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From Paul, an apostle appointed not by human beings nor through any human being but by Jesus Christ and God the Father who raised him from the dead,
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and all the brothers who are with me, to the churches of Galatia.
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Grace and peace from God the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ
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who gave himself for our sins to liberate us from this present wicked world, in accordance with the will of our God and Father,
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to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen.
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I am astonished that you are so promptly turning away from the one who called you in the grace of Christ and are going over to a different gospel-
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not that it is another gospel; except that there are trouble-makers among you who are seeking to pervert the gospel of Christ.
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But even if we ourselves or an angel from heaven preaches to you a gospel other than the one we preached to you, let God's curse be on him.
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I repeat again what we declared before: anyone who preaches to you a gospel other than the one you were first given is to be under God's curse.
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Whom am I trying to convince now, human beings or God? Am I trying to please human beings? If I were still doing that I should not be a servant of Christ.
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Now I want to make it quite clear to you, brothers, about the gospel that was preached by me, that it was no human message.
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It was not from any human being that I received it, and I was not taught it, but it came to me through a revelation of Jesus Christ.
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You have surely heard how I lived in the past, within Judaism, and how there was simply no limit to the way I persecuted the Church of God in my attempts to destroy it;
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and how, in Judaism, I outstripped most of my Jewish contemporaries in my limitless enthusiasm for the traditions of my ancestors.
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But when God, who had set me apart from the time when I was in my mother's womb, called me through his grace and chose
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to reveal his Son in me, so that I should preach him to the gentiles, I was in no hurry to confer with any human being,
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or to go up to Jerusalem to see those who were already apostles before me. Instead, I went off to Arabia, and later I came back to Damascus.
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Only after three years did I go up to Jerusalem to meet Cephas. I stayed fifteen days with him
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but did not set eyes on any of the rest of the apostles, only James, the Lord's brother.
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I swear before God that what I have written is the truth.
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After that I went to places in Syria and Cilicia;
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and was still unknown by sight to the churches of Judaea which are in Christ,
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they simply kept hearing it said, 'The man once so eager to persecute us is now preaching the faith that he used to try to destroy,'
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and they gave glory to God for me.
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