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

  

Kahl presents (p. 227 f.) four different slants on the oppression of the Roman regime, which are offered as evidence of defeated and dominated peoples pitted against one another "while being consumed together" by Roman overlords. 

These four examples, it is suggested, sustain the writer's larger argument: a re-imagining of the context in which Paul wrote his Galatians letter demonstrates that his converts to messianism were urged by him not to submit to circumcision. Why not? Acceptance by non-Jewish males of this fundamental marker of Jewish identity would amount to intolerable collaboration by these messianists with emperor worship, the official religion of the Roman empire.  

The four markers are (1) the references to Galatians in I and II Maccabees; (2) Galatian bodyguards, formerly the property of Cleopatra, assigned to Herod the Great after her defeat and suicide; (3) Augustus' Jewish toleration edicts, specifically one placed on temple walls at Ancyra. which benefitted Jews in Anatolia; (4) the person and place of Julia Severa. Galatian priestess of Roman civic religion, who sponsored a synagogue a Acmonia, in the province fo Asia (adjacent to Galatia).

The treatment of these four brief excursi typify Brigitte Kahl's procedure throughout - these excursi join the more extensive treatment of visual art and are likewise offered as proof of a thesis. 

But this is a circuitous route through a fairly well documented historical epoch. 


Rather than work with disparate and disconnected matters, why not lay out the salient events that prove the proposed thesis? 


Why not let history speak to the reader and, in this way, invite the reader to determine what, if any, re-imagining is in order?

There is unease in this reader, who is asked

- to accept Maccabean pericopes as historical records;

- to see the bodyguards of the humiliated Cleopatra as symbols of the defeated Galatians of centuries before;

- to accept Augustus' edict of Jewish toleration as evidence that the Jews of the Diaspora would have - illogically - insisted that Gentile messianists accept circumcision, or 

- to see the Galatian, Julia Severa, Roman citizen and priestess of the official cult and benefactor of a synagoge, as a type of wealthy Gentile, who would have felt her position threatened by uncircumcised Gentile messianists.

Transforming a fact into a metaphor can be an arresting and informative exercise. It is the work of the poet. 


But it is not the work of the historian.