Verse 2 is the general rule that verse 1 was a special case of. Paul has just told the πνευματικοί to set a fallen brother right in a spirit of gentleness, watching themselves; now he widens the frame: ἀλλήλων τὰ βάρη βαστάζετε. The pronoun is fronted, which throws the weight onto the mutuality — one another’s burdens, not simply burdens.

Three things then have to be settled, and the second and third are genuinely contested:

1. βάρη is a physical load-word, and Paul reuses the load-image three verses later with a different noun (φορτίον, v. 5). Whether the two nouns are being distinguished or are near-synonyms is a real question.
2. ἀναπληρώσετε — future indicative in NA28, but a substantial part of the tradition reads the aorist imperative. This changes whether v. 2b is a promise or a second command.
3. ὁ νόμος τοῦ Χριστοῦ — a phrase Paul uses nowhere else in this form, in a letter that has spent five chapters arguing that believers are not ὑπὸ νόμον. The genitive is left open here on purpose.

The verse is also the point at which Galatians’ argument turns fully practical without abandoning the law-question: Paul does not say that love replaces law, nor that the Torah is reinstated. He says that a specific practice — shouldering what crushes someone else — is how a certain law gets filled up.

The reciprocal pronoun stands before its head noun, reversing the unmarked order (τὰ βάρη ἀλλήλων). Per the corpus policy on fronted genitives, the displacement is topicalizing and cannot be reproduced in English word order; it is recorded here rather than compensated for with added emphasis words.

This is the fifth ἀλλήλων in fourteen verses (5:13, 15 twice, 26 twice, 6:2), and the corpus rule stands: identical English at every occurrence. Paul is running one thread — do not bite one another, do not provoke one another, do not envy one another, carry one another’s burdens. The final member is the positive one, and its force depends on the reader hearing the same pronoun.

βαστάζετε is present imperative — durative, a standing practice rather than a single act of relief.

The verb is a physical load-carrying word: the man with the water jar (Mark 14:13), Jesus carrying the cross (John 19:17), stones picked up to throw (John 10:31). Per §8 the metaphor is live and stays live in English.

Galatians deploys the verb three times in a deliberate pattern, and the pattern is only visible if one English root serves all three:

• 6:2 — shared burdens, imperative, plural.
• 6:5 — the load no one can hand off, future, distributive (ἕκαστος).
• 6:17 — Paul carries the στίγματα of Jesus in his body.

A reading that treats 6:2 and 6:5 as contradictory has usually lost the verb link.

βάρος is weight — literally the heat of a day’s labor pressing down (Matt 20:12), the load of a demand (Acts 15:28), and in one striking Pauline inversion the ‘weight of glory’ (2 Cor 4:17), where the LXX resonance with כָּבוֹד (heaviness / glory) is audible.

φορτίον (v. 5) is derived from φέρω and denotes a load as something borne — a ship’s cargo (Acts 27:10), the packs the scribes tie on others’ shoulders (Matt 23:4), and the load Christ calls light (Matt 11:30).

Either way, the corpus policy holds: two different Greek nouns, two different English nouns (‘burdens’ / ‘load’), so the reader can see what Paul wrote.

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

ἀναπληρώσετε is a compound of πληρόω with perfective ἀνα- (‘fill to the top’). The corpus has already fixed the family: πληρόω = ‘fill up’, ἀναπληρόω = ‘fill up / make complete’ (Phil 2:30, where it pairs with ὑστέρημα, ‘lack’).

That pairing is exegetically useful here. ἀναπληρόω presupposes something not yet full. Paul is not saying the law of Christ is obeyed or satisfied in a forensic sense; he is saying that burden-bearing is what brings it to its full measure.

Compare the perfect passive πεπλήρωται at Gal 5:14 — ‘the whole law stands filled up in one word.’ Chapter 5 says the filling has happened in the love-command; chapter 6 says the filling happens as you carry each other. The two are the same claim from opposite ends, and the shared English root is what lets a reader see it.

Excluded renderings: ‘fulfil’ alone (in modern English it has drifted toward satisfy a requirement), ‘obey’ (a different lexeme entirely), ‘carry out’ (loses the vessel image that ὑστέρημα/πλήρωμα depends on).

NA28 prints the future indicative ἀναπληρώσετε. The aorist imperative ἀναπληρώσατε is read by a substantial body of witnesses, including Codex Vaticanus (B) and part of the Western tradition; the Latin adimplebitis supports the future, and the reading has clearly fluctuated.

Internal considerations cut in both directions:

• Toward the imperative as secondary: assimilation to the neighboring imperative βαστάζετε is an obvious scribal pull, and the whole paragraph is imperatival (καταρτίζετε, βαστάζετε, δοκιμαζέτω, κοινωνείτω). Scribes normalize toward mood uniformity.
• Toward the future as secondary: the future is arguably the easier reading, since it produces the smooth ‘command + promise’ shape that καὶ οὕτως naturally introduces; and the aorist imperative is the lectio difficilior precisely because two imperatives joined by καί is awkward.

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

καί after an imperative regularly carries consecutive force in Koine, and per corpus policy it is rendered ‘and’ — the coordination Paul wrote, letting the consequence be heard rather than over-specified with ‘then’ or ‘so that.’

οὕτως is directionally neutral in Greek and here points backward to the command just given. Per the standing policy (Phil 4:1), ‘in this way’ is the equally neutral English equivalent; a bare ‘so’ tips toward the pleonastic reading, and ‘by doing this’ paraphrases.

The structure — imperative, καί, future indicative — is the standard Semitic-flavored ‘do X and Y will follow’ pattern (cf. Gen 42:18 LXX; Amos 5:4, 6). The future is not merely predictive; it states what the commanded action amounts to.

This is the crux, and the apparatus does not resolve it.

First, note the article. Galatians has been running anarthrous νόμος throughout the argument — ἐξ ἔργων νόμου, ὑπὸ νόμον, ἐν νόμῳ, οὐκ ἔστιν νόμος (5:23) — presenting law as a regime rather than a named document. Here the noun is articular and qualified by a genitive. Paul has shifted construction, and the shift is data.

Second, the genitive is open in three directions:

• Possessive/authorial — the law that belongs to Christ, i.e. his commands, above all the love-command (John 13:34; cf. Gal 5:14 and Lev 19:18).
• Subjective/exemplary — the law that Christ himself embodied and enacted; burden-bearing is Christoform, and the Isa 53:4 LXX pattern (τὰς ἁμαρτίας ἡμῶν φέρει) stands behind it.
• Epexegetical/appositional — the law which is Christ: the Torah as it now stands redefined in him.

A fourth reading takes the phrase as ironic or polemical — Paul borrowing his opponents’ νόμος-language and filling it with a content they had not envisaged. This is attractive given that the letter has just denied that any law stands against the fruit of the Spirit (5:23), and it explains the article: it may be their law-talk being answered.

One constraint worth stating plainly: whatever the phrase means, it cannot mean a reinstatement of ἔργα νόμου as the ground of standing before God, or Galatians collapses. Paul’s argument permits νόμος as the shape of Spirit-led life (5:16-25) while denying it as the basis of justification (2:16; 5:4).

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. · J. Louis Martyn, Galatians: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, Anchor Bible 33A, New York: Doubleday, 1997.

Verse 2 is not a new topic. Paul has already written:

• 5:13 — διὰ τῆς ἀγάπης δουλεύετε ἀλλήλοις, ‘through love be slaves to one another’ (present imperative, reciprocal).
• 5:14 — ὁ πᾶς νόμος ἐν ἑνὶ λόγῳ πεπλήρωται, ‘the whole law stands filled up in one word.’

Gal 6:2 recombines all three elements: the reciprocal pronoun, an imperative of humble service, and the πληρ- root applied to νόμος. The verse is the practical cash value of 5:14, and the two should be read as one movement.

Note the number shift Paul builds across 5:19-6:5: plural works of the flesh, singular fruit of the Spirit, plural burdens shared, singular load each carries. He is thinking in these contrasts throughout.

The Latin tradition reads alter alterius onera portate, et sic adimplebitis legem Christi — future indicative, and adimplebitis keeps the ‘fill up to completion’ force of ἀνα- rather than a bare implebitis. That is a good witness to how the compound was heard.

The Greek Fathers press the reciprocity hard. Chrysostom reads the verse as an argument that no one is exempt: the strong today will be the weak tomorrow, so burden-bearing is not condescension from a permanent height but an exchange, which is why Paul wrote ἀλλήλων. He also links ὁ νόμος τοῦ Χριστοῦ directly to love, on the strength of 5:14.

Jerome, in his commentary on Galatians, wrestles explicitly with the vv. 2/5 tension and resolves it by distinguishing the present mutual life of the church from the individual accounting at judgment — a solution that does not require a lexical distinction between βάρος and φορτίον, and which remains one of the two live options.

Augustine takes ‘the law of Christ’ as love and reads the verse as evidence that the whole law is charity — a construal that shaped the Western reception decisively but which, per §11, is named as reception rather than used as evidence for the rendering.

Proposed — pending reviewJohn Chrysostom, Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series 1, 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.

• ‘Carry’ for βαστάζω, identically at 6:2, 6:5, and 6:17, so the pattern is traceable. ‘Bear’ is retained in the liturgical tier only.
• ‘Burdens’ for βάρη, ‘load’ for φορτίον (v. 5). Two Greek nouns, two English nouns; no interpretive weight is placed on the distinction in the rendering itself.
• ‘Fill up’ for ἀναπληρόω, matching πληρόω at 5:14 and ἀναπληρόω at Phil 2:30. ‘Fulfil’ is not used in the reading text.
• ‘In this way’ for οὕτως, per standing policy.
• ‘The law of Christ’, bare genitive, unresolved.
• The present imperative is marked as durative in the study tier and left unmarked in smooth English, where ‘keep on carrying’ would over-specify.