Paul is still under oath. Galatians 1:20 (“before God, I do not lie”) hangs over everything that follows, and 2:1 is the third dated entry in a checkable itinerary: ἔπειτα at 1:18, ἔπειτα at 1:21, ἔπειτα here. Every element of the verse is evidence — an interval, a direction of travel, a companion, and a third man brought along.

Four things carry weight.

1. The interval. Fourteen years is stated, not estimated, and whether it runs from the conversion or from the first Jerusalem visit of 1:18 is undecidable from the Greek. Any rounding or hedging in English destroys the one feature that makes it evidence.
2. The direction. ἀνέβην is the fixed idiom for going up to Jerusalem, and πάλιν marks it as a repetition of 1:18 — Paul concedes a second visit before anyone can allege it.
3. The grammatical asymmetry. Barnabas accompanies (μετά + genitive); Titus is brought (accusative object of a participle). Paul does not write “with Barnabas and Titus.” The difference is set up deliberately: Titus is Paul’s own addition to the party, and he becomes the test case two verses later (2:3).
4. The adjunctive καί. It attaches to Τίτον, not to Βαρναβᾶ. Rendering it as a coordinating “and” levels the asymmetry at exactly the point where it matters.

The verse is also the chief crux in Pauline chronology: whether this ascent is the famine visit of Acts 11:30 / 12:25 or the council of Acts 15. The translation must not settle it.

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

Ἔπειτα is a sequential-enumerative adverb: it advances a list and never draws a conclusion. Paul uses it three times across the itinerary — 1:18 (Jerusalem, after three years), 1:21 (Syria and Cilicia), 2:1 (Jerusalem again) — and identical English wording at all three is mandatory, or the chronological frame becomes invisible.

It must never be rendered causally. Paul had οὖν, διό, and ἄρα available, and uses all three elsewhere; the adverb he chose reports order, not inference.

Note also that the verse opens in asyndeton — no connective particle at all, in a letter dense with them. Per §10 the absence is data: the chapter break at 2:1 is a modern editorial judgment, and the Greek runs on without a seam.

διά + genitive here is temporal-extensive (“through an interval of”), not instrumental, and must stay distinguishable in English from the μετὰ ἔτη τρία of 1:18, where Paul used the accusative. That he varies the construction across two entries in one itinerary is recorded rather than pressed; both amount to “after.”

The figure is rendered as a figure. Per §4 and §6, no hedging (“about fourteen years”), no recalculation (“in the fourteenth year”), and no conversion into a round span. The whole evidentiary force of the clause is that it is checkable.

ἀναβαίνω εἰς Ἱεροσόλυμα is the settled idiom for travel to Jerusalem from any direction — topographically grounded (the city sits high) and reinforced by the LXX pilgrimage vocabulary (1 Kgdms 1:3; Ps 121:4 LXX; cf. Luke 2:42; Acts 15:2; 21:15). Paul used the rarer compound ἀνῆλθον at 1:17, 18; here he switches to the commoner ἀναβαίνω. Both are rendered “go up,” and the alternation is recorded rather than exploited.

πάλιν is doing real work. It presupposes a prior ascent and so binds this verse to 1:18. Paul is not volunteering extra material; he is closing off the possibility that an opponent could produce a second Jerusalem visit he had failed to mention. Per the standing policy, the adverb stays in its Greek slot — between the time-phrase and the verb — so that its scope (modifying the ascent, not the interval) remains as it stands in Greek. It is never deleted as redundant.

Paul uses two Greek forms of the city’s name, and the distribution in Galatians is deliberate. The Hellenized, declinable neuter plural Ἱεροσόλυμα appears in the travel chronology (1:17, 18; 2:1); the indeclinable Semitic Ἰερουσαλήμ appears where the city is under theological description (4:25, 26, with ἡ ἄνω Ἰερουσαλήμ).

English has one name for both, so both are rendered “Jerusalem” and the form is recorded at each occurrence. The neuter plural morphology is a Greek reanalysis of the Semitic name and implies nothing about plurality of referent.

The two companions are introduced by two different constructions, and the asymmetry is the point of the clause.

• μετὰ Βαρναβᾶ — preposition + genitive: Barnabas accompanies. He is a co-traveler on the same footing, which matches Acts, where he is the senior figure of the Antioch mission.
• συμπαραλαβὼν καὶ Τίτον — participle + accusative: Titus is brought. He is the object of Paul’s action, not a fellow subject of the verb.

Paul could have written μετὰ Βαρναβᾶ καὶ Τίτου and did not. Rendering “with Barnabas and Titus” is excluded in every tier: it dissolves a distinction that the argument of vv. 3-5 then exploits, where Titus — the uncircumcised Greek Paul himself brought into the room — becomes the test case that the Jerusalem leadership declines to press.

The καί before Τίτον is adjunctive (“also, as well”), not coordinating. Per §10 it is always rendered; reducing it to a connective removes the claim that Titus was Paul’s own addition to the party.

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

A double compound — σύν + παρά + λαμβάνω — with four NT occurrences, all of adding a person to a traveling party: Acts 12:25 (John Mark taken to Antioch), 15:37, 38 (the dispute over whether to take Mark again), and here.

Both prefixes are load-bearing. παρά- gives taking to one’s own side; σύν- gives the companionship. Per the corpus-wide policy on σύν- compounds (συνεργός, σύμψυχος, συγκοινωνός, συμμιμητής, συνεκλεκτός, συμπρεσβύτερος, συνηλικιώτης), the σύν- morpheme stays audible in English where it can.

The aorist participle is coincident with the main verb, not antecedent: the taking-along and the going-up are one journey, not two stages. “Taking along” in reading tiers; “having taken along” in the literal tier to display the form.

Titus is named thirteen times in the Pauline corpus — chiefly in 2 Corinthians, as Paul’s emissary to Corinth and the bearer of the collection — and never once in Acts. The silence is a datum in itself and has been pressed in several directions, none decisive.

What the verse establishes is only this: Paul brought him, and (v. 3) he was a Greek, uncircumcised. Nothing further may be imported into v. 1. The reader should be able to see that the man who becomes the test case in v. 3 enters the narrative here as an accusative object — someone Paul deliberately put in front of the Jerusalem leadership.

Proposed — pending reviewHans Dieter Betz, Galatians: A Commentary on Paul's Letter to the Churches in Galatia, Hermeneia (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1979) · F. F. Bruce, The Epistle to the Galatians: A Commentary on the Greek Text, New International Greek Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1982)

Vulgate: Deinde post annos quattuordecim iterum ascendi Hierosolymam cum Barnaba assumpto et Tito. Three observations. Ascendi preserves the going-up idiom. Iterum renders πάλιν faithfully. Most importantly, assumpto et Tito — an ablative absolute — preserves the grammatical asymmetry between Barnabas and Titus exactly, and is a better guide here than most English versions, which flatten both into a single prepositional phrase.

Peshitta likewise keeps the two companions in different constructions, with Barnabas governed by the preposition and Titus by a verb of taking.

The LXX bears on the verse only indirectly, through the ἀναβαίνω idiom: the verb is standard in the pilgrimage and festival texts (1 Kgdms 1:3; Ps 121:4 LXX; cf. 2 Chr 36:23, ἀναβήτω) and gives the motion toward Jerusalem its settled directional shape.

Chrysostom (Homilies on Galatians) reads the delay as itself the argument: Paul lets fourteen years pass without seeking Jerusalem’s endorsement, which shows he did not derive his gospel from them — and then goes up, which shows he was not at odds with them either. The interval, on this reading, is doing the same work as the three years of 1:18, only more so.

Jerome (Commentary on Galatians) notes the asymmetry of the companions and connects it directly to v. 3: Titus is brought precisely so that the question may be raised.

The chronological debate is ancient in outline and modern in sharpness. The patristic commentators generally assumed the identification with the Acts 15 council without arguing for it; the famine-visit hypothesis became a live option only when the two accounts were set side by side as independent sources. Neither tradition supplies lexical evidence, and per §11 neither may be used to settle the rendering.

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)