Galatians 2

¹ It was not till fourteen years had passed that I went up to Jerusalem again. I went with Barnabas and took Titus with me.

² I went there as the result of a revelation, and privately I laid before the leading men the Good News as I proclaim it among the pagans; I did so for fear the course I was adopting or had already adopted would not be allowed.

³ And what happened? Even though Titus who had come with me is a Greek, he was not obliged to be circumcised.

⁴ The question came up only because some who do not really belong to the brotherhood have furtively crept in to spy on the liberty we enjoy in Christ Jesus, and want to reduce us all to slavery.

⁵ I was so determined to safeguard for you the true meaning of the Good News, that I refused even out of deference to yield to such people for one moment.

⁶ As a result, these people who are acknowledged leaders – not that their importance matters to me, since God has no favourites – these leaders, as I say, had nothing to add to the Good News as I preach it.

⁷ On the contrary, they recognised that I had been commissioned to preach the Good News to the uncircumcised just as Peter had been commissioned to preach it to the circumcised.

⁸ The same person whose action had made Peter the apostle of the circumcised had given me a similar mission to the pagans.

⁹ So, James, Cephas and John, these leaders, these pillars, shook hands with Barnabas and me as a sign of partnership: we were to go to the pagans and they to the circumcised.[*a]

¹⁰ The only thing they insisted on was that we should remember to help the poor, as indeed I was anxious to do.

¹¹ When Cephas came to Antioch, however, I opposed him to his face, since he was manifestly in the wrong.

¹² His custom had been to eat with the pagans,[*b] but after certain friends of James arrived he stopped doing this and kept away from them altogether for fear of the group that insisted on circumcision.

¹³ The other Jews joined him in this pretence, and even Barnabas felt himself obliged to copy their behaviour.

¹⁴ When I saw they were not respecting the true meaning of the Good News, I said to Cephas in front of everyone, ‘In spite of being a Jew, you live like the pagans and not like the Jews, so you have no right to make the pagans copy Jewish ways’.

¹⁵ ‘Though we were born Jews and not pagan sinners,

¹⁶ we acknowledge that what makes a man righteous is not obedience to the Law, but faith in Jesus Christ. We had to become believers in Christ Jesus no less than you had, and now we hold that faith in Christ rather than fidelity to the Law is what justifies us, and that no one can be justified[*c] by keeping the Law.

¹⁷ Now if we were to admit that the result of looking to Christ to justify us is to make us sinners like the rest, it would follow that Christ had induced us to sin, which would be absurd.

¹⁸ If I were to return to a position I had already abandoned, I should be admitting I had done something wrong.

¹⁹ In other words, through the Law I am dead to the Law, so that now I can live for God. I have been crucified with Christ,

²⁰ and I live now not with my own life but with the life of Christ who lives in me. The life I now live in this body I live in faith: faith in the Son of God who loved me and who sacrificed himself for my sake.

²¹ I cannot bring myself to give up God’s gift: if the Law can justify us, there is no point in the death of Christ.’