Galatians

Philip F. Esler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134836321
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Paul's letter to the Galatians, sometimes known as the Magna Carta of Christian liberty, is central to the understanding of the relation of Paul and the Law and is packed with crucial historical, social and theological material.
Philip F. Esler provides a detailed and accessible interpretation of the text, which draws on contemporary and modern literary models. He outlines the problems often associated with reading Galatians, the context of the text, the rhetoric of the text and the intercultural and social implications of Galatians. Galatians includes comprehensive indices of ancient sources and modern sources, detailed references and an appendix discussing Paul's attitude to the Law in Romans 5.20-21.
Galatians presents a succinct and emminently readable analysis of a dense and important New Testament text.

Chapter 1

Reading Galatians

READING GALATIANS INTERCULTURALLY

Paul wrote his letter to the congregations of Galatia (located in Turkey) some time in the period from the late 40s to the mid-50s of the first century CE.¹ It is a short document, comprising six chapters and totalling only 149 verses, yet packed with historical, social and theological material of the highest significance. We are distanced from its creation, however, by nearly two thousand years and by a vast expanse of geographic and cultural space. How am I, a modern New Testament critic, to set about reading this letter at the dawn of a new century and a new millennium? Or how am I to set about explaining my reading to contemporaries who are equally distant from Paul and his Galatian audience? What does ‘reading’ even mean in this context?

Thirty years ago, perhaps, New Testament commentators could launch upon an interpretation of a text like Galatians reasonably untroubled by questions of method such as these, but that is no longer possible today. The pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus vividly expressed his belief in the dominance of change in human experience by saying that ‘you could not step into the same river twice’,² a position on the nature of reality summarised in the phrase panta rhei (‘everything flows’).³ For someone involved in New Testament interpretation at present, panta rhei seems an apt summary in view of the rapid and continuous changes occurring in the field.⁴

Since at least the early 1970s the established mode of biblical criticism, the historical-critical method, which aims at retrieving the original meaning of biblical texts using historiographical techniques unrestrained by dogmatic beliefs, and which as far as the New Testament is concerned was largely developed by Ferdinand Christian Baur and David Friedrich Strauss in the 1830s and then refined by the source, form and redaction critics, has been under serious pressure. First, it has been challenged by the rise of literary criticism, which explores narrative and aesthetic dimensions of biblical texts commonly neglected by historical criticism and, very often, reacts against a perception of the Bible as an historical relic by seeking to find contemporary meanings in its pages. Second, social-scientific critics have argued that the historical method stands in need of fundamental overhaul, though not replacement, so as to bring within its scope the results of more than a century of research by anthropologists, sociologists and social psychologists.⁵ Third, the whole enterprise of historical biblical criticism has come under postmodernist attack, for the reason that it allegedly represents one of the prime metanarratives of post-Enlightenment rationality, riddled, for example, with unsustainable claims to objectivity.

In spite of the flux which now characterises the field, most commentators hold a general position with respect to New Testament texts (such as Galatians), a still centre of a turning world, and it will be helpful if I briefly set forth mine here.⁶ My guiding principle is to treat the New Testament texts primarily as communications from people (some of them known and some unknown) in first-and early second-century GE Mediterranean settings who had something of moment to say to other persons contemporaneous with them whom they thought would benefit from what was said.⁷ They were the bearers of good news which they wished to pass on to others.

This may seem a rather commonsensical and unsurprising view to those unfamiliar with current debate in this area. Yet it sharply distinguishes my position from that of critics who favour focusing on the theological meanings to be gathered (or created) from the texts by readers in the present and who are attracted to the notion of the biblical texts as aesthetic artefacts (see Francis Watson 1994:15). Critics such as these would be unhappy with the way my view privileges the elucidation of the meanings of biblical texts in the circumstances of their origin. In adopting this as my leading principle I have, in fact, situated myself on one side of a noticeable divide that has opened up in the field which, as we will soon see, largely mirrors a fundamental distinction in modern research as to how best to envisage the nature of communication and of ‘reading’ a text. Towards the end of this chapter I will set out a case that there are certain ethical implications to this dispute. On the other hand, I will make clear below my own position on how the meaning of biblical texts uncovered on the basis of this principle can function in our own setting.

Recognising and bridging the cultural divide

Inextricably linked to my position is the necessity of fully acknowledging the huge cultural gap between the New Testament authors and us. Unless we take steps positively to overcome this barrier, to comprehend the meanings of their utterances in their first-century contexts, we will never come near to understanding what they are saying, just as we discover today, if we travel or live among peoples of foreign cultures, that mere facility with the local language is no guarantee of understanding. Thus, we must also employ strategies for situating the words and gestures used in their very different cultural contexts; a wink might be an invitation to a pleasant liaison in one culture and a warning to keep away in another. If we do not face up to this cultural distance we remain at risk of ethnocentrically imposing our own taken-for-granted notions of reality onto a people who may simply not share them, of assuming that our understanding is their understanding. To reach some general comprehension of the distant culture of the first-century Mediterranean world we are able to profit from the work of anthropologists who have investigated contemporary societies which are remote in various ways from our own North Atlantic culture. Recent anthropological research into the Mediterranean area itself will be used extensively in this reading as one part of an array of social-scientific theory brought to bear on Galatians.

A good example of the issue at stake here arises with respect to a terminological point of some moment for this reading—the use of the words ‘Christian’, Jew’ and Jewish’ in connection with phenomena around the middle of the first century when Paul wrote Galatians. Some scholars have refused to use the word ‘Christian’ or ‘Christianity’ in relation to followers of Jesus in the first two generations after the Crucifixion because the Greek word Christianas only comes to be applied to them late in the first century.⁸ But a more fundamental reason for avoiding these words is that because we are so familiar with ‘Christian’ and ‘Christianity’ we risk unconsciously imposing modern associations of these words on ancient data if we apply them to the early generations of the Jesus movement. Accordingly, these terms will not be employed in this reading with respect to phenomena in the first century CE, except where used in quotations. These words will, however, be used in other contexts in what follows, especially in relation to our contemporary situation.⁹

Yet scholars who avoid ‘Christian’ for the New Testament period continue to employ the expressions Jew’,Jewish’ and Judaism’, to translate Ioudaios and Ioudaismos, notwithstanding the fact that they are affected by a similar anachronistic difficulty. Even though there has been great sensitivity in recent years to the need to recognise the diversity of outlooks and behaviour among Israelites in the first century GE (hence the frequent preference for ‘Judaisms’ over Judaism’), commentators have generally given little thought to the very appropriateness of Jew’ and Judaism’. Yet our understanding of these words is inevitably shaped by events which occurred after the composition of the New Testament texts. Prominent among these events were the generation by the House of Israel of a new identity for themselves around orally transmitted legal traditions eventually codified in the Mishnah from 200 CE onwards, their fortunes in the medieval period and their fate in Nazi Europe.John H. Elliott, on the other hand, has argued recently that during the first century CE the effect of Ioudaios and Ioudaismos was to designate the ethnic group which originated in the geographical region known to the Greeks and Romans as Judea (from which the words are derived), with the word initially employed by outsiders but later becoming a self-appellation (Elliott 1997). Unfortunately, to translate Ioudaios as ‘Judean’, a solution recently adopted by the editors of the Biblical Theology Bulletin, is at present somewhat misleading in English, since we already use ‘Judean’ in a limited sense to designate the actual inhabitants of Judea. Accordingly, in this reading I will employ ‘Israelite’ (which was, in fact, a self-designation of the descendants of Abraham in the first century—see Rom. 11.1 and 2 Cor. 11.22), and, occasionally, the adjective ‘Judaic’, which does not seem to me to be affected by the same problems as ‘Jewish’, or I will simply transliterate the Greek words themselves.¹⁰

Once we have done our best to pierce the barrier of cultural difference between ourselves and the authors and original readers of the New Testament, the way is open for us to acquire a deep understanding of these utterances from another culture and to enjoy the richness of insight which comes from being an ‘intercultural’ person—able to stand with one’s feet in two cultures and to analyse and assess one with respect to the other. There is a growing literature, to which I will refer below, which charts the nature and benefits of interculturalism. One aim of this reading of Galatians is to introduce this field as offering a promising new way of bringing biblical meanings into our contemporary experience. Biblical interculturalism represents a hermeneutics derived from social rather than philosophical sources.

We must, however, be open to the fundamental cultural diversity represented in the documents of the New Testament. At one level this reflects the geographic and ethnic variety encompassed in the Mediterranean region. In addition, although the New Testament texts originated there, in many vital respects they represent subversions of its culture. They are pervasively counter-cultural with respect to the world in which they were written. Accordingly, an important issue in a reading such as this is to acknowledge both the extent to which Paul reflects the Mediterranean culture in which he had been socialised while also recognising the degree to which he manifests a new, even subversive, culture based upon the unique impact of the Christian revelation. Indeed, to understand how far Paul diverges from cultural influences outside the Christian movement, we still need to appreciate them in their own terms; distinctiveness only manifests itself in contrast to the usual and the mundane.

Listening to our ancestors in faith

The particular communicators represented in the New Testament matter to me more than the other writers who survive from the ancient Mediterranean world. For the authors of the New Testament texts like Paul are my ancestors in faith; although remote in time and culture, they are the first extant witnesses of a new understanding of the relation of humanity and God which has continued to the present time so as to inform my own beliefs, values and identity. My attitude to these writers is rather like that of a family towards a distant cousin who arrives from across the sea bearing both a comforting sense of family identity and values but also harbouring certain outlooks and perspectives which are in discord with their own. They want to welcome their cousin into their midst, so as to renew their understanding of who they really are and what they stand for, while nevertheless wishing to make allowances for the extent to which his or her world and problems are not theirs.

These considerations lead to my reasons for adopting this approach. I cannot pretend to give a complete explanation in rational terms, as the reason lies as much in my own upbringing and identity as in any process of intellectual choice. Nevertheless, part of the answer rests on my view that although the Bible as a book plays a central role in Christian self-understanding, Christianity is not a religion of the book. Rather, Christianity is a religion of a series of revelatory acts to which certain texts bear witness in a manner which has subsequently been setded as authoritative (Grant with Tracy 1984:177). The word ‘biblicism’ refers to gentler forms of the temptation to see Christianity as a religion of the book and ‘fundamentalism’ to the more extreme forms. Thus, for me at least, the biblical texts continually refer the reader to acts of divine revelation and to their significance for human beings beyond their pages. I am drawn to an interpretation which brings out this referential function, rather than one which is committed to understanding the texts as texts, which means as autonomous or quasi-autonomous imaginative worlds whose connection with their historical origins is not of much importance. Nevertheless, this view certainly does not entail that the form of the texts is not vital to the meanings they initially conveyed. Moreover, I believe that we should be ready to move to what the texts mean for us in the present, while maintaining that the earliest witness to the revelatory Christ-event found in the New Testament has primacy and later interpretations must be appropriate to it—at least in the sense of carefully engaging with the contextualised meanings conveyed when the texts were first published. I will explain my view on how canonisation of these texts affects the position later in this chapter.

The ‘reading’ attempted in this volume will focus primarily upon the meanings communicated by Galatians in its original context while also being alive to the manner in which such meanings can inform Christian experience in the present. For an intercultural interpretation must fix on two stages in the process of involvement with communications from another culture—first, the effort to comprehend them in their own terms and in their indigenous context and, second, the extent to which acquiring such insight leads to significant enrichment of our understanding in a whole range of areas, as the experience of a foreign culture is brought provocatively into dialogue with our own. For it is not enough to immerse ourselves in a foreign culture; sooner or later we usually come home and then we become the locus for a meeting between two cultures at odds with one another in various ways.

Having set out my broad approach to the reading, in the remaining sections of this Introduction I will develop four areas to pave the way for the detailed interpretation which is to follow in subsequent chapters: the broad approach to communication to be used; an elaboration of the model of intercultural communication which will be employed; the value of a historical reading in the face of recent attack; and, last, some hermeneutical and theological implications of the reading proposed.

TWO THEORIES OF COMMUNICATION: MESSAGE TRANSMISSION OR MEANING PRODUCTION?

I will first consider communication theory.¹¹ The modern study of communication is represented by two principal schools. The first, based on research conducted into the nature of communication using electromagnetic media (Shannon and Weaver 1949; Gerbner 1956), treats communication as the transmission of messages whereby one person affects or attempts to affect the behaviour or state of mind of another. It is concerned with how senders of messages formulate them for transmission (called ‘encoding’, although in a broad sense), how receivers make sense of them (‘decoding’, again in a broad sense), and with the channels and media of communication. It acknowledges the fact that receivers may construe a message in a sense different from that intended by the sender, so that whatever a sender intended, while important, forms only part of the phenomena of the communication. This may be referred to as the ‘process’ school of, or approach to, communication. The second school, stemming especially from the work of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1974), analyses communication as the production and exchange of meanings; it is concerned with how messages, especially texts, interact with people to produce meanings. Its main method of study is semiotics, the science of signs and meanings, and this is a convenient term by which to describe it (Fiske 1990:2).

The process school draws upon the social sciences for resources to assist in its exploration of communicative acts, while the semiotics school utilises linguistics and the humanities (such as literary criticism) in its concern with works of communication. Thus, semiotics prefers the term ‘reader’ to ‘receiver’, since this suggests the greater degree of activity assumed under this approach, as the reader helps to create the meaning of the text by bringing to it his or her understanding and experience (Fiske 1990:40). Nevertheless, even in the process model the use of the word ‘reading’ is quite appropriate for the interpretation of a written message, and the extent to which a person will conduct such a reading on the basis of his or her experience can be readily included in the theory. It is also quite consistent with this view to utilise a specific reading theory, such as those proposed by John Darr (1992:16–36) or Bruce Malina (1996), since this merely constitutes the adaptation of the process theory of communication to the specific exigencies of a totally written communication emanating from a foreign culture.

From this admittedly brief outline of the two dominant theories of communication currently competing for attention, it will be apparent that my own approach to biblical interpretation lines up fairly closely with the process school, whereas the views from which I distinguished mine above broadly fall into the semiotics school. I do not wish to devalue the importance of semiotics and readily acknowledge that it will frequently offer useful insights in some areas; sometimes, indeed, both approaches may illuminate a particular problem (Fiske 1990:4). A sensitivity to form and literary effect is often of critical significance in assessing meaning. The advantages of a semiotic approach are most obvious in the case of the gospels, given the narrative form they represent, while being far less clear with respect to the epistles. Nevertheless, even the gospels provide supp...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Series editor’s preface
• Preface
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Reading Galatians
• 2 Social identity and the epistle to the Galatians
• 3 Context and rhetoric in Galatians
• 4 The problem with mixed table-fellowship
• 5 Paul, Jerusalem and Antioch
• 6 Righteousness as privileged identity
• 7 Paul and the law
• 8 Freedom, the Spirit and community life (Gal. 4.21–6.10)
• Epilogue The Intercultural Promise of Galatians
• Appendix Paul's attitude to the law in Rom. 5.20–21
• Notes
• References
• Index of Ancient Sources