Universal Man Confronts Difference: The Crisis in Galatia

The argument that I have begun to develop is that it is productive to read Paul as a Jewish cultural critic. My suggestion is that there is a great deal in his letters that suggests that the primary motivation, not only for his mission but indeed for his “conversion,” was a passionate desire that humanity be One under the sign of the One God—a universalism, I have claimed, born of the union of Hebraic monotheism and Greek desire for unity and univocity. In this chapter I would like to continue making the case for this as a plausible reading of Paul (especially in Galatians) and also to begin to explore some of the cultural issues that the Pauline move was to raise. We see Paul here actually confronting and attempting to deal with real social issues to which his theory gave rise. As E. P. Sanders has pointed out, “When it came to cases, Paul's easy tolerance, which he effortlessly maintained in theory—it is a matter of individual conscience what one eats and whether one observes ‘days'—could not work. It was not only a matter of individual conscience, it turned out, but of Christian unity, and he judged one form of behavior to be wrong. The wrong form was living according to the law” (1983, 178).

The major argument of this book, then, is that what drove Paul was a passionate desire for human unification, for the erasure of differences and hierarchies between human beings, and that he saw the Christian event, as he had experienced it, as the vehicle for this transformation of humanity. Paul operated with what I call an allegorical hermeneutic (of language, of the Jews, of history, of Christ) which was fully homologous with an allegorical anthropology and axiology. The text which establishes this understanding of Paul's gospel most clearly is his Letter to the Galatians, which is entirely devoted to the theme of the new creation of God's one people, the new Israel through faith and through the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ. In my reading of selected passages from that letter in this and the next chapter, I wish to establish the plausibility of two claims: (1) that the social gospel was central to Paul's ministry, i.e., that the eradication of human difference and hierarchy was its central theme, and (2) that the dyad of flesh and spirit was the vehicle by which this transformation was to take place. In the opening paragraph of the letter, the prescript, the major themes of Paul's thought are introduced and particularly the nexus between Christology and the mission to the gentiles.

“An apostle not from men”

Paul, an apostle not from men nor through a man, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father who raised him from the dead.

Dyadic opposition is introduced in this, the very first sentence of Galatians.^[1] Paul is not a human apostle but an apostle of the risen Christ. As commentators have pointed out, the form of the expression is certainly strange and very pointed rhetorically. Accordingly some exegetes have argued that Paul must be directly addressing his opponents' charge here, that is, that they had indeed charged him with being an apostle from men, the Church in Jerusalem, and that, therefore, he should submit to the authority of his principals (Bruce 1990, 72–73; Longenecker 1990, 4). Betz has already dismissed this interpretation, as had Burton long before, as there is no evidence anywhere else that this was the nature of the charge, and to assume that every bit of pointed rhetoric found in Paul is in direct response to the opponents seems methodologically unnecessary and therefore unsupportable (Betz 1979, 39, 65). Further, this reading makes sense of only one of the two parallel phrases (“from men”), and not the other. This interpretation does, however, have the advantage of taking account of the energy of this expression, which the suggestions of Betz and Burton do not. In my reading, Paul here, in the prescript, in his very identification of himself, provides a proleptic summary of his entire theme and argument. Paul is not an apostle from men, that is, not from those who are authorities “in the flesh,” as it were, those who have known or are related physically to Jesus, “a man,” but he is the apostle through the resurrected Christ “in the spirit,” and from God who raised him. This interpretation, which is plausible in itself, not least because it makes sense of both halves of the chiasm, does in fact provide an answer to the otherwise attested charge against Paul, to wit, that his apostleship was inferior because he had never had contact with the historical Jesus (Burton 1988, 5; Betz 1979, 39). Paul's argument is to be taken as a direct counter to such charges as the following from the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies:

You see now how expressions of wrath have to be made through visions and dreams, but discourse with friends takes place from mouth to mouth, openly and not through riddles, visions, and dreams as with an enemy. And if our Jesus appeared to you also and became known in a vision and met you as angry with an enemy, yet he has spoken only through visions and dreams or through external revelations, but can any one be made competent to teach through a vision? And if your opinion is, “That is possible,” why then did our teacher spend a whole year with us who were awake? How can we believe you even if he has appeared to you, and how can he have appeared to you if you desire the opposite of what you have learned? But if you were visited by him for the space of an hour and were instructed by him and thereby have become an apostle, then proclaim his words. (Betz 1979, 333)

^[2]

Even if, as seems plausible, this text is a later Jewish Christian text written in response to Paul and not the occasion of his response, I think it still indicates well what the nature of the conflict between Paul and his Jerusalem opponents would have been like. There is, after all, other evidence, from within Paul, for such a view. The allegory of the lower and the upper Jerusalem (Galatians 4:21–31) points in this direction. Moreover, in 2 Corinthians 5:16 Paul insists that his community no longer knows (that is, recognizes!) Christ according to the flesh but only recognizes Christ according to the spirit. To my mind, that polemic is similar to what we have in Galatians against those who claim that their authority derives from closeness, even family ties, with Jesus, the Jew born of a woman. Finally, it has been suggested that Romans 1:3–4 (“Concerning His son who was born of the seed of David according to the flesh, and declared to be the son of God in power, according to the spirit of Holiness, by the resurrection from the dead”) represents a Pauline gloss on a liturgical formula of the early Church for describing Jesus as the son of David and thus as ethnically Jewish.^[3] Paul reverses the value of this formula by insisting that this refers only to Jesus' birth according to the flesh, while according to the Holy Spirit, Jesus is the son of God thus rendering his ethnic and family ties, if not worthless—Romans 9:5—, of decidedly less importance!^[4] Paul's genius is to be found in this: That which his Jewish Christian opponents cited as the defect in his authority becomes for him precisely its point of greatest strength. I am not imputing to Paul a mere rhetorical or political ploy but an argument which fits perfectly with the entire structure of his thought. Maintaining the structure of binary oppositions that I have cited above in Chapter 1, the apostleship of Peter and James is of an inferior nature, because it is only from Jesus in the flesh (a man); it is the human teaching of a human teacher, while Paul's revelatory vision is not of the human Jesus but of Christ according to the spirit.

“Or am I seeking to please men?”

Or am I seeking to please men? If I were still pleasing men, I would not be Christ's slave. For I would have you know, brothers, that the gospel preached by me is not human in nature. For I did not receive it from man, nor was I taught, but through a revelation of Jesus Christ.

In direct counter to the charge of the Jewish Christians that I have just cited, Paul argues that while their gospel is only a human teaching, and therefore not truly a gospel but only a teaching like any other, his gospel came directly through a revelation of Jesus, that is, of course, Jesus in the spirit (Longenecker 1990, 5). The defect in his apostleship has been turned into its very source of strength.

“I did not confer with flesh and blood”

For you have heard of my former way of life in Judaism…and that I advanced in Judaism beyond many among my people who were of the same age, since I was far more zealous for the traditions of my forefathers. But when it pleased him who had set me aside from my mother's womb and called me through his grace to reveal his son in me, in order that I might preach him among the gentiles, immediately I did not confer with flesh and blood, nor did I go up to Jerusalem, to those who were apostles before me.

Betz understands these claims of Paul's to be in a philosophical tradition whereby the autodidact and the pneumatic is superior to the one who has received teaching through sane and rational means. I would like to argue that the burden of Paul's argument is different. Once more, on my view, he is contrasting the source of knowledge of his Jerusalem opponents, Peter and James, with his own, and his opponents are found wanting. Why precisely does Paul mention here his zeal and his advancement in learning of the traditions of his forefathers? I think it is because the precise claim that Peter and James had made against him is, in effect, that they have a paradosis of Jesus which Paul does not. Paul then says: If it is paradosis that is required, then I have had a greater paradosis than yours. If all that the coming of Christ means is some correctives to the teaching of traditional Judaism, of the traditions of the Fathers, then what did it accomplish? If there has not been a fundamental change in the structure of salvation, then the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross would have been in vain, as Paul will say openly later on. The source of my knowledge, he says, is not of the same type as the source of knowledge that I had when I was advancing in the traditions of genealogical fathers, but rather the direct revelation in the spirit of Christ is in me.^[5] Paul's next sentence—“immediately I did not confer with flesh and blood”—is now fully intelligible, whereas until now it has been held to be puzzling. As Betz puts the problem: “Strangely, he does it first of all negatively, saying what he did not do: ‘immediately I did not confer…'. It is obvious that Paul wants to underscore his immediate reaction to the call. Why does he not simply state his obedience, as he does in Acts 26:19–20? The negative statement is indeed mysterious” (Betz 1979, 72). This is one of the points where I believe that my interpretation solves exegetical problems which previous theses have not: Paul's “negative” statement is exactly the essence of his argument. Paul is emphasizing the superiority of his gospel precisely because it has no human, no fleshly, origin but only the content of the revelation of Christ in him. Therefore, he did not go up to Jerusalem or consult with flesh and blood (a calque on the normal Hebrew expression םדו רשפ for human beings, as opposed to God),^[6] having been vouchsafed a source of knowledge so far superior to the knowledge that the flesh and blood possessed. Paul's usage of this precise term here is not fortuitous, since for him, as we have seen, “Jesus according to the flesh” and “Israel according to the flesh” are both technical terms. He is making the case for his dualist hierarchy, here at the level of epistemology. Paul's revelatory experience was, indeed, of supreme importance to him, as we shall also see below in discussing Galatians 3. To deny the supreme importance to him of this experience would be to call Paul a liar, something which is entirely against my intent. The issue is not whether Paul was a mystic but rather what function his mysticism played in the formation of his doctrine and practice.^[7]

Paul sets up here the argument that will serve him well throughout the letter: If business is to continue as usual, with the traditions of the Fathers in place and observance of the commandments still required, and, moreover, with the Church claiming another sort of flesh-and-blood paradosis as well, then what possible purpose did the crucifixion serve? Notice that this obviates the old exegetical question of the relationship between Paul's vision of the risen Christ and the content of his gospel (cf. Betz 1979, 64–65).^[8] The vision and gospel are one, because the vision of the risen Christ is what enabled Paul to understand the allegorical structure of the entire cosmos as the solution to the problem of the Other and thus to set out on the road to Arabia, “in order that I might preach him among the gentiles.”