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

Professor Brigitte Kahl, in Chapter Six, considers several sections from the Galatians letter. Kahl examines these verses to demonstrate the cogency of the primary themes presented in her book. 


A consideration of selected portions of the Galatians letter falls well short of a full blown commentary.  My opinion, expressed in earlier posts, is that a commentary is the best and possibly the only way to re-locate this document in a context different from the traditionally accepted one.


Kahl's central theme is this: those who have appealed directly to Paul's converts are representatives of Diaspora Jewish communities, who insist that Gentile, male messianists need to accept circumcision.


Why is this demand being made? 


Kahl speculates that representatives from the Jewish communities, residing in the province of Galatia, argued to Paul's converts that they all will come under severe sanction by the Roman occupiers. 


Why? Because the Gentile messianists must be observed by the Roman occupation as lacking foreskins to be deemed Jewish and thus, avoid punishment as irreligious traitors to the emperor.


The argument made in Galatia by Jewish representatives is that the Galatian gentiles, who desire to worship and live pursuant to the earlier preaching of Paul, must either accept circumcision or return to participation in the public worship of the emperor. 


As argued by Kahl, emperor worship, practiced publicly, would remove these Gentile messianists from the benefit of the apparent Roman-Jewish accommodation, by which the emperor is prayed for in the Jerusalem temple and Jews in the Disapora are not required to participate in formal, public spectacles by which the emperor is honored and worshiped. These public events include attendance at festivals, processions and staged, often bloody, death-dealing spectacles in local arenas. 


Kahl argues that Paul, in his Galatians letter, rejects both the accept-circumcision and the attend-spectacles options for his converts.


Why?


Kahl thinks that Paul's view, expressed in his Galatians letter, is that circumcision of the Gentile messianists - just as it is for Jews, also living under occupation - amounts to a denigration of Torah, since the Jewish-Roman accommodation is an unsavory collaboration with the empire. 


The second option, public worship of the emperor, is likewise, as Kahl has Paul argue, out of the question.


Why? Public worship of the emperor would amount to a denial of the messianic faith, which Paul preached among the occupied, non-Jewish  populations of the empire.


Kahl believes that many statements in Paul's Galatians letter are encrypted, double messages. She holds that Paul expressed himself in this manner because of the same anxiety that animated his critics - the danger of running afoul of a cruel occupation, should he or his intended recipients be caught out as anti-Roman.


To line up Paul's statements with the book's thesis, Kahl looks at Gal 2:11-14: 

My translation:

11 But when Cephas came to Antioch, I got in his face because he stood condemned. 

12 Before some people from James arrived, he would eat with non-Jews. But after they arrived, he stood back and held himself apart, fearing those of the circumcision. 

13 The rest of the Jews practiced this hypocrisy along with him, so that even Barnabas was carried away into hypocrisy. 

14 But seeing that he did not walk in the truth of the gospel, I told Cephas in front of all of them, 'if you a Jew comport yourself as a Gentile and not as a Jew, how can you insist that Gentiles act in a Jewish manner?'

Before getting to Kahl's understanding of this pericope, a few observations seem appropriate here:


(1) Paul's truncated re-telling of these events (more than a single incident), which occurred in Syrian Antioch, is the point of departure for the balance of Paul's comments in his letter.

(2) Paul is so focused (or anxious) to get into an anti-circumcision polemic that he offers no resolution or conclusion to the incidents he recounts.

(3) Paul passes over how others present might have reacted either to the withdrawal from table fellowship of observant Christian Jews or to Paul's confrontation with Cephas.

(4) The Gentile messianists in Antioch, whom Paul, ostensibly, was protecting against humiliation and rejection by their Jewish co-adherents, have no reaction whatsoever (in Paul's re-telling) to the events Paul describes. 


(5) Were the Gentile believers in Antioch as angry as was Paul, at the Torah-observant withdrawal from fellowship? Were they also critical of Barnabas? These questions cannot be answered but if the Gentile messianists in Antioch had joined Paul in an expression of anger, one might expect Paul to report this to the Gentile messianists in Galatia. 

(6) Perhaps the Gentile messianists in Antioch expressed sympathy toward Barnabas or toward Cephas, either of whom could have been seen as a searcher for a middle ground between extremes.  


(7) Some of the Gentile believers in Antioch, in addition to welcoming Jewish guests from Jerusalem, might have been understanding of their guests' lifelong Torah-inspired observances.

(8) The divisive issue in Antioch is Torah observance, specifically table fellowship between Jews and Gentiles. Notably, Cephas, by eating with Gentiles, was going further than required by the earlier agreement in Jerusalem; his conduct in Antioch signaled that he was freeing not only Gentiles but also Jews from Torah observance. Cephas' practice at table may have pleased Paul but not other Christian Jews, arriving from Jerusalem.


(9) After recounting his confrontation with Cephas, Paul, launches into an anti-nomos diatribe (Gal 2:16), which is sustained throughout the letter. He is in such a hurry to do this, he does not give Cephas an opportunity to respond even to a question, which Paul directed to Cephas (Gal 2:14). 


(10) Paul's questioning of Cephas appears to be a rhetorical ploy, a launching pad for the dense and forceful remarks, which follow.

Paul's narrative also serves as a launching pad for Professor Kahl. 


Throughout her book, Professor Kahl argues that Paul's anti-nomos critique is directed at Roman law, not at Torah. 


Consistent with this, Kahl does not see in these verses an occasion for Paul to denounce the Torah observance of those whom Paul calls "those of the circumcised" (2:12). Nor does Kahl observe that the issue in dispute in these verses is table fellowship, not circumcision. 


Kahl understands Paul to be taking to task those who withdrew from the Gentiles, not because of their Torah observance but rather because the separators demonstrated "collective hypocrisy . . . as an idolatrous act of public window dressing that officially quotes Jewish law but secretly bows to civic religion and order."


This comment is typical of Kahl's analysis of the Galatians letter, as we find here 


- a generalized reference to "hypocrisy" in lieu of a specific comment about the actual issue in dispute: table fellowship;
- an illusion to a public  display of some kind, which is not otherwise apparent or even detectable in Paul's statements;
- the characterization of some aspects as secret;
- allusion to Roman civic religion and order, although the actual language found in the pericope under study does not readily suggest any such thing.

Kahl emphasizes (also p. 278), "Peter's enforced 'judaizing' of the Gentiles . . . as in fact a gesture of civic/imperial conformism . . . ." 


But Peter (Cephas) may have been a passive or a vacillating actor, conducting himself first in one way, then in another in Antioch. 


In Gal 2:12, Cephas entering into table fellowship with Gentiles is described in the imperfect, active indicative -   
which is common to story telling but which may suggest repeated past activity - 'Cephas used to eat. . .' or 'Cephas was eating . . .'


In either case, Professor Kahl's comments do not address Cephas' initial willingness to share table fellowship with non-Jewish messianists in Antioch. 


It's not clear to me why Kahl characterizes Peter (Cephas) as enforcing anything on Christian Gentiles, when the issue is whether Christian Jews must be Torah observant at table. 


Kahl associates the perspective of Torah observant messianists as public window dressing but there is nothing I can detect in Paul's telling that indicates a public aspect to gatherings for the sharing of a common meal. 


The absence of a public component in Paul's retelling of his dispute with observant Christian Jews is a difficulty for Kahl's theory, that Gentile males in the province of Galatia were urged by synagogue representatives either to become circumcised or return to participation in public worship of the emperor. 


There is no evidence that I know of that Roman authorities punished ordinary residents of occupied cities, who did not attend public festivals and events staged in the arenas. 


Nor is there much to suggest that Roman-occupied populations eschewed such sponsored, public activities out of religious sensitivity.


There seems to have been a distinction drawn in the empire at this time between temple worship of the emperor and public spectacles. Emperor worship was conducted though religious observances, which also focused on officially accepted divinities, who were worshipped privately at temples build for this purpose. 


Public spectacles, on the other hand, were intended as entertainments for the occupied urban populace. At these events, the emperor was honored, to be sure, but not in such a manner that non-attendance was punished.  


Interestingly, and in a way supportive of Kahl's invitation to re-imagine the context of Paul's Galatians letter, gatherings for a common meal - but not gatherings for worship - might have caused trouble with the Roman administration in Syrian Antioch. This seems to have been the case in Anatolia (north Galatia) a few decades later, when Pliny the Younger served there as governor under Trajan. The Romans were nervous about unsanctioned social gatherings. (See an earlier post.) 


But getting back to Gal 2:11-14, there is a forced quality about Kahl's construal of Paul's statements to find in them a Jewish anxiety about public worship of the emperor, discovered in the conduct of Christian Jews, who wished to maintain an allegiance to some aspects of Torah observance, including kosher meals. 

NOTE: The Greek text of Galatians has been taken from

Greek New Testament
http://www.kimmitt.co.uk/gnt/gnt.html

  

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.

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 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? 

    

  

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

CHAPTER ONE – “REMAPPING GALATIA”

Galatia As Primeval Background in the Christian Theological Imagination (page 33)

Yet more prolegomena, which Kahl justifies in the final sentence of the preceding section:  “It is important first to note just how different that topology is from the conventional imaginary location of ‘Galatia’.”

This is followed by the assertion that “Galatia is terra incognita in the Christian imagination” and that the Galatians addressed in Paul’s letter “seem” more at home in the Wittenberg of Martin Luther and in modern “dogmatic mindscapes” than in the actual environment “where Paul first met them.”

We then are told that the last hundred years of “exhausting” scholarship has “obscured” the true context in which the letter was originally and presumably still is, to be read.

Instead of providing examples, which might support any of these assertions, Professor Kahl goes on to further assert that the letter itself is more “secretive” than others of Paul’s letters “in terms of contextual markers.”

If Kahl’s assertion is correct, that the Galatians letter is lacking in contextual indicators, would this not explain why many later readers of Paul’s letter, looking over the shoulders of the intended recipients, are left to speculate about much of the original setting?

Does the suggestion about deliberate secretiveness on the part of the letter writer not indicate all the more why a consideration of the text of the letter is of first importance?  

Kahl focuses on the secretiveness of the letter, but not as a possible explanation of the letter’s uncertain context. Rather Kahl merely wishes to announce that Paul is being deliberately obscure. Again, without providing anything that could be assessed as evidence, Kahl simply asserts that Paul has not provided a “standard” opening but rather is perhaps engaged in “a conspiratorial concealment” of the location of the letter’s recipients.

The pinball approach to issues – moving rapidly from one assertion to another without supporting with evidence what has just been stated – does not clarify either the import of ‘traditional’ scholarship, of which Kahl is critical, or her own announced plan to establish a needed, re-imagined context in which the letter is to be assessed.

Beyond North and South is the first sub-head under this section. Yet again, Kahl wishes to make something decisive of scholarship, which is inconclusive as to whether Paul’s Galatia is the Roman province of that name or the likely more ethnically uniform region to the north of the province.

Enough already about the inherently inconclusive north-south debate! 

Kahl brings up the debate, yet again, in order to make the point that “self-congratulatory” scholarship, by not finding a conclusive answer to the location question has itself “decontextualized” the letter.

This cannot be the case. The letter itself does not provide enough information for clarity as to where the letter’s recipients resided. Scholars who point this out are not congratulating themselves.

One gets drawn into blind rhetorical allies, when one looks beyond the silence of a text, to fault previous research which has concluded, the text is silent.

It is true, and Kahl points this out forcefully and correctly, that the Romans, present as conquerors and occupiers of Galatia (whether north or south Anatolia), have been “conspicuously absent “in the “imagined geography of religious spaces and counter spaces,” that is, in the efforts to understand the letter.

Kahl is correct also to remind us that the letter’s likely recipients probably (Kahl insists they did) walked Roman roads, paid taxes, were present at events at Roman temples, fought in Roman legions, attended Roman meals and games, fulfilled their civic obligations.

But if the Romans are to be seen as players and not as background to the letter, the letter must be cited for this. But it is not.

Instead, Professor Kahl argues that, the a scholarly focus on the north-south location issue has lead to a “dominant concern,” already present in Luke-Acts, to reconcile Paul’s career with Luke’s travel narrative and a Lucan interest in confining Paul to the role of a model missionary and an orthodox, doctrinal pioneer. 

But Pauline scholarship does not uniformly point in this constrictive direction.  We cannot know where lived the Galatians of the letter, but this does not mean or imply that Luke rightly portrays Paul’s chronology or his mission.

Pauline and Lucan investigations are entirely separate, from a scholarly point of view. Not for Kahl, who has it that “Paul has been turned into an entirely agreeable and politically correct model Roman citizen.”

Before sweeping all modern Pauline scholarship into a murmuring devotional circle, willing to see Paul disengaged from “the social and political realities of conquest,” Professor Kahl might engage Ernst Käsemann, with whom she has much in common as a tenacious and thoughtful Pauline investigator from within the Lutheran tradition.

Käsemann is the most searching Pauline scholar we have. Perhaps his fundamental gift is his thoughtful dissent from the notion that ecclesiology is the determinant for theology.

“Contemporary theology has forgotten,” Käsemann asserted, “that its true opponent is not unbelief , which is in any case probably more or less a fiction . . . unbelief is a manifestation of superstition, whether religious or secularized . . . superstition [may have] contributed more to the continuity of church history, theology and Christian institutions than faith.” (“The Spirit and the Letter,” Perspectives on Paul (Fortress Press, 1971, p. 153, translator: Margaret Kohl)

Käsemann once described Paul as “a possessed man in pursuit of a feverish dream” and also asserted, “Historical research has perhaps its final and deepest value in the fact that it disillusions.”  (Both statements may be found in “Paul and Nascent Catholicism,” Distinctive Protestant and Catholic Themes Reconsidered (Harper Torchbooks, 1967, pp. 19, 17, translated by Wilfred F. Bunge).

A gift from J. Louis Martyn to this shy M. Div. student at Union Seminary in the ‘60’s was Martyn’s drumbeat for Ernst Käsemann. Even if you decide that a Käsemann nugget (rarely an entire sentence) is fool’s gold, you have had to turn it over in your hand three or four times, and it is so pretty!

Through the centuries, many official, i.e., self-declared, orthodox interpretations of Paul, have dutifully domesticated him as the Cosmic Apostle, bravely fighting to preserve space for the development of a magisterium, which would then invoke Paul for its own secular ends, while pretending never to avert its gaze from the heavens.

But this is not the Paul of the letters, when the letters, including Galatians, are read as the ingenious but flawed theological inventions they in fact are.

One best not try to re-imagine Paul as a resistance operative against Roman occupation, who sent a cryptic message to sleeper cells somewhere in Galatia.

This seems to be where Kahl is headed.

But the exercise is not likely to be true to the Paul of Galatians any more than are the long standing efforts to reshape Paul’s statements, in the interests of some other imposed agenda.     

Thus far, to the sub-head Beyond East and West, page 37.

    

  

    

  

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

KAHL’S INTRODUCTION

In the previous post, I offered comments to Professor Kahl’s presentations under three sub-headings, Galatians and the Occidental Semiotics of Combat, Pauline Binaries Revisited, The Annihilation of the Antinomies (J. Louis Martyn).

The following sub-head is The Politics of the New Creation, wherein the writer asserts (p. 21), that the image of Paul “primeval Christian warrior defending the purity of the Christian gospel against the onslaught of Jewish law and otherness begins to fade.”

I am suspicious of a polemic which acknowledges the complexity of its own perspective(s) while dismissing a counter position, which has been drawn so simplistically it is merely a caricature. 

This gambit is easily done, but is also easily dismissed in its turn as unpersuasive.

The casual dismissal of the traditional perspective on Paul (Paul is contending against those who would require circumcision of Gentiles, who adhere to a belief in Messiah Jesus) is prologue for Kahl, who moves quickly into an explanation of brand new polarities, created by Paul himself.

Kahl is unwilling to place Paul’s polarities on the same plain as the official Roman binary ideology. Nor is Kahl prepared to see these polarities as rhetorical devices merely.

Kahl sweeps all of Paul’s polarities into a pile in the middle of a paragraph, the better to sweep them aside.

Old age-new age, flesh-spirit, slave-freedom, old creation-new creation are Pauline polarities but – according to Kahl – not really. 


These contrary elements, Kahl acknowledges, function in the context of “performance power” but the real game is not Paul’s attempt to adopt a persuasive and familiar rhetoric.

For Kahl, one must come to see Paul’s “war” as actually an “anti-war” in which Paul calls for the mobilization of life’s “losers, the crippled and limping, the never victorious.” The recruitment of bottom rung dwellers amounts (p. 22) to Pauline  “erasures of the principle of enmity itself.”

Paul is challenging, Kahl asserts, “an evil order” and “not an evil Other.”

This is a pretty good rhetorical flourish in its own right.

It may also be reductionist to define Paul’s Galatians letter in this way.

It certainly is a heavy lift to attempt to persuade that Paul has been fundamentally, and indeed deliberately, misunderstood for two thousand years, by a Christianized empire that intends to reassert the old self-versus-other polarity.

The ironic transcendence of all ideologies associated with the message of Jesus followed by a crucifixion of a Jewish messianic figure certainly gains purchase in the imagery of the Gospels, but not, so far as I can tell thus far, in the letter to the Galatians.

Paul in Galatians simply is too angry and hostile for that. Paul in Galatians is strident and accusatory. He is taking on “the Other” because he must answer criticisms leveled against him.

But Kahl would see the author of the Galatians letter as embracing “the Other” – which in turn amounts to an upending of the entire Roman self-versus-other ideology of empire.

Kahl asserts that the abandonment of the old Greek-Roman polarities “does not create a new Christian binary” but rather “produces a non-binary space” wherein “the old cosmos” and “the old-Self” are “put to death and turned into Nothingness.”

Nietzsche saw this in Paul’s teachings, as Kahl again reminds her readers.

This reader responds: is Nietzsche the best you can do? Is a deliberately outrageous iconoclast, given to insults and exaggeration – the best you can do?

Kahl is bumping up against the literal words of the letter and she knows it. This is why she asserts (p. 22), “the transformation Paul perceives is difficult for us to grasp and to articulate.”  Professor Kahl states (p. 23) that Paul’s argument is “literally senseless” if one tries to understand it by “the old ways of meaning.”

Kahl invites readers to look past the words of the letter and focus on lifestyle changes. Kahl speaks (p. 23) of Paul as more interested in “a permanent discipline of self-Othering.” Earlier (p. 22) she had argued that Paul has in the Galatians letter, initiated “the practice of Selves, who no longer try to vanquish their Others.”

The gist of Kahl’s argument at this point (p. 24): “it is not an antagonism between Judaism and Christianity, however, but an antagonism between a messianic way of life and an imperial order.”

A sweeping critique of Christian ideological pretensions can be and has been made in praxis and by apologists over the centuries – along side other far less challenging critiques.

But is the most sweeping critique of all what Paul’s letter to the Galatians is all about?  I retain my doubts.

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

KAHL’S INTRODUCTION

Galatians and the Occidental Semiotics of Combat is the title of the next section of Professor Kahl’s introduction.

Kahl argue that the traditional understanding of Paul in Galatians by the Western church, is grounded in the imperial Roman world view.

The official, Roman world view, had in its turn, adopted the Greek perspective, which viewed all of creation as a pattern of opposites. Greek though first identified the fundamental components of creation – air, earth, fire and water – to which other opposites were added – superior, inferior; right left; good, evil, male, female; rest, motion, etc.  

The imperial view, naturally, allied “self” with elements associated with power and orthodoxy and identified its defeated adversaries, as “other” and allied with elements associated with weakness and heresy.  

Kahl states that she will demonstrate her thesis by way of a close examination of the Great Alter of Pergamon, described by Kahl as “the visual focus and anchor of this investigation.”

Kahl intends to demonstrate that the traditional understanding of Paul in Galatians is a continuance of the Greek and then Roman notion of the ordering of the cosmos into oppositional elements. 


This may be why Kahl does not address herself to any other than Protestant and specifically Lutheran prospective readers. 


All the rest, i.e., Roman Catholic interpretations of Galatians, merely perpetuate, in Kahl’s view, a theology of polarities and dominance, and have done so for two thousand years.

Kahl acknowledges that some commentators are in the role of precursors, having already reached the same conclusion regarding Paul’s declaration that the polarities built into the created order have been smashed by the “subversion” of the old, binary order by “a non-binary ‘new creation’. ”

Kahl acknowledges J. Louis Martyn’s Galatians commentary  (Doubleday, Anchor Bible, 1997) at this point, stating that Martyn had made “a groundbreaking insight” (Kahl, p. 20.) into Paul seeing the crucified Messiah in opposition to all negative, cosmic polarities. 

The new insight Kahl expects to establish beyond Martyn, is  a delineation of the actual motives of Paul’s opponents in Galatia.

Kahl intends to show that Paul’s perspective, properly understood and free from distortions engineered by a philosophy of dominance, threatened the security of the occupied populations in Galatia.

Kahl will maintain that the occupied of Galatia, including some among those who would follow the crucified Jewish Messiah, had concluded that Paul’s announcement of the “invasion” of the old order would likely be deemed a form of treason by the Romans.

For Kahl, Paul’s theology necessarily threatened the “compromise” which had been made with the Roman forces of occupation. Kahl (p. 21): “As we shall see, the Paul-opposing circumcision party in Galatia was driven much more by concrete sociopolitical concerns than by purely religious anxieties.”

Establishing the true motives of Paul’s opponents in Galatia, Kahl hopes then to show that Paul and his Messiah-believing adherents and recruits “were still part of Judaism” (p. 20).

This point, which can be established already on first century (CE) historical evidence, appears to be important for Kahl, who is at pains to separate the correctly understood Paul from the anti-Semitism which has pervaded Western Christian theology.

Kahl has already alluded to her personal connections to this dark and unsavory theme by reference to her mother’s reconciliation with a childhood classmate. It is therefore not beside the point to observe, as Kahl has done, that Western anti-Semitism culminated in the Holocaust, engineered by the government of Kahl’s native Germany and from within the natal ground of her Lutheranism. I suspect this book is, in part, about self-identify, whatever else it might be about. But come to think of it, this can be said about many books, can’t it?   

I expect it will not be difficult to show that features observed at the Great Alter of Pergamon express elements of the traditional Greco-Roman world view of an ordered universe composed of oppositional elements.

However, I retain my doubts that an awareness of oppositional cosmic elements can be seen reflected in the primary dynamics at play between Paul and his addressees in the Galatians letter.  

Surely it ought to be acknowledged that the Roman occupation adopted and co-opted an older philosophy of oppositional elements, with Rome itself in the positive role as embodiment of the positive and powerful elements. But this is background, part of the context of any and all, who lived under Roman occupation. The annual announcement of “the law” by Roman authorities would function in the same way and ought not to be taken as reflected in any particular debate or dispute among or between occupied peoples “on the ground” in some specific region of the Empire.

Can the Galatians letter itself be described as Paul’s answer to concerns about Paul subverting the Roman world view in a way that threatened the existence of his addressees or opponents in Galatia?

I expect only a close exegesis of the letter can answer this question.    

           

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

KAHL’S INTRODUCTION

Professor Brigitte Kahl now (p. 11 f.) marks out a major heading, Re-Imagining Justification by Faith, which is made up of several sub-heads. (As mentioned in an earlier post, keeping track of the argument in the Introduction is likely to prove important, when the exposition in the book itself is under consideration.) 

The sub-headings under this major heading are: Constructing the Protestant Other (M. Luther), “Final Solution,” Galatians and the Occidental Semiotics of Combat, Pauline Binaries Revisited, The Annihilation of the Antinomies (J. Louis Martyn), The Politics of the New Creation.

Kahl has stated already that the deliberate misreading of Paul operated as sort of a centuries-long conspiracy.

Introducing this section, Kahl states as given, matters which are subject to considerable uncertainty. Kahl declares that, by way of “a political makeover” the “pro-Roman Paul” is twinned with “the theological Paul’s opposition to Judaism” so that “eventually” Paul (“the apostle to the nations”) was made “admissible among the founding fathers of Western Civilization.” 

This appears to be the thesis of the book. But the chore that lies before Kahl is to establish the historical grounds for the new image of Paul. This is likely to be a taxing explication.

Kahl thesis is this: Paul was willfully misunderstood, so that he might become an important authority for the development of new Western imperialism(s) and the attendant exclusion of any who can be viewed as “the other.” Correctly understood, Paul offers small comfort to imperial power or to anti-Semitism, to homophobia or the millennias-long abuse of women.

In what sense is Paul to be understood, today, as a “founding father” of “Western Civilization.” No details are provided in the introduction. The book awaits.  

Constructing the Protestant Other (M. Luther)

Kahl invokes Luther, as she has invoked Nietzsche, as a kind of forerunner, who awakened Kahl to the new need to re-imagine Paul.

Nietzsche was brought on stage by Kahl, and handed the card that reads, Paul worked among the weak and the poor and we despise him for that. 

Taubes walked on, holding a card that read, In Paul’s time “nomos” meant anything you wanted it to mean. 

Martin Luther, enter stage right, holds a sign that says, Paul’s central doctrine is justification by faith and you must despise any and all who do not hold to this doctrine as we understand it.

Just as with Nietzsche, Luther’s intemperate opinions are presented flatly, for their face value. There is no attempt to qualify or to suggest there might be a more nuanced assessment.

The summary (simplistic?) presentation of the views of Luther and the others is deliberate. Kahl is introducing the reader to those who have influenced her to see Paul in a new, more compelling and more accurate – and therefore, a truer way.

I am struck by the irony of Professor Kahl invoking individuals as representatives of opinions, which may not reflect the complexity of the views held. Isn’t this the kind of distortion, Kahl argues, that has victimized the apostle?

“Final Solution”

In this sub-heading, Kahl relates the effecting story of a 2002 reunion between her aged mother and a Jewish childhood classmate. This story is inserted here, Kahl writes, because it stimulated her “to re-imagine my Lutheran heritage” and to discover, by way of Paul’s “true” story in Galatia, whether there might be a chance for peacemaking and justice seeking with the apostle.