Paul has just said that rebuilding what he tore down would convict him as a transgressor (v. 18). Verse 19 gives the ground (γάρ): he has no law-structure left to rebuild, because he died to law — and died through law. The verse is four clauses of extreme compression, three of them bare datives:

• ἐγὼ γάρ — the expressed pronoun, picking up the ἐμαυτόν of v. 18 and carrying the first-person argument down to v. 21.
• διὰ νόμου νόμῳ ἀπέθανον — the same noun twice in two cases, side by side, unarticled: law as the means of a death, law as the party died to.
• ἵνα θεῷ ζήσω — the purpose, with a third bare dative answering the second.
• Χριστῷ συνεσταύρωμαι — no connective at all, a perfect passive, and a fourth dative. The asyndeton is the hinge into vv. 20-21.

Three questions carry the weight: what νόμος is doing in the διά phrase (how law was the instrument of Paul’s death to law); what the bare datives mean (to law? for law? by law?); and whether the final clause belongs with v. 19 or opens v. 20 — a question of editorial punctuation, not of manuscripts. Each is set out below and none is resolved by the rendering.

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

Greek verb endings already carry person, so an expressed nominative ἐγώ is marked. Here it is doubly so: it stands first, before the postpositive γάρ, and it resumes the emphatic ἐμαυτόν of v. 18 (παραβάτην ἐμαυτὸν συνιστάνω). Paul has been speaking in the first person since v. 18 and will continue through v. 21; the pronoun opens that stretch rather than contrasting with a named party.

Per the standing policy (ἐγώ expressed with a finite verb → ‘I myself / I, for my part’), the pronoun is rendered visibly and not absorbed into the verb. No emphasis words beyond ‘myself’ or ‘for my part’ may be added.

γάρ grounds v. 19 in v. 18: the reason Paul would be a transgressor if he rebuilt is that the structure is, for him, dead. It is rendered ‘for’ per §10 and never dropped.

Two occurrences of νόμος stand adjacent in different cases, both anarthrous. Per the standing anarthrous-νόμος policy (ἐκ νόμου, ὑπὸ νόμον, ἐν νόμῳ), the article is withheld in English even where it reads stiffly: anarthrous νόμος presents law as a regime or principle rather than as a named document, and supplying ‘the’ narrows a categorical claim to a statement about the Mosaic text. The witnesses that add the article are smoothing.

διὰ νόμου is instrumental-mediatorial διά + gen (‘through, by means of’), kept distinct per standing policy from ἐκ/ἀπό (source) and ὑπό (personal agency). Law is the channel through which the death came about.

What that means is the crux. The main lines:

• Law pronounced the curse that fell on Christ (Gal 3:13), and Paul died in that death; so law itself was the instrument.
• Law’s own verdict — its demand, its condemnation of the sinner — brought Paul to the end of life under it (cf. Rom 7:9-11, where ἁμαρτία uses the commandment to kill).
• Law in its scriptural witness taught Paul that righteousness is not ἐκ νόμου (Gal 3:11, citing Hab 2:4), and so law itself removed him from law.

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

Three unprepositioned datives in one verse, each completing a different verb: νόμῳ ἀπέθανον, θεῷ ζήσω, Χριστῷ συνεσταύρωμαι.

The first two are plainly a pair — the same construction with ἀποθνῄσκω and ζάω, a pattern Paul uses elsewhere (Rom 6:2, 10-11 τῇ ἁμαρτίᾳ … τῷ θεῷ; Rom 7:4 τῷ νόμῳ; Rom 14:7-8 ἑαυτῷ … τῷ κυρίῳ). The standard classification is a dative of reference or relation: the party with respect to whom one is dead or alive, hence the relation severed and the relation established. English ‘to’ carries this.

Alternatives are available and must be noted rather than excluded. A dative of advantage (‘for law, for God’) is grammatically possible; an instrumental reading of νόμῳ (‘I died by law’) would make the clause tautologous with διὰ νόμου and is for that reason improbable, though it has been proposed. The corpus policy on bare datives (render ‘by’ where agency is leaned, ‘to’ where reference governs, and flag) applies: here reference governs because of the ζάω pair, and the alternatives are recorded.

Χριστῷ with συνεσταύρωμαι is a different matter: the dative is governed by the σύν- element of the compound, a dative of association, and is rendered ‘with Christ’ or ‘together with Christ’ — not ‘to Christ’, which would wrongly assimilate it to the first two datives.

The cumulative effect of four bare datives in nineteen words is a density that no English rendering reproduces; the literal tier keeps them in their Greek slots.

Aorist indicative, complexive: the death is viewed as one completed whole, not as a process and not as a repeated experience. English simple past.

The verb is the ordinary word for dying, and the metaphor is live: Paul is not saying that his attitude toward law changed but that a death occurred. Per §8 the image stays intact. Excluded from the reading text: ‘I am finished with the law’, ‘the law has no further claim on me’ — both substitute the inference for the verb; ‘I became dead to the law’ (converting an aorist into entry-into-a-state) is a tolerable paraphrase but loses the single completed act.

The tense is also evidence. An aorist locates the death at a point, not as an ongoing condition (contrast the perfect in the following clause), and the natural referent is the event the perfect then names: Paul’s death occurred in Christ’s crucifixion. Whether the aorist points to the cross itself, to Paul’s call (Gal 1:15-16), or to baptism (Rom 6:3-4) is not stated and is not supplied.

Keep lexically distinct from ἀπόλλυμι (‘perish’) and θάνατος (‘death’).

ἵνα + aorist subjunctive, telic: ‘so that … I might live’. Per standing policy the telic force is preserved and the aorist is complexive, not iterative. The clause names the purpose of the death, and the structure is the one Paul uses whenever the death/life pair appears: dying is never an end in itself (Rom 6:11; 7:4; 2 Cor 5:15; 1 Pet 2:24).

ζήσω is the Koine sigmatic aorist subjunctive of ζάω; the form carries no semantic weight and is recorded, not rendered differently. Per the standing ζάω entry the verb means ‘live’ and must not be paraphrased to ‘have life’ or ‘be alive’, which convert ongoing existence into a possession or a state.

θεῷ answers νόμῳ exactly — the same case, the same construction, the replaced relation. English must use the same preposition at both points (‘to law … to God’) or the substitution that is the whole point of the verse becomes invisible. Renderings that vary (‘died to the law so that I might live for God’) break the pair.

The tense of ζήσω is worth noting: Paul writes an aorist subjunctive rather than the present ζῶ he will use three times in v. 20. The aorist views the new life as a whole, entered; the presents of v. 20 describe it as underway.

Χριστῷ συνεσταύρωμαι — perfect passive, first person singular, of σύν + σταυρόω. Three features are load-bearing and all three must survive in English.

(1) The σύν- prefix. Per the standing policy on σύν- compounds throughout this corpus (συνεργός, σύμψυχος, συγκοινωνός, συμμιμητής, συνεκλεκτός, συμπρεσβύτερος, συναθλέω, συμμορφίζομαι), the prefix stays audible: ‘crucified together with’, not merely ‘crucified’. The dative Χριστῷ is governed by the prefix.

(2) The perfect. A completed crucifixion whose result stands. English present perfect is required: a simple past (‘I was crucified with Christ’) severs the standing result, and a present (‘I am being crucified’) converts the tense. The contrast with the aorist ἀπέθανον in the same verse is deliberate — one views the event, the other the state in force.

(3) The passive. The agent is unexpressed and must stay unexpressed, per the standing σταυρόω entry: neither ‘God crucified me with Christ’ nor ‘I have crucified myself with Christ’ is admissible. Note that Gal 5:24 has the active with believers as subject (τὴν σάρκα ἐσταύρωσαν) and Gal 6:14 the perfect passive with the κόσμος; the three must stay distinguishable.

Per the standing σταυρός/σταυρόω policy the concrete instrument of servile execution remains in the reading text. ‘I have died with Christ’, ‘I share in Christ’s death’, and ‘my old self was put to death’ all discard the cross, which is the one thing Galatians will not let go of (Gal 3:1; 5:11; 6:12, 14).

Cognates to keep on one English root: σταυρός (‘cross’), σταυρόω (‘crucify’), συσταυρόομαι (here and Rom 6:6; and literally of the two robbers, Matt 27:44; Mark 15:32; John 19:32).

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)

NA28 punctuates with a raised dot after ζήσω and another after συνεσταύρωμαι, which attaches Χριστῷ συνεσταύρωμαι to v. 19 as its closing clause. That is an editorial decision, not a manuscript reading: the earliest majuscules are unpunctuated, and the verse numbering is sixteenth-century.

The alternative attaches the clause to what follows, so that the perfect heads the sequence ζῶ δὲ οὐκέτι ἐγώ (v. 20) — crucifixion, then the life that results. On this reading δέ in v. 20 answers συνεσταύρωμαι directly.

There is no significant variation in the Greek witnesses to the wording itself. The occasional addition of the article before νόμου or νόμῳ in the later tradition is the familiar scribal pull toward definiteness and is secondary; the anarthrous text is the harder reading and is retained.

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

No connective stands between ἵνα θεῷ ζήσω and Χριστῷ συνεσταύρωμαι — no καί, no δέ, no γάρ. Per the standing asyndeton policy in this corpus (imperatival series, Phil 3:2; adjectival lists, Phil 4:8; ἵνα … ἵνα, Gal 4:5; coordinate main clauses, Gal 5:4; paragraph seams, Gal 5:25), the absence is reproduced: no conjunction is supplied in English.

The abruptness is the rhetoric. Paul has been arguing — γάρ, ἵνα, a measured substitution of one dative for another — and then stops arguing and states a fact about himself with no logical joint at all. Supplying ‘for’ (making it the ground of the death) or ‘and’ (making it a further item) both repair what the Greek leaves broken, and each quietly settles the clause-division question discussed above.

διὰ νόμου νόμῳ places one noun twice in adjacent words in two cases. This is not the cognate accusative or the figura etymologica already catalogued in this corpus (τῇ ἐλευθερίᾳ … ἠλευθέρωσεν, Gal 5:1; προσευχῇ προσηύξατο, Jas 5:17), where a verb and its own root noun are paired. Here a single noun is set against itself in two syntactic roles, and the effect is that law appears on both sides of the transaction: the agent of the death and its casualty.

English can reproduce the repetition and must: the standing anti-variation discipline (applied to ἀλλήλων in Gal 5, καλός/καλῶς in Gal 4:17-18, ἔργα in Jas 2, εἰρήνη in Jas 3:18) forbids varying the two to ‘through the law … to legal obligation’ or similar. One English word, twice, in the Greek order.

Chrysostom (Hom. in Gal., on 2:19) reads διὰ νόμου as the law’s own testimony: the law itself, rightly heard, hands the hearer over to Christ, so that in obeying law Paul left it. His concern is to deny that Paul sets law against itself arbitrarily.

Jerome (Comm. in Gal.) renders ego enim per legem legi mortuus sum, keeping both occurrences of the noun and both cases, though Latin’s lack of an article obscures the anarthrous force that the Greek carries. The Vulgate’s Christo confixus sum cruci for συνεσταύρωμαι is a two-word periphrasis forced by the absence of a Latin σύν- compound; the English tradition’s ‘I am crucified with Christ’ follows it and loses the perfect.

Augustine, treating the verse within his broader account of law and grace, presses the condemning function of law as what put the sinner to death (cf. his handling of Rom 7), a reading that has governed much of the Western tradition.

Later dogmatic use of συνεσταύρωμαι — as a locus for union with Christ, and in the ascetic tradition as a text about mortification — is reception rather than exegesis of this clause, and per §9 and §11 it is recorded here and not permitted to shape the rendering. In particular, the mortification reading requires a present or iterative force the perfect does not have.

Proposed — pending reviewJohn Chrysostom, Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, vol. 13 · Jerome, Commentarii in epistulam Pauli ad Galatas, ed. G. Raspanti, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 77A (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006)