For I tell you, brothers, the good news which was preached by me is not a human message,

for I did not get it from any man; I was not taught it, but I got it through a revelation given by Jesus Christ.

But I was personally unknown to the Christian churches in Judea;

I went up under the guidance of a divine revelation. Now I laid before them the good news that I was in the habit of preaching among the heathen, but first I did so privately before the leaders, for fear that my course might be or might have been to no purpose.

But they did not even try to compel my companion, Titus, although he was a Greek, to be circumcised --

Only they wanted us to remember the poor; the very thing that I was eager to do.

For before the coming of certain people from James, he was in the habit of eating with heathen Christians, but after they came, he began to draw back and hold aloof from them, because he was afraid of the circumcision party.

The rest of the Jewish Christians, too, joined him in this pretense so that even Barnabas was influenced to join them in their pretense.

O senseless Galatians! Who has bewitched you, before whose very eyes Jesus Christ was pictured as the crucified One?

just as "Abraham put his faith in God, and it was credited to him as right standing with God"?

I mean this: The law which was given four hundred and thirty years later could not annul the contract which had already been ratified by God, so as to cancel the promise.

For if our inheritance depends on the law, it can no longer depend on the promise. But it was by promise that God so graciously bestowed it upon Abraham.

Then what about the law? It was added later on to increase transgressions, until the descendant to whom the promise was made should come, enacted through the agency of angels in the person of an intermediary.

Is the law then contrary to God's promises? Of course not. For if a law had been given that was able to impart life, surely, then, right standing would have come through law.

But before this faith came, we were kept locked up under the law, in preparation for the faith which was to be unveiled.

And yet you know that it was because of an illness of mine that I preached the good news to you the first time,

But the child of the slave girl was born in the ordinary course of nature, while the child of the free woman was born to fulfill the promise.

You were running beautifully! Who was it that cut into your way and kept you from obeying the truth?