CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION: A SOCIOPOSTCOLONIAL HERMENEUTICS

Sculpture and classical texts portray the Gauls/Galatians as vanquished barbarians.1 Graeco-Roman colonial or imperial hermeneuts textually label them primitive, savage, fickle, uncivilized barbarians, and warlike giant beasts2 as a means of reducing them into subjects to subdue, rule, or Greecize3 and Romanize. In a quite different era and place—my home of Senegal in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—French colonial officials and the Holy Ghost Fathers labeled the Diola people as savage, primitive, indolent, superstitious, and morally depraved, people without a religion and in desperate need of civilization.4 Diola people live on the southwest and northwest shores of the Casamance river between the Gambia (north), Guinée Bissau (south) and the coast of the Atlantic Ocean (see maps on pages 71–72). Whoever has the most power in a society, shapes that society—for good or ill. Galatians 2:11–14 and 3:26–29 depict Paul in such a role,

1 J. J. Pollitt, Art in the Hellenistic Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 79–110; I. M. Ferris, Enemies of Rome: Barbarians Through Roman Eyes (Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing, 2000), 1–16; David L. Balch, “Paul’s Portrait of Christ Crucified (Gal 3:1) in Light of Paintings and Sculptures of Suffering and Death in Pompeiian and Roman Houses,” in Early Christian Families in Context: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue (ed. David L. Balch and Carolyn Osiek; Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Pub- lishing Company, 2003), 84–108. 2 Ferris, Enemies, 3–6; Pol. His. 18.17.9–12; 18.41.7; 2.32.8; 3.78.2; 24.14.7; 3.3.5; Athenaeus, Deipn. iv.151e–152b; Livy, Hist. 38.17.9–10. David Rankin, “Celts Through Classical Eyes,” in The Celtic World (ed. Miranda J. Green; New York: Routledge, 1995), 21–33, provides a concise discussion of typologies the above ancient authors apply to Celts, Gauls/Galatians. 3 Nancy T. de Grummond, “Gauls and Giants, Skylla and the Palladion: Some Responses,” in From Pergamon to Sperlonga: Sculpture and Context (ed. Nancy T. de Grum- mond and Brunilde S. Ridgway; Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 256; Greg Woolf, Becoming Roman: The Origins of Provincial Civilization in Gaul (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 241–9. An encounter between two cultures is a dynamic phenomenon that affects the dominant characteristics of each. 4 G. G. Beslier, Le Sénégal (CEDTSHT; Paris: Payot, 1935), 111, 123; Robert Baum, “Emergence of Diola Christianity,” Africa 60/3(1990): 386. I am indebted to Robert M. Baum whose research places Diola encounters with the Holy Ghost Father between 1880–1918 (Baum, “Emergence,” 378). 2 chapter one as a sociopostcolonial hermeneut who acts on his self-understanding as God’s messenger in order to create or form5 through faith in the cross of Christ free egalitarian communities. Like a Greek colonist, Saul-become-Paul, the once famous persecutor of the church in Judea and the diaspora,6 was divinely cleansed, empowered, and sent to create a people. With his gospel, he fearlessly engaged in socioreligious conflicts to free the Gauls/Galatians from a mythologized defeat which is publically fossilized in the Pergamum Frieze.7 That was the way he constructed Christian communities.

5 LSJM, “ἀποικεσία,” 200, conveys the idea of settling in a foreign land. The verb form, ἀποικίζω, means to “colonize a place” or “send a colony to it” (1 Sam 4:22; 2 Kgs 15:29; 16:9; 17:6; Herod. Hist. 1.94; Thucydides, Hist. 1.24. 2). The word as Karl Heinrich Rengstorf, “ἀποικίζω,” CCFJ, 1.185, quips, could mean “to resettle, settle elsewhere” or “send out” to inhabit a land ( Josephus, Ant. 8.114). Neither the noun nor verb form occurs in Galatians. Paul however does use κτίσις “creation” (Gal ”קָהַ ל“ and ἐκκλησία “assembly, community or church” (Gal 1:2, 13, 22). See (15 :6 ,noun) in John Kohlenberger III and James A. Swanson, HECOT) ”קָהָ ל“ verb) and) is often קָהָ ל means “to congregate” or “assemble.” The word קָהַ ל The verb .7–7736 translated ἐκκλησία “assembly” or “community” in the LXX (see Edwin Hatch and Henry A. Redpath, “ἐκκλησία,” CS, 433)—a term Paul uses to refer to his alternative communities. Whereas the word ἐκκλησία was used by classical writers to refer to a civic assembly of people, New Testament writers used it to speak of those who “confess Jesus as Lord” and are committed to his worldview (Wayne O. McCready, “Ekklēsia and Voluntary Associations,” Voluntary Associations in the Graeco-Roman World (ed. John S. Kloppenborg and Stephen G. Wilson; New York, Routledge, 1996), 61. See also Richard A. Horsley, “I Corinthians: A Case Study of Paul’s Assembly as an Alterna- tive Society,” in Paul and Empire: Religion and Power in Roman Imperial Society (ed. Richard A. Horsley; Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 1997), 242–52. 6 ὑπερβολὴν (extreme) denotes the intense nature of his persecuting of the church (Gal 1:13). In Acts 9:1, Luke describes Paul as one ἐμπνέων ἀπειλῆς καὶ φόνου εἰς τοὺς μαθητὰς τοῦ κυρίου (breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord). Brigitte Kahl, “Reading Galatians and Empire at the Great Altar of Pergamon,” USQR 59/3–4(2005): 29–30, notes, “within the ancient world, the Jewish God was difficult to integrate and also had a shameful track record of trouble-making. But if we look at the pre-Damascus Paul—how he zealously fights for the law and the traditions of ‘his (he says ‘my’-Gal 1:14) fathers’, how he wages a holy war with God at his side, how he tries to destroy the lawless Other without mercy—it seems like a replica of the battle fought by the gods against the giants. It has a different color but essentially the same structure. JEWS versus GENTILES can be seen as equivalent to GREEKS versus BARBARIANS/GIANTS. In both cases, a dominant SELF upholding law and order stands against an OTHER defined as hostile to order and law. That means that the biblical God, in a way, despite his absence was there at the Great Frieze as well, God among Gods within the framework of a law-based order.” 7 Kahl, “Reading Galatians,” 25, says the “Great Altar immerses us into a collective memory where the Galatians are firmly linked to the history of Pergamon, Rome, and the Greco-Roman world in General. They are seen, at least from the dominant perspec- tive, as ‘universal barbarians,’ a sort of ‘ancient terrorists’ operating on a global scale and they unite the Greco-Roman world not only in common fear of terror et tumultus