"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

Sunday, March 20, 2011

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

Professor Brigitte Kahl has devoted the first half of Chapter Five (pp. 209 - 227) to an explication of the options, as Kahl perceives them, which confronted Paul's Galatian messianists: they must either participate in public emperor worship or accept circumcision and benefit from the Jewish exemption.


Kahl believes that these options are embedded in the language of the Galatians letter, whose re-imagined context includes a serious disagreement between Jewish accommodationists and Paul.


The Apostle to the Gentiles, so Kahl maintains, argued to his converts that acceptance of circumcision amounts to a refutation of Paul's invitation to participate in the dawning messianic age.


A Jewish accommodation, Kahl argues, extended in imagination 
(Kahl, p. 215: "Could one imagine . . . ?") to whether the icons found at the Great Alter might have been seen as including "Israel's anticonic God" as "nevertheless at least invisibly present" - a conclusion with which Paul "would vehemently disagree."


One could imagine many things.


One could speculate, as Kahl does, that a Jew, whom Kahl identifies - Flavius Josephus, and Jews Kahl sort-of identifies - "high-ranking Jewish power brokers" - "would probably" find the God of Israel invisibly present among the icons at the Great Altar at Pergamon. 


This reader is as willing as the next to give a writer an opportunity to make a case for a new appreciation of a venerable document, such as Paul's Galatians letter. 


But questions arise:


How might Josephus and "Jewish power brokers" find acceptable the notion that YHWH can be said to be "invisibly present" at the Great Altar? 


Professor Kahl answer: they "would probably" find this idea acceptable "in one way or another."


Illusive is the argument that moves between an historical incident and an invitation to use one's imagination, so as to speculate how others not associated with the incident, might have imagined its import, which import is then invoked "in one way or another" as central to the context of another event, the writing of Paul's Galatians letter.


We can speculate what Abraham Lincoln might have thought of the cave paintings at Lascaux, France and decide that he would have though they were the product of adolescent male fantasies and not invocations of hunting success, drawn by ancient shamans. But do such speculations about what Lincoln could have thought of a matter about which he has no recorded opinions, merit a re-imagination of the context of Lincoln's fraught relationship with his wife?


The existence of the Great Altar at Pergamon is a fact.


But speculation about how someone not known ever to have been present at this alter (Josephus, Paul) might have imagined whether an invisible god could be said to be invisibly present - when there is no data offered in support of the idea that any such interpretation or response ever was made . . . this is a bridge too far.


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

This post offers some considerations of Professor Kahl's reference to Luke-Acts in Chapter Five.


Sprinkled through Chapter Five, are citations to Biblical texts, put forward to bolster Professor Kahl's argument that representatives of Diaspora Jews insisted to Paul's messianic converts they must accept circumcision. 


The circumcision requirement was in reaction, Kahl argues, to the risk posed by uncircumcised Gentile males who had identified themselves with the messianic proclamations of the missionary Paul. These men were perceived by Jews also resident in Galatia, as persons who were deceptively benefitting from the Roman-Jewish accommodation, whereby the emperor was prayed for in the Jerusalem temple and the Jewish Diaspora was permitted to follow its own observances, exempt from participation in public emperor worship.


Kahl offers several New Testament texts in support of these views.


One citation is to chapters 13 and 14 of Acts, offered to the reader in toto (note 63, page 355) as independent evidence of the situation Kahl has described, i.e., (p. 224) "portions of the Jewish population in Asia Minor negotiated rather successfully the compromise between Jewish otherness and civic and imperial integration, which brought them in some cases closer to the civic and imperial establishment in the cities." 


This heavily qualified statement may well be true, just as its opposite might also be true. That is, one could say, "in some cases" . . . "portions of the Jewish population" . . . "negotiated" un"successfully" . . . etc.


The varying  situations described in Acts 13 and 14 can be said to show many configurations beyond the one Brigitte Kahl is proposing.  


In these chapters, Jewish figures are portrayed as hospitable to Paul and his colleagues (13:5, 15, 42, 14:1)  but also as inhospitable (13:45, 50, 14:2, 19). Similarly, local representatives of Roman occupation and official religions are likewise both hospitable (13:6-7, 12) and hostile (13:50), sometimes in apparent collusion with Jews, in demonstrating hostility to Paul (13:50, 14:5), but then again, sometimes joining with Jews in praise of Paul (13:44, 14:7, 13, 18).


An allusion to Luke-Acts, especially if the subject under discussion is insistance by some that others accept circumcision, should include mention of Act 15:1, where it is stated that those Jews in the Diaspora, who are portrayed as arguing forcefully that Gentile messianists must be circumcised were "some men came down from Judea." 


This reference ought not be overlooked and should be explained in  light of Kahl's thesis that those who insisted on a circumcision requirement were not followers of Messiah Jesus nor were Judeans, but were Diaspora Jews.


The fact that Acts 15:1 is overlooked serves to remind that the description of a course of events, teased out of selected Biblical texts, retains cogency only if it accounts for other relevant texts.


To put this another way, a proposed new understanding of Paul in Galatians carries the burden of inter-connective textual coherence.


There is also the need to come to terms with a cited text, in its inherent literary integrity. Mention of a text in Luke-Acts, it seems to me, requires placing a given citation in the context of Luke's role as a writer. 


Much of the work done on Luke-Acts in the past half-century or so has demonstrated that the writer of Acts, sequel to Luke, was interested in developing a chronology that was friendly to a Gentile mission as an already established fact. 


Acts reveals a greater freedom to pursue this objective, than is apparent in the earlier work, Luke, in the writing of which, Luke was constrained both by the existence of a prescribed "gospel" form and by the subject matter of the earlier work, the career and the mission of Jesus. 


Citations to Acts 13 and 14 need to be given with their context within Luke's theological objectives as demonstrated elsewhere in Acts. A casual reference to these two chapters falls short, by not addressing Luke's redactional role. This failing is compounded by the fact (see above) that these chapters present a quite varied picture of the interaction between Paul, Diaspora Jews, and local authorities.


Further, a citation to Luke where the Apostle Paul is concerned, has to contend with the (to me) well established conclusion that the writer of Luke-Acts, though an admirer of Paul, did not understand Paul and placed words in his mouth, which are quite foreign to Paul's actual thoughts, expressed in the letters. If Luke felt free to compose speeches for Paul, did Luke also freely manipulate the context of those speeches? Since Dibelius' work on the Paul's speeches in Acts, this question must receive an affirmative answer. 


In the context of the research and the conclusions reached in the past decades about Luke's role as a creative historian and editor of material at hand, are their grounds, in the citations made by Professor Kahl, for concluding that these Lucan passages can be taken as references to actual events, or rather are we dealing with Luke's redactions?


Ironically, the Paul of Acts does displace Judaism as the essential ground and home of the Gentile mission. A further indication of this displacement is that the Jewish claim to be the people of God is not echoed in the speeches of the Paul of Acts, yet Jewish option may be found in the letters, as in Romans 9-11. Paul, letter writer, also who urged upon his converts the image of the body of Christ, not as in Acts, their unity as members of the human race. (See the Areopagus speech of the Paul of Acts,  at 17:22-31.)


All this is the work of Luke, not of the historical Paul, Apostle to the Gentiles.

Sunday, March 13, 2011

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

Kahl, at p. 224 f.


Professor Brigitte  Kahl's description of the situation in Galatia may be summarized as follows


Galatians:


- were peoples living under the harsh regime of Rome occupation;
- were represented in Greek-inspired sculpture, which the Roman Imperium adopted to represent the Galatians as defeated, "lawless," outsiders, whose incorporation within the Imperium remade ("resurrected") them as properly subordinate and, passive;
- as defeated and occupied people, were subject to the Roman demand that they take part in the cult of the emperor;
- had (some of them) come under the influence of the Jewish missionary, Paul;
- were addressed by Paul in a letter he dictated and directed to them.


the Apostle Paul:


- proclaimed faith in a Jew, Messiah Jesus, allegiance to whom brought them into a divinely governed epoch, which allegiance contradicted their enforced allegiance to the Roman emperor, who was to be worshipped as the one true God;
- organized his messianic converted into worshipping congregations, participation in which entailed a refusal to participate in the cult of the emperor and thus implicated his converts in at least latent if not actual civil disobedience;
- insisted that the status before God of his converted was not dependent upon submission to the Jewish rite of circumcision.


In the section of Chapter Five, under review, Kahl proposes to answer two questions:


Why had Paul's converts been told they must be circumcised?
Who had told them this?


Kahl's answers these questions in this way: those who insisted that Paul's Galatian converts must be circumcised were Jews, living in Galatia.


These persons ("control agents" acting on behalf of the Jewish community) demanded that Paul's converts be circumcised.


Why did the "control agents" make this demand? Kahl gives her answer:


Important elements within the Jewish community were afraid of the Roman authorities. The specific Jewish fear was that the authorities would target Jews for persecution, since Paul's converts no longer participated in the cult of the emperor. The converts, if Paul had his way, withheld themselves from emperor worship because, as heirs of Abraham, they had become Jews, and could invoke the Jewish-Roman accommodation, which exempted Jews from the enforced requirement that all occupied peoples participate in the emperor cult.


In order to allay persecution of the Jewish communities in Galatia, the Jewish control agents insisted that the messianic converts demonstrate their incorporation within Judaism, by undergoing the Jewish rite of circumcision, thereby displaying the physical mark of male Jewish identity.


The problems with Kahl's description of the situation among Paul's converts, as reflected in his letter to them, are an absence of data and implausibility.


MISSING DATA


There is no evidence I know of, that Jewish representatives would have insisted that non-Jewish males, who did not participate in synagogue activities, could be deemed part of Judaism so long as they got themselves circumcised.


There is no evidence I know of,  that a circumcision requirement alone was ever accepted by Rome as the only identity marker for a non-Jewish male, so as to declare this person to be Jewish.

There is no evidence I know of, that Roman authorities in Galatia inquired of Paul's converts whether they were circumcised, as a proffer of proof of their embrace of Judaism.


ABSENCE OF PLAUSIBILITY


It is not plausible that synagogue representatives would approach non-Jewish males, members of a messianic sect, and insist they get themselves circumcised because of a fear within the larger Jewish community of guilt by association.


More plausible is the scenario that synagogue representatives would argue to Roman authorities that the new Galatian sect had nothing to do with the Jewish community, or with Jewish observances or with the Roman-Jewish accommodation, by which the emperor was prayed for in the temple in Jerusalem and diaspora Jews were thereby exempt from participation in the emperor cult.


Certainly, it is possible to confect a scenario that gives purchase to the idea that a circumcision requirement was insisted upon, by Jewish agents, or Christian Jews from Palestine. This scenario, with varying details, is the traditional picture most commentators find in Paul's Galatians letter.


But in order to make Jewish circumcision a matter of concern to local Roman authority, as Kahl does, the situation requires that Roman authority held circumcision to be the defining characteristic for the new sect to be deemed part of Judaism. This notion is not plausible, implying as it must, that Roman officials, although described as insistent on the overt participation by everyone in the cult of the emperor, and specifically concerned to see that Jewish men were circumcised, were at the same time, too obtuse to uncover a shell game, by which men who were not Jews, could claim they were, merely by displaying their naked circumcised members.


The suggestion that local authorities would have accepted evidence of circumcision as their only concern becomes even less plausible in light of Kahl's belief that Paul's converts, following his teachings, proclaimed themselves to be the only true Israel, in contradiction to Jewish self-identification and synagogue practice.


Such self-centric views - we are true Jews, you are not  - openly expressed, would have led not to an overture made by Jewish synagogue representatives to messianic Gentiles to get themselves circumcised; it would have led to fistfights or worse.


If the we-are-the-only-true-Israel idea was articulated by Paul's converts, or even privately held, the theoretical Jewish "control agents" likely would have denounced the Gentile messianics to the authorities. What better way to demonstrate their respect for the Jewish-Roman accommodation than to denounce impostors?


Since Kahl would have it that Paul adheres to Torah for himself and his converts, it all comes down, for Kahl, to circumcision, plausibly, as it must, since this is a strong theme in the Galatians letter. 


But is it plausible to think that local Roman authority would have made to-be-or-not-to-be-circumcised the salient concern, in a situation where Gentile men asserted they were Jews, yet were not enrolled in any synagogues and declared themselves to be the only true Jews? I suggest, not; this is not a plausible circumstance.


Is it plausible that local Roman authority would declare everyone Jewish, including men who were not Jews by ethnicity and were not recognized as Jews by local Jewish leaders, so long as the authorities' own examination turned up a number of circumcised penises? No other questions asked? 


This is very far fetched. If Pliny the Younger is close to typical, local Roman officials were conscientious in conducting investigations into allegations of disturbances against public order.  


Far more likely is it that the debate in Galatia over circumcision was conducted between Jews or Christian Jews, on one side, and Paul on the other, with his Jewish and non-Jewish converts ranging between one or the other position.


Kahl bolsters her assertions with - at long last - some detailed examination of the text of the Galatians letter. These texts will be talen up in a later post.