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

CHAPTER ONE – “REMAPPING GALATIA”

"Universalized Galatian Barbarians and the Worldwide Roman Savior" (189 B.C.E. – 25 B.C.E.)

In this section, which completes Chapter One, Professor Kahl continues a narrative of the many battle(s) between Roman armies and Galatian clans.

The purpose of this retelling is to demonstrate that the Galatians, whether in the east (modern day Turkey) or west (Italy, France) have come to represent to the Romans (p. 65)   “universal agents of disorder and rebellion.”

Just prior to this assertion, Kahl had taken note of three acts of human sacrifice conducted by Roman officialdom. In 228, 216, and 113 B.C.E, Roman authorities sacrificed a Galatian man and woman in order to placate the Gods.

These events are especially significant for Kahl, who argues that these executions were significant to the Romans – especially the second of the three sacrifices, coming as it did, after a defeat, rather than as an invocation of divine favor before battle.

The executions in 216 B.C.E., Kahl writes, “might indicate” that “the Roman construction of the Galatian/Celtic enemy had undergone a profound metamorphosis”  being both “universalized” and simultaneously incorporated into “Roman state religion.”(p. 56).

The problem with reading such grand symbolism into these 216 B.C.E. executions is that we know what prompted them, as Kahl acknowledges. These executions were carried out in response to an accusation of unchastity against the vestal virgins. There is more, as Kahl also recognizes; the victims sacrificed were not just Galatians. Also killed were a Greek man and woman in both the first (228  B.C.E.) and the final (113 B.C.E.) instance of sacrifice. 

Nevertheless, these deaths occasion Kahl’s agreement with Karl Strobel, who concluded that the Celts / Galatians had come to be seen as the “enemy per se,” by Roman officialdom.

Another conclusion, also cited by Kahl (footnote 67 to Chapter One), is that of Rankin, who felt that Celtic invasions might have stimulated a more generally applicable Roman sense of “real or imagined menace from foreign peoples.”

Despite the fairly slim evidence Kahl asserts (p. 64) that the Galatians represent to the Romans “agents of godless and lawless disorder.” It is not clear to me how Kahl can associate the Celts with ‘godlessness’ or why Kahl concludes that the Romans did.

Nonetheless, Kahl goes on (pp. 64 – 74) to narrate the nearly two centuries of struggle (189 – 25 B.C.E.), which ended with Galatian slaughter, destruction and submission in both the Roman west and the regions, which had comprised the Seleucid empire in the east. In this latter area, the kingdom of Pergamum was placed in control of the surviving Galatian clans, by virtue of military allegiance given to Rome by successive Pergamene kings.

The final nail in Celtic independence is hammered home by Cesar’s campaigns in Gaul, modern day France.

Kahl concludes that the Galatians, by the end of this period and by virtue of their resistance to Greek and Roman hegemony, had become influential as a representational adversary, far beyond what they had accomplished on the battlefield.

This conclusion permits Kahl to further assert (p. 75) that “the entire vocabulary of Paul’s justification theology” needs to be read “within the framework of the Roman-Galatian encounter.”

“Texts are cultural constructs, and we need to treat them as such.” This statement, Kahl has cited (note 91 to Chapter One) with approval and it has relevance for her own text, I think.

Professor Kahl is reviewing and retelling certain historical events with an agenda in mind. She is interpreting as she goes, with the idea of demonstrating that a new perspective needs to be taken by Pauline scholarship, as to the correct interpretation of a text found in Christian scripture, Paul’s letter to the Galatians. 

Kahl (p. 75) would remove this text from its traditional interpretation (“issues of Jewish law”) because the larger context – the Roman one – means that the recipients of Paul’s letter “were already firmly and categorically condemned or justified by Roman law and power, and had been granted grace through faith as loyalty and allegiance to the Roman emperor.

I remain unconvinced.

Neither Kahl’s reading of the history of the period nor her assertions about the Galatians letter – accompanied by little in the way of citation to the letter itself – are persuasive. So Far.

Much depends on the reading of the letter. As noted earlier, this reading is absent, which means that fundamental questions, related to Kahl’s thesis cannot even be asked, much less answered.

Here are a couple of examples:

If the Celts / Galatians came to be represented as the barbarian arch enemy by Roman ideology, and if this is the context in which Paul writes to the Galatians, what can be made of the fact that many of Paul’s statements and assertions in his Galatians letter are also found in others of his writings, addressed to peoples other than Galatians? 

What about the fact that different New Testament writers make use of some of the same terminology Paul employed, but again, in a non-Galatian context? 

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

"Gauls / Galatians Marching Against Rome. Delphi, and Pergamon (387 - 189 B.C.E.)"


In this section of chapter one, Professor Kahl takes up (pp. 51 - 64) the murky history of Celtic occupations of parts of present day Italy, Greece and Turkey. The focus of this presentation is to highlight Greek and Roman descriptions of these events as a struggle by self-described civilized forces against Celtic barbarism, represented by tribes, who at first conquored and settled in these areas, but who were subsequently defeated by both Greek and Roman armies.


Kahl stresses that the centuries-long struggles against Celtic invasion - ending in Roman victory - assumed mythic proportions, with the Celtic (Galatian) tribes in the role of the archetypical enemy.


From what I can tell, the Celtic / Roman struggle was not much different from other invasions from northern Europe by clans, seeking either plunder or agricultural lands in warmer climes. Kahl certainly recognizes the similarities but calls attention to the apparently (to Kahl) unique mythic imagery assigned to the Celts by Roman  (Pliny) and Greek-speaking (Plutarch) historiagraphers.


Interestingly, though not remarked upon by Kahl, some of the ancient commentators, writing during Roman hegemony, displayed sympathy for the Celts.


Livy, a native of Padua (Patavium), who could be described as passionate about Rome, was of a Gallic family; Livy may have acquired his knowledge of Celtic epics from his own family's oral traditions. (Markale, p. 50, see below.)


Plutarch's sympathy for the Celts is found in a passage Kahl cites, in which a Celtic king ia given a speech that justifies his people's invasion and occupation of Italy on the same grounds which the Romans used to justify their own violent acquisition of lands already occupied by others.


The romantic image a thousand years later, of Celts as grand losers in shadowy, epic battles across Britain is part of English, Irish and even Scottish folklore. Here is an example - a paragraph that is fun to read - which purports to explain the impetus for ancient Celtic invasions / migrations, which are then linked to sagas of kingdoms won and then lost in the British isles:


"The Gauls in Illyria were becoming restless. As believers in an all-governing dynamism, they were anxious to be on the move again. The Celts looked upon the present as a mere function of the future, as a continual process of evolution. The legends of Brittany,Wales and Ireland all serve to illustrate this theme.The mark made by trhe Celts on the ancient historians is no more than a manifestation of their asnti-historic desire to deny the present and create the future, if only in the imagination.This singular attitude is inherent both in the capture of Rome and the expedition to Delphi; and was later responsble for the Twelfth Century Round Table Romances of Christian Europe, a cycle of magical adventures to match the aspirations of a fallen race which refused to accept that it had died." (The Celts: Uncovering the Mythic and Historic Origins of Western Culture, by Jean Markale [Rochester VT: Innte Traditions International, 1993 (1976: Les Celts et la Civilisation Celtique, p. 66.])


The epic nature of sweeping invasions and occupations, combined with ambiguous tellings and retellings - to say nothing of the final defeat and destruction of peoples who are linked with the foundation of Western Europe - all this gives momentum to romantic imagery.


T.G.E. Powell, inclined against romance, states that it must have been not their religious notions but "visions of rich plunder" which sent the Gauls into northern Italy, as well as some "special misfortune" which drove the Celts to "descend upon Macedonia in midwinter." (See The Celts [Thames and Hudson,1958, 1994], pp. 18, 19.)


Kahl has little interest in the romance but does want to call attention to that part of the Celtic myth, which was developed by ancient historian / propagandists, in the service of imperial Roman hegemony.

Kahl argues that the epic struggle for supremacy in Italy between Celts and Romans occasioned the visual representation of Celts as the archetypal Enemy.


For this argument to persuade, an explanation of the sympathetic treatment by Plutarch and Livy must be offered.


Kahl does cite Livy but as an apologist for Rome, who uses "twisted logic" (p. 52) to denigrate the Celts, when Roman emissaries break the peace "as if they were Celts". Kahl cites Livy 5:35 but the closest statement by Levy for this characterization that I can find is at 5:36, where Livy describes the Roman ambassadors, as a "peaceable enough mission, had it not contained envoys of a violent temper, more like Gauls than Romans." (See Titus Livius (Livy), The History of Rome, Book 5, Rev. Canon Roberts, Ed., posted at perseus.tufts.edu.)


This seems to me straightforward enough and does not warrant Kahl's conclusion (Kahl, p. 52) that Livy is asserting "that it is barbarians who are lawless and Romans who keep the law--even when they do not." Kahl's conclusion is made more dubious since Livy goes on to describe how the Roman ambassadors abused their diplomatic credentials by taking up arms on the spot and killing a Celtic chieftain, an event which the Celts justly complained of before the Roman senate, but to no avail.


The Celtic king, Brennus the Second is said to have laughed out loud when he saw the gods at Delphi represented in human form. Can Celtic history / myth / romance become grist for a re-imagined context for Paul's Galatians letter? 

We are not there yet.