Nanos, Mark D, editor. The Galatians Debate: Contemporary Issues in Rhetorical and Historical Interpretation.

Peabody MA: Hendrick. son Publishers, 2002. Pp Ivi + 517. Cloth, $34.95.

The Apostle Paul exited this life in a pelage of enigma. We want to figure him out, and we want help. We want undaunted scholarship to lay a wreath of syllogisms upon his grave. Across the generations, the wreaths have crowded upon one another. But except for the plastic ones (ironically, more durable), each will wither, leaving room for a newer arrangement, designed with an eye on contemporary tastes and trends.

What is Paul's letter to the Galatian churches all about? After two thousand years of reflection, the definitive answer is: we cannot be sure. This collection, with its 23 essays from 22 scholars, indicates why. Paul's literary, rhetorical and apologetic intentions as well as the events that occasioned the letter and the point(s) of view of the intended recipients is unknowable.

Does this mean Nanos (who furnishes two articles of his own) and the other contributors are wasting their time? No. Each of these essays is thoughtful and can be used profitably where Paul's letter is made the subject of inquiry and where diverse points of view are to be considered. There are fundamental questions here as well as proposals that stand in dubious isolation from previous scholarship. Among the contributors who raise basic issues are C. Joachim Classen and John M. G. Barclay.

Classen (writing in 2000) fires a cannon across the bow of the rhetorical-analytical frigate, which has been sailing with favorable winds just off the coast of Anatolia for the past twenty-five or thirty years. Classen is firing for effect. He asserts (p. 105) the classification of a document and its components neither illuminates the context, which gave rise to the document nor clarifies how its components function. Classen argues (p. 111) that rhetoric is just another term for oratory and points out (p. i05) that "a letter cannot be expected to have the structure of a speech." Worse. The classification of letters "does not assist one in understanding the letter's intentions or any of its details" (p. 109). Classen faults Hans Deter Betz (who has contributed a 1975 essay to this volume) for not paying sufficient attention to the distinction between oratory and epistolography (p. 98) and for imposing a rhetorical outline upon Galatians without arguing the merits of the selected structural components (Pp.109-10). Betz is also taken to task for ignoring prior applications of rhetorical analysis (Pp. 96, 98-99), especially Philip Melanchthon's (p. 99-103). Classen wonders (p. 97) why Betz limited his study to ancient rhetorical categories. Although an earlier version of Classen's essay appeared in I993, no direct responses to Classen can be found in this volume. The editor has provided a helpful introductory summary, but this is no substitute for actual disputation. Classen's essay is exceptional for this reason.

Barclay, in a 1987 essay reproduced here, argues for caution in 'mirror-reading' Paul's letter. Barclay is worried about "the distorting effects of polemic" (p. 369), which may have lead Paul "to caricature his opponents, especially in describing their motivations" (p. 369). Barclay insists (p. 367) that reconstructing the arguments of "the other side" in Galatians is a "difficult and delicate" exercise, which is nevertheless "essential" although "extremely problematic."

Does Barclay leave his readers as people most to be pitied and without hope? Nope. The interpretive dangers of "undue selectivity" and "over-interpretation" of Paul's statements (p. 372) may be met by a cautionary methodology, if "appropriate criteria" are employed (p. 376). Barclay's criteria include (p. 376ff.) a classification of Paul's "utterances" (assertion? denial? command? prohibition? etc.) and an attempt to tease out of the text such matters as Paul's "tone." Barclay also wants the critic to consider whether Paul's comments are clear, expressive of familiar or unfamiliar motifs, and frequently or infrequently found elsewhere in the letters. Finally, Barclay wants to determine whether Paul's "attacks" are "historically plausible," that is, whether what we know of "men [sic] and movements" of Paul's day is reflected in Paul's statements. Barclay includes (p. 377) this arresting thought: "If our results are anachronistic or historically implausible, we will be obliged to start again."

Start what again? Barclay's suggestions highlight the circularity of every attempt to understand the situation in Galatia: we have Paul's statements, and from them we infer conditions "on the ground" and then decide what Paul's statements mean. But is the historian of Paul's letter any differently positioned that any other historian? Isn't all history circular as to the interplay between facts and their significance? It seems to me the task of the historian is not to record but to evaluate. Otherwise, how can one know what to record? E. H. Cart makes this point by reminding that uncounted thousands of individuals have crossed the Rubicon. These are the facts. But the crossing by Caesar is probably the one crossing we must take notice of. (See E. H Carr, WHAT IS HISTORY [Random House, 1961] p. 9).

If history always comes to us refracted through the mind of the historian, then history is "made" by none other than the historian. History is not about what is over and done with but rather is about the present and its needs. This may help explain why the historian, in the guise of poet or prophet, often got into trouble back in the day.

And so, Barclay's caution is fine for Barclay--but not for J. Louis Martyn, who has contributed a 1985 essay, much supplemented in recent years, which has culminated in a commentary (GALATIANS, Doubleday 1997). In his commentary, Martyn has taken "mirror reading" about as far as it can be taken. He has created hypothetical "sermons," suggesting they are similar to those which must have been composed and delivered by Christian Jewish "teachers" who allegedly followed Paul into Galatia, and who, according to Martyn, wanted to supplement for the Galatian believers the misleading inadequacies they perceived in Paul. Barclay, not surprisingly, found fault (p. 378) with this approach even before Martyn used it to full effect. One of Martyn's inventions, reproduced (pp. 358-61) in THE GALATIANS DEBATE, demonstrates that the past can be as unpredictable as the future.

These essays (some more than thirty years old, almost all collected from scholarly publications) are inventive and diverse treatments gathered under three headings: Pauline Rhetoric, Pauline Autobiography, and The Situation in Galatia. Some conclusions are plausible. Some not. No doubt, future scholars will chase down several of these proposals with the instincts of a beagle.

Until then, you will have to read the arguments and judge for yourself. Is Paul in Galatia confronting concrete charges concerning his apostolate ? Not so, according to Johan S. Vos (p. 180). Is it the case that for Paul "justification through faith" and "covenantal nomism" were "in direct antithesis to each other," as James D. G. Dunn suggests (p. 234)? Do you think "from its inception, the Christian movement admitted Gentiles without demanding that they be circumcised and observe the law," as Paula Fredirksen asserts (p. 255)? Did Peter in Antioch "demand circumcision" of Gentiles as Philip F. Esler has concluded (p. 281)? Did Peter in Antioch engage in "obsequious behavior" when he "withdrew from these mixed meals" as Mark Nanos says (p. 317)? Or (door number three) was Peter in Antioch actually "passive-aggressive" ("compelling" the Gentile believers by withdrawing from them), as Fredriksen concludes (p. 258)? Is it probable that "Jewish Christians in Judea were stimulated by Zealotic pressures into a nomistic campaign among their fellow Christians," as Robert Jewett argues (p. 340), or was Paul contending in Galatia with a "Jewish countermission," as uncovered by Nikolaus Walter (p. 362)? Were Paul's opponents "very successful" in convincing the Galatians "to obey the Torah and adopt a Jewish way of life," as B. C. Lategan

maintains (p. 395)? Or (as Nanos would have it-p. 405) are the Galarians whom Paul addresses "members of Christ-believing sub-groups within larger Jewish communities" who see Paul as "a Torah-observant Jew"? Were there "circumcised people in Galatia who were advocating circumcision of Gentiles not for the purpose of keeping the law but for the purpose of avoiding persecution," as Dieter Mitternacht asserts (p. 409)?

One or two of these suggestions are as plausible as the notion that Paul's antagonists in Galatia were not theological contortionists at all but victims of Paul's earlier persecution, who happened to be in Galatia shortly after Paul marched into town under their (former?) colors. This is my own suggestion (Paul and the Victims of His Persecution: The Opponents in Galatia, BTB 32:4, p. 182). Its weak points have received two or three coats of Kevlar like all the other suggestions. It is put forward with the idea that we should try to keep the situation real. At least a few of Paul's Celtic converts probably had their noses firmly pressed against the nether side of the iron age. They would have had as much fondness for circumcisers as John Paul II for Jean Paul Sartre.

Few of these contributions have taken into account the leading Pauline historians of the past. For a ready summary of these older results consult the critical essays in THE WRITINGS OF ST. PAUL, edited by Wayne Meeks (Norton, 1972). Meeks' own concluding essay, The Christian Proteus, reminds us of the shape-changing aspect of Paul, a daimon who questions us just when we think we are questioning him.

None of us is likely ever to figure Paul out. This is due to the intensity of his rhetoric, the mutual inconsistency of many of his perceptions, and to the large role his mostly muted adversaries have played in shaping his literary legacy, as Meeks emphasized. Paul remains beyond us primarily because his letters are read as Scripture. We must fail as a matter of course at a complete understanding of Scripture. But we may obtain a serendipitous and fragmentary rapport with the message carried by the words, a rapport that grasps and releases as the configurations of wisdom, absurdity, curiosity, humility, self-regard, grief, and exaltation bubble inside us from moment to moment.

Richard B. Cook

PO Box 411

Hunt Valley, MD 21030