Paul has just refused all boasting except in the cross (v. 14). This verse gives the ground (γάρ): the whole scale on which the agitators are measuring — circumcised against uncircumcised — has been abolished, because the world in which that scale operated has been crucified.

Three things carry the weight.

1. The symmetry is total. οὔτε … οὔτε cancels both members with equal force. Paul is not saying uncircumcision is now the better option; he is saying the question no longer scores. That is why he can be simultaneously the man who circumcised Timothy (Acts 16:3) and the man who refused to circumcise Titus (Gal 2:3).
2. The third term is not a third option on the same scale. ἀλλά does not offer a better religious status; it names a different order of thing altogether — καινὴ κτίσις, creation-language, God’s own vocabulary.
3. The phrase is deliberately unresolved. καινὴ κτίσις is anarthrous and verbless. It can mean the new creature (the transformed person), the new creation (the new world order inaugurated in Christ), or the act of creating. Ancient and modern readers divide, and the Greek does not adjudicate. The rendering here keeps it open.

The near-identical formulation at Gal 5:6 (“neither circumcision nor uncircumcision has strength for anything, but faith working through love”) shows Paul running the same sentence twice with a different third term — and 1 Cor 7:19 a third time (“but keeping the commandments of God”). The frame is fixed; what fills the ἀλλά slot varies with the argument.

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

NA28 reads οὔτε γὰρ περιτομή τί ἐστιν οὔτε ἀκροβυστία, supported by 𝔓⁴⁶ א* A C D F G and the bulk of the early versional evidence.

A large body of later witnesses (א², the Byzantine tradition) prefixes ἐν γὰρ Χριστῷ Ἰησοῦ — “for in Christ Jesus neither circumcision…” This is transparently an assimilation to the parallel at Gal 5:6, which does have ἐν γὰρ Χριστῷ Ἰησοῦ. The shorter reading is both earlier and explains the longer; scribes harmonize toward a nearby parallel far more readily than they excise one. The editorial committee’s confidence here is high.

A smaller cluster reads ἰσχύει (“has strength for”) for ἐστιν, again from 5:6. Same direction of assimilation, same verdict.

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

γάρ grounds v. 14, not v. 13. Paul’s refusal to boast in anything but the cross, and his statement that through the cross the κόσμος has been crucified to him, are explained by the fact that the flesh-scale itself has been voided. If the world has been crucified, then the world’s markers of standing have no purchase.

Per the corpus policy on epistolary connectives, γάρ is rendered and never dropped. The grounding relation is the argument.

Both nouns stand anarthrous and abstract, functioning as status-terms rather than as designations of persons or of the physical operation.

περιτομή is retained as “circumcision” without a qualifying adjective, per standing policy — including at Phil 3:3, where Paul claims the term for his own side. The abstract-for-concrete idiom (“the circumcision” = the circumcised) is the same construction he parodied with κατατομή at Phil 3:2.

ἀκροβυστία is a biblical-Greek formation (LXX for עָרְלָה) rather than the polite classical ἀκροποσθία. Its primary referent is the concrete foreskin (Gen 17:11 LXX); Paul has abstracted it into a status-term paired with περιτομή (Rom 2:25-27; 3:30; 4:9-12; Gal 2:7; 5:6; 6:15; Col 3:11). The reading text keeps “uncircumcision” so that the abstract parallel with περιτομή survives; the crude register of the underlying word is recorded, not laundered (§5).

Rendering ἀκροβυστία as “the uncircumcised” would shift from status to persons and break the parallel with καινὴ κτίσις, which is emphatically not a class of persons defined over against another class.

τί here is the accented indefinite — “something, anything of consequence” — not the interrogative. NA28’s accentuation (τί before the enclitic ἐστιν) reflects the standard convention; the accent is editorial in the earliest witnesses, which are unaccented, and this should be recorded as editorial judgment rather than presented as manuscript evidence.

The idiom εἶναί τι (“to be something, to amount to something”) is well attested in Paul: Gal 2:6 (οἱ δοκοῦντες εἶναί τι), Gal 6:3 (δοκεῖ τις εἶναί τι), 1 Cor 3:7. It is status-language — to count for something in a reckoning. Note that Paul used this same idiom fourteen verses earlier in this chapter (6:3) of a man who thinks he is something while being nothing; the recurrence at 6:15 applies the same verdict to a ritual status.

At Gal 5:6 the verb is ἰσχύει (“has strength for anything”); here it is the bare copula. Per the standing ἰσχύω entry, the two must stay distinguishable in English: 5:6 says the marker has no strength; 6:15 says it is not anything at all. The reading text uses “counts for anything” at 6:15 to make the reckoning-sense of εἶναί τι audible while keeping ἰσχύω’s strength-vocabulary reserved for 5:6.

The correlative pair cancels both members with equal weight, and a single verb (ἐστιν) stands inside the pair serving both subjects. The literal tier preserves the Greek placement (“neither circumcision is anything nor uncircumcision”) even at cost to English flow; the reading tier may gather the subjects.

The symmetry must not be tilted. Any rendering that leaves either member operative — “circumcision no longer matters, what matters is being uncircumcised in heart” — destroys the abolition of the whole scale on which the argument turns.

After ἀλλά, the verb is elided and must be carried over from the negated clause. The elided verb is ἐστιν, not δικαιοῖ or σῴζει. Supplying a justification-verb (“but a new creation justifies”) would import the letter’s central doctrinal claim into a clause that does not contain it. The literal tier brackets any supplement; smooth registers carry the sense by parallelism and a dash.

Two words, and the whole weight of the verse.

καινός is qualitative newness — new in kind, not merely new in time (νέος). The LXX/NT field is eschatological: καινὴ διαθήκη (Jer 38:31 LXX; 1 Cor 11:25), καινὸς οὐρανὸς καὶ καινὴ γῆ (Isa 65:17; 66:22; Rev 21:1), καινὸν ᾆσμα (Ps 39:4 LXX). Paul’s other use of this exact phrase is 2 Cor 5:17: εἴ τις ἐν Χριστῷ, καινὴ κτίσις — with the same anarthrous verbless construction.

κτίσις is a -σις formation and therefore formally ambiguous between the act of creating, the product (the created order), and by extension an individual creature. All three are attested: Rom 1:20 (act or product), Rom 8:19-22 (the created order), Mark 16:15 (πάσῃ τῇ κτίσει, every creature). LXX usage (Wis 2:6; 5:17; 16:24; 19:6; Sir 43:25) is dominantly the created order.

The rendering keeps “a new creation.” English “creation” carries the same act/product ambiguity as κτίσις and does not exclude the creature-reading as sharply as “creature” excludes the cosmological one. The indefinite article tracks the anarthrous Greek and blocks the definite “the new creation,” which would tip toward the cosmological reading in the reading text.

Proposed — pending reviewF. F. Bruce, The Epistle to the Galatians: A Commentary on the Greek Text, NIGTC, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1982 · J. Louis Martyn, Galatians: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, Anchor Bible 33A, New York: Doubleday, 1997 · Moisés Silva, Biblical Words and Their Meaning: An Introduction to Lexical Semantics, rev. ed., Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1994

The clause ἀλλὰ καινὴ κτίσις has no verb and no article. Greek can leave the equation unstated; English cannot, quite.

What is being asserted? Grammatically the simplest supplement is the carried-over ἐστιν with an implied subject — “but [what is something] is a new creation,” i.e. this is what counts. That is how the parallel at 5:6 works (ἀλλὰ πίστις διʼ ἀγάπης ἐνεργουμένη, with ἰσχύει carried over) and 1 Cor 7:19 (ἀλλὰ τήρησις ἐντολῶν θεοῦ).

The reading text uses a dash rather than supplying “what counts is,” which would add a clause Paul withheld. The study tier brackets the supplement so the reader can see where English has intervened.

Chrysostom (Hom. in Gal. 6) reads the verse as the abolition of the whole category: what Paul cancels is not one marker in favor of another but the mode of reckoning by markers. On καινὴ κτίσις he leans anthropological — the believer remade — but does so in cosmic terms, glossing it by the transformation of the whole manner of life, so the two readings are not sharply separated in his exposition.

Jerome’s nova creatura fixed the anthropological reading in the Latin West for a millennium and is the source of the English “new creature” tradition. Per §11 this is reception, not evidence: it may be named, but it cannot be used to decide the rendering.

Augustine, on 2 Cor 5:17, likewise reads the individual renovation. The cosmological reading is a recovery of the apocalyptic frame that the modern Jewish-apocalyptic scholarship on Paul has foregrounded; it is not a modern invention (the Isaianic and Enochic parallels are ancient) but it was less prominent in the patristic tradition, which had less access to the apocalyptic corpus.

What all the ancient readers agree on is the point the verse makes about circumcision: the symmetry is total, and no ritual status survives it.

Proposed — pending reviewJohn Chrysostom, Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, vol. 13, ed. Philip Schaff

Vulgate: in Christo enim Iesu neque circumcisio aliquid valet neque praeputium sed nova creatura. Jerome renders the expanded Greek text (with ἐν Χριστῷ Ἰησοῦ) and imports valet from 5:6’s ἰσχύει — both assimilations to the parallel, and both against the critical text. Nova creatura fixes the anthropological reading.

Peshitta likewise reflects a text with the “in Christ Jesus” expansion and renders κτίσις with a term for created thing/creature.

The versional evidence is therefore a good witness to the direction of ancient smoothing — toward Gal 5:6 and toward the personal reading of κτίσις — and a poor guide to the wording of the verse.