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.