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

Professor Kahl's brief Conclusion (pp. 287-89) summarizes what Kahl asserts has been demonstrated in this investigation.


Kahl believes (p. 287) that she has shown that "the entire letter is a 'coded' theological manifesto of the nations of the world pledging allegiance to the one God who is other than Caesar . . ."


Is this description of the intent of the writer of the Galatians letter meant by Kahl to be taken ironically?


A manifesto is a public announcement of principles or intentions. A cryptic statement cannot be described as a manifesto because the intended meaning of a cryptic message is something other than what is stated in the literal message. This is the opposite of manifest-o.


The coded-manifesto conundrum is twinned with that other conundrum, already commented upon, wherein what the Galatians letter may be taken to mean by subsequent, unintended readers is retrojected upon the mental processes of the writer as his personal, intended meaning given by him to his own words.


For some readers, the Galatians letter may become "a passionate plea to resist the idolatrous lure of imperial religion and social ordering" (Kahl at p. 287). But evidence is lacking that Paul meant for such a coded message to be read into his statements by readers he addressed in Galatia.


What is up with Galatians?


Paul is confronting sharp criticisms of his own authority and message, raised by Jewish messianists, who were victims of his brutal treatment of them when he operated as an enforcer of temple and synagogue mores. (See my article, “Paul and the Victims of His Persecution: The Opponents in Galatia” 32 Biblical Theology Bulletin No 4 (Winter 2002) pages 182-191.)

Paul's over-heated response to his critics in Galatia is to denounce to his wavering converts his victims' description of himself. He insists he is not a transgressor of Torah who represents no one. After making these denials, Paul launches into a reassertion of his theological claims, which had earlier impressed the Galatian converts. 


By this gambit, Paul is changing the subject. He dismisses his critics and devotes the balance of his dictation to a reprise of his complicated rearrangement of Jewish religious history, which elevates Abraham at the expense of Moses and invites gentiles into allegiance to a Jewish messiah by denigration of the rituals propounded by Torah, because Torah is limited chronologically, ending with the advent of Messiah Jesus.


It may be true, as Kahl concludes (p. 288), that Paul did not see himself as "breaking away from Judaism." But in fact, by demeaning Moses and denying the validity of Torah observance, this is what he did.


One further irony. In a book which expressly declares the "commonality" of all, we are told in the last sentence of the Conclusion, that "only" by seeing things as Paul prescribed, do we see things aright.

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

CHAPTER ONE – “REMAPPING GALATIA”

 “It is harder to interpret Paul to one who half understands him than to one who knows nothing about him.”

Kahl’s heavy lift into a re-imagining of Paul might be associated with this comment, which was made more than a century ago by William Wrede, whose scholarly promise was tragically cut off by his death in 1906. See Paul (Eugene, Oregon: WIPF and Stock Publishers, 2001, originally published by the American Unitarian Assoc. in 1908) p. 85.

Is Kahl engaged with a scholarly guild that only partially understands Paul?

Under the sub-head A Depolitized Geography, Kahl addresses a concern I had just voiced in the previous post – that Kahl’s critique of Pauline scholarship was too general and not grounded in specifics.

But Kahl does engage at least one investigative current in a clarifying and helpful rhetorical tact, by drawing attention to the work of E.P. Sanders and James Dunn, which has come to be knows as the “new perspective” on Paul. In essence, Sanders and Dunn have argued that Paul’s concerns ought not be equated with Luther’s emphasis on the plight of the individual to find acceptance by and before God.

Kahl is impressed with subsequent responses to Sanders and Dunn, which argue that Paul’s missionary focus had to do exclusively with Gentile recruitment. She mentions the work of Gaston and Gager and then goes on to highlight a scholar I am not familiar with, James M. Scott. Kahl is impressed with Scott’s location of the geography of Paul’s missionary program in the Genesis 10 “Table of Nations,” although she faults Scott for assuming that Paul would have simply taken over the geographic perspective of “the dominant class, ” i.e, the Roman overlords of Anatolia.

Kahl is intent upon pushing a debate in the direction of the view that Paul is antagonistic, in his letters, not towards Judaism but towards the Roman occupation.

Interestingly, Kahl begins with a salute to Krister Stendahl’s 1976 book of essays, in which Stendahl argued against equating the concerns of Luther and Paul. The work of Stendahl, which Kahl cites goes back to a 1960 essay, originally in Swedish, which was then delivered in 1961 as a speech to the American Psychological Association and published in English in the Harvard Theological Review (No 56, pp. 199-215) in 1963.

Stendahl observed, then, fifty years ago, that Paul’s “trivial” observation in Romans 7 that everyone “knows that there is a difference between what he [sic] ought to do and what he [sic] does” is part of “a very special argument about the holiness and goodness of the law" (Torah). Stendahl suggests that this special argument and its accompanying trivial observation has been taken as “a penetrating insight into the nature of man and the nature of sin.”


Kahl is right to credit Stendahl for drawing attention to the divide between Paul and his era and Luther and his. It is in Stendahl’s essay that the call for a “new perspective” is found, a call which was answered by Sanders, Dunn and others.

Citing the work of Stendahl, Kahl is locating her own research on foundational work by one influential scholar, who, though not the first to do so, suggested that Paul’s statements, to be understood aright, must not be abstracted from his context.

But this raises another issue. Isn’t it in the nature of Scripture that a venerated text inherently is removed from its original locus and applied anew?