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.
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