RESPONSE NUMBER EIGHT To Galatians Re-imagined: Reading with the Eyes of the Vanquished (Fortress 2010) by Brigitte Kahl

KAHL’S INTRODUCTION

Law As Power Construct (Nietzsche)

The material under these brief sub-heads (pp. 8-9. ff.), does not appear to be cumulative so much as different slants on the same fundamental idea, that Paul in Galatians is mounting an attack on Roman Nomos rather than Jewish Torah.

In the paragraphs under this heading, Professor Kahl enlists Nietzsche as a forerunner of her re-imagining of Paul’s Galatians. How is Nietzsche a forerunner to the new re-imagining? It is because Nietzsche asserted that the natural order places the powerful over the weak and Paul, writing under the banner of a crucified (lawfully executed) Messiah, is aligned with the weak.

Brigitte Kahl views Nietzsche as an astute historian (“profoundly knowledgeable about ancient history and the Roman empire”), but Nietzsche’s various statements can be assessed with greater nuance. For one thing, Nietzsche can be seen as sarcastic, ironic, contradictory or provocative.

  

Nietzsche’s assertion, cited by Kahl, that Paul intended to undermine the Roman empire by uniting “all who lay at the bottom . . . into a tremendous power” is unlikely to be taken as an historically precise view of the writer of the letter to the Galatians.

Nietzsche’s take on Paul may find purchase as a description of the Cosmic Saint Paul, of the much later church universal, a figure and a worldly institution never contemplated by the Apostle himself.  

I think Nietzsche gets ink here because he can be presented as a (cynical?) admirer of power and a (bitter?) critic of Paul, apostle to the weak.