Boasting of Beatings (2 Corinthians 11:23-25) Author(s): Jennifer A. Glancy Source: Journal of Biblical Literature, Vol. 123, No. 1 (Spring, 2004), pp. 99-135 Published by: The Society of Biblical Literature Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3268552 Accessed: 31-08-2016 15:47 UTC REFERENCES Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3268552?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms The Society of Biblical Literature is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of Biblical Literature This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Wed, 31 Aug 2016 15:47:03 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms JBL 123/1 (2004) 99-135 BOASTING OF BEATINGS (2 CORINTHIANS 11:23-25) JENNIFER A. GLANCY [email protected] Le Moyne College, Syracuse, NY 13214-1399 Paul writes that he bears t'x otiyptara to6 'Inio6 in his body (Gal 6:17). J. Louis Martyn comments, "Considering his physique to be a major form of communication, alongside the words of his letter, Paul points literally to his own body. He can do this because his body tells the story of the forward march of the gospel, just as do his words."1 Martyn shares the widely held view that Paul's o-iyitaza are literal scars "from Gentile stones and from Jewish whips" (2 Cor 11:24-25).2 These "Jesus scars," Martyn continues, "reflect the wounds of a soldier sent into the front trenches of God's redemptive and liberating war."3 Tracings of whips and magistrates' rods, however, are not primafacie the wounds of a soldier, cicatrices ennobling a warrior's breast. They are, typically, markings of a servile body, insignia of humiliation and submission. Who, then, reads Paul's somatic markings as badges of martial valor: the Christians of Gala- tia? the Christians of Corinth? scholars? Paul himself? In the introduction to his Anchor Bible commentary on Galatians, Martyn invites the reader "to take a seat in one of the Galatian congregations, in order-as far as possible-to listen to the letter with Galatian ears."4 Following Martyn, I propose to read Paul's storytelling body, as far as possible, with Galatian eyes, with Corinthian eyes A version of this paper was presented at the 2003 meeting of the Society of Biblical Litera- ture to the Gender, Sexuality, and the Bible Group. I am grateful to David Andrews, Karmen MacKendrick, and Elizabeth Salzer for their comments on an earlier draft of this article. I am also grateful to Wayne Stevens for his efforts on behalf of my research. In my quotations from Greek and Latin sources I have, in many instances, adapted the trans- lations cited in the notes. 1 J. Louis Martyn, Galatians: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (AB 33A: Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1997), 568. 2 A view set forth as early as Jerome (Comm. Gal. 3.6.17). For modern studies, see n. 122. 3 Martyn, Galatians, 568. 4 Ibid., 42. 99 This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Wed, 31 Aug 2016 15:47:03 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 100 Journal of Biblical Literature (see Gal 6:17; 1 Cor 4:9-13; 2 Cor 6:4-5; 11:24-26). Because Paul's rhetoric pivots, at times, on the posturing of his body, the project of interpreting Paul includes the task of interpreting his body language. In this article I read the body language of 2 Cor 11:23-25, where Paul, boasting, elaborates on the char- acter of the beatings he has endured; more broadly, I ask how Paul's boasting of beatings contributes to the complex argument of 2 Cor 10-13. Every body tells a story; every body tells stories. Each body has multiple stories to tell, and the markings of any body may be read in multiple ways. A ribbon of scar tissue across a woman's abdomen tells the story of a cesarean delivery or of a hysterectomy. In a farming community, a severed limb is an icon of a farm machinery accident; in a land at war, a severed limb is an icon of a land mine exploding. The legibility of an individual body is contingent on social bod- ies, particularly on the socially inscribed body that is the object of the gaze and the socialized eyes of the one who gazes. Paul may understand his body to tell a story "of the forward march of the gospel," as Martyn suggests, but those who catch a glimpse of what Stephen D. Moore calls "the map of his [Paul's] mis- sionary journeys that has been cut into his back" may well read other stories, some shameful, scored there.5 In his influential study of peristaseis catalogues in the Corinthian corre- spondence, John T. Fitzgerald argues that, in Greco-Roman literature, "[t]he scars that the good man sometimes bears on his body are visible tokens of his virtue, 'so that not by hearsay but by evidence of their own eyes men can judge what manner of man he is' [Xenophon Ages. 6.2]. The endurance of hardship is thus the proof of virtue, the seal of integrity."" Fitzgerald implies that in the corporal idiom of Mediterranean antiquity, a man's scarred body tells a virtu- ous, virile story. By extension, Paul's scars attest to a praiseworthy endurance of hardship. However, Fitzgerald's quotation from Xenophon is selective. Xenophon addresses Agesilaus's cv6pesia, his manly courage, established in battle.7 Xenophon writes that, as a consequence of valor in combat, Agesilaus bears "in his own body visible tokens [orlttida] of the fury of his fighting [emphasis added], so that not by hearsay but by the evidence of their own eyes 5 Stephen D. Moore, God's Gym: Divine Male Bodies of the Bible (New York: Routledge, 1996), 28. 6 John T. Fitzgerald, Cracks in an Earthen Vessel: An Examination of the Catalogues of Hard- ships in the Corinthian Correspondence (SBLDS 99; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1988), 43. Scott B. Andrews has rightly noted that Fitzgerald (among others) "does not describe how any particular type of hardship list differs ... in function from another type" ("Too Weak Not to Lead: The Form and Function of 2 Cor 11.23b-33," NTS 41 [1995]: 263-76, esp. 264). 1 On &v8peia, see Stephen D. Moore and Janice Capel Anderson, "Taking It like a Man: Masculinity in 4 Maccabees,"JBL 117 (1998): 249-73, esp. 253. This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Wed, 31 Aug 2016 15:47:03 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Glancy: Boasting of Beatings (2 Corinthians 11:23-25) 101 men could judge what manner of man he was."s By effacing the explicitly mar- tial context in which scars are legible as signs of virtue, of dv6pEia, Fitzgerald leaves the impression that the endurance of any hardship, any physical ordeal, is equally exemplary. On a first-century view, however, hardships might enno- ble or degrade a man; scars might testify to heroism or contemptibility. The scars that some men bore in their bodies, impressed by lash and rod, testified not to virtue but to a lack of integrity. Recognition of the semiotic distinction between a breast pierced by a sword and a back welted by a whip is crucial to reading Paul's body language in 2 Cor 11:23-25. In boasting of beatings, Paul boasts not of his &v6pEia but of his humiliating corporal vulnerability. Pierre Bourdieu argues that we make sense of human bodies-and human bodies make sense-through a "system of structured, structuring dispositions, the habitus."9 Habitus--"embodied history, internalized as a second nature and forgotten as history"-translates itself into knowledge borne in the body:10 Adapting a phrase of Proust's, one might say that arms and legs are full of numb imperatives. One could endlessly enumerate the values given body, made body, by the hidden persuasion of an implicit pedagogy which can instil a whole cosmology, through injunctions as insignificant as "sit up straight" or "don't hold your knife in your left hand", and inscribe the most fundamental principles of the arbitrary content of a culture in seemingly innocuous details of bearing or physical and verbal manners, so putting them beyond the reach of consciousness and explicit statement.11 Reading Paul's body language is difficult because, with the passage of time, the discourse of the familiar fades. Downcast eyes, a blush spreading across a face, the deliberate exposure of dermal markings-facial expression, demeanor, and posture cease to bear shared meanings.12 We do, however, have clues for recon- structing those meanings, for interpreting the "bodily hexis" that "is political mythology realized, em-bodied, turned into a permanent disposition, a durable way of standing, speaking, walking, and thereby of feeling and thinking."13 The scars of a first-century body instantiate relationships of power, of legal status (freeborn, freed, or enslaved), of domination and submission, of honor and shame, and of gender.