Galatians 2:5-14

5But we did not allow them to do this to us. They wanted to spoil the true good news that you have believed. We kept the good news safe for you.

6The church leaders in Jerusalem did not argue with me. (They were the people who seemed to be the leaders. It does not matter to me whether they were really important people or not. God does not respect some people more than others.) Those leaders did not tell me to change the message that I teach.

7Instead they saw that God had given a special job to me. God wanted me to tell the good news about Christ to the Gentiles. In the same way, he had told Peter to tell the good news to the Jews.

8God gave Peter the authority to be his apostle to the Jews. God also gave me the authority to be his apostle to the Gentiles.

9James, Peter and John understood that God had given this special job to me. They are the leaders that the church in Jerusalem respects. And they were happy to accept Barnabas and me as their friends. They agreed that we should teach God's message to the Gentiles. They themselves would continue to teach the Jews.

10They only asked us to do this: We should remember to help the poor people among their group. That is something that I myself wanted very much to do.

11But later, when Peter came to Antioch, I spoke against him. I told him clearly that he had done something wrong.

12When he first arrived in Antioch, Peter had been eating meals with the Gentile believers there. Then James sent some Jewish believers from Jerusalem to Antioch. After those men had arrived, Peter started to keep himself separate from the Gentiles. He stopped eating meals with them. He was afraid of those Jews who wanted to circumcise the Gentile believers.

13The other Jewish believers in Antioch also did what Peter did. They became hypocrites like him. Even Barnabas agreed and he copied their example.

14But I could see that they were wrong to do this. They were not living in a way that agrees with God's true message. So I spoke to Peter in front of all of them. I said to him, ‘You were born as a Jew, but you have been living like a Gentile. As a believer, you no longer obey all the Jewish rules. So you should not try to make Gentile believers obey those Jewish rules.’