Galatians 4:17
They are zealous in your regard not well: but they would exclude you, that you might be zealous for them.
Open Galatians 4:17 in the Motif Searcher, word by word across all five texts →Show on the spiral →The verse in its languages
- Vulgate (Clementine)
- Æmulantur vos non bene : sed excludere vos volunt, ut illos æmulemini.
- Greek New Testament (SBLGNT)
- ζηλοῦσιν ὑμᾶς οὐ καλῶς, ἀλλὰ ἐκκλεῖσαι ὑμᾶς θέλουσιν, ἵνα αὐτοὺς ζηλοῦτε.
Haydock's commentary
On verses 17 to 20
He tells them this change comes from the false teachers among them, who with a false zeal would exclude them from a friendship and a submission to St. Paul, and deprive them again of that Christian liberty by which Christ, and the faith of Christ, had freed them from the yoke of the Mosaical law. On this account I must labor and travail, as it were to bring you forth a second time. How do I now wish to be with you, to change my voice, to exhort you, to reprehend you, to use all ways and means to regain you to Christ?
I am in confusion about you,2 I am perplexed, as the Greek signifies, as not knowing what to say or do. (Witham)
From Haydock's Catholic Bible Commentary, 1859, in the transcription made by Todd Easton and kept online by John Paul Wohlschied at johnblood.gitlab.io/haydock.
The Fathers on this verse
St Augustine On Christian Doctrine, Examples of the Various Styles Drawn from Scripture
44. Again, in writing to the Galatians, although the whole epistle is written in the subdued style, except at the end, where it rises into a temperate eloquence, yet he interposes one passage of so much feeling that, notwithstanding the absence of any ornaments such as appear in the passages just quoted, it cannot be called anything but powerful: “Ye observe days, and months, and times, and years. I am afraid of you, lest I have bestowed upon you labor in vain. Brethren, I beseech you, be as I am; for I am as ye are: ye have not injured me at all. Ye know how, through infirmity of the flesh, I preached the gospel unto you at the first. And my temptation which was in my flesh ye despised not, nor rejected; but received me as an angel of God, even as Christ Jesus. …
St John Chrysostom The Commentary and Homilies of St. John Chrysostom on Galatians and Ephesians, Galatians 4:1-3
Ver. 17 . “They zealously seek you in no good way; nay, they desire to shut you out that ye may seek them.”