Corpus-Paul

["Stephen.Finlan" <Stephen.Finlan AT durham.ac.uk>]

Dear List-folks:

This was my reply to Mark Nanos after he sent me a lengthy post.
He thought I ought to share it with the list.
  First, Mark listed a number of textual evidences of pagan pressure
on, or persecution of, nonconformist Jews and of pagans who got
cozy with Judaism.  

[Mark:]> It is one thing for Jewish people not to
> participate, but it is quite another for pagan people to appeal to
> this privilege and threaten the extension of the special privilege,
> and that is what I am suggesting is at work in the situation
> addressed by Galatians.

This helps clarifies the quite complex dynamic for which
you are arguing.  It seems the addressees are responding to pressure
from the influencers who are responding to pressure from the Jews 
who are responding to pressure from the pagans.
  Each bigger circle, presumably, can apply more pressure.  
  It now becomes clear to me that the threat that both the
influencers and the Jewish community of Galatia felt (in your 
analysis) was the threat of destabilization and confusion of the 
agreement that allowed a special status to Judaism.  Confusion and
shifting of established social boundaries is threatening, even in
today's "tolerant" America.

I'll quote another sentence of yours, which NOW makes sense to me,
but which I wouldn't really have understood a few days ago:

> If the influencers should seek to legitimate the exception that these
> "pagan" addressees seek to claim to the agents of the dominant pagan
> communities, they fear the threatening implications for their own
> continued privilege. 

Maybe some new terms, clarifying the circles of society, or even the
"maps" by which social relationships are understood and stabilized,
would help in the explanation (or else make it harder to understand!).
   I'm not saying jargon is good, but I am saying there are too many 
circles of Galatian society to keep them all straight in one's mind
without some diagramming.

Paul
   Galatian Christian community
      influencers
           Jewish establishment in Galatia
                 pagan establishment


each one applying pressure to the contiguous levels

thanks,
Steve Finlan
University of Durham