Paul is recalling the Galatians’ first reception of him. Something about his physical condition (v. 13, διʼ ἀσθένειαν τῆς σαρκός) put them under strain: his body was a πειρασμός — a test — for them. He names two things they did not do, and one thing they did.

The two negatives escalate. ἐξουθενέω is a verb of appraisal: to reckon someone as nothing. ἐκπτύω is a verb of the body: to spit. The second is coarser and more physical than the first, and it is a NT hapax. Whether the spitting is literal contempt or the apotropaic gesture Mediterranean people used against the evil eye and against contagious or ill-omened bodies is genuinely disputed, and the decision changes the temperature of the verse.

The positive is a double comparison that climbs: ὡς ἄγγελον θεοῦ … ὡς Χριστὸν Ἰησοῦν. Whether the second clause escalates past the first or restates it turns on how one reads ἄγγελος — an angelic being, or a messenger commissioned by God. Either way the verse ends with the highest possible claim about how a preacher may be received, and it does so without a verb of comparison beyond the bare ὡς, which Paul leaves the reader to fill.

The sting is in v. 16: the people who once received him as Christ now count him an enemy.

πειρασμός is a verbal noun of πειράζω and covers two distinct things in biblical Greek: (1) a trial or ordeal that tests, and (2) an enticement toward evil. BDAG separates them cleanly, and the second is what English ‘temptation’ now means almost exclusively.

Here the first sense governs. The thing that tested was Paul’s own bodily state, and there is nothing in the context about being lured into sin. The LXX use of πειρασμός for Israel’s testings in the wilderness (Deut 4:34; 7:19; 29:2, of the Egyptian ordeals) and for the testing at Massah (Exod 17:7; Ps 94:8 LXX) sits in exactly this domain: a situation that reveals what someone is made of.

So: trial. The archaic English ‘temptation’ — still audible in the liturgical register — is not wrong historically but is now actively misleading, and per §9 the diachronic finding governs the base rendering.

ἐν τῇ σαρκί μου is one of the plainest anthropological uses of σάρξ in Paul: his physical body and its condition, picked up directly from ἀσθένειαν τῆς σαρκός in v. 13. It carries none of the ethical charge that the same word will carry from Gal 5:13 onward.

Per the standing corpus policy the single gloss flesh is retained rather than switched to ‘body’ or ‘physical condition’ — the reader needs to see that Paul uses one word across the neutral and the polemical range, and Galatians is precisely the letter where both occur. The register difference is carried here in the note, not in the rendering.

What the ailment was is unrecoverable. Ophthalmic disease has been proposed on the strength of v. 15 (τοὺς ὀφθαλμοὺς ὑμῶν ἐξορύξαντες), malaria on the strength of the South Galatian itinerary, epilepsy on the strength of ἐκπτύω. Every reconstruction is an inference from a single word, and the text names nothing.

ἐξουθενέω (a Hellenistic by-form of ἐξουδενέω, built on οὐδέν) means to reduce to nothing in one’s estimation — to write off. It is overwhelmingly a Septuagintal and NT word, rare in classical prose, and it belongs to the vocabulary of social contempt: the despised stone (Ps 117:22 LXX), the despised Servant (Isa 53:3 uses ἀτιμάζω, but the semantic field is the same), the strong despising the weak (Rom 14:3, 10; 1 Cor 16:11).

The rendering despise / treat as nothing keeps the οὐδέν root audible. ‘Reject’ is too neutral — it names an outcome without the valuation; ‘scorn’ adds heat the verb does not require. The aorist is a single retrospective act, not a habit.

Note the pairing: Paul first denies the inward verdict (they did not write him off) and then the outward gesture (they did not spit). The order is estimation, then act.

ἐξεπτύσατε is a NT hapax. The verb is ἐκ + πτύω, ‘spit out,’ and πτύω itself is the ordinary Greek verb for spitting (John 9:6; Mark 7:33; 8:23).

By the Koine period the compound is well attested in a faded, figurative sense: to reject with disgust, to abominate — Homer’s use of the simplex for spitting out seawater (Od. 5.322) stands at the concrete end, and Hellenistic writers use the compound for spurning a proposal or a person. The Vulgate’s respuistis takes it this way, and Chrysostom on Galatians reads the pair straightforwardly as two grades of contempt.

Per §8 the metaphor is retained in the main text either way: spat away keeps the physical image live and is compatible with both readings, whereas ‘loathed’ or ‘abominated’ silently adopts the faded one. The object is supplied in English only because English transitivity requires it; Greek leaves it unstated and so does the literal tier.

NA28 reads τὸν πειρασμὸν ὑμῶν ἐν τῇ σαρκί μου with 𝔓⁴⁶ א* A B C² D* F G 33 and the bulk of the early versional evidence. The genitive is objective: the trial you underwent.

Two secondary readings are worth naming, and both look like attempts to relieve the awkwardness of ‘your trial in my flesh’:

• τὸν πειρασμόν μου (‘my trial’) — read by the Byzantine tradition (K L Ψ, most minuscules) and reflected in the Textus Receptus. It smooths by matching the genitive to the following μου, and it makes Paul rather than the Galatians the one tested. Transcriptionally this is the easier reading and therefore the later one.
• τὸν πειρασμὸν ὑμῶν ἐν τῇ σαρκί μου with τόν omitted, or ἐν omitted, in scattered witnesses — trivial and without exegetical consequence.

Metzger’s committee treats the ὑμῶν reading as secure; the internal argument is decisive, since a scribe who found ὑμῶν puzzling would produce μου, while no scribe would create the harder ὑμῶν out of the easy μου.

One further point of punctuation, not of text: the position of ἐν τῇ σαρκί μου is ambiguous. It can qualify πειρασμόν (the trial consisting in my flesh) or attach adverbially to the verbs (in the matter of my flesh you did not despise me). English word order reproduces the same ambiguity if the phrase is left in its Greek slot, which is what the literal tier does.

ἄγγελος is ‘one sent with a message.’ Greek has no separate word for the celestial being; context alone distinguishes a human courier (Luke 7:24; Jas 2:25) from an angel (Matt 1:20; Gal 1:8).

The qualifier θεοῦ and the anarthrous form leave both open.

The rendering keeps angel of God in the reading text, since the Gal 1:8 parallel is the closest control in the letter, and flags ‘messenger’ rather than resolving. Note that the ambiguity is not eliminable in English either way: ‘messenger’ loses the celestial reading, ‘angel’ loses the commission reading, and no single word holds both. The apparatus carries what the gloss cannot.

ἐδέξασθε is the standard hospitality verb: to receive a guest, welcome a visitor. The middle is lexical (δέχομαι has no active) and should not be over-read as reflexive.

It is worth keeping distinct from προσδέχομαι, already fixed in the corpus as ‘welcome / receive,’ and from παραλαμβάνω (‘receive as something handed on’). Here the object is a person arriving, and the Jesus-tradition supplies the controlling parallel: ὁ δεχόμενος ὑμᾶς ἐμὲ δέχεται (Matt 10:40), where receiving the emissary is receiving the sender. Paul’s two ὡς clauses stand in exactly that logic.

Render received in the literal tier (the guest-reception sense) and welcomed where the smooth text needs the warmth the aorist plainly carries in context.

Both comparisons are bare ὡς + accusative, with no verb of their own; they modify ἐδέξασθέ με. Greek permits the compression; English needs a supplied ‘[you would]’ in the study tier to make the construction legible, and this is bracketed rather than smuggled in.

The second ὡς is asyndetic — no καί, no ἀλλά. Per the corpus asyndeton policy no connective is supplied. The abruptness is the rhetoric: the sentence lands on Χριστὸν Ἰησοῦν with nothing cushioning it.

On the relation of the two clauses:

The punctuation adopted (comma, not dash or colon) leaves both available. A dash would tip toward climax; ‘that is, as Christ Jesus’ would tip toward restatement.

On Χριστὸν Ἰησοῦν: the title-first order is retained per corpus policy rather than normalized to ‘Jesus Christ.’ Some witnesses transpose, which is the expected scribal drift toward the commoner order.

Paul does not say the Galatians mistook him for Christ. He says they received him as Christ Jesus — and he says it approvingly, as the high point of the recollection, without a word of correction.

The theological logic is the emissary convention, not any confusion of persons. In the Jesus-tradition the sent one carries the sender’s standing so completely that reception of the one is reception of the other (Matt 10:40; Luke 10:16; John 13:20). Paul’s opening claim in this letter — an apostle οὐκ ἀπʼ ἀνθρώπων οὐδὲ διʼ ἀνθρώπου ἀλλὰ διὰ Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ (1:1) — is what makes v. 14 defensible rather than blasphemous.

Two consequences follow for the argument. First, the Galatians’ original reception of Paul is evidence for the gospel they received, since they treated its bearer as they would treat its subject. Second, the reversal in v. 16 (ἐχθρὸς ὑμῶν γέγονα) is therefore not merely a change of affection but a repudiation of their own earlier verdict about where the message came from.

The contrast with the flesh is deliberate and should not be softened. What they received as Christ was a man whose body was a trial to look at. Paul is placing the pattern of 2 Cor 12:9-10 — and behind it Phil 2:6-8 — on his own person: divine commission carried in weakness, honored not despite the weakness but through it.

Chrysostom (Hom. in Gal. 4) takes the two verbs as ascending grades of contempt and stresses that Paul is not boasting of his reception but shaming the Galatians with it: they honored him most when he had least to commend him, and dishonor him now when nothing about him has changed but their allegiance. He reads ὡς Χριστὸν Ἰησοῦν as the top of a ladder.

Jerome, commenting on Galatians, is interested in the ἀσθένεια of v. 13 and the spitting here, and treats ἐκπτύω as ordinary rejection (respuistis in the Vulgate) rather than as a ritual gesture — evidence that the faded sense was the natural one for a fourth-century Latin reader, though not evidence for what a first-century Galatian did.

Theodoret and the Antiochene tradition connect ἄγγελον θεοῦ to Gal 1:8, which is the strongest ancient support for the celestial reading.

None of the Fathers reads the verse as a christological problem, which is itself informative: the emissary convention was transparent to them in a way it is not to modern readers.