Brigitte Kahl, in Chapter Six, endeavors to tie all the rhetorical threads tightly together, and so demonstrate the cogency of the re-imagination of Galatians, which has been the driving impulse of this book.
Added here (p. 245 f.) is an illuminating series of comments on the first nine verses of Galatians, chapter one.
Kahl's juxtaposition of Paul's amen and anathema is striking.
These terms operate exactly as Kahl states (p. 247); they "impose themselves at the outset of Paul's letter and at the onset of occidental Pauline interpretation as well." Again (p. 248): "If Jewishness is anathema the countervailing amen must affirm Christianity. This reading produced the birth of the Christian self, out of, and in anthesis to the Jewish other . . ."
This doctrinal development is a source of regret, and not only to Brigitte Kahl, but to many who see and lament an ethnocentric resonance down the centuries, which vindicates itself in Paul's angry condemnation of those of his own day, who display a narrowness even more constricted than his own.
Kahl would rehabilitate Paul but at the expense of the essential logic of his response to his circumstances.
It is an overreach to assert (p. 258) that "Paul's Amen and Anathema echo from the Great Frieze" of the Pergamon altar.
Kahl would re-imagine a different circumstance, one in which Paul is not contesting the exclusionary praxis of Judaism but rather is contending with Augustus himself.
Kahl (p. 247) would have Paul's rhetoric placing us, his late readers, "right back at the foot of the great alar in Pergamon" where she believes, all of his readers are directed by Paul's own deepest concerns - resistance to the empire of the caesars.
Kahl's explication of an "intertextual retelling" (p. 251) helpfully opens Paul's text to creative re-application as anti-imperial in its essence. This is a homiletical gambit.
Kahl and the scholars Kahl cites with approval, as experts in 'intertextual' matters, delineate the indices of the 'intertextual' markers which, coincidentally, have been found in the material they wish to see as relevant. This is like cutting out puzzle pieces and then announcing that one has been successful in putting a puzzle together.
As I have suggested in earlier comments , the context of the material found in Paul's Galatians letter is not illuminated by the linkage Kahl finds between the text of this very specifically focused letter and representational art found at Pergamon.
The constant harkening back to visual art, fashioned decades if not centuries earlier, is warranted neither by what can be surmised from Roman republican and imperial history nor from the circumstances of Paul and his messianic converts in Galatia.
Nor is it illuminating to suggest that what can be called "cryptic" in Galatians is best understood (p. 252) as "a semi-hidden (or semi-public) transcript circulating among the dominated that has an anti-Roman core message."
This is all too forced. Here is an example:
The "single man" of Gal 1:1 is not the emperor in Rome, and so, is not a clue to Paul's intended readers, that "the whole of the following letter needs to be read in an anti-imperial key" (page 257).
Gal 1:1
contains the phrase, 'nor through (a) man' which Kahl takes as a reference to Caesar and from this, concludes (p. 257), that "the law and religion that Paul primarily criticizes are the law and religion not of Judaism but of the Roman empire."
But a perfectly acceptable translation of the verse and therefore of Kahl's cornerstone phrase is:
Paul, an emissary, neither through men nor by a man, but through Messiah Jesus and Father God, who raised him from the dead
Kahl takes "a man" as a cryptic reference to a specific individual, Caesar. This conclusion is stated without addressing a more likely reading.
Paul is asserting that his credentials as a missionary-organizer have been conferred upon him by God. Paul is contradicting his critics, who have asserted that Paul is lacking in qualification and/or proper appointment.
This being the case the reading that suggests itself is that Paul means to contrast positively, his assertion of his own divine commission with a commission or credential dependent, negatively, merely upon human agency. It is not likely that Paul has a specific person in mind.
Even if a specific person is referenced here, as some commentators suggest - someone whom Paul intends to denigrate - the reference is to a leader of the messianists in either Antioch or in Jerusalem.
The human-agency conclusion has been reached by many; ("human channel" Burton, p. 3 [1968]; 'human in origin" Betz, p. 39; "not depend on human authorization" Dunn, p. 26; anthropos = "the human orb" Martyn, p. 84).
Kahl, in proposing an entirely new interpretative direction, i.e., that Paul is here referring however cryptically to Caesar, ought first contend with comments which point, cogently, in another direction - not through any human being.
In sum, Professor Kahl, in chapter six, is engaged in homiletical gambits, not historical investigations.
That's OK with me. "It's right to praise . . . not meaning, but feeling . . . " ("Why I'm Here" by Jacqueline Berger, from The Gift That Arrives Broken. © Autumn House Press, 2010.)
NOTE: The Greek text of Gal 1:1, used above, has been taken from Greek New Testament
Added here (p. 245 f.) is an illuminating series of comments on the first nine verses of Galatians, chapter one.
Kahl's juxtaposition of Paul's amen and anathema is striking.
These terms operate exactly as Kahl states (p. 247); they "impose themselves at the outset of Paul's letter and at the onset of occidental Pauline interpretation as well." Again (p. 248): "If Jewishness is anathema the countervailing amen must affirm Christianity. This reading produced the birth of the Christian self, out of, and in anthesis to the Jewish other . . ."
This doctrinal development is a source of regret, and not only to Brigitte Kahl, but to many who see and lament an ethnocentric resonance down the centuries, which vindicates itself in Paul's angry condemnation of those of his own day, who display a narrowness even more constricted than his own.
Kahl would rehabilitate Paul but at the expense of the essential logic of his response to his circumstances.
It is an overreach to assert (p. 258) that "Paul's Amen and Anathema echo from the Great Frieze" of the Pergamon altar.
Kahl would re-imagine a different circumstance, one in which Paul is not contesting the exclusionary praxis of Judaism but rather is contending with Augustus himself.
Kahl (p. 247) would have Paul's rhetoric placing us, his late readers, "right back at the foot of the great alar in Pergamon" where she believes, all of his readers are directed by Paul's own deepest concerns - resistance to the empire of the caesars.
Kahl's explication of an "intertextual retelling" (p. 251) helpfully opens Paul's text to creative re-application as anti-imperial in its essence. This is a homiletical gambit.
Kahl and the scholars Kahl cites with approval, as experts in 'intertextual' matters, delineate the indices of the 'intertextual' markers which, coincidentally, have been found in the material they wish to see as relevant. This is like cutting out puzzle pieces and then announcing that one has been successful in putting a puzzle together.
As I have suggested in earlier comments , the context of the material found in Paul's Galatians letter is not illuminated by the linkage Kahl finds between the text of this very specifically focused letter and representational art found at Pergamon.
The constant harkening back to visual art, fashioned decades if not centuries earlier, is warranted neither by what can be surmised from Roman republican and imperial history nor from the circumstances of Paul and his messianic converts in Galatia.
Nor is it illuminating to suggest that what can be called "cryptic" in Galatians is best understood (p. 252) as "a semi-hidden (or semi-public) transcript circulating among the dominated that has an anti-Roman core message."
This is all too forced. Here is an example:
The "single man" of Gal 1:1 is not the emperor in Rome, and so, is not a clue to Paul's intended readers, that "the whole of the following letter needs to be read in an anti-imperial key" (page 257).
Gal 1:1
contains the phrase, 'nor through (a) man' which Kahl takes as a reference to Caesar and from this, concludes (p. 257), that "the law and religion that Paul primarily criticizes are the law and religion not of Judaism but of the Roman empire."
But a perfectly acceptable translation of the verse and therefore of Kahl's cornerstone phrase is:
Paul, an emissary, neither through men nor by a man, but through Messiah Jesus and Father God, who raised him from the dead
Kahl takes "a man" as a cryptic reference to a specific individual, Caesar. This conclusion is stated without addressing a more likely reading.
Paul is asserting that his credentials as a missionary-organizer have been conferred upon him by God. Paul is contradicting his critics, who have asserted that Paul is lacking in qualification and/or proper appointment.
This being the case the reading that suggests itself is that Paul means to contrast positively, his assertion of his own divine commission with a commission or credential dependent, negatively, merely upon human agency. It is not likely that Paul has a specific person in mind.
Even if a specific person is referenced here, as some commentators suggest - someone whom Paul intends to denigrate - the reference is to a leader of the messianists in either Antioch or in Jerusalem.
The human-agency conclusion has been reached by many; ("human channel" Burton, p. 3 [1968]; 'human in origin" Betz, p. 39; "not depend on human authorization" Dunn, p. 26; anthropos = "the human orb" Martyn, p. 84).
Kahl, in proposing an entirely new interpretative direction, i.e., that Paul is here referring however cryptically to Caesar, ought first contend with comments which point, cogently, in another direction - not through any human being.
In sum, Professor Kahl, in chapter six, is engaged in homiletical gambits, not historical investigations.
That's OK with me. "It's right to praise . . . not meaning, but feeling . . . " ("Why I'm Here" by Jacqueline Berger, from The Gift That Arrives Broken. © Autumn House Press, 2010.)
NOTE: The Greek text of Gal 1:1, used above, has been taken from Greek New Testament
No comments:
Post a Comment