Paul has just closed the argument of vv. 2-6 with a summary of what does and does not count in Christ Jesus. Verse 7 breaks the register entirely: from formal attestation (μαρτύρομαι, v. 3) and doctrinal summary to a short, stinging pair of clauses — one indicative, one question — with no connective at all. The asyndeton is the pivot into the diatribe of vv. 7-12.

Three things carry the verse:

1. The athletic image is live. Ἐτρέχετε is the footrace verb Paul uses of his own ministry (Gal 2:2; Phil 2:16; 1 Cor 9:24-26), and ἐγκόπτω in this context is best heard as the obstruction of a runner. The chapter sustains movement-vocabulary throughout: running here, walking at 5:16, keeping rank at 5:25.
2. The imperfect is not a compliment. ‘You were running well’ locates the good course in the past and leaves the present open — which the question then fills in.
3. The question is singular. After the plurals of 1:7 (οἱ ταράσσοντες) and 5:12 (οἱ ἀναστατοῦντες), τίς narrows to one. Whether Paul knows the man and is being ironic, or genuinely does not, is left open by ὅστις ἐὰν ᾖ three verses later (5:10).

The verse also sets up a pun the English cannot carry: πείθεσθαι here, πεισμονή in v. 8. Paul asks who stopped them being persuaded, then says that the persuading is not from God.

Built onobrien-nigtc · bdf

Ἐτρέχετε — imperfect of the ordinary verb ‘run.’ In Paul the footrace is a live metaphor, not a faded one for general effort: at 1 Cor 9:24-27 he unpacks the whole stadium (οἱ ἐν σταδίῳ τρέχοντες, βραβεῖον, στέφανος), and at Gal 2:2 he fears he may have run εἰς κενόν. Per §8 the image stays in the main text; per the standing glossary entry, τρέχω is not abstracted to ‘strive’ or ‘make progress.’

Two features of the form matter:

• Aspect. The imperfect is durative — a course sustained over time — and it is set against the aorist ἐνέκοψεν, a single interrupting act. The contrast is the sentence’s whole architecture: a run in progress, then one blow.
• Temporal reference. The imperfect places the good running in the past. Paul does not say ‘you are running well but someone is troubling you’; he says the running was going well. This is the same rhetorical move as 1:6 (θαυμάζω ὅτι οὕτως ταχέως μετατίθεσθε) and 4:15 (τίς ἦν ἡ μακαρισμὸς ὑμῶν) — a past good named in order to expose a present loss.

καλῶς is the same adverb Paul used against the rivals at 4:17 (ζηλοῦσιν ὑμᾶς οὐ καλῶς). The Galatians ran καλῶς; the agitators court them οὐ καλῶς. Keep one English root at both places per the standing καλός/καλῶς entry.

Built onbdag · obrien-nigtc · fee-nicnt

ἐνέκοψεν — aorist of ἐγκόπτω, ἐν + κόπτω (‘strike, cut’). The transparent morphology is ‘cut into,’ and the attested Hellenistic sense is to break in on something in progress: to cut up a road so as to make it impassable, hence to hinder, block, detain.

All five NT occurrences are Pauline or Petrine and all involve the interruption of something under way: Rom 15:22 (ἐνεκοπτόμην τοῦ ἐλθεῖν, repeatedly prevented from coming); 1 Thess 2:18 (Satan blocked the journey); Acts 24:4 (Tertullus asks Felix not to be detained further); 1 Pet 3:7 (prayers cut off). The cognate noun ἐγκοπή at 1 Cor 9:12 stands in exactly the athletic-and-road field Paul is using here.

The rendering decision:

• ‘Hinder’ (Vulgate impedivit) is lexically defensible but has weakened in modern English to mean ‘slow down slightly,’ and it drops the road entirely.
• ‘Cut in on’ keeps the κόπτω root audible and, in a running context, names a recognizable act: crowding a runner out of his lane. This is the reading Chrysostom’s line of interpretation presupposes when he treats the Galatians as tripped mid-course.
• ‘Prevent’ and ‘stop’ overshoot: they assert that the run has ended, which the participle-free question does not.

Per §8 the image is retained. Note the ἐν- assimilated to ἐνε- before the κ; the aorist is complexive, naming the obstruction as one accomplished thing without specifying its mechanism.

Built onbdag · bdf · obrien-nigtc

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

πείθεσθαι — present middle/passive infinitive of πείθω. The active means ‘persuade’; the middle/passive means ‘be persuaded’ and, by a short and thoroughly attested extension, ‘obey’ (Acts 5:36-37; 27:11; Rom 2:8; Heb 13:17; Jas 3:3).

The corpus already fixes the second perfect πέποιθα as ‘I am confident’ (the settled state of one persuaded) and πεποίθησις as ‘confidence.’ The present middle/passive belongs to the same family and its English must stay recognizably connected, because Paul is about to build on the root: πεισμονή in v. 8 is coined from it.

Policy: the reading text uses ‘obeying,’ which modern English hears as a stance toward a claim rather than a mental event, and the literal tier keeps ‘be persuaded’ so the root and the v. 8 pun stay visible. Both are flagged rather than resolved.

Built onbdag · silva-becnt · obrien-nigtc

The dative τῇ ἀληθείᾳ is the ordinary complement of πείθομαι (BDAG: πείθομαί τινι, ‘be persuaded by / obey someone or something’). It is not a dative of respect (‘with respect to the truth’) and not instrumental.

What matters is which word governs it. Greek word order places the dative between the finite verb and the infinitive, and it could in principle attach to either:

• With πείθεσθαι (standard, and required by the verb’s regular construction): ‘not to obey the truth.’
• With ἐνέκοψεν: ‘who hindered you in the matter of the truth?’ — grammatically imaginable but leaves πείθεσθαι without its expected complement and has no support in the versions or the Fathers.

Take it with the infinitive. On the referent: ἡ ἀλήθεια in Galatians is not truth in the abstract but ἡ ἀλήθεια τοῦ εὐαγγελίου (2:5, 14) — the gospel in its integrity, the thing at stake when Paul confronted Peter at Antioch. The article here is anaphoric to that.

Built onbdag · bdf · obrien-nigtc

The bare infinitive with μή, dependent on ἐνέκοψεν, is the crux of the sentence’s syntax. Koine offers several ways to construe it, and the classification changes the force of the question.

The last two overlap in practice, and the μή is in any case grammatically expected with an infinitive, so no emphasis may be read out of its presence (consistent with the standing μή + infinitive/participle policy). The literal tier keeps the negated infinitive bare with a bracketed marker; the reading text adopts result, which is the least committed of the substantive options, and the alternatives are recorded here rather than resolved.

Built onbdf · bdag · silva-becnt

τίς is singular. Elsewhere in the letter the troublemakers are plural: οἱ ταράσσοντες ὑμᾶς (1:7), οἱ ζηλοῦντες (4:17), οἱ ἀναστατοῦντες ὑμᾶς (5:12), ὅσοι θέλουσιν εὐπροσωπῆσαι (6:12). Three verses after our verse Paul returns to a singular — ὁ δὲ ταράσσων ὑμᾶς … ὅστις ἐὰν ᾖ (5:10) — and there the ὅστις ἐὰν ᾖ signals studied indifference or studied ignorance about the man’s identity.

Three construals of the singular here, all live:

1. Generalizing. ‘Who’ as an indefinite singular for whoever it may have been — Greek routinely uses the singular this way, and no individual is in view.
2. A ringleader. Paul knows there is a single principal figure and declines to name him, either for rhetorical effect or because naming would dignify him.
3. Rhetorical, expecting no answer. The question functions as reproach rather than inquiry; Paul is not asking the Galatians for information.

These are not mutually exclusive, and the English ‘who’ is exactly as open as the Greek. Do not resolve to ‘what’ or to ‘someone has.’ The alignment with 5:10 is the strongest evidence that a single figure is at least in Paul’s mind.

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

There is no connective at the head of this verse and none between its two clauses. Both absences are load-bearing (§10; and consistent with the corpus asyndeton policies fixed at Phil 3:2, Phil 4:8, Gal 5:4).

• Sentence-initial. Verses 5 and 6 both open with γάρ; v. 7 opens with nothing. Paul stops arguing and turns on the audience. English must not repair this with ‘but,’ ‘now,’ or ‘so.’
• Between clauses. ‘You were running well’ and ‘who cut in on you?’ stand side by side. The juxtaposition itself does the work: the second clause is the consequence of the first having become past tense. Supplying ‘but’ manufactures an antithesis Paul left the reader to supply.

The register shift matters for §7 (match the source’s own register). Verses 2-6 are formal — an oath-strength attestation (μαρτύρομαι), a legal consequence (ὀφειλέτης), a summary formula. Verse 7 is short, personal, and interrogative. The English should be correspondingly clipped: no subordinating conjunctions, no smoothing.

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

The Greek of this verse is stable in substance. NA28 prints no variant in the apparatus of consequence for meaning, and the reading above is supported across the early witnesses.

Two minor points worth recording:

• ἀνέκοψεν for ἐνέκοψεν appears in a scattering of later witnesses. ἀνακόπτω (‘beat back, check’) is a near-synonym; the variation is almost certainly itacistic/phonetic drift plus lexical substitution of a commoner compound, and it does not alter the sense. ἐνέκοψεν is the harder and better-attested form and is retained.
• Punctuation. The division between the statement and the question is editorial, since the earliest majuscules are unpunctuated. That ἐτρέχετε καλῶς is a statement rather than part of the question is universally agreed and is not seriously in doubt — the imperfect indicative with no interrogative word settles it — but the reader should know that the semicolon (Greek question mark) after πείθεσθαι and the raised point after καλῶς are both modern judgments.

Related: some later witnesses at 3:1 add τῇ ἀληθείᾳ μὴ πείθεσθαι, harmonizing that verse to this one. That is secondary there, and its existence confirms that the phrase belonged here first.

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Vulgate: currebatis bene: quis vos impedivit veritati non oboedire? Jerome keeps the imperfect (currebatis), renders ἐγκόπτω with impedivit (‘blocked, obstructed’ — closer to the road-image than modern English ‘hinder’), and takes πείθεσθαι as obedience (oboedire) with the dative preserved (veritati). He also keeps the pleonastic negative (non oboedire), which shows he read the μή as construction rather than emphasis.

Peshitta likewise renders the second verb with an obedience-word rather than a persuasion-word, which is significant only as evidence that the obedience construal was the early default in both Latin and Syriac reception — not as evidence for the lexeme’s range, which the Greek itself supplies.

LXX background: neither τρέχω nor ἐγκόπτω carries a distinctive LXX register that bears on this verse; the athletic frame is Hellenistic, not Septuagintal. πείθομαι + dative, however, is well established in the LXX in the obedience sense.

Built onmuraoka-lxx · obrien-nigtc

Chrysostom reads the verse as pure encomium-turned-rebuke: the Galatians are competitors who had begun the course honorably and were then jostled out of it. He presses the singular τίς as reticence rather than ignorance — Paul knows and will not say — and he pairs the verse with 5:10 accordingly. He also draws the pastoral inference that the fault lies primarily with the one who cut in, which is why the sentence names an agent rather than accusing the runners.

Jerome, commenting on Galatians, dwells on the road-sense of the compound: the obstruction is something laid across a path, and the Galatians did not stop running of their own accord.

Both readings assume the athletic/road image is live, which is a useful check on the modern temptation to treat ἐγκόπτω as a colorless ‘hinder.’ Neither is cited as lexical evidence (§11) — they are recorded as reception, and as confirmation that the image was still felt by readers much closer to the Greek than we are.

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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 · Jerome, Commentarii in epistulam Pauli apostoli ad Galatas, ed. G. Raspanti, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 77A, Turnhout: Brepols, 2006