"Philosophy is like trying to open a safe with a combination lock: each little adjustment of the dials seems to achieve nothing, only when everything is in place does the door open." Ludwig Wittgenstein

Monday, January 31, 2011

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

The concluding remarks (pp. 125-127) which end Chapter Two prompt a further response from this reader.


Professor Kahl helpfully summarizes the three themes which Chapter Two intends to convey, namely (1) a detailed description of the Great Altar at Pergamon (reconstructed in Berlin), (2) an emphasis upon "the antithetical character" (p. 127) of the symbolism of the Great Altar, accomplished by applying a "semiotic square" (high - low, in - out) to the representations on the Altar and, interwoven in (1) and (2), is the third theme: (3) an association of the Altar sculptures with Paul's letter to the Galatians.


Kahl, I would allow, has accomplished (1) and (2) but not (3).


Finding an association between the Great Altar and Paul's Galatians feels forced.


A case in point is the identification of the Altar Giants with the Gauls / Galatians. Kahl states without qualification that "the Galatians / Giants have been set up as the archetype of lawlessness and rebellion" (p. 126).


But the Great Altar's mythological giants do not obviously represent the historical Galatians. The Galatian defeat by the Attalids is represented on the Great Altar in company with a separate sculpture of the mythological giants. (See Post Twenty-three.)


The Galatian-Giant correlation has to be established, it appears, in order to move on to explicate how (p. 126) "every single element in this construct [at the Great Alter] of divine and human order, the nature of God(s), and the nature of community, will be challenged by Paul in interaction with Galatian communities in the first century C.E."


I don't see how the challenge(s) posed by Paul in Galatians is made more coherent historically or more pertinent to ourselves, if seen as directed against the symbolism expressed at the Great Alter.


The Pauline challenge, understood as the subversion of imperial values, is implied in the symbolism of a crucified God, to whom allegiance is owed by communities gathered from among the oppressed.  

Friday, January 28, 2011

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

The balance of Chapter Two (pp. 82 -1250 is devoted to an elucidation of "the Great Alter" of Pergamon.  This edifice was part of a collection of buildings and is thought to have been built in the 180's B.C.E., under the rule of Eumenes II, to celebrate the final Roman-Greek victory over the Seleucids in 188 B.C.E.  Pergamon was one of the Greek city-states along the Aegean Coast, in what is today, the western coast of Turkey. Important to Professor Kahl's larger argument is the need to emphasize the role of Galatian clans on the Seleucid side of the conflict. 


Professor Kahl goes to considerable length in explicating the details of the Great Alter, with this objective (p. 86): "our focus here is on the question of visual impact . . . a coherent semantic system of meaning making this . . . readable even for the illiterate . . . and those who come (and still come) to visit the alter."  


Calling attention to the different perspectives offered the viewer (high/up and in versus low/down and out), Kahl suggests that the visitor today would likely share the impression made on the "majority" of contemporary visitors, described (p. 90) a second time by Kahl as "illiterate."


The visual impression we are invited to share, as we observe a conflict between the high and the low sculpted figures is to side with "the good cause." 


A case in point is a portrayal in a frieze of the higher placed Athena, wrenching away the child of earth-mother Guia (pp. 92-95). But this is not the point Kahl wishes to make. 


What is appended to this straightforward description of the frieze is the equating of sculptures of giants with Galatian enemies "at various stages of Pergamon history." 


Following this identification of Galatian enemies in the frieze, Kahl asks (p. 95), "How is this stunning metamorphosis of Galatians into giants to be explained?" 


By associating the Galatians in general, with the mythological giants, Kahl appears to me to be making a leap well beyond what is suggested either by Pergamon history or by the representations found on the sides of the Great Alter.


Galatians fought on all sides (apparently as mercenaries) in the wars between Roman and Greek armies against the Seleucid rules in Greece and Anatolia. This suggests to me that there is no apparent reason for the Greek builders of the Great Alter to have wanted to require a visual association to be made between mythological giants and Galatian tribesmen. 


The Galatians in defeat, are represented by the Dying Gaul, as Kahl has observed (see my previous two posts). 


But the Galatians are not obviously represented as giants in the mythology of warfare against giants, as they were represented already by the Dying Gaul. 


Professor Kahl thinks the Galatians were associated with the defeated mythological giants and, as evidence, cites  the traveler and sight-seeing Pausanias, when, in the 2nd century C.E., he observed a victory monument set up on the Acropolis in Athens by Atalos I. 


Here is what Pausanias seems to have seen: 








perg_vict_small.jpg (1235×450)


Here is what Pausanias wrote (I.25.2) about what he saw: "By the south wall [of the Athenian Acropolis], Attalos dedicated a) the legendary battle of the Giants [top right]..., b) the battle of the Athenians against the Amazons [bottom right], c) the battle against the Persians at Marathon [bottom left]; d) the destruction of the Gauls in Mysian --each figure being about two cubits [=3']."



(For the above image and quotation, see: http://employees.oneonta.edu/farberas/ARTH/ARTH209/Hellenistic.html 


A further descriptive leap is made when Kahl refers to the opponents of Greek and then Roman forces as "lawless" (p. 96), whether mythological or actual. 


Kahl finds lawlessness to be "a crucial layer of meaning" both as to the Alter at Pergamon and "also of the fight between Paul and his opponents in the letter to the Galatians."


The reference to Paul's letter to the Galatians prompts this reader to feel that Professor Kahl is straining to redefine what can reasonably be concluded from ancient visual representations. Such is the desire to associate these images with the venerable Apostle. 


Isn't that what the title of this book suggests?





 

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

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



These comments are addressed to Chapter Two, sub-head: "The Lawlessness of the Dying Trumpeter - and of Paul" (pp. 78-82).

Kahl asserts, that the image of the Dying Trumpeter / Dying Gaul was ubiquitous across the Greek and Roman worlds ("omnipresent images" page 79) and in the first century was understood by means of "a common sigh system of otherness" (p. 78) which "Paul and the Galatians of his letter would "have no difficulty reading" (p. 79).

These assertions lead Kahl to further argue that this sculpture informs not simply the context of Paul's Galatians letter, but the argument(s) contained in the letter. This is so, Kahl states, because of two features of the sculpture: (1) the presentation of  an uncircumcised penis and (2) the assailant who has delivered the lethal blow is not pictured. 

Conflating the centuries older sculpture with the contemporaneous Galatians of Paul's letter, Kahl allows the imagery of the art to represent the circumstance of Galatians, per se, whose ancestors had been defeated in war. The analogy seems to run in the opposite chronological direction as well: "Is there any relation between his [the statue's] foreskin and the mortal would on his side? And who inflicted the wound? [. . .] Is it Jewish law that has cruelly punished the dying man for not complying with the 'works' of circumcision?" 

Kahl expects her reader to see such questions as "bizarre" because, in her view, the tension about circumcision has little or nothing to do with Torah and much to do with the imperious law of the Roman occupiers.

As mentioned in an earlier post, the photographic image below is taken from William Smith, Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities (London: John Murry, 1875) see pp. 574-77.

dyinggaul.jpg (684×450)


This sculpture, taken as representing Paul's Galatian converts, means to Kahl (p. 80), "it is not Jewish particularism or ethnocentrism that has struck him [i.e. the Dying Gaul] down but Cesar's imperial universalism." 


Are we to impute imperial Roman pretensions to Greek sculpture of an earlier date simply because Rome took possession of these objects?

Even if this question is answered affirmatively, where is there an association between the sculpture and the letter dictated by the Apostle Paul?  

One of the problems Kahl faces is that of assigning significance to a work of art, on behalf of an absent set of supposed viewers. 


Art engages with individual sensibilities and perceptions which inform each viewer's understanding. Is there a 'correct' way to understand a work of art? Can a particular understanding of a sculpture be assigned with confidence to observers in another time and place? 

A specific historical problem is that much art from the Greek and later Roman eras display an uncircumcised penis. On what grounds is one entitled to announce that any one of these works of art is part of an argument about circumcision?

As mentioned in an earlier post, the surviving marble sculpture of the Dying Gaul / Dying Trumpeter appears, to me, to have been modeled on an even older, strikingly similar bronze figure from the sanctuary of Aphaia, at Aegina, a depiction of Trojan King Laomedon, killed by an arrow from Herakles (Heracles), during the first campaign against Troy. (This image may be found in A History of Ancient Sculpture, Vol 2, by Lucy Mitchell (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1883) p. 244.)

[graphic]

This image also displays a penis. Are we to speculate then that this image, too. is a critique of circumcision? On what grounds, whether historical, esthetic or literary, can this association be made?


In this image, as with the Dying Gaul, the attacker is absent. Dos this mean we are entitled to declare that the attacker is Roman, since imperial Rome later came into possession of Greek art?  


Professor Kahl concludes (p. 81) this section by citing an ambiguous comment from Paul (Gal 6:11-13) wherein Paul seems to be saying that those who insist the Galatians must be circumcised, do so  "that they may not be persecuted." 


Kahl implies that Paul is here referring to "a third party" which Kahl, herself writing ambiguously, takes as "something or someone," of whom Paul's circumcision-insisting adversaries "are genuinely afraid."  


Whether a single one of Paul's Galatians ever viewed this sculpture on a single occasion is simply asserted to be true; they all must have seen this statue because it was "omnipresent."


This assertion permits Kahl to speculate that Paul's adversaries might be afraid of the same "invisible hand that struck the deadly blow against the Trumpeter."


This further assertion muddies what is known of the provenance of the sculpture of the Dying Gaul, representing as it does, an adversary defeated in a Greek or Pergamene victory, not a Roman one. 


For a new interpretative key to be accepted, displacing a former understanding, the new idea cannot be merely plausible. The new approach must be more plausible than the older approaches. We are not at this point, so far in Kahl's presentation.









Sunday, January 16, 2011

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



CHAPTER TWO – “DYING GAULS / GALATIANS ARE IMMORTAL”
“The Great Alter of Pergamon”
In introductory remarks, Professor Kahl writes (pp. 77-78), “the visual semiotics of dying and dead Galatians is the overall topic of the present chapter” and adds, “Our exploration of the Great Alter [of Pergamon] in both its Pergamene context and in light of its Roman semiotics aims at establishing this unique piece of art as an essential background image, auxiliary context, and intertext for reading Paul’s letter to the Galatians – a ‘complementary system’ for interpreting the text.”
These comments  are made in the context of opening up a discussion about the sculpture Kahl identifies as “the Dying Trumpeter,” perhaps better known as “the Dying Gaul.”
The marble sculpture is thought to be a Roman copy of a bronze Greek original commemorating the 230 B.C.E. victory of Attalos over the Gauls. It is to be found today in the Capitoline Museum in Rome.
Photographs of this item are found on page 32 and on the cover. The photographic image below is taken from William Smith, Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities (London: John Murry, 1875) see pp. 574-77.

dyinggaul.jpg (684×450)


Earlier scholars have identified the Dying Gaul as a gladiator, but the later consensus is that we are looking at a defeated warrior. 


Kahl takes (p. 77) this life size marble figure very sweepingly, to be “a message about sacred violence and the basic order of the world, about victory and civilization: our civilization.” 


The marble sculpture of the Dying Gaul / Dying Trumpeter appears, to me, to have been modeled on a centuries older, strikingly similar bronze figure from the sanctuary of Aphaia, at Aegina.


The older work, of a dying warrior, is believed to be the depiction of the treacherous Laomedon, king of Troy, killed by an arrow from Herakles (Heracles), during the first campaign against Troy. This image may be found in A History of Ancient Sculpture, Vol 2, by Lucy Mitchell (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1883) p. 244.

[graphic]

Mitchell catalogues the earlier image as "advanced archaic" and dates it between 500 and 450 B.C.E. 


There is no hint of lawlessness in this earlier depiction, apparently of a Trojan warrior or king. 


Were the Gauls or Celts ever depicted by the Romans as lawless, i.e., as without law? 


So far as I can find, the Gauls / Celts / Galatians were not denegrated as a lawless people. Strabo describes their legal practices in some detail as does Caesar. 

Is the most plausible suggestion the one that Kahl proposes: that the Gauls / Celts / Galatians were held by imperial Rome to be lawless (pp. 53-4, 61-64, 75) and thus, the representation of them by the Dying Gaul is a depiction of lawlessness

This seems unlikely to me.


Kahl advances this proposition, it would appear, because Kahl wishes to introduce the idea that Paul in Galatians is "targeting Greco-Roman imperial nomos much more than Jewish Torah," which has been suggested already in the Introduction (p. 7).





Friday, January 14, 2011

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



CHAPTER ONE – “REMAPPING GALATIA”
"Universalized Galatian Barbarians and the Worldwide Roman Savior" (189 B.C.E. – 25 B.C.E.)

In this section, which completes Chapter One, Professor Kahl continues a narrative of the many battle(s) between Roman armies and Galatian clans.
The purpose of this retelling is to demonstrate that the Galatians, whether in the east (modern day Turkey) or west (Italy, France) have come to represent to the Romans (p. 65)   “universal agents of disorder and rebellion.”
Just prior to this assertion, Kahl had taken note of three acts of human sacrifice conducted by Roman officialdom. In 228, 216, and 113 B.C.E, Roman authorities sacrificed a Galatian man and woman in order to placate the Gods.
These events are especially significant for Kahl, who argues that these executions were significant to the Romans – especially the second of the three sacrifices, coming as it did, after a defeat, rather than as an invocation of divine favor before battle.
The executions in 216 B.C.E., Kahl writes, “might indicate” that “the Roman construction of the Galatian/Celtic enemy had undergone a profound metamorphosis”  being both “universalized” and simultaneously incorporated into “Roman state religion.”(p. 56).
The problem with reading such grand symbolism into these 216 B.C.E. executions is that we know what prompted them, as Kahl acknowledges. These executions were carried out in response to an accusation of unchastity against the vestal virgins. There is more, as Kahl also recognizes; the victims sacrificed were not just Galatians. Also killed were a Greek man and woman in both the first (228  B.C.E.) and the final (113 B.C.E.) instance of sacrifice. 
Nevertheless, these deaths occasion Kahl’s agreement with Karl Strobel, who concluded that the Celts / Galatians had come to be seen as the “enemy per se,” by Roman officialdom.
Another conclusion, also cited by Kahl (footnote 67 to Chapter One), is that of Rankin, who felt that Celtic invasions might have stimulated a more generally applicable Roman sense of “real or imagined menace from foreign peoples.”
Despite the fairly slim evidence Kahl asserts (p. 64) that the Galatians represent to the Romans “agents of godless and lawless disorder.” It is not clear to me how Kahl can associate the Celts with ‘godlessness’ or why Kahl concludes that the Romans did.
Nonetheless, Kahl goes on (pp. 64 – 74) to narrate the nearly two centuries of struggle (189 – 25 B.C.E.), which ended with Galatian slaughter, destruction and submission in both the Roman west and the regions, which had comprised the Seleucid empire in the east. In this latter area, the kingdom of Pergamum was placed in control of the surviving Galatian clans, by virtue of military allegiance given to Rome by successive Pergamene kings.
The final nail in Celtic independence is hammered home by Cesar’s campaigns in Gaul, modern day France.
Kahl concludes that the Galatians, by the end of this period and by virtue of their resistance to Greek and Roman hegemony, had become influential as a representational adversary, far beyond what they had accomplished on the battlefield.
This conclusion permits Kahl to further assert (p. 75) that “the entire vocabulary of Paul’s justification theology” needs to be read “within the framework of the Roman-Galatian encounter.”
“Texts are cultural constructs, and we need to treat them as such.” This statement, Kahl has cited (note 91 to Chapter One) with approval and it has relevance for her own text, I think.
Professor Kahl is reviewing and retelling certain historical events with an agenda in mind. She is interpreting as she goes, with the idea of demonstrating that a new perspective needs to be taken by Pauline scholarship, as to the correct interpretation of a text found in Christian scripture, Paul’s letter to the Galatians

Kahl (p. 75) would remove this text from its traditional interpretation (“issues of Jewish law”) because the larger context – the Roman one – means that the recipients of Paul’s letter “were already firmly and categorically condemned or justified by Roman law and power, and had been granted grace through faith as loyalty and allegiance to the Roman emperor.
I remain unconvinced.
Neither Kahl’s reading of the history of the period nor her assertions about the Galatians letter – accompanied by little in the way of citation to the letter itself – are persuasive. So Far.
Much depends on the reading of the letter. As noted earlier, this reading is absent, which means that fundamental questions, related to Kahl’s thesis cannot even be asked, much less answered.
Here are a couple of examples:
If the Celts / Galatians came to be represented as the barbarian arch enemy by Roman ideology, and if this is the context in which Paul writes to the Galatians, what can be made of the fact that many of Paul’s statements and assertions in his Galatians letter are also found in others of his writings, addressed to peoples other than Galatians? 
What about the fact that different New Testament writers make use of some of the same terminology Paul employed, but again, in a non-Galatian context? 

Sunday, January 9, 2011

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

"Gauls / Galatians Marching Against Rome. Delphi, and Pergamon (387 - 189 B.C.E.)"


In this section of chapter one, Professor Kahl takes up (pp. 51 - 64) the murky history of Celtic occupations of parts of present day Italy, Greece and Turkey. The focus of this presentation is to highlight Greek and Roman descriptions of these events as a struggle by self-described civilized forces against Celtic barbarism, represented by tribes, who at first conquored and settled in these areas, but who were subsequently defeated by both Greek and Roman armies.


Kahl stresses that the centuries-long struggles against Celtic invasion - ending in Roman victory - assumed mythic proportions, with the Celtic (Galatian) tribes in the role of the archetypical enemy.


From what I can tell, the Celtic / Roman struggle was not much different from other invasions from northern Europe by clans, seeking either plunder or agricultural lands in warmer climes. Kahl certainly recognizes the similarities but calls attention to the apparently (to Kahl) unique mythic imagery assigned to the Celts by Roman  (Pliny) and Greek-speaking (Plutarch) historiagraphers.


Interestingly, though not remarked upon by Kahl, some of the ancient commentators, writing during Roman hegemony, displayed sympathy for the Celts.


Livy, a native of Padua (Patavium), who could be described as passionate about Rome, was of a Gallic family; Livy may have acquired his knowledge of Celtic epics from his own family's oral traditions. (Markale, p. 50, see below.)


Plutarch's sympathy for the Celts is found in a passage Kahl cites, in which a Celtic king ia given a speech that justifies his people's invasion and occupation of Italy on the same grounds which the Romans used to justify their own violent acquisition of lands already occupied by others.


The romantic image a thousand years later, of Celts as grand losers in shadowy, epic battles across Britain is part of English, Irish and even Scottish folklore. Here is an example - a paragraph that is fun to read - which purports to explain the impetus for ancient Celtic invasions / migrations, which are then linked to sagas of kingdoms won and then lost in the British isles:


"The Gauls in Illyria were becoming restless. As believers in an all-governing dynamism, they were anxious to be on the move again. The Celts looked upon the present as a mere function of the future, as a continual process of evolution. The legends of Brittany,Wales and Ireland all serve to illustrate this theme.The mark made by trhe Celts on the ancient historians is no more than a manifestation of their asnti-historic desire to deny the present and create the future, if only in the imagination.This singular attitude is inherent both in the capture of Rome and the expedition to Delphi; and was later responsble for the Twelfth Century Round Table Romances of Christian Europe, a cycle of magical adventures to match the aspirations of a fallen race which refused to accept that it had died." (The Celts: Uncovering the Mythic and Historic Origins of Western Culture, by Jean Markale [Rochester VT: Innte Traditions International, 1993 (1976: Les Celts et la Civilisation Celtique, p. 66.])


The epic nature of sweeping invasions and occupations, combined with ambiguous tellings and retellings - to say nothing of the final defeat and destruction of peoples who are linked with the foundation of Western Europe - all this gives momentum to romantic imagery.


T.G.E. Powell, inclined against romance, states that it must have been not their religious notions but "visions of rich plunder" which sent the Gauls into northern Italy, as well as some "special misfortune" which drove the Celts to "descend upon Macedonia in midwinter." (See The Celts [Thames and Hudson,1958, 1994], pp. 18, 19.)


Kahl has little interest in the romance but does want to call attention to that part of the Celtic myth, which was developed by ancient historian / propagandists, in the service of imperial Roman hegemony.


Kahl argues that the epic struggle for supremacy in Italy between Celts and Romans occasioned the visual representation of Celts as the archetypal Enemy.


For this argument to persuade, an explanation of the sympathetic treatment by Plutarch and Livy must be offered.


Kahl does cite Livy but as an apologist for Rome, who uses "twisted logic" (p. 52) to denigrate the Celts, when Roman emissaries break the peace "as if they were Celts". Kahl cites Livy 5:35 but the closest statement by Levy for this characterization that I can find is at 5:36, where Livy describes the Roman ambassadors, as a "peaceable enough mission, had it not contained envoys of a violent temper, more like Gauls than Romans." (See Titus Livius (Livy), The History of Rome, Book 5, Rev. Canon Roberts, Ed., posted at perseus.tufts.edu.)


This seems to me straightforward enough and does not warrant Kahl's conclusion (Kahl, p. 52) that Livy is asserting "that it is barbarians who are lawless and Romans who keep the law--even when they do not." Kahl's conclusion is made more dubious since Livy goes on to describe how the Roman ambassadors abused their diplomatic credentials by taking up arms on the spot and killing a Celtic chieftain, an event which the Celts justly complained of before the Roman senate, but to no avail.


The Celtic king, Brennus the Second is said to have laughed out loud when he saw the gods at Delphi represented in human form. Can Celtic history / myth / romance become grist for a re-imagined context for Paul's Galatians letter? 


We are not there yet.

Tuesday, January 4, 2011

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




CHAPTER ONE – “REMAPPING GALATIA”
Lawless Barbarians: The Representation of Galatians / Gauls in Imperial Ideology, pp. 42-51.
In this major subsection, Kahl cites and summarizes descriptions of Gauls and Galatians, which have been taken from antiquity. Kahl makes several points along the way, namely:
1. Ancient chroniclers largely reflected the imperial Roman take on these peoples (Diodorus: “mixed with the Greeks”) as dangerous adversaries.
2. All of the surviving materials are about the Gauls / Galatians and not by them.
3. “[O]ccidental scholarship has been shaped by the ancient stereotypes.”
4. The divide between New Testament and Classical scholars has hidden from view the “possibility” that Paul’s Galatians letter is exceptional as written from the point of view of the “vanquished” (See Kahl, p. 43) or as “a discourse among the vanquished.”
Elaborating on this last point – which is the most important one for the theory underlying this book – Kahl suggests that readers of Galatians should be “alert” to the “possible existence of linguistic codes and figures of speech that Paul employs in order to exclude unwanted conversation partners, codes and figures of speech that hide rather than reveal their true meaning” (Kahl, p. 48).
Paul’s Galatians letter is written in code? Now wait a minute.
Where is the citation to the contents of the letter itself, which might offer examples of the “code” we are to detect in Galatians?
By way of a textual citation at this point in her argument, Kahl offers a footnote (no 56).
Citing Galatians 3:1 (“you stupid Celts” – my translation), Kahl suggests the possibility (“maybe”) that Paul, writing as a member of “another vanquished nation,” employs language that could be “an element of colonial discourse,” offered ironically or sarcastically.


Without further ado, Kahl has introduced the idea that Paul in his Galatians letter is to be seen (by himself? by his readers?) as a representative Jew of his day. 


If we are to heed the appeal to place the ancient Galatians / Celts in their proper historical context, does not that rule also apply to an ancient epistle addressed to Galatians / Celts? 


And does not the reader  deserve more than a maybe-maybe not footnote for this fundamental re-defining of what the Galatians letter is all about?
Galatians 3:1 has its context, which is the document in which this phrase is found. This document has its context, too, which includes both what is known about the letter writer as well as what can be known about Galatia and the proposed recipients of the letter.
It seems to me that in the first instance, what is actually known must be sifted with results stated, before we move into more speculative areas involving possibly coded phrases and their supposed meanings.
Once again, I wonder if a comprehensive assessment of the Galatians letter isn’t the first order of business, if the letter is to be taken as a shaft of light, illuminating a neglected re-imagination of Paul and the context in which this letter was composed.      

   
  



Sunday, January 2, 2011

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



CHAPTER ONE – “REMAPPING GALATIA”
 “It is harder to interpret Paul to one who half understands him than to one who knows nothing about him.”
Kahl’s heavy lift into a re-imagining of Paul might be associated with this comment, which was made more than a century ago by William Wrede, whose scholarly promise was tragically cut off by his death in 1906. See Paul (Eugene, Oregon: WIPF and Stock Publishers, 2001, originally published by the American Unitarian Assoc. in 1908) p. 85.
Is Kahl engaged with a scholarly guild that only partially understands Paul?
Under the sub-head A Depolitized Geography, Kahl addresses a concern I had just voiced in the previous post – that Kahl’s critique of Pauline scholarship was too general and not grounded in specifics.
But Kahl does engage at least one investigative current in a clarifying and helpful rhetorical tact, by drawing attention to the work of E.P. Sanders and James Dunn, which has come to be knows as the “new perspective” on Paul. In essence, Sanders and Dunn have argued that Paul’s concerns ought not be equated with Luther’s emphasis on the plight of the individual to find acceptance by and before God.
Kahl is impressed with subsequent responses to Sanders and Dunn, which argue that Paul’s missionary focus had to do exclusively with Gentile recruitment. She mentions the work of Gaston and Gager and then goes on to highlight a scholar I am not familiar with, James M. Scott. Kahl is impressed with Scott’s location of the geography of Paul’s missionary program in the Genesis 10 “Table of Nations,” although she faults Scott for assuming that Paul would have simply taken over the geographic perspective of “the dominant class, ” i.e, the Roman overlords of Anatolia.
Kahl is intent upon pushing a debate in the direction of the view that Paul is antagonistic, in his letters, not towards Judaism but towards the Roman occupation.
Interestingly, Kahl begins with a salute to Krister Stendahl’s 1976 book of essays, in which Stendahl argued against equating the concerns of Luther and Paul. The work of Stendahl, which Kahl cites goes back to a 1960 essay, originally in Swedish, which was then delivered in 1961 as a speech to the American Psychological Association and published in English in the Harvard Theological Review (No 56, pp. 199-215) in 1963.
Stendahl observed, then, fifty years ago, that Paul’s “trivial” observation in Romans 7 that everyone “knows that there is a difference between what he [sic] ought to do and what he [sic] does” is part of “a very special argument about the holiness and goodness of the law" (Torah). Stendahl suggests that this special argument and its accompanying trivial observation has been taken as “a penetrating insight into the nature of man and the nature of sin.”


Kahl is right to credit Stendahl for drawing attention to the divide between Paul and his era and Luther and his. It is in Stendahl’s essay that the call for a “new perspective” is found, a call which was answered by Sanders, Dunn and others.

Citing the work of Stendahl, Kahl is locating her own research on foundational work by one influential scholar, who, though not the first to do so, suggested that Paul’s statements, to be understood aright, must not be abstracted from his context.
But this raises another issue. Isn’t it in the nature of Scripture that a venerated text inherently is removed from its original locus and applied anew? 

    
  



Saturday, January 1, 2011

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

CHAPTER ONE – “REMAPPING GALATIA”
The sub-head Beyond East and West, pages 37-39.
Kahl counter poses the perspectives of William Ramsey (1899) with Edward Said (1978) in order to contrast a colonialist appropriation of Paul with a post-colonial point of view.
The post-colonialist perspective, preferred by Kahl, is critical of the colonialist denigration of “native” culture, with its explicit attitude of superiority towards non-Western traditions. The colonialist attitude, with Ramsey given as typical, deemed “native” cultures inherently inferior to Western accomplishments.
The attitude of superiority extends to the allegedly superior, true religion of Christianity, delivered to heathens, who are expected to cash in their culture along with their religious beliefs in order to save their blackened souls and – ka-ching! – progress materially in the world.
Kahl delivers this critique in order to highlight three “obstacles” to the needed re-imagining of the Apostle Paul.
The first obstacle is an “unreflective triumphalism” which portrays Paul as necessarily “de-Judaised” in his articulation of a “law free Gospel.”
The second obstacle is “combat semiotics” which is based, in Galatians, on “Paul’s harsh polemics,” which animate seemingly “every reading” of Galatians as a weapon against “the Other.”
The third obstacle, is that Paul is taken to be not only “anti-Jewish” but “pro-imperial” because Galatians is read to define “the Other” by the standards of “imperial culture.”
Kahl is painting with very broad strokes here, when what is needed, it seems to me, is pinpoint accuracy.
If Paul in Galatians is uniformly misconstrued in the interests of a Western imperialist agenda, why trot out a one hundred year old treatise (Ramsey, 1899) as evidence?
Aren’t there statements from various centers for the propagation of “the faith” that might better exemplify the contemporary misuse or miss-construal of Paul and Galatians?  What about offering statements from contemporary scholarship to portray how Paul has been taken, non-reflectively, to be pro-imperial?
What about the actual work of Christian missionaries, over the decades, as examples of the supposed miss-application of Galatians?
Certainly, many missionaries began their careers by marching “overseas” under the banner of Western triumphalism. But, once on the “mission field” many became so respectful of the cultures of Others, that these missionaries, risking support from sending agencies, shifted their work to anthropology, language and linguistics, comparative religion, etc.
People do change their minds. Do such changes in perspective entail an abandonment or a re-interpretation of Paul and Galatians?
What the Galatians letter says is different from how the letter has been appropriated. This last is an historical issue.
The question, what the letter says, is addressed here in a methodologically questionable manner, treated as if the answer is self-evident, if we get the preliminary issues lined up just right.
Kahl seems to be saying that Galatians has been read along lines similar to the old definition of orthodoxy – understood always, everywhere, and by everyone, in the same way.
Kahl seem to be moving along three tracks.
One track is to demonstrate Imperial Rome presented the defeated people known as Gauls / Galatians as the archetype of the enemy, ruined by opposition to Rome.
A second track is the assertion that Paul and Galatians have been appropriated as standard bearers for later imperial and hegemonic regimes.
The third track is that Paul and Galatians have been misunderstood by scholarship as an anti-Jewish condemnation of oppressed people(s) so as to establish a law-free message of allegiance to Jesus Christ.
But marshalling evidence that bolsters one of these rhetorical tracks does not then demonstrate a second or third track.
The Romans may have focused on representations of Gauls / Galatians as Defeated Enemy Number One. But this focus, even if shown to be true, does not require the conclusion that Galatians has been largely misconstrued by Biblical scholarship.
Scholarship  may have gotten Galatians right. But scholarship then simply may have been ignored by, say, the powers, who wished to appropriate New Testament writings to justify violent conquest, human slavery or colonialism.
The notion that Galatians has been not only misappropriated but misread for millennia, including by much (most? all?) of modern Biblical scholarship, is a thesis that requires specific demonstration.