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

This response is to Kahl's Chapter Five, pp. 209 - 222.

Kahl answer a question she poses; one she considers (p. 209)  "most directly relevant to the reading of Galatians: Why is the messianic association of circumcised Jews and uncircumcised Gentiles a controversial issue in Roman Galatia?"

Is association of circumcised and non-circumcised men THE question in the Galatians letter?

Some might argue the main question is not association between circumcised and uncircumcised males, but rather, a requirement of circumcision for non-Jewish males, who have alligned themselves with the Messianic group for which Paul had solicited recruits in Galatia.

Kahl promptly reframes the issue (pp.  209-10) not as association, when she describes Paul's "opponents" in Galatia, who "press for circumcision among the male Christ-followers."

This brings Kahl's discussion in line with more traditional views about the nature of the contentious issue in Galatia, i.e., that Paul is arguing against a circumcision requirement for Galatian males.

Kahl loses little time in departing from the traditional view.

Once more invoking the visual imagery displayed at the Great Altar at Pergamon, Kahl draws attention (p. 210) to the eagle with unfurled wings and claws, sculpted at the top and to one side of the staircase.

Who or whom does the eagle represent? Kahl applies an idiosyncratic interpretation, describing this work, despite its greater antiquity and the place of its creation, as "the Roman eagle."

Kahl then (in the next sentence) relocates the bird to its place of origin, the "eagle at Hellenistic Pergamon" but then quickly adds that the eagle is "the personification of Zeus's super logos and law."

Zeus? Super logos? Personification of . . . law?

The piling up of descriptive clauses, so as to make a sculpture do its mythic duty and then double duty and even triple duty as a portrayal of an aspect of Pergamonic history, of Hellenistic sensibilities, and then as a visual representation of the Roman Principate and finally, of the Imperium . . . this is a lot of rhetorical weight to ask a stone eagle to lift.

But lift that weight, this bird must.

The eagle is put forward by Kahl as the symbol of Roman imperial rectitude, a representation of the insistence by the imperium that all defeated peoples must accept their subordinate place in this stratified society, which functions top-down as a system of totalitarian oppression.

In several excursi, Kahl traces earlier Jewish settlements in Anatolia, and then emphasizes the tension between Jewish religious practices and Roman dictates that occupied peoples must offer civic, i.e., religious allegiance to the Emperor.

The Roman-Jewish compromise entailed daily sacrifices for the Emperor in the Jerusalem temple, in exchange for the unmolested maintenance by Diaspora Jews of their ban on images in their synagogues and more-or-less unrestricted freedom to follow their rituals, as decreed by Torah.

Noting the inherent contradiction of prayers for the emperor, offered in the temple of the one true God, Kahl asserts (p. 216) the Roman-Jewish accommodation meant "The Torah of the one God . . . had in effect become a favor granted . . . by the supreme representative of idolatry, the one other God, Caesar."

Given the power of Roman legions to enforce whatever was decreed by the imperium, Kahl is correct; any accommodation with Rome was coerced by Rome. But does this mean Jews on the ground, as it were, whether in Jerusalem or elsewhere, saw matters in this light? Is there any indication that Paul did?

A more nuanced description of matters between Jews and Rome probably ought to take notice of the perspectives of the first two dictators, Julius Caesar and Augustus, both of whom were inclined to extend respectful deference to local customs of great antiquity.

The Romans, not just these two dictators, were sensitive about the absence of explicit Roman connections to antiquity. Lacking ancient civic and religious traditions of their own, compared to the Greeks and others, the Julian-Augustan regimes, and successors, though to a lesser extent, were inclined to give limited scope to local practice, including Jewish customs.

The erratic, insane behavior of subsequent emperors (Caligula, Nero) might better account for strains brought to bear on the Roman-Jewish accommodation, more than speculation about theological turbulence on the Jewish side.

Kahl (p. 215) imagines that local Jewish thinkers might have pondered whether the literal absence of an image at Pergamon could have represented the "aniconic God" of Israel. Kahl speculates that Josephus and other "high ranking Jewish brokers" would have said, yes, the God of the Jews might well be found at the Great Alter. Paul, the Apostle, Kahl believes, "would have vehemently disagreed" and thus,  Paul would have been able to lay claim (p. 217) to the Hebrew "prophetic and exodus tradition, as well as of the Macabean resistance to the violation and usurpation of law." This speculation is and not part of an historical record I am familiar with.

By undertaking this gambit, Kahl positions Paul - in imagination - as  articulating "a counter-interpretation from below" since the view from above, that is, temple worship and the priestly caste were "tightly controlled by Rome."

Where does this mixture of imagination and history leave us?

"Against this overall backdrop the unspoken and unseen part of Paul's Galatian correspondence finally begins to emerge from historical oblivion" (p. 210).

What emerges, Kahl proposes, is this: the uncircumcised penises of the Galatians becomes, in their allegiance to Messiah Jesus, not simply a natural state (as shared by Roman soldiers and citizens) but a symbol of resistance to Roman occupation. Had the Galatians submitted to circumcision, thus signaling their conformity to the subordinate Jewish position, their circumcision would have been accepted by both Roman overlords and Jewish sensibilities. But their allegiance, as Galatians, to Messiah Jesus, while refusing to accept the sign of Jewish identity, was a serious act of rebellion - insisted upon by the author of their conversion, the Apostle Paul.

As Kahl puts it (p. 220): "When Paul declares that neither circumcision nor foreskin matters any longer because both circumcised Jew and uncircumcised Galatians belong to Abraham's seed and stand under the authority of Israel's God alone, that declaration smashes an icon of Roman law and order. And the Galatians' foreskin, never before of any significance, all of a sudden emerges as evidence of an illicit boundary transgression that claims for the God of the circumcised what lawfully belongs solely to the deified Caesar."

This view owes much to Kahl's method, which receives its momentum from imaginary, interpreted so as to admit of possible but historically undocumented developments and associations.

Kahl's method, as I appreciate it, works like this:

First, there is a description of art, followed by an interpretation, heavy with metaphor, of what the art might have meant to the overlords of the culture (Pergamon) wherein the art was inspired.

This is followed by an association of that art and the heavily metaphorical meaning assigned to it, with the highest levels of a heavily stratified culture (Rome), which preserved the artwork (the Great Altar) or reproduced it (the Dying Gaul).

Having established a metaphorical association between artworks and certain top-down power dynamics that were part of the Roman imperium, Kahl suggests that the meaning of the art is no longer limited to a metaphorical template but to a factual one. The Galatians of Paul's acquaintance are, in fact, dying Gauls, as represented, centuries before, by the Dying Gaul / Trumpeter sculpture, who "may redeem themselves, by doing the works of Roman law that 'redeem' them . . . ."(See p. 219).

The richer and more nuanced the transition from metaphor to fact, the better to bolster the proposition that representational art is not just as part of the Galatian background, but actually delineates issues that are addressed in Paul's Galatians letter.

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

These comments are addressed to Chapter Two, sub-head: "The Lawlessness of the Dying Trumpeter - and of Paul" (pp. 78-82).

Kahl asserts, that the image of the Dying Trumpeter / Dying Gaul was ubiquitous across the Greek and Roman worlds ("omnipresent images" page 79) and in the first century was understood by means of "a common sigh system of otherness" (p. 78) which "Paul and the Galatians of his letter would "have no difficulty reading" (p. 79).

These assertions lead Kahl to further argue that this sculpture informs not simply the context of Paul's Galatians letter, but the argument(s) contained in the letter. This is so, Kahl states, because of two features of the sculpture: (1) the presentation of  an uncircumcised penis and (2) the assailant who has delivered the lethal blow is not pictured. 

Conflating the centuries older sculpture with the contemporaneous Galatians of Paul's letter, Kahl allows the imagery of the art to represent the circumstance of Galatians, per se, whose ancestors had been defeated in war. The analogy seems to run in the opposite chronological direction as well: "Is there any relation between his [the statue's] foreskin and the mortal would on his side? And who inflicted the wound? [. . .] Is it Jewish law that has cruelly punished the dying man for not complying with the 'works' of circumcision?" 

Kahl expects her reader to see such questions as "bizarre" because, in her view, the tension about circumcision has little or nothing to do with Torah and much to do with the imperious law of the Roman occupiers.

As mentioned in an earlier post, the photographic image below is taken from William Smith, Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities (London: John Murry, 1875) see pp. 574-77.

This sculpture, taken as representing Paul's Galatian converts, means to Kahl (p. 80), "it is not Jewish particularism or ethnocentrism that has struck him [i.e. the Dying Gaul] down but Cesar's imperial universalism." 

Are we to impute imperial Roman pretensions to Greek sculpture of an earlier date simply because Rome took possession of these objects?

Even if this question is answered affirmatively, where is there an association between the sculpture and the letter dictated by the Apostle Paul?  

One of the problems Kahl faces is that of assigning significance to a work of art, on behalf of an absent set of supposed viewers. 


Art engages with individual sensibilities and perceptions which inform each viewer's understanding. Is there a 'correct' way to understand a work of art? Can a particular understanding of a sculpture be assigned with confidence to observers in another time and place? 

A specific historical problem is that much art from the Greek and later Roman eras display an uncircumcised penis. On what grounds is one entitled to announce that any one of these works of art is part of an argument about circumcision?

As mentioned in an earlier post, the surviving marble sculpture of the Dying Gaul / Dying Trumpeter appears, to me, to have been modeled on an even older, strikingly similar bronze figure from the sanctuary of Aphaia, at Aegina, a depiction of Trojan King Laomedon, killed by an arrow from Herakles (Heracles), during the first campaign against Troy. (This image may be found in A History of Ancient Sculpture, Vol 2, by Lucy Mitchell (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1883) p. 244.)

This image also displays a penis. Are we to speculate then that this image, too. is a critique of circumcision? On what grounds, whether historical, esthetic or literary, can this association be made?


In this image, as with the Dying Gaul, the attacker is absent. Dos this mean we are entitled to declare that the attacker is Roman, since imperial Rome later came into possession of Greek art?  


Professor Kahl concludes (p. 81) this section by citing an ambiguous comment from Paul (Gal 6:11-13) wherein Paul seems to be saying that those who insist the Galatians must be circumcised, do so  "that they may not be persecuted." 


Kahl implies that Paul is here referring to "a third party" which Kahl, herself writing ambiguously, takes as "something or someone," of whom Paul's circumcision-insisting adversaries "are genuinely afraid."  


Whether a single one of Paul's Galatians ever viewed this sculpture on a single occasion is simply asserted to be true; they all must have seen this statue because it was "omnipresent."


This assertion permits Kahl to speculate that Paul's adversaries might be afraid of the same "invisible hand that struck the deadly blow against the Trumpeter."


This further assertion muddies what is known of the provenance of the sculpture of the Dying Gaul, representing as it does, an adversary defeated in a Greek or Pergamene victory, not a Roman one. 


For a new interpretative key to be accepted, displacing a former understanding, the new idea cannot be merely plausible. The new approach must be more plausible than the older approaches. We are not at this point, so far in Kahl's presentation.