Jerome counted some two hundred and fifty readings of this verse in the commentators available to him, and the number has not gone down. Nine Greek words, every one of them common, and no agreement on what the sentence argues.

The shape is clear enough. Two clauses, balanced by δέ … δέ, each with an articular subject and the verb εἰμί, each turning on the numeral εἷς. The first is a general maxim about mediators: a mediator is not of one. The second is a bare confession: but God is one. What is not clear is how the two halves bear on each other, or on the sentence before them.

The context supplies the hinge. Verse 19 has just said that the law was διαταγεὶς διʼ ἀγγέλων ἐν χειρὶ μεσίτου — ordained through angels by the hand of a mediator. Verse 20 picks up that μεσίτης and says something about mediators as a class. Verse 21 then asks, with some alarm, whether the law is therefore against the promises of God — which suggests that v. 20 had just said something that could look like an attack on the law.

The standard reading runs: a mediator implies two parties; the Sinai arrangement had one; the promise to Abraham had none, God speaking directly and unilaterally; therefore the law stands at one remove from the promise, and the promise is the more direct. But each step of that is contestable, and the next section lays out why.

What the rendering must do is refuse to fix what Paul left unfixed. The genitive ἑνός has no expressed head noun; the English must bracket whatever it supplies. The two δέ particles must both be rendered. And the second clause must not be absorbed into the first as though it were a premise in a syllogism Paul never wrote out.

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

Six NT occurrences: Gal 3:19, 20; 1 Tim 2:5; Heb 8:6; 9:15; 12:24. In the LXX only Job 9:33 (Symmachus and Theodotion; the Old Greek differs), where Job wishes for μεσίτης between himself and God. The word is at home in the documentary papyri and the historians: an arbitrator, a guarantor of a contract, a go-between in a negotiation or a treaty. Josephus uses it of Moses and of God as witness to an agreement.

The noun’s defining feature is relational: it names a position between, and so presupposes parties on either side. Whether it presupposes exactly two, or merely more than one, is the question the verse turns on, and the lexica are properly cautious — the word covers the arbitrator between two litigants, the guarantor standing between a creditor and a debtor, and the intermediary through whom a superior deals with an inferior.

Rendering. ‘Mediator’ is retained. ‘Go-between’ is too colloquial and loses the legal register; ‘intermediary’ is accurate but has acquired a bureaucratic flavor; ‘arbiter’ narrows to the dispute-settling sense and would prejudge the verse. ‘Mediator’ in English has the same breadth the Greek has, which is exactly why it is kept.

Built onbdag · muraoka-lxx

Three words, and nearly all the difficulty.

ἑνός is genitive singular, masculine or neuter — the form does not distinguish. It has no head noun. Greek can leave a genitive like this to be filled from context (cf. οἱ ἐκ πίστεως, Gal 3:7, 9, where ‘those of faith’ requires no supplement at all), but here the reader must supply something: one party, one person, one side.

οὐκ ἔστιν is accented in NA28, which in Greek orthography normally marks the existential (‘there is’). But with a predicate genitive the construction is possessive-characterizing — ‘belongs to one’, ‘is a mediator of one’ — and the accent here is better explained by the preceding οὐκ, which regularly throws the accent onto an enclitic. The existential reading (‘a mediator of one does not exist’) is grammatically possible and yields nearly the same sense, but the copular reading is simpler.

So: the mediator is not of one. The predicate genitive names the party or parties the mediator represents or stands between.

Built onbdf · bdag

Proposed — pending reviewHans Dieter Betz, Galatians: A Commentary on Paul's Letter to the Churches in Galatia, Hermeneia, Philadelphia: Fortress, 1979 · J. B. Lightfoot, Saint Paul's Epistle to the Galatians, 10th ed., London: Macmillan, 1890

The second clause is the Shema in Greek dress. Deut 6:4 LXX: κύριος ὁ θεὸς ἡμῶν κύριος εἷς ἐστιν. Paul’s wording is not verbatim — he has ὁ θεός where the LXX has κύριος, and no possessive — so this is a credal formulation echoing the Shema rather than a citation of it, and it is treated accordingly: no quotation punctuation, no restoration of the divine name (§1). The same confession stands at Rom 3:30 (εἷς ὁ θεός), 1 Cor 8:6, and Jas 2:19 (σὺ πιστεύεις ὅτι εἷς ἐστιν ὁ θεός), always with the article on θεός and the numeral anarthrous and predicative.

The article on ὁ θεός and its absence on εἷς fix the direction of the predication: not ‘the one is God’ but ‘God is one’. What the clause asserts is God’s singularity, not his identity.

What the clause does in the argument is less clear than what it says.

Built onbauckham-god-crucified · hurtado-ljc

Two postpositive δέ particles, one in each clause. Per §10 both are rendered; Greek epistolary argument runs on connectives and dropping either converts a balanced pair into two detached remarks.

The first δέ is transitional-continuative: it picks up μεσίτου from v. 19 and develops it. ‘Now’ carries this. The second is adversative: it sets the one God against the two-party mediator. ‘But’ carries this.

Rendering both ‘but’ would manufacture an opposition between v. 20 and v. 19 that the first particle does not assert. Dropping the first (common in modern versions) hides that v. 20 is a continuation of the clause about the mediator rather than a new thought.

The symmetry is tight and deliberate: article + noun + δέ-position + numeral-based predicate + ἐστιν, twice. English cannot reproduce the balance exactly, but the parallel structure of the two clauses should be visible on the page.

Built onbdf

The critical text is secure and is read by 𝔓⁴⁶, א, A, B, C, D, and the mass of witnesses. But the verse attracted early supplementation, which is itself evidence of how hard it was felt to be.

A scattering of witnesses add Χριστοῦ after μεσίτης (reading ‘the mediator of Christ is not of one’) — a clarifying gloss identifying the mediator, not a serious candidate. A few Latin and patristic witnesses read unus differently or expand the second clause with an explanatory phrase.

Built onna28 · metzger-tc

Vulgate: mediator autem unius non est, Deus autem unus est. Jerome reproduces the Greek word for word, including the bare genitive unius, and so hands the ambiguity on intact — which is the right thing to have done, and a better guide than most English versions, which supply a head noun unbracketed.

Peshitta supplies a second party in the first clause, making the two-party reading explicit. This is translational completion, not textual evidence, and the direction of the supplement (toward reading (a) above) is what one would expect of any translator forced to choose.

The pattern across the versions is uniform: where a language can carry the bare genitive, it does; where it cannot, it fills the gap, and always in the same direction. That consistency is worth noting but proves nothing about the Greek — it reflects what a translator must do, not what Paul meant.

Jerome, in his commentary on Galatians, records the extraordinary diversity of interpretation and declines to adjudicate. Chrysostom takes the verse as a defense rather than an attack: having set law and promise apart, Paul guards against the inference that two gods stand behind them, and the one God is the guarantee that both arrangements are his. Augustine reads the mediator-clause as pointing forward to Christ, the true mediator, who is himself one with the God he mediates — a christological development that goes beyond anything the Greek states and must be recorded as reception, not as evidence (§11).

The medieval and Reformation commentators multiplied the readings further. The verse’s later history is a standing demonstration of what happens when a compressed Greek sentence meets readers who require it to argue something complete.

None of this bears on what the words mean in their own setting. It is recorded because the count of opinions is itself a datum about the verse’s difficulty.

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

1. Bracket the supplied head noun. The literal tier reads ‘of one [party]’. The Greek supplies nothing; English requires something; the supplement must be visible as a supplement (§4).

2. Render both δέ particles. ‘Now … but’. Dropping the first is the commonest modern practice and it severs v. 20 from v. 19.

3. Do not supply the conclusion. Renderings such as ‘a mediator implies more than one party, but God is one’ or ‘but God, who gave the promise, is one’ insert an inference Paul withheld. §6 forbids resolving a contested question in the reading text.

4. Keep the copular force. ‘Is not of one’ or ‘does not belong to one’. ‘There is no mediator of one’ adopts the existential reading of the accented ἔστιν, which is possible but not demonstrable.

5. Keep God’s singularity, not his identity, as the predicate. ‘God is one’, never ‘there is one God’ (that would require the predicate article arrangement reversed) and never ‘the one is God’.