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

KAHL’S INTRODUCTION

Torah Criticism as Affirmation of Roman Nomos

The argument presenting under this sub-head strikes me as more persuasive than the preceding assertions that Nietzsche and Jacob Taubes lead the way.

Here, Kahl asserts that the Roman context was, for Paul, far more relevant than subsequent New Testament and theological developments have seen. Instead, this context has been “eclipsed” because of the centrality of “the doctrine of justification by faith” which is prominent in Galatians. (See Gal 2.16). 

Hopefully, this point will be expanded, since, superficially, the impression is left that Kahl is in a dialogue only with her Lutheran context.

Kahl adds that an important alarm about the traditional misunderstanding of Paul has been sounded by Robert Jewett in his Romans commentary (Fortress, 2007).

I think Kahl needlessly obfuscates the clarity of her argument about the importance of the Roman context, by asserting that Paul’s negative critique of nomos in Galatians required the creation of “an anti-Jewish double.”

Why? To create an explanation for Paul’s law-critical statements. Also, Kahl adds, the actual target of Paul’s critique – the Roman empire – could not be acknowledged in the subsequently developed “Christianized empire.” 

These arguments come very near to the promulgation of a conspiracy theory, which would have had to include centuries of commentators, agreeing together not to understand Paul plainly and correctly.

Kahl finds it ironical that the Rome-critical Paul was replaced in theology, by a “pro-Roman Paul” and his "anti-Jewish double.”

These arguments appear to me to be tendentious. 

Why isn’t it sufficient simply to demonstrate that the larger Roman context has been neglected? Why does this probable truth need to be expanded into an argument about conspiracies and the wholesale, deliberate misreading of Galatians?

Maybe the book itself will draw all these threads together.   

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

KAHL’S INTRODUCTION

Law As Imperial Compromise Formula (J. Taubes)

Under this sub-head, Kahl credits (page 9) Jacob Taubes’ 1986 lectures on Paul (The Political Theology of Paul, Stanford: 2004) with providing an insight which has proven to be “one of the decisive impulses behind the assumption of this book that in Galatians Paul does not abandon Jewish law but, on the contrary, wrestles, from a rigorously Jewish perspective, with a practice of Torah that has a least partly been ‘hijacked’ and desecrated by Roman imperial law and religion.” 

What Taubes says in the passages reproduced by Kahl is that nomos is imbued with an elastic essence, which permits “everyone to understand law as they want to” but that Paul rejects this “liberal” accommodation to imperial power, in favor of “the one who was nailed to the cross by nomos.”

I have not read Taubes but the statements of his, which Kahl has quoted, do not appear particularly controversial or groundbreaking.

The Roman occupation certainly enforced a religious consensus. Certainly, too, those who wished to preserve their own practices, had to seek some kind of accommodation, which satisfied both the Roman overload and their own identity and integrity.    

Paul, an adherent of Christ crucified, vigorously dissented from the imposed (and partly negotiated) consensus.

But it’s not clear from Taubes’ comments, how Paul’s Galatians letter is a forum in which it is demonstrated that Paul did not “abandon Jewish law” (Kahl) but rather “wrestles with a practice of Torah” (Kahl) that Roman law has “hijacked and desecrated.”

I can see grounds for describing Jewish practice under Roman occupation as a kind of “desecration” but I don’t – yet – see the target of Paul’s critique in Galatians not Torah but rather Roman law and its enforced practice. (As I have suggested already, my own take on Galatians is that it is a highly personal self-defense by the missionary, who was required to answer the charge that his violent abuse of Jewish adherents of Messiah Jesus destroyed his credibility as a religious guide.) 

Kahl refers the reader to earlier writings of her own and to chapter six, below.

We shall see.