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

CHAPTER TWO – “DYING GAULS / GALATIANS ARE IMMORTAL”

“The Great Alter of Pergamon”

In introductory remarks, Professor Kahl writes (pp. 77-78), “the visual semiotics of dying and dead Galatians is the overall topic of the present chapter” and adds, “Our exploration of the Great Alter [of Pergamon] in both its Pergamene context and in light of its Roman semiotics aims at establishing this unique piece of art as an essential background image, auxiliary context, and intertext for reading Paul’s letter to the Galatians – a ‘complementary system’ for interpreting the text.”

These comments  are made in the context of opening up a discussion about the sculpture Kahl identifies as “the Dying Trumpeter,” perhaps better known as “the Dying Gaul.”

The marble sculpture is thought to be a Roman copy of a bronze Greek original commemorating the 230 B.C.E. victory of Attalos over the Gauls. It is to be found today in the Capitoline Museum in Rome.

Photographs of this item are found on page 32 and on the cover. The photographic image below is taken from William Smith, Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities (London: John Murry, 1875) see pp. 574-77.

Earlier scholars have identified the Dying Gaul as a gladiator, but the later consensus is that we are looking at a defeated warrior. 


Kahl takes (p. 77) this life size marble figure very sweepingly, to be “a message about sacred violence and the basic order of the world, about victory and civilization: our civilization.” 


The marble sculpture of the Dying Gaul / Dying Trumpeter appears, to me, to have been modeled on a centuries older, strikingly similar bronze figure from the sanctuary of Aphaia, at Aegina.


The older work, of a dying warrior, is believed to be the depiction of the treacherous Laomedon, king of Troy, 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.

Mitchell catalogues the earlier image as "advanced archaic" and dates it between 500 and 450 B.C.E. 


There is no hint of lawlessness in this earlier depiction, apparently of a Trojan warrior or king. 


Were the Gauls or Celts ever depicted by the Romans as lawless, i.e., as without law? 


So far as I can find, the Gauls / Celts / Galatians were not denegrated as a lawless people. Strabo describes their legal practices in some detail as does Caesar. 

Is the most plausible suggestion the one that Kahl proposes: that the Gauls / Celts / Galatians were held by imperial Rome to be lawless (pp. 53-4, 61-64, 75) and thus, the representation of them by the Dying Gaul is a depiction of lawlessness? 

This seems unlikely to me.


Kahl advances this proposition, it would appear, because Kahl wishes to introduce the idea that Paul in Galatians is "targeting Greco-Roman imperial nomos much more than Jewish Torah," which has been suggested already in the Introduction (p. 7).