The verse is a single verbless nominal clause, and nearly everything about it is contested except its words.

Three things carry the weight. First, Ἡμεῖς is expressed where Greek did not require it, so it is emphatic and contrastive — and it answers the σύ Paul had just thrown at Cephas in v. 14. Second, φύσει locates Jewishness in descent rather than in practice, which is exactly the point after a verse describing a Jew living ἐθνικῶς. Third, ἁμαρτωλοί is not Paul’s own verdict on Gentiles but a standing Jewish category-term for those outside the covenant, and whether Paul speaks it straight or with irony is the oldest live question in the verse.

The largest editorial question is where the speech to Cephas stops. NA28 prints no closing quotation mark, leaving vv. 15-21 inside the Antioch address; many editors close it at v. 14. The Greek gives no marker either way — the earliest majuscules are unpunctuated — so the decision is modern judgment and is reported as such, not presented as text.

The clause has no verb. Supplying ‘are’ is unavoidable in English and is bracketed in the literal line; what must not be supplied is a concessive (‘though we are Jews’) or a participle (‘we who are Jews’), both of which settle how the clause attaches to v. 16.

Greek verb endings carry person, so an expressed nominative pronoun is marked. Here there is no verb at all, which makes Ἡμεῖς doubly conspicuous: it stands first, it is unnecessary to the sense, and it directly answers Εἰ σὺ Ἰουδαῖος ὑπάρχων in v. 14. The corpus policy on expressed nominative pronouns (fixed at Phil 4:11, extended to the second person at Gal 4:28) requires that it be rendered visibly — ‘we ourselves’, ‘we, for our part’ — and not absorbed.

The referent of the ‘we’ is the first interpretive fork. On the most natural reading it is Paul and Cephas, and behind them the Jewish believers at Antioch who dissembled with him (v. 13). Some take it more broadly of Jewish Christians as a class.

Built onna28 · bdf · metzger-tc

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

Dative of respect (BDF §197): the standing glossary entry for φύσις / φύσει fixes the sense as what a thing constitutionally is, apart from convention, ascription, or reputation, and requires an adverbial rendering — ‘by nature’ — rather than conversion to an adjective.

The word is doing precise work here. Paul has just described Cephas, a Jew, ἐθνικῶς ζῇ — living in the manner of the nations. If Jewishness were constituted by practice, Cephas’s table habits would have unmade it. φύσει says it is not: Jewish identity here is descent, the thing one is born into and cannot eat one’s way out of. That is why ‘by birth’ is an acceptable modern rendering and ‘by upbringing’ or ‘religiously’ are not.

Compare Rom 2:27 (ἡ ἐκ φύσεως ἀκροβυστία), where the same noun marks uncircumcision as a matter of birth, and Eph 2:3 (τέκνα φύσει ὀργῆς). What φύσει never means in Paul is ‘genuinely’ or ‘really’ — that reading, available at Gal 4:8, is excluded here by the contrast with ἐξ ἐθνῶν, which is plainly a statement about origin.

The word order is worth noting: Ἡμεῖς φύσει Ἰουδαῖοι, with the dative wedged between pronoun and predicate. Keep it there.

The standing policy keeps Ἰουδαῖος lexically distinct from Ἰσραήλ / Ἰσραηλίτης, which Paul reserves for the covenant-insider name (Rom 9:4; 11:1; 2 Cor 11:22). Here the civic-ethnic designation is the right one and the right word in English is ‘Jews’.

The term is a §5 flashpoint, and the standard caution applies in a modified form. In John the Ἰουδαῖοι are often a specific faction rather than an ethnicity, and the English ‘the Jews’ can be made to carry freight the Greek does not. That problem does not arise here in the same shape: Paul is naming the group he himself belongs to, and the designation is a credential, not an accusation. What the rendering must avoid is the opposite distortion — treating Ἰουδαῖοι as a religious label (‘Jewish by religion’) rather than a descent-and-people term, which both misreads φύσει and imports a modern category (§9).

The word recurs through the paragraph (vv. 13, 14 twice, 15) and the related adverbs Ἰουδαϊκῶς and Ἰουδαΐζειν stand in v. 14. One English root across all of them so the cluster stays visible.

The prepositional phrase stands between the negative and the adjective it modifies, and the construction is compressed: literally ‘not out of [the] nations sinners’. ἐκ marks derivation and group membership, not motion — the corpus entry for ἐκ of group membership (οἱ ἐκ πίστεως, οἱ ἐκ τῆς Καίσαρος οἰκίας) governs. ‘From among the nations’ carries it; ‘from the nations’ alone risks the reading that these persons have come out of the Gentile world.

ἔθνη is the standing LXX outsider-term (גּוֹיִם): not an ethnic grouping but the non-covenant peoples. The glossary fixes ‘the nations’ for the literal tier to keep the Israel/nations frame visible, with ‘Gentiles’ permitted in smooth registers. ‘Pagans’ and ‘heathen’ are excluded absolutely (§5).

The negative οὐκ governs the whole phrase ἐξ ἐθνῶν ἁμαρτωλοί, not a verb — there is none. What is denied is membership in a category, which is why the English negative must stay attached to the noun phrase: ‘not sinners from among the nations’, not ‘we are not sinners, who are from the nations’. The second reading would make Paul deny Gentile sinfulness, which is the opposite of the argument he is about to build.

Built onbdf

The standing entry renders ἁμαρτωλός ‘sinner’ where it is a designation and ‘sinful one’ where it is adjectival under a shared article. Here it is a predicate nominative and a designation.

The critical point is that the word is being used as a category-term, not as a moral assessment delivered by Paul. In Jewish usage of the period ἁμαρτωλοί functions as a standing label for those outside the Torah’s covenant provisions: 1 Macc 2:44 and 2:48 set ἁμαρτωλοί and ἄνομοι in parallel for the Gentile oppressors and their collaborators; Ps 9:18 LXX and Tob 13:6 run the same line. The Synoptic pairing τελῶναι καὶ ἁμαρτωλοί (Mark 2:15-17; Luke 15:1-2) shows the same sociological usage inside Judea. Paul is not coining; he is quoting a classification.

Excluded in every tier: ‘Gentile sinners’ as a fused phrase (it reads as a slur and collapses ἐξ ἐθνῶν into an adjective), and any softening to ‘outsiders’ or ‘those outside the law’, which deletes a word Paul needs intact for v. 17.

Built onbdag

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

There is no copula and no finite verb anywhere in v. 15. The whole of vv. 15-16 is one sentence whose main verb (ἐπιστεύσαμεν) does not arrive until the middle of v. 16, after a participle (εἰδότες) and a ὅτι clause.

This matters for rendering. Three options are live for how v. 15 attaches:

1. Independent nominal sentence: ‘We are Jews by nature…’ — a full stop or dash, with v. 16 beginning fresh. This is what NA28’s comma permits and what the reading text adopts.
2. Concessive: ‘Though we are Jews by nature…’ — subordinating v. 15 to the main clause of v. 16. Natural English, and probably the logical relation, but Paul wrote no concessive marker (no καίπερ, no participle), and the corpus policy on unmarked adverbial constructions (ὑπάρχων, Phil 2:6; ὤν, Gal 4:1) confines the concessive to the smooth tier with the inference flagged.
3. Subject of the far-off verb: ‘We, Jews by nature and not sinners from among the nations, knowing that… have believed’. Grammatically tidy but makes an English reader wait as long as the Greek does, which is itself an argument for it.

Per §4, the literal tier supplies only a bracketed copula and lets the clause stand; the smooth tier uses a dash, which keeps all three readings audible. ‘Though’ is excluded from the reading text because it would silently decide the logical relation on which the force of δέ in v. 16 depends.

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

The verse is textually stable. NA28 prints Ἡμεῖς φύσει Ἰουδαῖοι καὶ οὐκ ἐξ ἐθνῶν ἁμαρτωλοί with no variation unit, and the apparatus records nothing of substance.

The one editorial decision that touches the reader is punctuation, and it is not a manuscript matter: the earliest majuscules are unpunctuated throughout, so both the comma at the end of the verse and the absence of a closing quotation mark are modern judgments. Printed editions differ on where the Antioch speech ends (see above), and that difference appears in the text as punctuation rather than as a variant. It must be reported as editorial, never as evidence.

Vulgate: Nos natura Iudaei, et non ex gentibus peccatores. Latin reproduces the verblessness exactly, including the bare ablative natura for φύσει and the preserved ex gentibus. It is a closer guide here than most English versions, which supply a verb and frequently fuse ex gentibus peccatores into ‘Gentile sinners’.

Peshitta renders with a pronoun and the kinship-of-descent sense intact, likewise keeping the two members of the predicate distinct.

Neither version resolves the quotation-boundary question, since neither tradition punctuates speech in a way that would show it.

Chrysostom (Homilies on Galatians, ad loc.) reads v. 15 as a real concession spoken to Cephas: the advantage of birth is granted, precisely so that its insufficiency in v. 16 lands harder. He notes that Paul does not say ‘we were Jews’ but ‘we are’, keeping the descent-claim intact.

Jerome and Augustine read the verse inside the Antioch speech, and their larger dispute over that episode — whether Peter’s withdrawal and Paul’s rebuke were genuine or a staged accommodation — turns in part on how far the quoted speech extends. Augustine’s insistence that the confrontation was real makes vv. 15-21 the substance of what Paul actually said; Jerome’s accommodation theory sits more easily with an early break.

The later Latin tradition’s peccatores ex gentibus passed into English as ‘sinners of the Gentiles’, which in modern ears reads as invective. That is reception, not evidence (§11), and the reading text does not follow it.

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)