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

Professor Kahl discusses (pp. 281-85) Gal 3 and 4, proposing that this section of Paul's letter offers specific support for her re-visioning of the letter by way of Paul's discussion of "Father Abraham" (Ch 3) and "Mother Sarah and Mother Paul" (Ch 4). 


To Kahl's credit, the phrase living under Roman occupation must be evaluated as a factor in assessing the context of Paul's letters, just as living under occupation must become part of any summary description of Paul's career.  


But Kahl's further assertion, that the emperor was the focus of Paul's belletristic productions, remains unproven. This is so because Kahl's engagement with Paul is conducted in this book in a manner removed from a detailed consideration of what Paul wrote. 


A second reason why Kahl's placement of the emperor at the center of Paul's Galatians polemic is a failure to assess Paul essential Jewishness. Paul, Jew of the Diaspora, was a rigorous practitioner of Torah observance, prone to violence against Jews who asserted that Messiah had come and dethroned Torah. When Paul himself was  converted to the same conviction by way of a mystical experience, he felt himself called to missionize Gentiles; his message was: you can know life through Messiah Jesus as spiritual heirs of Abraham without observance of the ritual law of the Jews, without Torah. 


Failing to come to terms with the center of Paul's polemic, Kahl misplaces the Pauline emphasis on ritual law, by shifting the discussion away from Torah and seeing Roman law as the actual center. This is a misconception of Paul's central concern with Torah.


Paul's primary focus on Torah and Kahl's neglect of this focus comes clear, I believe, by looking more closely at the third and fourth chapters of Galatians, which Kahl treats (pp. 281-85) in summary form.


Paul's Galatians letter is addressed to the collective membership of assemblies he had organized in Galatia (present day central Turkey). Paul writes (dictates) this missive after antagonists in Galatia had denounced Paul to his converts. Neither the substance of the criticisms directed against Paul nor the identities of the opposition are made clear in the letter. What is clear that Paul's critics have had an effect upon his converts, to the detriment of Paul's work and reputation among them.


Paul's Galatians letter is framed as an answer to arguments made by these antagonists. Neither the tone nor the substance of the arguments Paul makes in Gal 3 and 4 is defensive. Rather, he is re-stating motifs he had presented in person, earlier, when present in Galatia.


In Gal 3-4, Paul asserts that his stupid erstwhile converts must have come under an evil eye, since before their own eyes Messiah Jesus was portrayed as executed (v. 1). 


Paul demands to know: 
- was it by observance of Torah or believing your own eyes that you received the divine presence within you (v.2)
- have you begun with the divinity only to end with mortality? (v. 3) - - was everything you did in vain? (v. 4)
- did the One who infused divinity in you and worked miracles in you accomplish this by your observance of Torah or believing your own eyes? (v. 5)


Paul answers his own questions (v. 6) by invoking Torah (Gen 15:6): Abraham trusted in JHWH and this was deemed a righteous act.


Paul offers (vv. 7-29) a commentary on Gen 15:6, which becomes a commentary on Torah generally:


- surely you remember that those who live by trust [in God] are Abraham's descendants  (v. 7)
- Torah prophesied that those who trust in God are the righteous among the nations since God promised to Abraham beforehand (Gen 12:3) that all nations will be blest in you (v. 8)
- which means that all who trust in God are blest through Abraham's faith (v. 9)
- because those who observe Torah are cursed, as it is written (Deut 27:26): cursed are all who do not keep and fail to do all that is written in the book of the law (v. 10)
- since it is obvious that by keeping Torah, no one is righteous before God because (Hab 2:4): only by demonstrating faith lives the righteous man
- keeping Torah is not a matter of trust (Lv 18:5) since by what one does, one lives (v. 12)
- Messiah has nade us no longer objects, to be bargained, under the curse of Torah because he has become cursed himself, fulfilling what was written (Deut 21:23): cursed be all who are hanged on a tree.
- so then: in Messiah Jesus, to the Gentiles has come the blessing upon Abraham, since you have received the divine presence through your own faith.
    
Jewish religious history foretells the appearance of a Messiah, who will, by divine intent, draw adherents from among both Jews and Gentiles. Paul further asserts that the Messiah has now come, was executed and was raised from among the dead, into the height of divine cosmic rule.


Paul argues that the death by execution of Messiah Jesus brings life grounded in the power of the advancing reign of God. Life in God entails, for Paul, freedom from reliance on any base (basic, elemental) cosmic forces. Paul adds that these cosmic elements never did possess the power to give freedom and life.


What about Torah? 


Paul concedes that Torah has its source in the one, true God but, Paul argues, Torah is inferior to the promise made gratuitously by God to Abraham, a promise of life based upon the new messianic foundation, available to all of Abraham's spiritual heirs.


Paul further asserts that Torah is also subordinate to the contract (covenant) made directly between God and Abraham. The contract between these two parties specifies that, by virtue of Abraham's offer of faith, the gifts of life and freedom would be shared by all who, like Abraham and his primary heir, Messiah Jesus, trust in God. Torah plays no role in the implementation of the covenant.


What then was the purpose of Torah? 


Paul asserts that Torah is a divine but inferior gift that was given to restrain misconduct. Torah, in Paul's view, never did offer life to anyone.


The conditional nature of Torah is demonstrated, Paul asserts, in the conveyance of Torah by way of angels and Moses, third parties, acting as mediators between God and the people. This mode of conveyance, Paul asserts, is in contrast to God's direct dealing with Abraham, inasmuch as God made a promise directly to Abraham and entered into a contract directly with Abraham.


The promise to Abraham was made gratuitously by God and remained effective as to Abraham's heir, Messiah Jesus, and also to Abraham's many additional heirs, of many ethnicities, who subsequently adhere to Messiah Jesus.


The contract between God and Abraham bound both parties; Abraham offered faithfulness to God and God, by way of Messiah Jesus, offered both freedom from elemental forces and eternal life.


Because of the chronological and authoritative inferiority of Torah to the prior Abrahamic promise and the contract made directly between God and Abraham, Paul classifies Torah as a no-longer effective cosmic element.


Professor Kahl does not address many specific statements found in the Galatians letter. Instead, Kahl proposes a dramatic shift in the meaning of Galatians 3 and 4, by isolating certain of Paul's statements from the argument in which they appear. 


Kahl also proposes a different understanding of nomos, law. 


Nomos in Gal 3 and 4 is taken by Kahl to refer to Roman law, in the sense of Roman rule and domination of subject peoples. This shift in the meaning of nomos enables Kahl to propose the emperor of Rome as the one who affirms both Roman and Jewish nomos in a domineering and brutal way, which is antithetical to the freedom and messianic life Paul has offered in his preaching in Galatia. 


Kahl's second thrust toward a new perspective on Gal 3 and 4 is made by isolating discrete Pauline arguments, thereby freeing these Pauline rhetorical forays for a new interpretation, which is otherwise not plausible (to this reader), if kept within the contours of Paul's sustained argument. 


Two Examples: 


(1) Kahl's treatment (pp. 283-4) of Paul's reprise of the Galatian messianists' initial reception of him (Gal 4:12-20)


and


(2) Kahl's treatment (pp. 284-5) of the Hagar-Sarah analogy (Gal 4:21-5:1) 


Paul's Initial Reception in Galatia:


Professor Kahl sees this passage (Gal 4:12-20) as a paradigm of the Christian life, wherein Paul, sickly, possibly near-mortally ill, embodied the Messiah in his otherness and weakness. 


But to this reader Gal 4:12-20 is not about the Galatians' "solidarity with a weak and despised other" (p. 283). Kahl is reading too much into Paul's invitation to his converts to reminiscence about their initial reception of him. 


These verses contain a dramatic outline of Paul's helplessness and the Galatians' generous hospitality towards him. This recollection reads like an individual, who finds himself estranged from his interlocuteurs, reminding them, how well they had treated him at first, when he was ill.     


The Hagar-Sarah Analogy


In Paul's analogy, the first son, born of the enslaved handmaiden, persecutes the second son, born of the free wife. Isaac and his lineage is favored by father Abraham, over his half brother, who is outcast, together his spiritual lineage. Paul presents these mythic events as analogous to the situation of the Galatian messianists, who are the spiritual heirs of Isaac.  


Professor Kahl sees Gal 4:21-5:1 highlighting the image of Jerusalem "above" as "representing a new international exodus of Jews and nations out of Caesar'e empire." In this reading, Hagar "becomes the allegorical representation of the not-one (3:19) as one-against-other that has hijacked Torah . . . " (p. 284). 


This is very forced. It is unlikely that Paul's auditors were expected by him to identify Hagar, an enslaved concubine, with contemporary representatives of Judaism, who demanded circumcision of them and who are stand-ins for Jewish representatives, who supposedly reached an agreement with Caesar, by which the emperor is prayed for in the temple and Diaspora Jews thereby are exempted from participation in emperor-worship throughout the empire.  


Kahl's take on the reminiscence passage (Gal 4:12-20) and the Hagar-Sarah analogy (Gal 4:21-5:1) loses purchase when isolated from Paul's argument in Gal 3-4. In these chapters, Paul is attempting a summary of Jewish religious history, which includes, from a Jewish perspective (then and now), an intolerable denigration of Torah. 


Paul does not assert that Torah was 'hijacked' by anyone. Rather, he argues that Torah never was adequate to fulfill God's salvific purpose for humankind, a purpose which entails freedom and new life, not by way of the continued observance of Torah but rather through allegiance to Messiah Jesus. 


These chapters read as the distinctive, idiosyncratic interpretation of Jewish religious history, which Paul worked out in the decade following his conversion to messianism, after his earlier career as a devout and violent enforcer of temple and Torah oriented Judaism.