This is the hardest sentence in Galatians 4 to construe, and the difficulty is grammatical, not doctrinal. Paul has just said the rival teachers ζηλοῦσιν ὑμᾶς οὐ καλῶς — “they are courting you, but not honorably” (v. 17). Here he concedes the practice while condemning their version of it: being courted is a good thing, provided it is in a good cause, and provided it lasts.

Three things must be decided, and only the third is genuinely open:

1. The ellipsis. There is no finite verb. Greek supplies ἐστίν, and the neuter καλόν is its predicate: “[it is] good to be courted.”
2. The wordplay. καλόν … ἐν καλῷ deliberately answers οὐ καλῶς of v. 17. The repetition is the argument, so English must repeat the word.
3. The voice of ζηλοῦσθαι. Passive (“to be courted”) or middle (“to be zealous”)? The passive is now dominant and fits the context; the middle has real patristic support. This is flagged, not resolved.

The second half is plain and pointed: the Galatians’ devotion was warm while Paul stood in front of them and cooled when he left. That is the wound the whole paragraph (vv. 12–20) is pressing on.

δέ is mildly adversative and does the pivot: v. 17 named a corrupt zeal, v. 18 concedes the genus while indicting the species. Paul is not saying “it is better to be courted well”; he is saying that being the object of eager attention is in itself καλόν, and that the rivals fail on two counts — the cause is not good, and the attention will not last.

The two qualifications are joined asymmetrically: ἐν καλῷ (the sphere) and πάντοτε (the duration), then καὶ μὴ μόνον … unpacks πάντοτε by naming the one interval the Galatians’ zeal did cover. Read this way the sentence is tight, and the second half is not an afterthought but the sting.

The δέ is rendered, not dropped: epistolary connectives carry the argument (§10).

ζηλόω covers a spectrum: to be zealous for something, to court or make much of someone, to be jealous of someone. BDAG distinguishes the transitive “strive for, show interest in, court the favor of” (which governs v. 17 twice) from the intransitive “be filled with jealousy.” The verb is object-determined, exactly as the standing glossary entry for the noun ζῆλος records.

In v. 17 the sense is settled by the accusatives: ζηλοῦσιν ὑμᾶς — they are paying court to you, canvassing you, making you the object of their attentions. ἵνα αὐτοὺς ζηλοῦτε turns the tables: so that you will court them. Verse 18’s ζηλοῦσθαι, if passive, is the third member of that chain: “to be the one courted.”

English has no single verb spanning this. “Be zealously courted” is heavy but exact; “be courted” alone reads as romantic in modern English unless the context steadies it, which here it does. “Be sought after” is the smoothest and is used in the liturgical tier. Avoid “be envied” (that is φθονέω / φθόνος, kept distinct at Phil 1:15) and avoid “be admired,” which drops the active exertion the verb names.

καλός in Koine covers what is fine, honorable, admirable, fit for its purpose — the aesthetic and the moral together, and in the LXX it renders טוֹב across that whole range. It is not narrowly “morally right” (that leans δίκαιος) and not merely “useful” (χρηστός).

The force here is the repetition. Verse 17 has the adverb οὐ καλῶς; verse 18 has the neuter predicate καλόν and then the substantival dative ἐν καλῷ. Three members of one root inside twenty words. Any translation that varies the English (“it is right … in a fine way”) destroys the figure. So: good … good.

ἐν καλῷ is anarthrous and substantival: “in [what is] good.” Two construals of the ἐν:

• Sphere/domain — the courting takes place within the realm of what is honorable: “in a good cause.”
• Standard/manner — very nearly adverbial, equivalent to καλῶς: “honorably.”

The difference is slight and both readings answer οὐ καλῶς. “In a good cause” is preferred because it preserves the prepositional shape and lets the reader see the ἐν, whereas “honorably” silently converts a prepositional phrase into an adverb. A supplied bracketed noun keeps the substantival adjective visible in the literal tier, per the standing policy for τὸ ἐπιεικές (Phil 4:5) and τὸ ὑπερέχον (Phil 3:8).

The clause is verbless. Greek routinely omits ἐστίν with an impersonal neuter predicate plus infinitive — καλόν [ἐστιν] ζηλοῦσθαι, on the model of καλὸν … ἐστιν at 1 Cor 7:1, 8, 26 and Mark 9:5. The copula is supplied in brackets in the literal tier and unbracketed in the reading text, consistent with the policy already fixed for verbless doxologies and salutations.

The negative is μή, not οὐ, because the construction is non-assertive: the negation falls inside an infinitival predicate expressing what is fitting, not on a statement of fact. This is regular Koine (BDF) and carries no special emphasis.

One further ambiguity deserves naming: does πάντοτε attach to ζηλοῦσθαι or to the whole predicate? Practically it makes no difference to the sense, and the clause-final position is emphatic either way, so the English keeps the adverb where Paul put it — last, before the comma, so the sentence lands on the word that indicts the Galatians’ inconstancy.

πάντοτε is the plain frequency adverb “always, at all times,” already fixed in the glossary from Philippians. Here it stands clause-final, which the standing policy requires be preserved in English word order where possible: the sentence closes on the temporal demand, and the following καὶ μὴ μόνον … then names the interval the Galatians actually managed.

μὴ μόνον without a following ἀλλὰ καί leaves the positive member unstated. The Greek is elliptical: “not only during my presence [but also in my absence].” Paul does not write the second half, and the translation should not supply it — the omission is itself rhetorical, since the unstated clause is exactly what the Galatians have failed to do. The reader is left to complete the sentence against themselves.

Compare the ἀπουσία / παρουσία pair at Phil 2:12, where the same pastoral point is made with both members expressed. Here only one is.

ἐν τῷ + infinitive is the standard Koine temporal construction, heavily Lukan and clearly LXX-flavored (rendering Hebrew בְּ + infinitive construct): “during, while, when.” με is the accusative subject of the infinitive.

πάρειμι is cognate with παρουσία, and the standing glossary entry for that noun distinguishes bodily presence from eschatological advent. Here the sense is unambiguously the first: Paul on the spot, in the room. The idiom πάρειμι πρός + acc. (cf. Acts 12:20; 2 Cor 11:9) means to be present with someone, face to face, not merely nearby — which is why πρός is rendered “with” in smooth English while the literal tier keeps “toward” to display the accusative.

The phrase recurs two verses later: ἤθελον δὲ παρεῖναι πρὸς ὑμᾶς ἄρτι (v. 20). The verbal link is deliberate and should be visible in English at both points: v. 18 says their zeal only ran while he was present; v. 20 says he wishes he were present now. The same word, opposite direction.

NA28 prints καλὸν δὲ ζηλοῦσθαι ἐν καλῷ πάντοτε without brackets, and the reading is supported by the major uncials (𝔓⁴⁶ ℵ A B C D) with no serious rival. Metzger’s committee did not treat the verse.

Two minor points of variation, neither exegetically live:

• Some minuscules read ζηλοῦσθε (present indicative or imperative, 2 pl.) for the infinitive. Since ζηλοῦσθαι and ζηλοῦσθε were homophonous in later Greek, this is an itacistic slip. As an imperative it would produce a smoother sentence — “be zealous in what is good always” — which is precisely why it is secondary: it repairs the awkward ellipsis. The direction of scribal smoothing runs from the harder infinitive to the easier finite verb.
• The order ἐν καλῷ ζηλοῦσθαι appears in scattered witnesses, a stylistic transposition without consequence.

The difficulty of the verse is grammatical, not textual. Nothing in the apparatus rescues the interpreter here.

The Vulgate reads bonum autem aemulamini in bono semper — “but imitate/emulate the good always,” taking the verb as a middle-deponent imperative with bonum as its object. Jerome has thus resolved both cruxes at once: the voice is middle, and the ellipsis disappears because the verb is finite. This is a legitimate construal of the letters but it is one reading among several, and per §11 it is reception rather than evidence. It should not be allowed to settle the voice question.

The Syriac Peshitta likewise leans toward an active-zeal sense, rendering with a form of the root meaning “be zealous.” The versions thus line up with the patristic middle reading rather than the modern passive — which is worth knowing, and worth not being governed by. The versions faced the same ambiguity in Greek that we do, and their solutions are attempts, not information.

The cumulative point: where three ancient versions independently choose the easier construal, that tells us the Greek was hard, not that the easier construal is right.

Chrysostom (Hom. on Galatians 4) reads the verse as continuing Paul’s contrast of motives: the rival teachers’ eagerness is real but its object is corrupt, and Paul insists that zeal is honorable only when its aim is honorable. He also presses the temporal clause pastorally — the Galatians’ warmth toward Paul was tied to his physical presence, and that dependence is itself the symptom of immaturity the whole chapter diagnoses (νήπιοι, v. 3).

Theodoret and Jerome in his Galatians commentary take substantially the same line, both operating with a middle or active sense of the verb.

What the Fathers uniformly see — and it is worth recovering — is that this verse is not a general maxim dropped into a polemic. It belongs to the wounded-affection paragraph of vv. 12–20, where Paul recalls how they received him as an angel of God (v. 14), would have torn out their eyes for him (v. 15), and now count him an enemy (v. 16). Verse 18 names the pattern: their devotion was situational. That reading requires no lexical decision and holds under either construal of the voice.

The genre is polemical-epistolary argument with a strong affective undertow, and the register should stay conversational and slightly broken — Paul’s Greek here is not smooth, and per §6 the English should not be smoothed past it. The literal tier keeps the bracketed copula, the wooden “to be zealously courted,” and “the being-present of me,” so the constructions stay visible.

The reading text keeps three things: the good … good repetition, the clause-final always, and the unfinished μὴ μόνον. The em dash carries the shift from the general principle to the personal complaint, which the Greek marks with καί alone.

One thing the rendering must not do is supply the unstated second half of the contrast. “Not only when I am there with you, but also when I am away” is what Paul means and is not what Paul wrote. Leaving the sentence open leaves the reader where Paul left the Galatians.