Verse 7 is a single sentence in two movements, and both of them are corrections Paul makes to his own words.

First he takes back the noun he had just written. In v. 6 the Galatians were deserting to ἕτερον εὐαγγέλιον — “a different gospel.” He now says of it: ὃ οὐκ ἔστιν ἄλλο — it is not another one. Greek distinguishes the two words (ἕτερος marks the counterpart or the different kind; ἄλλος adds a further item of the same kind), and Paul exploits the distinction. Having conceded, for the sake of describing their defection, that something is being offered under the name “gospel,” he immediately denies that there is a second item in that category. There is one gospel; the rival is not a member of the class.

Then he supplies what is in fact the case. εἰ μή is not a conditional (“unless”) but the fixed exceptive idiom: except that. What exists is not a second gospel but τινές — unnamed people, actively unsettling the congregations and wanting to turn Christ’s gospel about. Paul will never name them in this letter.

Three features of the Greek carry the weight: the ἕτερος/ἄλλος pair, which the verse is built on; the single article οἱ governing both participles, which makes agitators and would-be-revisers one party rather than two; and θέλοντες, which names the intention and stops short of granting the accomplishment. They want to turn the gospel about. Paul’s sentence does not concede that they have.

The sentence turns on two Greek words for “other.”

ἕτερος properly marks the other of two, the counterpart, or a thing of a different kind. ἄλλος adds a further instance of the same kind. The distinction is a tendency rather than an iron rule in Koine — the two are often interchangeable, and BDAG records the overlap — but Paul uses both words four words apart, and that is itself the strongest evidence that here the difference is live. Having written ἕτερον εὐαγγέλιον in v. 6, he denies ἄλλο in v. 7.

The resulting claim is not a riddle. Paul’s sense is: what you are turning to is of a different sort, and the category “gospel” has no second member. Compare 2 Cor 11:4, where Paul again stacks the two of a rival proclamation (ἄλλον Ἰησοῦν … πνεῦμα ἕτερον … εὐαγγέλιον ἕτερον).

The corpus policy fixed at this point requires both words to remain distinguishable in English wherever the contrast is live, and the glossary already records that policy under ἄλλος with Gal 1:6-7 as its warrant. The wooden line therefore reads “which is not another”; the smoothed line expands to “which is no other gospel at all,” supplying the elided noun and marking the categorical force.

Proposed — pending reviewJ. B. Lightfoot, Saint Paul's Epistle to the Galatians, 10th ed. (London: Macmillan, 1890)

εἰ μή here is the fixed exceptive idiom, not a live conditional, and per standing corpus policy it is never rendered “if not.” The question is what it excepts.

The difficulty is that an exceptive clause normally carves something out of a preceding statement, and “which is not another, except that there are some troubling you” does not obviously carve anything out of “not another.” Two constructions are standardly proposed.

On the first, εἰ μή is adversative in effect — only, it is just that — and introduces the actual state of affairs over against the denied one: there is no second gospel; what there is, is a group of agitators. This is the reading the rendering adopts, and it accounts for the following εἰσιν, which is existential (“there are some”) rather than copular.

On the second, εἰ μή genuinely qualifies the denial: the rival message is no gospel, unless one allows that certain people are indeed presenting something and calling it that — a concession Paul makes only to withdraw it in v. 8.

The practical English differs little; what must not happen is a rendering that makes the clause a true condition, since Paul is not entertaining a hypothesis about whether such people exist. He knows they do.

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

ταράσσω names the throwing of what was settled into disturbance — literally of water (John 5:7), figuratively of persons and crowds (John 11:33; 14:1; Acts 15:24; 17:8), with LXX precedent for churned sea and turbulent nations (Ps 45:4; 47:6 LXX).

The standing corpus gloss, fixed at Gal 5:10 where the same verb returns in the singular (ὁ ταράσσων ὑμᾶς), is “stir up / unsettle / agitate,” and the same English must stand at both points so that the singular/plural alternation is the only variable the reader sees. “Trouble” is permitted in declared liturgical register, where the older diction has fixed it, but modern English has weakened it badly. Excluded are “confuse” (relocates the damage to the intellect) and “pervert” or “mislead” (import a verdict on content, which Paul delivers with μεταστρέφω in the second half of the verse, not with this one).

The present participle is durative: the agitation is under way as Paul writes. Note also the striking parallel at Acts 15:24, where the Jerusalem letter uses the same verb of men who ἐτάραξαν ὑμᾶς λόγοις — whatever the historical relation between the two texts, the vocabulary of the dispute is shared.

μεταστρέφω is μετά (change, reversal) + στρέφω (turn), and the prefix carries reversal rather than mere motion. The LXX uses it for turning one thing into another, characteristically into its opposite: Joel 3:4 LXX (sun into darkness, moon into blood), Amos 5:7 and 6:12 (judgment turned into wormwood), Sir 11:31. Acts 2:20 cites Joel verbatim with this verb.

So the aim named here is not adulteration by degrees but conversion into something else. The traditional English “pervert” (Vulgate pervertere) captures the reversal but has acquired in modern English a sexual and moral-degeneracy sense that is not in the Greek; retain it in declared liturgical register. “Distort” and “corrupt” weaken the reversal into damage. “Change” is too colourless for a compound whose whole force is in the prefix.

The rendering keeps a turning-verb — “turn about,” or in smoother English “turn into something else” — so the reversal stays visible.

A second construction is grammatically available and should be recorded: με­ταστρέψαι could take τὸ εὐαγγέλιον as object of a verb meaning “turn [you] away from” rather than “transform.” But the LXX pattern with a direct object of the thing transformed is overwhelming, and the accusative here is the gospel, not the Galatians.

θέλοντες μεταστρέψαι is a participle of volition governing an aorist infinitive, and the construction is doing real work: Paul names an intention without conceding its accomplishment.

He could have written that they are turning the gospel about. He wrote that they want to. The glossary fixes θέλω as “want / wish” with one English root throughout, and the deliberative colouring belongs rather to βούλομαι; what matters here is that the verb is a verb of willing and not of achieving. Chrysostom already read the clause this way, noting that Paul grants the opponents the desire and denies them the deed — the gospel of Christ is not in fact convertible.

The aorist infinitive is complexive: the turning viewed as a single whole act, not a gradual process.

English must therefore not render “who are distorting the gospel,” which converts an aim into an accomplished fact. “Wanting to turn the gospel of Christ about” keeps the intention where Paul put it.

A single article οἱ governs both participles. Per standing corpus policy (fixed at Phil 3:3 for coordinated participles joined by καί), one article over a coordinated participial series marks a single composite referent: the agitators and the would-be revisers are one party described twice, not two groups.

This matters for the rendering. “Some who are troubling you, and some who want to change the gospel” manufactures two constituencies. The participles must stay participial and stay under one article in English — “some who are unsettling you and want to turn the gospel of Christ about.”

Note also the tense: both participles are present, durative, and coordinate. The second is not subordinate to the first (not “troubling you by wanting to…”); they are two aspects of one standing activity.

τινές is the accented indefinite, not the interrogative — and the accentuation in printed editions is modern editorial convention, the earliest majuscules being unaccented. The sense is nonetheless unambiguous from the syntax.

Paraphrase must not fill the blank. Paul writes “some,” “certain people,” and throughout the letter declines to name them: τινές here, ὁ ταράσσων ὑμᾶς at 5:10, οἱ ἀναστατοῦντες at 5:12, ὅσοι θέλουσιν at 6:12. Renderings such as “the Judaizers,” “the circumcision party,” or “agitators from Jerusalem” supply an identification the Greek withholds and settle a historical question — who they were, where they came from, what their relation to James was — by translation.

Per §5, the identity of the opposed party is a flashpoint and the range of serious positions belongs in a note, not in the reading text.

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

Note the articles. In v. 6 the rival was ἕτερον εὐαγγέλιον — anarthrous, qualitative, “a gospel of a different kind.” Here the real thing is τὸ εὐαγγέλιον τοῦ Χριστοῦ — doubly articular, the gospel, and Christ’s. The contrast of definiteness is part of the argument and should be preserved: do not supply an article in v. 6 or drop one here.

The genitive τοῦ Χριστοῦ is left as a bare “of.” Three forces are live and none is decidable from the phrase: source (the gospel that comes from Christ, which coheres with διʼ ἀποκαλύψεως Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ at v. 12), content (the gospel whose subject is Christ, cf. v. 16 ἵνα εὐαγγελίζωμαι αὐτόν), and possession (the gospel belonging to him, which is what makes its alteration an offence against him). Per standing corpus policy on bare genitives, English holds the genitive and the alternatives are flagged rather than resolved — “Christ’s gospel” and “the gospel about Christ” each adopt one.

Χριστός is here articular, which in Paul tends toward the titular force; the glossary policy on Χριστοῦ Ἰησοῦ word order and on christos (title vs. name) applies.

The Greek fathers took v. 7 as a self-correction and read both halves closely.

Chrysostom (Hom. in Gal. 1) presses the ἕτερον/ἄλλο pair: Paul has called it another gospel and now withdraws the name, because what differs from the gospel is not a gospel. On θέλοντες he observes that Paul assigns the opponents the wish and not the accomplishment — they would overturn it if they could, and cannot.

Jerome (Comm. in Gal.) wrestles with the apparent self-contradiction between vv. 6 and 7 and resolves it by distinguishing the name from the thing: there is a message so called, but no second gospel in reality. His Latin pervertere for μεταστρέψαι fixed the Western rendering, and through it the English “pervert.”

Theodoret reads the εἰ μή clause as naming the only thing that actually exists over against the denied gospel — certain men, and their activity — which is the construal adopted here.

These readings are recorded as how the verse was understood, not as evidence for what the Greek means; but it is worth noting that the ancient readers, working without the distinction between formal and dynamic equivalence, were alert to precisely the two features modern renderings most often flatten: the two words for “other,” and the verb of wishing.

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; repr. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans) · Jerome, Commentarii in epistulam Pauli ad Galatas, ed. G. Raspanti, CCSL 77A (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006)

The Vulgate reads quod non est aliud, nisi sunt aliqui qui vos conturbant et volunt convertere evangelium Christi. Three observations. Latin has only alius and alter with a weaker distinction than the Greek, and Jerome had already used aliud in v. 6 — so the ἕτερον/ἄλλο play is invisible in Latin and in every version dependent on it. Nisi renders εἰ μή exceptively, which is right. Convertere for μεταστρέψαι keeps the turning; Jerome’s commentary uses pervertere, and it is that stronger form that entered the tradition.

The Peshitta renders with a verb of changing or altering for μεταστρέψαι and, like the Latin, cannot reproduce the two Greek adjectives for “other.”

Proposed — pending reviewBiblia Sacra iuxta Vulgatam Versionem, ed. R. Weber and R. Gryson, 5th ed. (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2007)

The verse is textually stable in the critical editions. NA28 prints no variant of consequence in the apparatus for the main clause.

Two minor matters are worth recording. Some later witnesses smooth the asyndetic transition and the exceptive clause; and the accentuation of τινές (indefinite) versus τίνες (interrogative), together with the accented existential εἰσιν, is editorial in origin, since the earliest majuscules carry neither accents nor punctuation. Nothing in the sense depends on these, but per §4 the editorial character of the printed accents and the high point after ἄλλο should be stated rather than presented as manuscript support for the adopted construal.

The high point after ἄλλο is the single most consequential editorial decision in the verse, since it fixes εἰ μή as introducing what follows rather than qualifying what precedes.