and says instead that something astonishing has happened.

Built onsilva-becnt

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

The Greek commentators read the verse as reproach aimed at the Galatians’ own instability. Chrysostom presses οὕτως ταχέως as the point of the rebuke: it is not merely that they shifted but that it took so little to shift them — he draws out the implied contrast with the firmness Paul expected, and treats the verb as naming their act rather than their passivity. He also emphasizes ἀπὸ τοῦ καλέσαντος: the offence is against a person, not a system.

Theodoret likewise takes the participle of God and notes that Paul says ‘from the one who called,’ not ‘from me,’ so that the defection is measured against God rather than against the apostle.

Jerome, in his commentary on Galatians, and the Latin tradition generally render translati estis — a passive — and in aliud evangelium, which blunts the ἕτερος/ἄλλος distinction that v. 7 turns on. Latin has only alius and alter available, and the versions divide; the result is that the Latin West largely received the verse without the lexical edge the Greek carries. This is reception, not lexical evidence (§11), and it is one of the clearer cases where the Greek distinction must be recovered against a long and otherwise respectable versional tradition.

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)