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

The concluding remarks (pp. 125-127) which end Chapter Two prompt a further response from this reader.


Professor Kahl helpfully summarizes the three themes which Chapter Two intends to convey, namely (1) a detailed description of the Great Altar at Pergamon (reconstructed in Berlin), (2) an emphasis upon "the antithetical character" (p. 127) of the symbolism of the Great Altar, accomplished by applying a "semiotic square" (high - low, in - out) to the representations on the Altar and, interwoven in (1) and (2), is the third theme: (3) an association of the Altar sculptures with Paul's letter to the Galatians.


Kahl, I would allow, has accomplished (1) and (2) but not (3).


Finding an association between the Great Altar and Paul's Galatians feels forced.


A case in point is the identification of the Altar Giants with the Gauls / Galatians. Kahl states without qualification that "the Galatians / Giants have been set up as the archetype of lawlessness and rebellion" (p. 126).


But the Great Altar's mythological giants do not obviously represent the historical Galatians. The Galatian defeat by the Attalids is represented on the Great Altar in company with a separate sculpture of the mythological giants. (See Post Twenty-three.)


The Galatian-Giant correlation has to be established, it appears, in order to move on to explicate how (p. 126) "every single element in this construct [at the Great Alter] of divine and human order, the nature of God(s), and the nature of community, will be challenged by Paul in interaction with Galatian communities in the first century C.E."


I don't see how the challenge(s) posed by Paul in Galatians is made more coherent historically or more pertinent to ourselves, if seen as directed against the symbolism expressed at the Great Alter.


The Pauline challenge, understood as the subversion of imperial values, is implied in the symbolism of a crucified God, to whom allegiance is owed by communities gathered from among the oppressed.