Corpus-Paul

[iscott2 AT uwo.ca]

I think we must give the academy at large more credit than this thread seems 
to.
I for one have read "Irony" very closely and have simply come away 
unconvinced.
This is not at all because I think Nanos is a shabby scholar. I am impressed
with the boldness and creativity of his work, and have been stimulated by
interacting with it. But I remain unconvinced. The suggestion that there is
some rhetorical overstatement in Paul's approach to the Galatians is not in
itself new. Recently a similar point has been made by Lauri Thuren in his
"Derhetorizing Paul." The suggestions which seem to make Nanos' book
distinctive are: a) that the "influencers" in Galatia are not Christians, but
non-Christian Jews; b) that the influencers are native Galatians; c) that that
Paul supports full Torah-observance for Jews and only opposes the push for
Gentiles to convert to Judaism; and d) that that Paul sees law-observant Jews
as still full participants in salvation. If I have missed something major,
forgive me. It's some time since I read the book. Now, I realize that a brief
response like this does not do a book like "Irony" justice, but briefly these
are my reasons for remaining unconvinced:

1) There is significant evidence in the letter that the "influencers" are in
fact believers in Christ. The implication in 1:6-9 certainly seems to be that
the influencers understand themselves to be preaching a gospel, i.e. to be
preaching the message about Christ. Even taking into account the possibility
that Paul is painting them rhetorically with a brush they did not take on
themselves, Paul's rhetoric here would make little sense unless the Galatian
audience perceived the influencers as Christian preachers. Notice that the
curse in 1:8 only applies to self-consciously Christian teachers.

2) Similarly, in 6:12 the implication is clearly that the influencers are in a
position in which they could be persecuted because of Christ's cross. Even if
this motive is entirely Paul's idea, such a suggestion (in order to be
rhetorically effective) must at least be plausible, and I still don't see that
it is plausible unless the influencers are believers in that cross. Nanos
argues that there was a threat of reprisals from civic authorities if not all
those identified as "Jewish" were maintaining the clear signs of Jewish
identity. Yet in this case it would be strange for Paul to isolate the *cross*
(as opposed to, say, uncircumcision) as the issue creating the danger. On the
other hand, there is some evidence that Christ's crucifixion *was* a polemical
issue between Jews who believed in Christ and those who didn't.

3) Nanos argues that Paul still, thoughout Galatians, supports the full
observance of Torah for Jews. Yet this is difficult to square with, e.g.,
Paul's description of Peter in Antioch as having lived *ethnikws*. Peter (and
by implication Barnabas as well as Paul himself) had been living "in a Gentile
manner." This must include at least some compromise of their Torah observance.
Moreover, there is nothing in 2:14 to indicate that Paul disapproves of such a
state of affairs. This, in combination with the way in which Paul portrays
himself as among those liberated from the law's supervision in 3:23-27,
certainly suggests that the Apostle sees the role of Torah as fundamentally
changed in light of the cross -- for Jews as well as for Gentiles.

4) As for Paul's opinion of the status of law-observant (non-Christ-believing)
Jews, I think it is impossible to maintain that he portrays them in Galatians
as participating in salvation. Paul's Hagar/Sarah allegory identifies the
present Jerusalem with Hagar, the slave whose children are excluded from the
promise. This must imply that those associated with "Jerusalem" are excluded
from salvation in Christ. It has, of course, been suggested that this "present
Jerusalem" stands for the Jerusalem Christian community, but I think this is a
large stretch. The city (contrasted with the Jerusalem from above) clearly
stands for the dominant ethos of the Jewish mother-city -- a traditional
Judaism in which covenant membership is maintained by Torah observance.

5) The most plausible element of Nanos' argument, from my perspective, is his
suggestion that the influencers were actually native Galatians. Here Nanos is
not alone (Thuren and Munck have agreed), and though I disagree on this point
as well, I think it is at least possible to read the letter coherently from
this perspective.

I hope this gives some idea of why one pauline scholar has not been
significantly moved by Nanos' book. I think we need to be careful about
imputing hidden (and sinister?) motives to other scholars and focus instead on
the substantive arguments they make (there have, after all, been reviews of
Nanos' books). The issue here, as I see it, is *not* about Jewish vs. Gentile
Christianity (Paul, after all, was a Jew), but rather about a widespread 
debate
in earliest Christianity about a) whether Gentile believers need to become
Jews; and b) if not, then whether Jews themselves need to maintain the same
level of Torah observance in the new eschatological situation. Nor, I think, 
is
this necessarily about people hanging on to the old "Lutheran" (since that is
now apparently a bad word) and (even worse) "existential" reading of Paul.
After all, neither Dunn, nor Raisanen, nor Sanders have read Galatians in
anything like the manner Nanos is suggesting, and to my knowledge Dunn and
Raisanen have not adopted his approach wholesale (I haven't seen recent
publications by Sanders). But I do not think anyone would accuse them of being
wedded to, say, Bultmann's reading of Paul! So let's stick to discussing the
evidence. Aside from anything else, there is the danger with accusations about
motives that a list like this become an insider's group for those who accept a
certain view (e.g., that of Nanos), while others feel marginalized because 
they
do not adopt the "obviously correct" position. I look forward to further
debate!

All the best,

Ian Scott

Quoting Loren Rosson <rossoiii AT yahoo.com>:

> Jeff Krantz wrote:
>
> > I regret that it's taken me so long to finish Mark's
> > most recent book, The
> > Irony of Galatians, but having done so I was even
> > more troubled by the
> > academy's apparent reluctance to engage his work.
> >
> > I can see that "Irony" hasn't really been out long
> > enough to have impacted
> > the study of many, but "Romans" has been out for
> > ages, and the insights
> > present in that book, whether agreed with or not,
> > are so compelling that
> > it's disturbing to see so little reaction to it.
>
> I agree. Mystery of Romans is one of those books you
> read and say, "It's so obvious. Why we didn't we ever
> see this before?" (I refer to the book's main point
> that the "weak in faith" of chs 14:1-15:6 are
> non-Christian Jews rather than Christian Jews; that
> they were "weak" because they were non-Christian
> rather than because they were Jewish; and how this
> impacts understanding Rom 9-11). Irony of Galatians is
> one of those studies best illustrating the principle,
> "People don't always mean what they say." Mystery of
> Romans points to what's been under our noses for a
> long time. Irony of Galatians digs up what's been
> under Paul's rhetoric for a long time.
>
> > I wonder if the listers have any insight into this
> > phenomenon...The image of Paul as a
> > Torah-observant Jew who, believing in
> > Christ, finds no inherent contradiction between that
> > and his Jewish
> > identity, while seeing any Gentile movement toward
> > claiming a Jewish identity as a negation of the
> > very gospel he preaches, solves so many of the
> > inconsistencies inherent in most models of Paul, and
> > yet this model seems slow to catch on.
>
> The two major problems seem to be thus: (1) Many
> simply cannot let go of the Lutheran/ Augustinian/
> existentialist paradigm; that "true religion"
> transcends external observances. (2) More
> specifically, there appears to be an ongoing need not
> only for Judaism as a foil, but for Jewish
> Christianity as a foil. A Paul who opposes both at the
> same time makes for an exceptional champion and puts a
> comfortable distance between Christianity and its
> parent faith.
>
> Point (1) has been recognized for some time, but
> unfortunately point (2) remains a problem even within
> the camp of the New Perspective. Perhaps the reason
> why Nanos' work has not been given due consideration
> is because (2) has yet to be fully recognized.
>
> Loren Rosson III
> Nashua NH
> rossoiii AT yahoo.com
>
>
>
>
>
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Ian W. Scott
Lecturer in Religious Studies
King's University College (at the University of Western Ontario)
email: iscott2 AT uwo.ca
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Please visit my web-site at http://www.ian-w-scott.com
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