Status Updates From Galatians Re-Imagined: Read...

In Paul's time, then, there was nothing innocent about gathering Galatians and Jews around the table of a crucified "emperor/king [basileus] of the Jews, as the Gospels have Pontius Pilate describe Jesus' offense (Mark 15:26). It is even more scandalous that Paul allowed no libation to the Roman emperor or to the Roman gods at that table. (294)

The new creation, on the other hand, of which Christ is the firstborn, erases the inscription of conquest and violence from the collective and individual self and reshapes human beings in the likeness of Christ's solidarity and love. (262)

Uncircumcised Galatians, with circumcised Jews as their brothers and the Jewish rather than Roman God as their common father, constituted an identity, a community, and a model of worship that was ambiguous in terms of Jewish law but more importantly, was illicit in its civic consequences within the framework of Roman law. (242)

Messianic Galatians who still had their foreskins yet did not participate in civic and imperial worship because of their allegiance to a God other than Caesar were an anomaly that challenged the most fundamental principles of the imperial cosmos. (242)

...the crucified Jew Jesus belongs among the trans- gressors of Roman law who are defined as unjust and unjustifiable enemies of imperial and divine order and whose dying therefore is righteous. By resurrecting Jesus, the one God of Israel has openly challenged the singular power of the divine Caesar to define law and to impose death, and to restore life and righteousness to the vanquished at his discretion. (205)

To see the image of the crucified not as the image of an evil other to be lawfully destroyed but as the image of the world savior and divine life-giver, shatters all the images of power that were the embodiment of imperial ideology, most notably the dyadic icon at its center-the image of the defeated enemy/other that as its flipside held up the idol of the triumphant self. (205)

What if the target of Paul's universal and inclusive gospel is not the partial exclusivism of Jewish law, but the universal exclusivism of an imperial world order and world religion under the divine Caesar? (166)

When entering the ancient world as readers of a letter to Galatia we have to keep in mind that on the mental map of the first century C.E., Galatia was a well-defined territory; it was Roman territory and it was enemy territory, burnt earth and fertile ground where civilization—and the worldwide Roman Empire—could thrive on the ashes of barbarism. (75)

World-wide Galatia was the prototypical battlefield of the Roman ideology of domination that derived its law and legitimacy from the triumph over the barbarian Other, the quintessential topos signifying hostile and inferior barbarian Otherness that needs to be conquered. (75)

What Galatia and Galatians meant for the ancient world has long faded present-day English understanding, not least in contemporary theological debates. Our examination of the first-century language usage of both Latin and the Greek koine used by Paul has unearthed Galatia as a much more complex, comprehensive, and controversial concept than New Testament scholarship has taken into account so far. (74)

In stark methodological contrast to the prevalent hermeneutical pattern of a dematerialized and disembodied theological reading, critical re-imagination seeks to restore Paul, his Galatian congregations, and their dissention about justification by law or faith to their specific material, sociopolitical, and historical context. (27)