CHAPTER ONE – “REMAPPING GALATIA”
In Search of a Displaced Context (pp 31-33)
In this sub-head the writer announces that “Gauls had become a topic of visual art” ever since Gauls / Galatians had begun to be a “presence in the Mediterranean region in the fourth century B.C.E.”
The discussion at this point is helpfully enlarged by the inclusion of several (presumably) marble figures of falling or defeated Gauls, together with captions, which are either the generally accepted title such as “The Dying Trumpeter / Gaul,” and the “Suicidal Gaul” or which succinctly describe the representation (a warrior trampled under by horses drawing a Roman chariot.)
Kahl states that this visualization, typified by the monument(s) Nero saw, returning from Rome after putting down an uprising in Galatia, was invariably the image of “failing, falling, dying and dead” Gauls / Galatians.
The prevalence of such images, Kahl asserts, would have been encountered by anyone “who traveled as much as Paul did . . . .”
Further, these representations of defeated Gauls / Galatians “might” be taken as “representations of the direct ancestors of Paul’s Galatians,” i.e., the intended recipients of his letter to the Galatians.
I wonder if this conclusion, proposed tentatively (“might”) here, is actually to become a building block for the promised re-imagining.
Kahl combines these assertions with the complaint that “none of these images has played a role in traditional theological reflections on the context of Galatia or Paul’s letter to the Galatians.”
This omission is regrettable, Kahl argues because the context of such representations and the representations themselves – “virtually omnipresent in Paul’s world” – “are crucial for “re-imagining Paul’s world and for correcting what has all too frequently been a decontextualized reading of the letter.”
The correct visualization, Kahl argues is the Roman perception of Gauls /Galatians as a ‘counternation’ inhabited by ‘universal barbarians,’ who had, after centuries of Roman struggle against them, “at last been forced into compliance with the ‘world-saving’ power of Roman victory, at the threshold of the era of Jesus and Paul.”
Kahl does not identify the source of the information placed in quotation marks: counternation . . . universal barbarians . . . world saving (the Romans). I suspect these terms are Kahl’s own confections, intended to assist the reader in the re-imagination effort.
The balance of this first chapter, then, will be “to establish and visualize Galatia as a focal topos” of both the geographical and the ideological map of the Roman Empire.
My reaction to these continuing preliminary remarks is one of frustration.
Still, we have not arrived at the actual, fleshed out re-imagined context.
We are, still, up to our elbows in prologue.
I sense the writer wants to deploy every likely strand of factual detail before trusting her reader to get it.
Nero’s journey to/ from Galatia is here mentioned for the second time, at least.
The representations of defeated Gauls are described as dying and also dead, as failing and also falling. These depictions are beginning to be re-played while the reader is invited, yet again, to wait longer for the coming re-imagination to be revealed.
There is even an additional reference to the fact that scholarship is divided, whether the Galatians of the letter resided in south Galatia (a Roman province) or in north Galatia (likely historical homeland for some Galatian clans).
Is there going to be an actual, new, never-before-imagined setting, for Paul and his Galatians? Can such a context be established without detailed reference to what is contained in the one letter we have from Paul to the Galatians?
No comments:
Post a Comment