Book of Common Prayer
1 1-5 I, Paul, who am appointed and commissioned a messenger not by man but by Jesus Christ and God the Father (who raised him from the dead), I and all the brothers with me send the churches in Galatia greeting. Grace and peace to you from God the Father and from our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to the Father’s plan gave himself for our sins and thereby rescued us from the present evil world-order. To him be glory for ever and ever!
The gospel is God’s truth: men must not dare to pervert it
6-7 I am amazed that you have so quickly transferred your allegiance from him who called you in the grace of Christ to another “Gospel”! Not, of course, that it is or ever could be another Gospel, but there are obviously men who are upsetting your faith with a travesty of the Gospel of Christ.
8-10 Yet I say that if I, or an angel from Heaven, were to preach to you any other Gospel than the one you have heard, may he be damned! You have heard me say it before and now I put it down in black and white—may anybody who preaches any other Gospel than the one you have already heard be a damned soul! (Does that make you think now that I am serving man’s interests or God’s? If I were trying to win human approval I should never be Christ’s servant.)
The gospel was given to me by Christ himself, and not by any human agency, as my story will show
11-12 The Gospel I preach to you is no human invention. No man gave it to me, no man taught it to me; it came to me as a direct revelation from Jesus Christ.
13-19 For you have heard of my past career in the Jewish religion, how I persecuted the Church of God with fanatical zeal and, in fact, did my best to destroy it. I was ahead of most of my contemporaries in the Jewish religion, and had a greater enthusiasm for the old traditions. But when the time came for God (who had chosen me from the moment of my birth, and then called me by his grace) to reveal his Son within me so that I might proclaim him to the non-Jewish world, I did not, as might have been expected, talk over the matter with any human being. I did not even go to Jerusalem to meet those who were God’s messengers before me—no, I went away to Arabia and later came back to Damascus. It was not until three years later that I went up to Jerusalem to see Peter, and I only stayed with him just over a fortnight. I did not meet any of the other messengers, except James, the Lord’s brother.
Faith is followed by healing
21-23 When Jesus had crossed again in the boat to the other side of the lake, a great crowd collected around him as he stood on the shore. Then came a man called Jairus, one of the synagogue presidents. And when he saw Jesus, he knelt before him, pleading desperately for his help. “My little girl is dying,” he said. “Will you come and put your hands on her—then she will get better and live.”
24-28 Jesus went off with him, followed by large crowds jostling at his elbow. Among them was a woman who had a haemorrhage for twelve years and who had gone through a great deal at the hands of many doctors (or physicians), spending all her money in the process. She had derived no benefit from them but, on the contrary, was getting worse. This woman had heard about Jesus and came up behind him under cover of the crowd, and touched his cloak, “For if I can only touch his clothes,” she said, “I shall be all right.”
29-30 The haemorrhage stopped immediately, and she knew in herself that she was cured of her trouble. At once Jesus knew intuitively that power had gone out of him, and he turned round in the middle of the crowd and said, “Who touched my clothes?”
31 His disciples replied, “You can see this crowd jostling you. How can you ask, ‘Who touched me?’”
32-34 But he looked all round at their faces to see who had done so. Then the woman, scared and shaking all over because she knew that she was the one to whom this thing had happened, came and flung herself before him and told him the whole story. But he said to her, “Daughter, it is your faith that has healed you. Go home in peace, and be free from your trouble.”
35 While he was still speaking, messengers arrived from the synagogue president’s house, saying, “Your daughter is dead—there is no need to bother the master any further.”
36 But when Jesus heard this, he said, “Now don’t be afraid, just go on believing!”
37-39 Then he allowed no one to follow him except Peter and James and John, James’s brother. They arrived at the president’s house and Jesus noticed the hubbub and all the weeping and wailing, and as he went in, he said to the people in the house, “Why are you making such a noise with your crying? The child is not dead; she is fast asleep.”
40-41 They greeted this with a scornful laugh. But Jesus turned them all out, and taking only the father and mother and his own companions with him, went into the room where the child was. Then he took the little girl’s hand and said to her in Aramaic, “Little girl, I tell you to get up!”
42-43 At once she jumped to her feet and walked around the room, for she was twelve years old. This sight sent the others nearly out their minds with joy. But Jesus gave them strict instructions not to let anyone know what had happened—and ordered food to be given to the little girl.
The New Testament in Modern English by J.B Phillips copyright © 1960, 1972 J. B. Phillips. Administered by The Archbishops’ Council of the Church of England. Used by Permission.