Paul has just made a bare, verbless appeal — Γίνεσθε ὡς ἐγώ (“Become as I am,” v. 12) — and immediately cleared the air: “You did me no wrong.” Verse 13 is the first step of the recollection that follows. He reminds the Galatians of the circumstances under which they first heard the gospel from him: not a planned campaign, but an illness.

Three things carry the weight of the verse.

1. οἴδατε — Paul is not informing but invoking. The argument of vv. 13–16 depends entirely on facts the readers already hold, which is why he can afford to be maddeningly vague about the details.
2. διʼ ἀσθένειαν τῆς σαρκός — διά with the accusative is causal. The most natural reading is that a bodily illness occasioned the mission: he was detained, or diverted, and preached where he had not intended to. A minority take διά here in the sense “in a condition of,” which would make the illness the circumstance rather than the cause.
3. τὸ πρότερον — either “on the former of two visits” or, more loosely, “originally, at the first.” The choice touches the North/South Galatia question and the dating of the letter, and it cannot be settled from the phrase alone.

The pastoral force is that Paul’s founding visit was unimpressive and physically repellent (v. 14 will say they did not spit at him), and they welcomed him anyway. That memory is the lever he uses against the agitators.

Built onbdag · bdf

οἶδα is perfect in form, present in force: settled knowledge, not inference (the corpus already fixes this at Phil 1:19, 25). Paul uses the 2nd plural indicative here as an appeal to shared memory — the same move as Gal 4:15 (μαρτυρῶ γὰρ ὑμῖν) and 1 Thess 2:1-2. It is a rhetorical constraint on the reader: what follows cannot be denied without denying their own experience.

The postpositive δέ is mildly contrastive and marks the transition from the imperative-plus-disclaimer of v. 12 to the narrative recollection. Per §10, epistolary connectives are rendered, not dropped; “and” or “but” both serve, and the reading text takes the lighter option since the contrast is with the charge Paul just waived rather than with anything asserted.

Built onbdag · bdf

διά + accusative is causal (“because of, on account of”), against διά + genitive which is instrumental or attendant (“through, by means of”). The corpus policy already distinguishes the two, and the distinction matters here more than usual.

Read causally, the sentence says the illness is the reason the Galatians heard the gospel at all: Paul stopped, or turned aside, or stayed longer than planned, and preached because he was there. This is how the majority of commentators take it, and it fits the surprise implicit in v. 14 — they had every reason to reject a sick, unimpressive preacher.

The noun is anarthrous — a weakness, not the weakness. Paul does not identify it, and the honest translation does not either.

Built onbdf · bdag

ἀσθένεια is the α-privative on σθένος (“strength”): absence of strength. Paul’s usage runs the whole range — moral and existential weakness (Rom 6:19; 2 Cor 12:9-10; 13:4), and plain physical illness (1 Tim 5:23; and the cognate verb ἀσθενέω of Epaphroditus, Phil 2:26-27). The qualifier τῆς σαρκός fixes the sense here at the physical pole.

The genitive is one of reference or location: weakness of / in the body. Per the standing σάρξ policy, the single gloss “flesh” is retained even though the referent is plainly the physical organism, so the reader can see that Paul uses one word neutrally here and polemically at Gal 3:3 and 5:16-19. Substituting “body” would hide that, and σῶμα is a word Paul had available.

What the illness was has been guessed at since antiquity — ophthalmia (from v. 15’s eyes), recurrent fever such as Malta or Anatolian malaria, epilepsy (from the ἐξεπτύσατε of v. 14, if the spitting is apotropaic), the σκόλοψ τῇ σαρκί of 2 Cor 12:7. None is demonstrable. Chrysostom, commenting on the verse, declines to name it and takes the point to be the contrast between the preacher’s condition and the message’s reception; Jerome, in his Galatians commentary, links it to the eyes of v. 15. The apparatus records the guesses; the translation must not encode one.

Built onbdag · muraoka-lxx

εὐαγγελίζομαι is deponent middle in Paul (active forms are rare and late), so the middle voice carries no reflexive force. The base sense is to announce good news; the LXX use of the verb at Isa 40:9; 52:7; 61:1 for the herald of YHWH’s saving reign gives Paul’s usage its prophetic weight, and Gal 1:8-9, 11, 16, 23 have already established the word as programmatic in this letter.

The aorist is complexive: the whole founding mission summed as one act. Not “I was preaching” (which the imperfect would give) and not “I have preached.”

Rendering: “proclaimed the good news” in the literal tier keeps the εὐαγγέλ- root visible against εὐαγγέλιον (Gal 1:6-7, 11); “preached the gospel” is used in the reading text, where English idiom is stronger and the noun-link is still audible.

Built onbdag · muraoka-lxx

Neuter article plus comparative adjective used adverbially — a standard Greek construction (cf. John 6:62; 9:8; Heb 4:6; 7:27). Two construals, and the choice has consequences well beyond the verse.

(a) True comparative: “the former of the two times.” Classical usage keeps the comparative force, and if Paul means it strictly, he has visited Galatia twice at the time of writing, and this verse names the first of them. Lightfoot’s reading, and the standard support for a later dating of the letter.

(b) Weakened to a superlative / general past: “at the first, originally.” Koine regularly erodes comparatives toward the superlative and the merely temporal (BDF), and τὸ πρότερον is common in Hellenistic Greek for “formerly” with no second term implied.

Built onbdf · bdag

The verse is textually stable in substance. NA28 prints it without variation units of consequence, and Metzger’s commentary records no discussion at this verse.

Two minor points worth naming:

• Some later witnesses read διὰ τὴν ἀσθένειαν with the article, assimilating toward a definite, known illness. The anarthrous critical text is the harder and better-attested reading, and it is exegetically load-bearing: Paul leaves the ailment unspecified.
• The orthography οἴδατε is universal; the Attic ἴστε does not appear here.

The elision διʼ before a vowel is editorial convention in NA28 and carries no weight.

Built onna28 · metzger-tc

The Vulgate has scitis autem quia per infirmitatem carnis evangelizavi vobis iam pridem — and the choices are instructive. Per + accusative keeps the causal-instrumental ambiguity of διά rather than resolving it. But iam pridem (“long since, a good while ago”) flatly adopts reading (b) of τὸ πρότερον: a general past, with no second visit implied. That is a translational decision, and per §11 it is reception, not evidence.

The Peshitta likewise renders with a temporal “formerly” rather than a comparative.

Chrysostom (Hom. in Gal. 4) takes the weakness as bodily affliction and persecution together, and reads the verse as Paul praising the Galatians: they received him when everything visible about him argued against the message. He does not press the two-visit question. Jerome’s commentary on Galatians associates the ἀσθένεια with the eyes of v. 15 — an inference, not a datum, and one worth naming precisely so the reader can see it is an inference. Theodoret similarly reads bodily illness rather than moral weakness.

The patristic consensus is therefore: physical infirmity, not spiritual or rhetorical weakness. That is a real check on modern proposals that read ἀσθένεια here as unimpressive oratory (cf. 2 Cor 10:10).

Built onmetzger-tc · muraoka-lxx

Verses 12–20 are the letter’s most personal stretch, and this verse opens the evidence. The structure is:

• v. 12 — the appeal, and the disclaimer of grievance
• v. 13 — the circumstances of the founding mission: illness
• v. 14 — their response: no contempt, no spitting; welcomed as an angel of God, as Christ Jesus
• v. 15 — the μακαρισμός they then had; they would have gouged out their eyes for him
• v. 16 — the reversal: has truth-telling made me your enemy?

The rhetorical force of naming the illness is that it maximizes the gap between what the Galatians had to overlook and what they in fact did. Their welcome was not owed to Paul’s presentation; it was owed to the message. The agitators, by contrast, ζηλοῦσιν ὑμᾶς οὐ καλῶς (v. 17) — they court the Galatians attractively and for their own ends. Weakness authenticates; attractiveness does not.

This is the same logic Paul runs at 1 Cor 2:1-5 and 2 Cor 12:7-10, and it is the ἀσθένεια/δύναμις pattern of the cross applied to the messenger.

Built onbdag