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  • From: nanosmd AT comcast.net
  • To: Corpus-Paul <corpus-paul AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Corpus-Paul] Gal 5:12
  • Date: Thu, 01 Jan 2004 16:20:07 +0000

Elli's paraphrase seems right to me. The one's whom Paul sarcastically
wishes would mutilate themselves are not the addressees but those seeking to
influence them to become proselytes, which for the males includes
circumcision.
The implication is that those influencing the addressees are Jewish people
who
are in a position to conduct non-Jewish people throught the proselyte
conversion
rites of passage.

Paul feels in some sense so helpless to mitigate their influence upon the
addressees (as often does a parent when faced with the powerful immediate
influence of his or her child's peers), that he (as does such a parent),
resorts
to rhetoric that seeks to undermine the influencer's motives as self instead
of
addressee (child) serving. Hence the wish that they would harm themselves
instead
of the addressee (child) under the care of the one writing (speaking).

The specific of self-mutliation is, I think, not based upon an allusion to
the
castration of the galli, as Elli understands it (although I do not dispute
that
it could also be a part of the conceptual field to which the sarcasm
alludes),
but works within the metaphorically field of circumcision, which symbolizes
the
issue at hand as one of whether the addressees should become proselytes if
they
are to successfully negotiate acceptance by the dominant (albeit minority)
Jewish community standard for full (ie, proselyte) instead of mere (however
"welcome") guest standing.

Paul maintains that it is and cannot be so for this subgroup of the Jewish
community, which Paul (when in town) had formed around the notion that the
end of the ages had dawned (stating that the non-Jewish members were not
guests as conventionally understood to be in Jewish communal subgroups, but
full-members, albeit remaining non-Jews [non-proselytes, non-Israelites],
representatives of the nations turning to the one God of Israel as the one
God of all the nations, as expected in the awaited age).

So Paul seeks to undermine the influence of those who challenge this
proposition, in which the addressees have believed, by suggesting that they
have
their own instead of the addressees' interests in mind with their call to
compliance with the traditional norms, and thus should turn their attention
to
their own members, as it were, instead of the digits of the addressees, who
are,
in Paul's view, already on equal standing with these influencers, i.e.,
equally
empowered to express their own voice as their seemingly more important and
influential peers.

Paul's nasty wish is, in other words, an expression of exasperation because
his
own abiblity to influence the addressees according to his minority Jewish
coalition's "newly revealed" view is mitigated by both his distance from the
addressees' situation and the novelty of his proposition in the face of the
traditional (and otherwise unchallenged) revealed and Scripture-based norms
to
which those influencing the addressees' can probably convincingly appeal.

While constructing his argument, which explores many avenues to dissuade the
addressees from compliance with the influencers, Paul includes this and
several
other mean-spirited expressions (like curse-wishes) that give us a glance
into
the human social dimension of the enterprise that gave rise to these letters.

For what it is worth, I believe that if Paul thought for a moment that what
he was writing would become "Scripture" or become universalized in non-Jewish
"Christian" theology to negatively value Jewish circumcision propositionally,
he would deeply regret such rhetoric, and seek to take such language back.
The intolerance it expressed and has since then seemingly legitmated if not
aroused is surely against the spirit of the ("for" instead of "against" the
neighbor) proposition (of Torah as well as Gospel) that I believe he
otherwise intended the rhetoric of this letter to uphold.

Happy New Year,
Mark
--
Mark D. Nanos, Ph.D.
Rockhurst University
co-moderator
nanosmd AT comcast.net
http://home.comcast.net/~nanosmd
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