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

Further along in Chapter Six, one finds a fuller engagement by Brigitte Kahl, with some of Paul's statements taken from the text of the Galatains letter. This engagement is welcome but problematic. 

A discussion of only selected statements falls well short of detailed exegesis. The lack of this kind of investigation is a disappointment in a book, which wants to see Paul in Galatians mounting a critical (yet cryptic) argument against the public worship of the emperor.

Professor Kahl’s treatment of Gal 6:4 (p. 271) may serve as an example. 

My translation:

“Each person should assess one’s own work and so take pride in (eis) one’s own alone and not in (eis) that of another.”

Kahl translates differently,

“Everybody should evaluate the work of himself or herself and then will have the boast in front of (eis) himself or herself alone.”

By way of this awkward translation, Kahl utilizes this statement to assert (see quotation below) that Paul, sarcastically, is arguing against public display, that is against the public show of allegiance to the emperor.

To enlist Paul’s sentence in the service of an argument against a display of public allegiance to the emperor, Kahl deploys the preposition eis, in translation to mean, “in front of.” By way of this translation, Paul can be said to have public acts ("works") in mind, which he then, sarcastically, dismisses: display yourself privately, not in front of anyone else.

But the issue in this statement is not display but judging. Kahl substitutes display for judging by combining the two appearances of the preposition, eis. 


The preposition eis entails a range of meanings depending on its context (see Gal 3:17 and 4:11). 


But this preposition cannot be said to mean “in front of” to the exclusion of the notion that Paul is calling on his readers to make, individually, an internal or private assessment of one’s own conduct. 

In Gal 6:4 Paul clearly admonishes his readers not to assess the conduct of others. Kahl does not allow this meaning to be given to this verse.

Why not?

Kahl wishes to use Gal 6:4 to characterize Paul as mounting an “up-front attack on the competitive system of euergetism/benefactions, which, as we have seen, is a key feature of imperial order in a province like Galatia, ‘works’ are declared to be no longer the showcase of the self in the public race for status.”


To make Gal 6:4 carry all of this weight, Kahl declares that chapters 5 and 6 of Galatians have been dismissed by many of the commentators, who find earlier sections of the letter to be more substantive.


But in fact, the very statement Kahl enlists here, Gal 6:4, is best understood as Paul’s invocation of a general counsel to right conduct.




NOTE: The Greek text of Gal 6:4 has been taken from:

Greek New Testament

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

What we have proposed here, by Professor Brigitte Kahl, is a meaning ascribed to a document by virtue of associations that have been made between the document and pre-existing art. 


The success of this procedure is dependent upon the establishment of an historic link between the one and the other. This is an exercise in historical investigation. 


Unless an historical link can be shown, we have metaphorical associations.

No one would presume to declare that a given object could not be exploited as metaphor by a perceptive or creative observer.

Professor Kahl has associated the visual art found at the Great Altar at Pergamon with the Galatians letter, a primary literary source of the later-developing traditions of a faith community. 

But while Kahl's presentation sees more here than a metaphorical association, her procedure does not follow the rules of the historian. Her procedure does not begin either with facts, or with an assertion of a theory to be proven by the marshaling of facts. Nor does her conclusion offer a summation of facts presented with assertions or inferences drawn as to the meaning or the importance of past events.


Instead of laying out a set of facts to support the assertion that Paul opposes circumcision, which is seen, supposedly by Paul, as a collaboration with the Roman Empire, the reader too often is given citations to scholars who, in one way or another, are used to bolster Kahl's primary argument. The scholars cited hold views on some aspect of Paul's argument, that are tangential to Kahl's central argument and opinions.  


It may be, for example, as Kahl suggests (p. 260) that the emphasis on apocalyptic in Paul (cf. J.C. Beker) requires to be supplemented or even modified by insights into his letters, which demonstrate Paul's allegiance to his roots in Judaism (cf. Roy Ciampa). 


But this sort of adjustment does not require an association between the images found on the Great Altar and Paul's pre-literary context, that is, the circumstances which occasioned his Galatians letter.


Once one has opened the door onto the idea whether Paul retained a place, even a contentious place, within Judaism, one must admit this idea and take it on directly.


The notion that Paul, in working out his messianic theories, retained an underlying embrace of Judaism must answer Schoeps, who pointed out a half-century ago (1961) that the Judaism Paul characterizes in Galatians is a caricature. 


Schoeps wrote (p. 174), "There are no Jewish parallels to [Paul's] assessment of the law." 


If, as Kahl contends, Paul is rehabilitating Torah from a messianic perspective, rather than upending Torah from an apocalyptic one, something must be done about Schoeps. But in this book, nothing is.


The associations made here, as in earlier chapters, are inviting if proposed as metaphor. Offered as historical, these associations are not persuasive (as in this example, p. 273):


"As the social practice of a new creation (Gal 6:15) Paul's empire-critical theology has a profoundly ecological dimension as well. Combat, competition and mindless consumption of the other - the other human and the other of the Earth - in Paul's system are the 'works of the law' and the signature of the 'flesh' (sarx) in enslavement to sin, crying out for the liberting transformation of the spirit."


Is all of this actually Paul's theology or an interpretation of it with metaphorical associations to the Great Altar in mind?


It may be that Paul's "messianic retelling of the Genesis story" (p. 261) functions, as a "counterimage" to the imperial, Roman story of the founding of that empire, exemplified by the use employed by the caesars of the imagery on display at the Great Altar. But it is quite another matter to assert that Paul had this counterimage in mind, which is more than to assert that his arguments can function in this way, in a later interpretation. 


To the extent that the reader is told that Paul was actually engaged in a conscious repudiation of Roman imperial mythology, with Pergamonic images infusing both the Galatians' and also the Roman mind, the reader is offered a post hoc argument. 


Paul's assertions, in the hands of a creative reading of his Galatians dictation, may become a critique of prior or subsequent imperial systems or of all such systems. 


But we are not entitled, for this reason, to state that Paul had such in mind, or that his intended readers did. 


It simply is not the case, made from the letter, that the "core" of Paul's opposition to "works of the law" (p. 262) is alarm that his messianic converts are on the point of slipping back into "conformity with the imperial body" by either accepting circumcision or participation in emperor worship. This is not Paul's argument in Galatians. 


To reduce Paul's law-critique to "works of imperial violence and competition" is an unwarranted reduction of the argument  to be found in his Galatians letter.


Kahl, as promised in the Introduction, places (p. 265) the novel of Peter Weiss front and center, as an important template with which further inferences about Paul's Galatians can be made. 


Weiss is important to Kahl because of the prominence Weiss gives to the imagery of the Great Altar, in his story about resistance to nazism. 


But the reader is given Weiss' novel and not exegesis of the Galatians letter. 


Instead, there is in a circular way, frequent reversion to the visual art at Pergamon.






   


  

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

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
    

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. 

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

Professor Brigitte Kahl has devoted the first half of Chapter Five (pp. 209 - 227) to an explication of the options, as Kahl perceives them, which confronted Paul's Galatian messianists: they must either participate in public emperor worship or accept circumcision and benefit from the Jewish exemption.


Kahl believes that these options are embedded in the language of the Galatians letter, whose re-imagined context includes a serious disagreement between Jewish accommodationists and Paul.


The Apostle to the Gentiles, so Kahl maintains, argued to his converts that acceptance of circumcision amounts to a refutation of Paul's invitation to participate in the dawning messianic age.


A Jewish accommodation, Kahl argues, extended in imagination 
(Kahl, p. 215: "Could one imagine . . . ?") to whether the icons found at the Great Alter might have been seen as including "Israel's anticonic God" as "nevertheless at least invisibly present" - a conclusion with which Paul "would vehemently disagree."


One could imagine many things.


One could speculate, as Kahl does, that a Jew, whom Kahl identifies - Flavius Josephus, and Jews Kahl sort-of identifies - "high-ranking Jewish power brokers" - "would probably" find the God of Israel invisibly present among the icons at the Great Altar at Pergamon. 


This reader is as willing as the next to give a writer an opportunity to make a case for a new appreciation of a venerable document, such as Paul's Galatians letter. 


But questions arise:


How might Josephus and "Jewish power brokers" find acceptable the notion that YHWH can be said to be "invisibly present" at the Great Altar? 


Professor Kahl answer: they "would probably" find this idea acceptable "in one way or another."


Illusive is the argument that moves between an historical incident and an invitation to use one's imagination, so as to speculate how others not associated with the incident, might have imagined its import, which import is then invoked "in one way or another" as central to the context of another event, the writing of Paul's Galatians letter.


We can speculate what Abraham Lincoln might have thought of the cave paintings at Lascaux, France and decide that he would have though they were the product of adolescent male fantasies and not invocations of hunting success, drawn by ancient shamans. But do such speculations about what Lincoln could have thought of a matter about which he has no recorded opinions, merit a re-imagination of the context of Lincoln's fraught relationship with his wife?


The existence of the Great Altar at Pergamon is a fact.


But speculation about how someone not known ever to have been present at this alter (Josephus, Paul) might have imagined whether an invisible god could be said to be invisibly present - when there is no data offered in support of the idea that any such interpretation or response ever was made . . . this is a bridge too far.

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

This post offers some considerations of Professor Kahl's reference to Luke-Acts in Chapter Five.


Sprinkled through Chapter Five, are citations to Biblical texts, put forward to bolster Professor Kahl's argument that representatives of Diaspora Jews insisted to Paul's messianic converts they must accept circumcision. 


The circumcision requirement was in reaction, Kahl argues, to the risk posed by uncircumcised Gentile males who had identified themselves with the messianic proclamations of the missionary Paul. These men were perceived by Jews also resident in Galatia, as persons who were deceptively benefitting from the Roman-Jewish accommodation, whereby the emperor was prayed for in the Jerusalem temple and the Jewish Diaspora was permitted to follow its own observances, exempt from participation in public emperor worship.


Kahl offers several New Testament texts in support of these views.


One citation is to chapters 13 and 14 of Acts, offered to the reader in toto (note 63, page 355) as independent evidence of the situation Kahl has described, i.e., (p. 224) "portions of the Jewish population in Asia Minor negotiated rather successfully the compromise between Jewish otherness and civic and imperial integration, which brought them in some cases closer to the civic and imperial establishment in the cities." 


This heavily qualified statement may well be true, just as its opposite might also be true. That is, one could say, "in some cases" . . . "portions of the Jewish population" . . . "negotiated" un"successfully" . . . etc.


The varying  situations described in Acts 13 and 14 can be said to show many configurations beyond the one Brigitte Kahl is proposing.  


In these chapters, Jewish figures are portrayed as hospitable to Paul and his colleagues (13:5, 15, 42, 14:1)  but also as inhospitable (13:45, 50, 14:2, 19). Similarly, local representatives of Roman occupation and official religions are likewise both hospitable (13:6-7, 12) and hostile (13:50), sometimes in apparent collusion with Jews, in demonstrating hostility to Paul (13:50, 14:5), but then again, sometimes joining with Jews in praise of Paul (13:44, 14:7, 13, 18).


An allusion to Luke-Acts, especially if the subject under discussion is insistance by some that others accept circumcision, should include mention of Act 15:1, where it is stated that those Jews in the Diaspora, who are portrayed as arguing forcefully that Gentile messianists must be circumcised were "some men came down from Judea." 


This reference ought not be overlooked and should be explained in  light of Kahl's thesis that those who insisted on a circumcision requirement were not followers of Messiah Jesus nor were Judeans, but were Diaspora Jews.


The fact that Acts 15:1 is overlooked serves to remind that the description of a course of events, teased out of selected Biblical texts, retains cogency only if it accounts for other relevant texts.


To put this another way, a proposed new understanding of Paul in Galatians carries the burden of inter-connective textual coherence.


There is also the need to come to terms with a cited text, in its inherent literary integrity. Mention of a text in Luke-Acts, it seems to me, requires placing a given citation in the context of Luke's role as a writer. 


Much of the work done on Luke-Acts in the past half-century or so has demonstrated that the writer of Acts, sequel to Luke, was interested in developing a chronology that was friendly to a Gentile mission as an already established fact. 


Acts reveals a greater freedom to pursue this objective, than is apparent in the earlier work, Luke, in the writing of which, Luke was constrained both by the existence of a prescribed "gospel" form and by the subject matter of the earlier work, the career and the mission of Jesus. 


Citations to Acts 13 and 14 need to be given with their context within Luke's theological objectives as demonstrated elsewhere in Acts. A casual reference to these two chapters falls short, by not addressing Luke's redactional role. This failing is compounded by the fact (see above) that these chapters present a quite varied picture of the interaction between Paul, Diaspora Jews, and local authorities.


Further, a citation to Luke where the Apostle Paul is concerned, has to contend with the (to me) well established conclusion that the writer of Luke-Acts, though an admirer of Paul, did not understand Paul and placed words in his mouth, which are quite foreign to Paul's actual thoughts, expressed in the letters. If Luke felt free to compose speeches for Paul, did Luke also freely manipulate the context of those speeches? Since Dibelius' work on the Paul's speeches in Acts, this question must receive an affirmative answer. 


In the context of the research and the conclusions reached in the past decades about Luke's role as a creative historian and editor of material at hand, are their grounds, in the citations made by Professor Kahl, for concluding that these Lucan passages can be taken as references to actual events, or rather are we dealing with Luke's redactions?


Ironically, the Paul of Acts does displace Judaism as the essential ground and home of the Gentile mission. A further indication of this displacement is that the Jewish claim to be the people of God is not echoed in the speeches of the Paul of Acts, yet Jewish option may be found in the letters, as in Romans 9-11. Paul, letter writer, also who urged upon his converts the image of the body of Christ, not as in Acts, their unity as members of the human race. (See the Areopagus speech of the Paul of Acts,  at 17:22-31.)


All this is the work of Luke, not of the historical Paul, Apostle to the Gentiles.

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

Kahl, at p. 224 f.


Professor Brigitte  Kahl's description of the situation in Galatia may be summarized as follows


Galatians:


- were peoples living under the harsh regime of Rome occupation;
- were represented in Greek-inspired sculpture, which the Roman Imperium adopted to represent the Galatians as defeated, "lawless," outsiders, whose incorporation within the Imperium remade ("resurrected") them as properly subordinate and, passive;
- as defeated and occupied people, were subject to the Roman demand that they take part in the cult of the emperor;
- had (some of them) come under the influence of the Jewish missionary, Paul;
- were addressed by Paul in a letter he dictated and directed to them.


the Apostle Paul:


- proclaimed faith in a Jew, Messiah Jesus, allegiance to whom brought them into a divinely governed epoch, which allegiance contradicted their enforced allegiance to the Roman emperor, who was to be worshipped as the one true God;
- organized his messianic converted into worshipping congregations, participation in which entailed a refusal to participate in the cult of the emperor and thus implicated his converts in at least latent if not actual civil disobedience;
- insisted that the status before God of his converted was not dependent upon submission to the Jewish rite of circumcision.


In the section of Chapter Five, under review, Kahl proposes to answer two questions:


Why had Paul's converts been told they must be circumcised?
Who had told them this?


Kahl's answers these questions in this way: those who insisted that Paul's Galatian converts must be circumcised were Jews, living in Galatia.


These persons ("control agents" acting on behalf of the Jewish community) demanded that Paul's converts be circumcised.


Why did the "control agents" make this demand? Kahl gives her answer:


Important elements within the Jewish community were afraid of the Roman authorities. The specific Jewish fear was that the authorities would target Jews for persecution, since Paul's converts no longer participated in the cult of the emperor. The converts, if Paul had his way, withheld themselves from emperor worship because, as heirs of Abraham, they had become Jews, and could invoke the Jewish-Roman accommodation, which exempted Jews from the enforced requirement that all occupied peoples participate in the emperor cult.


In order to allay persecution of the Jewish communities in Galatia, the Jewish control agents insisted that the messianic converts demonstrate their incorporation within Judaism, by undergoing the Jewish rite of circumcision, thereby displaying the physical mark of male Jewish identity.


The problems with Kahl's description of the situation among Paul's converts, as reflected in his letter to them, are an absence of data and implausibility.


MISSING DATA


There is no evidence I know of, that Jewish representatives would have insisted that non-Jewish males, who did not participate in synagogue activities, could be deemed part of Judaism so long as they got themselves circumcised.


There is no evidence I know of,  that a circumcision requirement alone was ever accepted by Rome as the only identity marker for a non-Jewish male, so as to declare this person to be Jewish.

There is no evidence I know of, that Roman authorities in Galatia inquired of Paul's converts whether they were circumcised, as a proffer of proof of their embrace of Judaism.

ABSENCE OF PLAUSIBILITY


It is not plausible that synagogue representatives would approach non-Jewish males, members of a messianic sect, and insist they get themselves circumcised because of a fear within the larger Jewish community of guilt by association.


More plausible is the scenario that synagogue representatives would argue to Roman authorities that the new Galatian sect had nothing to do with the Jewish community, or with Jewish observances or with the Roman-Jewish accommodation, by which the emperor was prayed for in the temple in Jerusalem and diaspora Jews were thereby exempt from participation in the emperor cult.


Certainly, it is possible to confect a scenario that gives purchase to the idea that a circumcision requirement was insisted upon, by Jewish agents, or Christian Jews from Palestine. This scenario, with varying details, is the traditional picture most commentators find in Paul's Galatians letter.


But in order to make Jewish circumcision a matter of concern to local Roman authority, as Kahl does, the situation requires that Roman authority held circumcision to be the defining characteristic for the new sect to be deemed part of Judaism. This notion is not plausible, implying as it must, that Roman officials, although described as insistent on the overt participation by everyone in the cult of the emperor, and specifically concerned to see that Jewish men were circumcised, were at the same time, too obtuse to uncover a shell game, by which men who were not Jews, could claim they were, merely by displaying their naked circumcised members.


The suggestion that local authorities would have accepted evidence of circumcision as their only concern becomes even less plausible in light of Kahl's belief that Paul's converts, following his teachings, proclaimed themselves to be the only true Israel, in contradiction to Jewish self-identification and synagogue practice.


Such self-centric views - we are true Jews, you are not  - openly expressed, would have led not to an overture made by Jewish synagogue representatives to messianic Gentiles to get themselves circumcised; it would have led to fistfights or worse.


If the we-are-the-only-true-Israel idea was articulated by Paul's converts, or even privately held, the theoretical Jewish "control agents" likely would have denounced the Gentile messianics to the authorities. What better way to demonstrate their respect for the Jewish-Roman accommodation than to denounce impostors?


Since Kahl would have it that Paul adheres to Torah for himself and his converts, it all comes down, for Kahl, to circumcision, plausibly, as it must, since this is a strong theme in the Galatians letter. 


But is it plausible to think that local Roman authority would have made to-be-or-not-to-be-circumcised the salient concern, in a situation where Gentile men asserted they were Jews, yet were not enrolled in any synagogues and declared themselves to be the only true Jews? I suggest, not; this is not a plausible circumstance.


Is it plausible that local Roman authority would declare everyone Jewish, including men who were not Jews by ethnicity and were not recognized as Jews by local Jewish leaders, so long as the authorities' own examination turned up a number of circumcised penises? No other questions asked? 


This is very far fetched. If Pliny the Younger is close to typical, local Roman officials were conscientious in conducting investigations into allegations of disturbances against public order.  


Far more likely is it that the debate in Galatia over circumcision was conducted between Jews or Christian Jews, on one side, and Paul on the other, with his Jewish and non-Jewish converts ranging between one or the other position.


Kahl bolsters her assertions with - at long last - some detailed examination of the text of the Galatians letter. These texts will be talen up in a later post.