Paul has just consigned the agitator to judgment (v. 10) and is about to wish him under the knife (v. 12). Between the two he inserts himself: ἐγὼ δέ — but as for me. The verse is a compressed self-defense, and its logic runs backward from a fact everybody knows.

The fact is that Paul is being persecuted. The inference is that he cannot be preaching circumcision. The unstated premise is that preaching circumcision is precisely what would stop the persecution — which tells us something about who was doing the persecuting and why.

Three things carry the weight:

1. The doubled ἔτι. Still proclaiming, still persecuted. Each occurrence presupposes a prior state, and the first of them is the crux: it is the one word in the verse that has been read as an admission about Paul’s own past.
2. The reductio. The conditional is first-class in form (εἰ + indicative), so the protasis is entertained as real for the sake of argument — not conceded. The apodosis is a question, and the second sentence draws out what would follow if the answer were unsatisfactory.
3. σκάνδαλον τοῦ σταυροῦ. Not an abstraction. The trip-hazard of a crucified messiah is what makes the gospel unpreachable to those who would otherwise tolerate it, and the perfect κατήργηται says that if circumcision is added, the scandal stands deactivated — it has been made to stop working.

The vocative ἀδελφοί is not decoration. It is the only vocative in the chapter, and it lands in the middle of the letter’s harshest stretch (κατηργήθητε ἀπὸ Χριστοῦ, v. 4; ἀποκόψονται, v. 12). Paul is arguing hard with people he still addresses as kin.

Built onobrien-nigtc · bdf

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

The pronoun is redundant grammatically — κηρύσσω already carries the person — so its presence is emphatic and its function is contrastive. It answers ὁ δὲ ταράσσων ὑμᾶς of v. 10 and pairs with the ἐγὼ πέποιθα that opened that verse. Paul brackets the agitator between two first-person assertions.

δέ here is mildly adversative rather than merely transitional: the shift is from the man who unsettles them to the man who is being hunted. Per corpus policy the particle is rendered, never dropped, and the English pronoun is not absorbed into the verb.

Rendering ‘But I’ is grammatically exact but thin in English; ‘But as for me’ carries the topicalization that the fronted pronoun performs, which is why the reading text uses it.

Built onbdf · silva-becnt

Vocative masculine plural, and the referent at Philippi and Galatia alike is demonstrably mixed (cf. Gal 3:28 in this same letter). Per §3 the masculine stands as written and the mixed referent is noted here rather than resolved in the text: ‘brothers and sisters’ would add words Paul did not write, and neutralizing to ‘friends’ would flatten a kinship term that is doing real work.

The placement is the point. Galatians uses ἀδελφοί at hinges (1:11; 3:15; 4:12, 28, 31; 5:11, 13; 6:1, 18), and here it interrupts an argument about persecution to remind the hearers whose side he is on. Chrysostom noticed the tonal function: the address softens what the sentence is doing.

Built onbdag

First-class condition: εἰ + present indicative. Per standing corpus policy the protasis is entertained as real for the sake of argument without being asserted, and ‘since’ is excluded — it would make Paul concede the charge outright.

But the construction is doing something more specific here than a plain first-class condition. It is a reductio: Paul grants the opponents’ premise hypothetically, then produces a fact (the persecution) that is incompatible with it. The Greek form does not mark this; the argument does. Hence the smooth rendering keeps the plain ‘if’ and lets the following question carry the reduction.

On the apodosis: τί ἔτι διώκομαι is a genuine question, not a rhetorical exclamation with a suppressed answer. The second sentence (ἄρα κατήργηται …) is not the answer but the consequence of the answer being unavailable.

Built onbdf · silva-becnt

The adverb occurs twice, in parallel slots, and both must be rendered. Each ἔτι presupposes a prior state and asks whether it persists — that is the lexical content of the word, and it is what makes the sentence contested.

The rendering must not adjudicate. ‘Still’ in both slots is exactly as open as ἔτι, and relocating or dropping either occurrence would close the question. Note that the second ἔτι is textually secure and unambiguous: the persecution is ongoing, which is the fact the argument rests on.

Built onbdf · silva-becnt

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

κηρύσσω is the herald’s public announcement on behalf of an authority — the corpus gloss is proclaim / herald, kept distinct from διδάσκω (teach) and καταγγέλλω. The word is normally reserved for the gospel (Gal 2:2), which is what makes its object here so pointed: περιτομήν stands where εὐαγγέλιον should stand.

The standing glossary rule applies: the herald-force must survive even where the object is polemically substituted (compare ἄλλον Ἰησοῦν, 2 Cor 11:4). So ‘advocate,’ ‘require,’ or ‘teach’ are all excluded — they would soften the point that the rival message is being presented as a rival kerygma, a competing public announcement.

The accusative is fronted before ἔτι and the verb. Fronting is topicalizing: circumcision is the item under examination, held up before the verb that would allegedly proclaim it. English preserves this by keeping the object early where idiom allows, though the reading text has to place it after the verb.

On περιτομή itself: the standing entry keeps the abstract noun even where Paul uses it polemically, so that the περι-/κατα- wordplay coined at Phil 3:2 (κατατομή) and the claim of Phil 3:3 remain visible.

Built onbdag · silva-becnt

One Greek verb, two English words, per the standing corpus split: διώκω is persecute with a hostile object and pursue with a goal object. Galatians runs both poles — 1:13, 23 and 4:29 of Paul persecuting or Ishmael persecuting; here of Paul persecuted; 6:12 of persecution avoided.

The present passive is durative: standing exposure to harassment, not a single episode. The agents are unexpressed and must stay unexpressed — Greek names no one, and supplying ‘by the Jews’ or ‘by my own people’ would resolve a question the verse leaves open.

Note the internal argument at 6:12: those who compel circumcision do so ‘only so that they may not be persecuted for the cross.’ Gal 5:11 and 6:12 are the same equation read from opposite ends — circumcision buys exemption; Paul has not bought it.

Built onbdag · silva-becnt · obrien-nigtc

Inferential particle, weaker and more colloquial than οὖν or διό, drawing out what follows on a granted supposition. Per the standing corpus entry: where ἄρα heads the apodosis of a reductio, the English must keep the clause audibly hypothetical — ‘in that case’ rather than a bare ‘therefore,’ which would read as Paul’s own flat assertion that the scandal has in fact been nullified.

That is the whole interpretive stake. Rendered ‘therefore the offense of the cross has been abolished,’ the sentence becomes a statement Paul is making. Rendered ‘in that case,’ it becomes the absurd consequence he is refusing.

Built onbdf · na28 · silva-becnt

καταργέω = κατά + ἀργός: to put out of operation. Per the standing corpus entry the gloss is render ineffective / nullify, and one English root must serve every occurrence — which matters acutely here, because Galatians uses the verb twice in eight verses and in opposite directions:

• 5:4 κατηργήθητε ἀπὸ Χριστοῦ — you were severed from Christ, the aorist passive with ἀπό.
• 5:11 κατήργηται τὸ σκάνδαλον — the stumbling-block has been nullified, the perfect passive without ἀπό.

The reader must be able to see it is one verb. ‘Abolish’ is too institutional, ‘destroy’ wrong (the thing is not annihilated but deactivated), and the Vulgate’s evacuatum est drifts toward κενόω.

Three grammatical features are load-bearing:

• Perfect, not aorist: a completed act whose result stands. If circumcision were being preached, the scandal would not merely have been removed once but would be standing removed — permanently out of operation.
• Passive, agent unexpressed. Do not supply one. ‘Then I have nullified the offense of the cross’ is a legitimate inference from the logic but writes a subject into the text.
• Singular verb with neuter singular subject — unremarkable, but worth recording that σκάνδαλον is the subject, not the object.

Built onbdag · bdf · silva-becnt

σκάνδαλον is essentially a Septuagintal formation rendering mikšôl / môqēš — the trip-hazard or snare (Lev 19:14; Ps 118:165 LXX; Isa 8:14). Per §8 the metaphor is live, so the literal tier keeps stumbling-block, which preserves the Isa 8:14 field that Rom 9:33, 1 Cor 1:23, and 1 Pet 2:8 all draw on. ‘Offense’ is permitted in smooth registers where English idiom has fixed the phrase; ‘scandal’ is excluded, since modern English has narrowed it to reputational disgrace, and a bare ‘obstacle’ drops the moral affront.

σταυρός stays concrete. The standing entry forbids abstraction: ‘the crucifixion’ or ‘Christ’s death’ would discard the physical instrument of servile execution whose disgrace is the force of the phrase. The articular τοῦ σταυροῦ is metonymic for the event, but the noun remains the object.

On the genitive: it is best taken as source or epexegetical — the stumbling-block constituted by the cross, or arising from it. Not possessive in any ordinary sense. English holds the bare genitive, so it does.

The phrase is Paul’s compressed name for what 1 Cor 1:23 spells out: Χριστὸν ἐσταυρωμένον, Ἰουδαίοις μὲν σκάνδαλον. A crucified messiah is the offense; circumcision-preaching would file the edge off it.

Built onbdag · muraoka-lxx · silva-becnt

The verse is textually stable in its substance. Points worth recording:

• ἔτι (first occurrence) is read by the whole tradition. Its retention is secure; only its force is disputed (see above).
• ἄρα / ἆρα — the accent is editorial. The earliest majuscule witnesses carry no accents, so NA28’s inferential ἄρα represents a modern judgment about the sentence’s function, not a manuscript reading. This must be reported as editorial and not as evidence.
• Punctuation — where the question mark falls (after διώκομαι only, or again after σταυροῦ) is likewise editorial. Greek manuscripts of this period are unpunctuated, and the choice between a statement and a second question in the last clause rests on discourse analysis.
• Minor witnesses show the usual smoothing tendencies around the connectives, but nothing that affects sense.

No variant here bears on doctrine, and none is worth carrying into the rendering.

Built onna28 · metzger-tc

Chrysostom takes the argument as a proof from experience: the persecution is the evidence, and the Galatians can check it. He also reads the doubled ἔτι without embarrassment about Paul’s past — for him the point is present practice, and the vocative ἀδελφοί is Paul deliberately tempering severity with affection in the middle of a harsh passage.

Jerome, commenting on Galatians, presses the σκάνδαλον: the cross is a stumbling-block precisely because it is shameful, and anything added to it (circumcision above all) removes the shame and with it the gospel. His Latin evacuatum est for κατήργηται is worth noting as reception, not as evidence — evacuo pulls toward κενόω (‘empty’), whereas καταργέω means ‘put out of operation.’ The English tradition’s ‘made of none effect’ descends from that Latin.

Augustine (Exp. Gal.) links 5:11 to 6:12: the agitators’ program is persecution-avoidance, and Paul’s scars are the counter-evidence.

What none of them do is read the sentence as an admission that Paul once preached circumcision. That reading is available from the Greek but is not the patristic instinct, which is worth recording on both sides of the ledger.

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Proposed — pending reviewJohn Chrysostom, Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, vol. 13, ed. Philip Schaff, Buffalo: Christian Literature Company, 1889 · Jerome, Commentary on Galatians, trans. Andrew Cain, Fathers of the Church 121, Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2010

The word is effectively biblical Greek. It is rare in pagan prose and its NT sense is inherited from the LXX, where σκάνδαλον and σκῶλον render the Hebrew words for a snare or a thing set in the path to trip a traveler:

• Lev 19:14 LXX — οὐ προσθήσεις σκάνδαλον, of a stumbling-block laid before the blind.
• Isa 8:14 LXX — the stone of stumbling and rock of offense, which Paul quotes at Rom 9:33 and 1 Peter at 2:8, both with reference to Christ.
• Ps 118:165 LXX — οὐκ ἔστιν αὐτοῖς σκάνδαλον, of those who love the law.

The LXX field is consistently concrete and consistently about being brought down on a road. That is why the corpus retains the physical rendering in the literal tier. Paul’s application of it to the cross at 1 Cor 1:23 and here is the same move: the crucified messiah is a stone in the path of those who would otherwise walk on.

The cognate verb σκανδαλίζω, dominant in the Synoptics (Matt 5:29-30; 18:6-9), preserves the same image and must share the English root.

Built onmuraoka-lxx · bdag

Proposed — pending reviewGustav Stählin, σκάνδαλον, σκανδαλίζω, in Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, ed. Gerhard Kittel, vol. 7, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1971

The argument is not merely biographical. Paul is claiming that circumcision-preaching and cross-preaching are mutually exclusive, and the reason is not that circumcision is intrinsically wicked (he says the opposite at 5:6 and 6:15, where it counts for nothing either way). The reason is that adding circumcision removes the offense — and the offense is not incidental to the gospel but constitutive of it.

This is why the perfect κατήργηται is so sharp. A gospel with circumcision attached is not a slightly diluted gospel; it is one in which the scandal has been decommissioned and stands decommissioned. The cross either offends or it has been neutralized. There is no middle setting.

The corollary, which 6:12 states outright, is that the agitators’ motive is exemption from persecution. Paul’s persecution is therefore not an unfortunate side-effect of his message but a diagnostic of its integrity — the same logic that governs 6:17 (τὰ στίγματα … ἐν τῷ σώματί μου βαστάζω).

Hold this against 1 Cor 1:18-25 and the pattern is one argument: the cross is σκάνδαλον to Jews and μωρία to Greeks, and any preaching that stops being either has stopped being the preaching of the cross.

Built onsilva-becnt · bauckham-god-crucified

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