Here I am ready to visit you for the third time, and I shall not be a burden upon you; for I want you, not your money, since children are not obliged to store up treasures for the parents, but parents for their children. I will most gladly spend and be expended myself for the sake of your lives. If I love you excessively, am I the less beloved? Concede, I did not burden you. But was I really unscrupulous and took you by guile? Could I have taken advantage of you through one of those I sent to you? I asked Titus to go and I sent the brother with him. Surely Titus did not take advantage of you? Do we not go in the same spirit as he? In the same footsteps?
Have you been thinking all this while that we were defending ourselves to you? We are speaking as Christians, before God. And all is for your edification, dear friends, for I am afraid I might arrive and find you not as I would wish you to be, and I myself be found not as you wish me to be; and there will be rivalry, jealousy, rages, ambitions, slanders, whisperings, pretensions, disorder- liness. I am afraid God might humiliate me before you once again, and I may have to mourn over many of those who sinned before and did not repent of the viciousness and lechery and unchastity of which they were guilty.
I am coming to you for the third time; and everything said shall be established by the mouths of two, or three, witnesses. As I warned you on my second visit, so I warn you now in my absence, both those who sinned before and all the rest: when I come again I will not spare you, since you demand a proof of the Christ who speaks in me. He is not weak against you but strong among you, since he was crucified because of weakness but lives because of the power of God. We too are weak with him but shall live with him because of the power of God. Test yourselves, whether you are still in the faith, assess yourselves. Do you not know yourselves, and that Jesus Christ is in you? Unless you prove unworthy. I hope you will recognize that we are not unworthy. And we pray to God that you will not do anything wrong, not so that we may appear worthy, but so that you may do what is good and we may be, as it were, the unworthy ones. We cannot do anything against the truth, only on the side of the truth. We rejoice when we are weak and you are strong; that is what we are praying for, your improvement. Therefore I write this while I ^ still absent from you, so as not to use too sharply, when I am with you, the authority which the Lord gave me (to build you up, not to tear you down).
For the rest, brothers, farewell; improve yourselves, encourage each other, agree, be at peace, and the God of love and peace will be with you. Greet each other with the sacred kiss. All the saints send you greetings. May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.
The Letter to the Galatians
1PAUL, THE APOSTLE, NOT FROM MEN, nor through man, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father who raised him from the dead; and all the brothers who are with me, to the churches of Galatia: grace to you and peace, from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself for our sins, to rescue us from the present age, which is evil; according to the will of our God and Father, whose glory is forever and ever. Amen.
I am amazed that you have so quickly forsaken the man who summoned you by the grace of Christ, for another gospel, which is not another gospel; unless there are some people who are confusing you and trying to upset the gospel of the Christ. But even if anyone, we ourselves or an angel from heaven, announces any gospel that is contrary to the gospel we brought you, let him be damned. I have said it before and I say it again now, if anyone brings you a gospel contrary to the one you have been given, let him be damned.
Am I appealing now to men or to God? Or ^ I trying to please men? If I were still trying to please men, I should not be the slave of Christ. For I would have you know, brothers, the gospel you received from me is not according to man; nor did I receive it from man, nor was I taught it by man, but by the revelation of Jesus Christ.
For you have heard how I used to act when I was a Judaist, how excessively I persecuted and assailed the church of God, and went further in the Jewish faith than many contemporaries of my own kind, since I was an extreme zealot for the traditions of our fathers. But when he, who had marked me from my mother's womb and summoned me by his grace, was pleased to reveal his son through me, so that I should bring his gospel to the Gentiles, I did not tum at once to any flesh and blood, nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were apostles before me, but I went into Arabia and then returned to Damascus. Then after three years I went up to Jerusalem to learn to know Peter, and I stayed with him for fifteen days, but I did not see any other of the apostles except James the brother of the Lord. Behold, before God, what
^ writing you is no he. Then I went to the regions of Syria and Cilicia. But I was not known personally in the churches of Christ in Judaea; they had only heard this: the man who once persecuted us is now preaching the gospel of the faith which he used to assail. And they glorified God for me.
Then after fourteen years I went up to Jerusalem again, with Barnabas, and taking Titus along. I went up in obedience to a vision; and I put before them the gospel which I preach among the Gentiles; but I did it privately, to the men of mark, so that the race I ran should not be run, or have been run, in vain. Even Titus, who was with me and was a Greek, was not forced to be circumcised, but only might have been because of some so-called brothers who were brought in, who stole in to spy on that freedom which we had in Christ Jesus, and to enslave us. But we did not for one moment give way and obey them; so that the truth of the gospel might be preserved for you. But of those who were thought to have some standing—which ones they were does not matter to me, God is no respecter of persons—those who were thought to have some standing did not make any additions to my gospel. On the contrary, they saw that I had been entrusted with the gospel for the uncirc^ncised just as Peter had been with the circumcised; for he who had moved Peter to his mission to the circumcised had moved me to go to the Gentiles. And realizing the grace that had been granted to me, James and Peter and John, who are held to be the pillars of the church, gave B^abas and me the right hand of fellowship, that we should go to the Gentiles and they to the circumcised; only we should remember their poor, which I have taken pains to do.
Then when Peter came to Antioch, I stood up to him face to face because he was plainly at fault. Before the arrival of certain people from James he had been eating with the Gentiles; but when these came he flinched and removed himself from them, fearing the representatives of the circumcised. And the other Jews were hypocrites along with him, so that even Barnabas followed them in their hypocrisy, but when I saw that they were deviating from the truth of the gospel, I said to Peter before them alclass="underline" If you, a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you make the Gentiles be like Jews?
We, Jews by birth, not sinners from among the Gentiles, knowing that a man is not justified by doing what is in the law unless it is through belief in Christ Jesus, believe, we too, in Christ Jesus, so that we may be justified by faith in Christ and not by doing what is in the law. It is not from the law that all flesh shall be justified. But if while seeking to be justified in Christ we ourselves are found to be also sinners, then is Christ the minister of sin? Never! But if I rebuild what I tore down, I make myself a transgressor. Because of the law I died in the law to live for God. I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. But I who now live in the flesh live in faith in the son of God who loved me and gave himself for me. I do not reject the grace of God. For if righteousness comes through the law, then Christ died in vain.