Paul has just laid two catalogues side by side — the works of the flesh (vv. 19-21) and the fruit of the Spirit (vv. 22-23) — and closed with the remark that no law stands against the second. Verse 24 is the hinge that turns from description to accomplished fact.

Three things carry the weight:

1. The subject is a possessive designation, not a moral one. οἱ τοῦ Χριστοῦ — “those of Christ,” Christ’s own. Paul does not say “those who have conquered the flesh.” The claim rests on belonging, not achievement.
2. The verb is aorist active, and the subject of the crucifying is the believers. Everywhere else in Galatians the crucifixion-verb has Christ or the world as its object with a passive or a σύν-compound (2:19 συνεσταύρωμαι, 3:1 ἐσταυρωμένος, 6:14 ἐσταύρωται). Here alone Paul makes the believers the grammatical crucifiers, and the tense presents it as one completed act.
3. The flesh goes to the cross with its retinue. σύν + dative is comitative: the παθήματα and ἐπιθυμίαι are not additional victims but the flesh’s own train, executed with it.

The verse therefore answers, in advance, the objection that Paul’s ethic has no mechanism. The mechanism is not a program of suppression but the cross already applied — which is why v. 25 can move straight to a hortatory “let us keep in step.”

What the verse does not say deserves noting. It does not say the flesh is dead and gone; v. 17 has it still desiring, and 6:1 anticipates real lapses. Crucifixion in the first century was a slow death, and the image permits an executed thing still capable of noise.

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

Article + bare genitive, with the head noun unexpressed — a wholly ordinary Greek construction for “those belonging to X” (cf. οἱ τοῦ Ἰσραήλ, οἱ ἐκ πίστεως at Gal 3:7). English needs a supplied noun, bracketed in the literal tier.

The genitive is possessive. Paul had alternatives and did not use them: οἱ πιστεύοντες (those who believe), οἱ ἐν Χριστῷ (already fixed in this corpus as ‘in Christ’), οἱ πνευματικοί (which he does use at 6:1). The bare possessive is the most minimal designation available — nothing about status, maturity, or performance, only ownership.

One further note against a common paraphrase: “those who have become Christ’s” imports an aorist that is not there. The phrase is nominal and timeless; only the verb carries tense.

σταυρόω is fixed in this corpus as ‘crucify,’ with the concrete instrument of servile execution retained in every tier (§8). That discipline matters here more than usual, because every abstraction on offer — “put to death,” “renounced,” “broke with” — quietly removes the thing that makes the sentence hard.

Two features are load-bearing:

• Active voice, believers as subject. This is unique in the Pauline corpus. Rom 6:6 has ὁ παλαιὸς ἄνθρωπος συνεσταυρώθη (passive, divine agent); Gal 2:19 has the perfect passive of the σύν-compound; Gal 6:14 has ἐσταύρωται with the agent unexpressed. Here the believers do the crucifying. This is not a contradiction of the passives but their pastoral counterpart: what was done to them in Christ is something they also did.
• Aorist, complexive. One completed act viewed as a whole, and the natural referent is conversion-baptism (cf. Gal 3:27; Rom 6:3-4). English present perfect (“have crucified”) reads well in smooth registers and preserves the standing result; the literal tier keeps the plain past so the aorist is visible.

The rendering does not adjudicate. ‘Crucified’ / ‘have crucified’ is compatible with all three.

Proposed — pending reviewRichard N. Longenecker, Galatians, Word Biblical Commentary 41, Dallas: Word, 1990

The corpus policy on σάρξ is one English gloss, ‘flesh,’ across the whole range — Christ’s humanity (Gal 4:4), Paul’s illness (4:13-14), Ishmael’s generation (4:23, 29), and the hostile power of 5:13-24 — with the register carried by context and note rather than by varying the word. Galatians is the letter that makes this discipline indispensable: a reader who sees ‘sinful nature’ here and ‘body’ at 4:13 cannot see that Paul used one noun for both.

Here the referent is the σάρξ of vv. 13, 16, 17, 19 — the whole human person as a sphere of self-directed existence, personified enough to have desires (ἐπιθυμεῖ, v. 17), produce works (v. 19), and now to be executed. The article is anaphoric: that flesh, the one the chapter has been describing.

What is excluded from the reading text:

• ‘sinful nature’ — imports a two-natures anthropology and makes σάρξ a component of the person rather than the person under a description (§9).
• ‘body’ — that is σῶμα, a word Paul uses distinctly (Gal 6:17; Phil 1:20), and the substitution would make the verse ascetic in a way Gal 6:17’s flogged σῶμα resists.
• ‘lower self,’ ‘old self’ — modern psychological framing.

Note also the theological restraint the noun imposes. Because σάρξ is not a part of the person, its crucifixion is not the amputation of something but the sentencing of the whole self-in-its-old-mode. The Fathers saw the difficulty: how is the flesh crucified if it still fights (v. 17)? Chrysostom’s answer is that Paul speaks of the will’s decisive verdict, not the extinction of impulse — a reading the crucifixion image itself supports, since a crucified man is condemned, fixed, and dying, but not yet silent.

This is the one place in the corpus where the standing gloss must be set aside, and the departure is declared rather than made silently.

The binding entry fixes πάθημα as ‘sufferings’ — concrete things undergone — precisely so that Christ’s passion and the believer’s afflictions stay on one English root (Rom 8:17-18; 2 Cor 1:5-7; Col 1:24; Phil 3:10; 1 Pet 4:13; 5:9). That is right for every other Pauline occurrence. It cannot be right here: things suffered are not crucified alongside the flesh, and the paired ἐπιθυμίαι fix the domain as impulse rather than affliction.

The -μα formation is passive in force (what is undergone), and in Hellenistic moral vocabulary that yields the sense of an affection or passion — the movement the self undergoes rather than initiates. Aristotle and the Stoics use the cognate πάθος this way, and the LXX has the sense thinly. Paul writes πάθημα, not πάθος (contrast Rom 1:26 πάθη ἀτιμίας; Col 3:5), so the word remains formally the suffering-noun even where the sense is passion.

Rendering: ‘passions’ in reading tiers, with the study tier showing ‘sufferings/passions’ so the concordance link is visible. Excluded: ‘affections’ (archaic outside liturgical register, and modern English hears warmth); ‘emotions’ (a modern faculty-category, §9); ‘evil desires’ (duplicates ἐπιθυμίαι and collapses the pair).

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

The standing entry makes ἐπιθυμία a morally neutral stem whose charge comes from its object or qualifier — ‘longing’ where legitimate (Luke 22:15, of Christ; Phil 1:23), ‘craving’ where marked as disordered (1 Pet 1:14; 2:11; 4:2-3; Gal 5:16, 24). Here the qualification comes from σαρκός in v. 16 and from the company of vv. 19-21, so ‘cravings’ is correct.

The plural is instantial (BDF §142): particular appetites, not appetite as such — matching the pluralized vice-nouns of v. 20-21 (φθόνοι, θυμοί, μέθαι) and reinforcing that what goes to the cross is an actual set of drives, not an abstraction.

‘Lust’ remains excluded as base gloss. Modern English has narrowed it irrecoverably to sexual appetite, which the catalogue of vv. 19-21 shows is one item among fifteen. The Vulgate’s concupiscentiis carries the broad sense the Latin still had; English no longer does (§9, §11).

σύν + dative is comitative — accompaniment, not addition. The prepositional phrase does not name two further objects of ἐσταύρωσαν (which would be καί + accusative) but the retinue that goes to the cross with the condemned. The corpus already keeps σύν lexically distinct from ἐν in Christological contexts (σὺν Χριστῷ vs. ἐν Χριστῷ), and the same discipline applies: ‘together with’ rather than ‘and.’

The image is exact. A crucified man was fixed to the beam and everything about him went up with him; nothing was detachable. That is the force of σύν here — the flesh cannot be executed while its impulses are spared, and the impulses cannot be dealt with apart from the sentence on the flesh.

Two articles. Greek repeats the article before ἐπιθυμίαις, which normally marks a second distinct referent (see the contested block above). English must render both nouns separately rather than fusing them.

No possessive pronoun. The Greek has none. Smooth registers may supply ‘its,’ since the articles are naturally read as possessive with the anaphoric σάρκα, and the reading text does so; the literal tier withholds it, and the note records that αὐτῆς is absent from the critical text (see the textual section).

Proposed — pending reviewJ. B. Lightfoot, Saint Paul's Epistle to the Galatians, 10th ed., London: Macmillan, 1890

δέ is mildly contrastive and must be rendered (§10). It sets v. 24 over against the concluding remark of v. 23 (κατὰ τῶν τοιούτων οὐκ ἔστιν νόμος): there is no law against such things — and those who belong to Christ have dealt with the flesh at the root.

Whether the contrast is with v. 23 alone, or with the whole flesh/Spirit antithesis of vv. 16-23, is a paragraphing question the manuscripts do not answer (they are unpunctuated, and the printed paragraph divisions are editorial judgment). NA28 keeps v. 24 with what precedes; some editors join vv. 24-25 as a unit closing the section.

What is clear is that v. 24 is the indicative on which v. 25’s hortatory subjunctive stands. Verse 25’s εἰ ζῶμεν πνεύματι assumes something already accomplished, and v. 24 is what has been accomplished. Rendering δέ as a full adversative ‘but’ in a way that severs the two would obscure this; a light ‘and’ or ‘but’ at a comma-level seam is right.

The verse is textually quiet, and the variation that exists runs in one predictable direction — scribal completion of what Paul left bare.

1. Addition of Ἰησοῦ after Χριστοῦ. A number of witnesses read οἱ δὲ τοῦ Χριστοῦ Ἰησοῦ. This is the ordinary expansion of a bare Χριστός toward the fuller title, abundantly attested throughout the Pauline tradition, and the shorter reading is to be preferred as the harder and less liturgically shaped. The corpus policy on Χριστοῦ Ἰησοῦ word order (retain as written, do not normalize) applies to the order of an attested pair; here the second name is an addition, not a transposition.

2. Addition of a possessive with the datives. Some witnesses supply αὐτῆς with the παθήμασιν / ἐπιθυμίαις, making the two explicitly the flesh’s own. This is exactly the clarification a reader wants and a scribe supplies; the articles already carry the sense, which is why the addition is easy and secondary. The reading text supplies ‘its’ in smooth registers as an English idiom-requirement and records here that the Greek has no pronoun.

No variant touches the sense of the clause. The active ἐσταύρωσαν with the believers as subject — the theologically striking feature — is universally attested.

The patristic reading is worth having because the Fathers felt the tension between v. 24 and v. 17 sharply, and their answers are still the live options.

Chrysostom presses the active voice as evidence of human agency and therefore of praise: Paul assigns the whole achievement to the Galatians’ own decision, which is why the statement functions as encouragement rather than mere information. On the tension with v. 17 he distinguishes the settled verdict of the will from the continuing motion of appetite — the flesh is condemned and fixed, not annihilated. He also notes that Paul does not say the flesh is destroyed, since to destroy the flesh would be to destroy the man.

Jerome, commenting on Galatians, connects the verse to Gal 2:19 and 6:14 and reads all three as one crucifixion viewed from three sides — Christ’s, the world’s, the flesh’s — with the believer’s own act at 5:24 being participation in the one event rather than a second execution.

Augustine, characteristically, takes the tension differently: the crucifixion is real and complete as a change of dominion, and the continuing conflict of v. 17 belongs to the not yet of the same reality, not to an incompleteness in the act. This is the reading that later becomes standard in the Western tradition.

What none of them does is soften the verb. The image of a slow death by execution — condemned, immobilized, still audible — is what all three use to hold vv. 17 and 24 together, and it is a reason to keep the concrete rendering rather than abstracting to ‘renounced.’

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

Genre: epistolary argument (§10). The clause is a flat indicative statement of fact placed between two catalogues and a hortatory subjunctive, and the register should be plain — no elevation. The one place English is tempted to inflate is the verb, and it must not be: ‘have crucified’ or ‘crucified,’ never ‘have nailed to the cross,’ which adds a word Paul did not write.

The rendering keeps Greek word order where English permits, since οἱ δὲ τοῦ Χριστοῦ stands in the topic slot and the fronting is doing discourse work — identifying the new subject over against the τοιούτων of v. 23.