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Paul uses the present tense in this paragraph. The churches are shifting their allegiance from Paul’s preaching to other preachers with another “gospel.” “I am astonished,” writes Paul. The verb thaumazo implies an “indignant rebuttal and attack on the things the opposition . . . has done,” Betz suggests (p. 47). Arichea and Nida suggest that Paul is expressing an “element of intense unbelief in what has happened” (p. 11).
Paul sees his readers as having turned away from the Gospel of grace that he had preached to them and turning to a different, or another gospel, which is no gospel at all. Paul declares that any gospel other than the one he preached is a “travesty” (Phillips) of the Gospel. The one who proclaims such a travesty is placed under anathema, a curse. Arichea and Nida have suggested that the best literal translation of v.8 is, “May he be condemned to hell” (p. 14).
Luther wrote forcefully: “The doctrine of grace can by no means stand with the doctrine of the Law. The one must simply be refused and abolished, and the other confirmed and established” (p. 69). F. F. Bruce has stated: “The logic of the ‘gospel according to Paul’ was implicit in his Damascus-road experience. . . . The bankruptcy of the Law and the all-sufficiency of Christ came to him at once. Knowledge of the Law was the prerogative of the Jews, but if salvation was bestowed by grace (as it was bestowed on Paul) and not on the ground of law-keeping, then it was accessible to Gentiles equally with Jews” (pp. 93-94). John Wesley said that whatever good one does, “faith does not find but brings” (Works, 1:194).
In the present age there is no tendency for believers to adopt Jewish legalism as a supplement to grace, yet there always seems to be the temptation to relegate God’s grace to second place. It is the human tendency to put our own achievements on a pedestal. “See what we have accomplished,” we want to say to God. To mingle grace with anything is to make a travesty of the Gospel.
It is probably justified to maintain the distinction between the two terms an other (heteros), and another (allos) in vv.6-9. The classic writer Trench wonders, if there is no difference, why Paul would change the word (pp. 357ff.)? International Critical Commentary states that there is “no room for doubt that for Paul heteros suggested difference of kind more distinctly than did allos, and that the latter, in contrast with heteros, signified simply numerical non-identity” (p. 427). What the readers are accepting as just a different gospel is so totally contrary as to be no gospel at all.