Understand

Is the Gita's highest path knowledge, or devotion?

Different chapters seem to crown different winners.

One reading

The one of steady knowledge, seeing the self everywhere, is the ideal — jñāna dissolves the problem at the root.

BG 4.38 — Verily there is no purifier in this world like wisdom; he that is perfected in yoga finds it in the Self in due season. read →
BG 6.46 — The Yogi is greater than the ascetics; he is thought to be greater than even the wise; the Yogi is greater than the men of action; therefore become thou a Yogi, O Arjuna! read →
BG 13.2 — This body, son of Kuntî, is called the Field; that which knoweth it is called the Knower of the Field by the Sages. read →

The tension

Of all yogins, the one who worships with faith, absorbed in Krishna, is called the most united.

BG 6.47 — And among all Yogis, he who, full of faith, with the inner Self abiding in Me, adoreth Me, he is considered by Me to be the most completely harmonised. read →
BG 12.2 — They who with mind fixed on Me ever harmonised worship Me, with faith supreme endowed, these, in My opinion, are best in yoga. read →
BG 18.66 — Abandoning all duties come unto Me alone for shelter; sorrow not, I will liberate thee from all sins. read →

My reading

The Gita ranks devotion first where it ranks at all (6.47, 12.2) — but not as a rival to knowledge. Bhakti is offered as the path that carries knowledge for an embodied person, who finds the bare formless goal "hard to reach" (12.5). Knowledge is the destination described; devotion is the road most people can actually walk.