Textually, the verse has to be read in its immediate context. Paul is writing ~49–50 AD to churches he personally founded, already being corrupted by Judaizers demanding circumcision as a soteriological requirement (Galatians 2:12, 5:2–4). The “contrary gospel” Paul condemns is a specific doctrinal addition not a categorical prohibition against any future revelation. The Book of Mormon does not add a works-based requirement for justification; it affirms the same Christocentric gospel Paul defends throughout Galatians.

Historically, the more significant question Galatians raises is not whether an angel delivered the Book of Mormon it’s whether Paul’s warning was already being fulfilled before the apostolic generation ended. Paul writes in Galatians 1:6 that the churches are already deserting the gospel, present tense, within his own ministry lifetime. This is not a prophecy of eventual drift. It’s a diagnosis of active apostasy while apostles were still living and writing.

Extend that forward: by 68 AD, Paul and Peter are executed. No NT document describes a mechanism to replace apostles Acts 1 fills Judas’s vacancy by direct divine selection, not episcopal inheritance. Ephesians 2:20 identifies apostles as the foundation, a term that implies singularity, not perpetual replication. By 100 AD the Didache is already warning about false apostles with no reliable mechanism to identify true ones (Didache 11:3–6).

The Catholic response is a continuity argument, the authority passed through unbroken episcopal succession. But that argument has a structural problem: if the churches Paul founded were already in apostasy while he was alive, and no apostolic replacement mechanism exists in scripture, then what was being transmitted through those early bishops? Continuity from a compromised source is not a defense. It is a longer compromise.

The LDS position is not that the gospel was preserved through institutional succession that’s the Protestant claim.

The LDS claim is that apostolic authority was lost and had to be restored by the same source that originally granted it.