In this book, George rejects articulating an essentialised identity of Paul in Hellenistic or Jewish background as done through the Christian centuries by Paul's interpreters. With his lucid, precise, and cogent argumentation, George articulates Paul's postcolonial identity in non- essentialist, transcultural hybrid, and 'impure' terms. He argues that the apostle occupied a cultural-political interstitial space between the Jewish, Hellenistic, and Roman cultures from where he spoke in 'forked tongue subverting, simultaneously, all the three cultures.
Borrowing cultural-political tools of literary praxis from the literary critics like Said, Spivak, and Bhabha, an exegetical study of Paul's letter to the Galatians is undertaken in the context of the first century Galatia. It enables unraveling Paul's strategic imagination in a postcolonial hybrid context. It is argued that his self-representation and the community identity formation within the christological-ekklesial space subvert competing power discourses emanating from the colonial 'centre' and 'margins,' at the same time. For Paul, it is in Christ, the 'Third space, that one is emancipated from all oppressive binaries.
This book is sure to interest every serious student of Paul and his theology who wishes to hear multiple meanings of Paul's utterances in the then colonial context subverting dominant power discourses, seeks relevance of his writings in the present cultural-political world, and is interested in reading his writings from multiple interpretive ventage points like Postcolonialism.
Roji T. George, MA [Sociology], MTh, DTH [New Testament], is Professor of New Testament at SAIACS, Bangalore. Earlier, he has taught at Luther W. New Jr. Theological College, Dehradun, (2001- 2016) in the Department of New Testament Studies and has served as the Managing Editor of Doon Theological Journal for a number of years. He is a recipient of the J. G. Frank Collison Award for Theological Research (2014) for his work on Luke's portrayal of Paul's mission in Ephesus in Acts 19. He has authored several important articles in national and international journals. He lives in Bangalore with his wife, Anjana, and two young daughters, Joanne and Janet.
This book originates from my doctoral dissertation. Several sections of the current published version have been revised without altering or diluting my basic contention in order to suit a wider readership. I content to interpret Paul's identity 'beyond cultural binaries in order to appreciate his complex hybrid cultural location, thereby also of his writings, created by the Roman imperial presence in the first century. To this end, the postcolonial theoretical tools of textual praxis proposed by Homi K. Bhabha and G.C. Spivak are employed in order to reconstruct the cultural location of both Paul and his letter to the Galatians. I see my work standing in group with several nuanced readings on Paul and his letters by many other postcolonial interpreters in recent times.
I neither claim to exhaust all the postcolonial insights which can possibly be drawn from the letter by such a study, nor negate the value of several other important strands of interpretations currently employed in the study of Paul. However, my dissatisfaction with essentializing Paul's background to either Hellenistic or Jewish context, as if they are untouched by the innumerable power discourses criss-crossing discursively in the then world, is underlying my effort to re-read Paul and his letter to the Galatians in the interstitial space of Jewish. Hellenistic, and Roman cultural terrain. A word about my exegetical approach to study Galatians with an aim to unravel possible postcolonial insights based on the biblical text is relevant at the outset. I, having introduced the problem under investigation, the method of Postcolonialism, and the socio- cultural, rhetorical world of the first century, undertake a serious exegetical study of Galatians from a postcolonial perspective with a hope to base my findings firmly grounded in the text. Such an approach may be unconventional to many postcolonial with whom I beg to differ. As a result, at times, while some of my readers may find several exegetical engagements as distracting and unnecessary, many others may find such sections clarifying and strengthening my final reconstruction of Paul's identity in the final chapter.
Ever since 1998, the postcolonial readings on Christian Scriptures have risen in the horizon of biblical studies with the publication of Semeia 75. The ray of light that appeared out of that publication has enlightened a few from the colonized communities, both in the cast and the west, to take up full scale readings of some of the books of the Bible such as the Gospel of Mark, Gospel of John, Acts of the Apostles, etc. In their list comes Roji T. George's reading of the Letter to the Galatians and Paul. Following the footsteps of a few Indian pioneers of Postcolonial theory (such as Homi K. Bhabha) and its practioners in reading the Christian scriptures, George ventured into the colonial conundrumic world of Paul through his poetics to locate him culturally and to unravel his politics of culture (theology).
Sailing carefully away from those postcolonial readers who read the biblical texts in the light of modern western colonialism as a dominant and dominating text, George locates Paul within the first century Greco-Roman- Jewish hyphenated colonial world where Paul and his community lived as a minority, powerless, subjugated community drawn from both Jews and Gentiles. Though this community experienced colonial subjugation, it refused to essentialize itself into an 'either/or' space but rather positioned itself in an interstitial space in-between the Jewish native and the Roman colonial space of power. By doing so, George shows that Paul carved a third space for the Gospel of Jesus Christ which was affiliative and antagonistic almost simultaneously to both the native Jewish and the alien colonial Roman spaces of power. His book sheds light on the colonial/postcolonial perspective of Paul, a perspective often sidelined understandably by most western Pauline scholars like Troels Engberg-Pedersen, John Barclay, Daniel Boyarin and others who wrote much about the fluid cultural world of Paul and the poetics and politics of his theology.
Paul and his writings have invited much scholarly attention in New Testament studies. Scholars and churchmen have fiercely engaged in debates ranging from doctrinal issues to ideological priorities based on his writings.' Among these, the complex cultural location of Paul, as found in his letters, has baffled the Pauline scholars in their attempt to discover his cultural identity. Traditionally, the Western church viewed Paul through the 'Lutheran' spectacles as a preacher of justification by divine grace which was to be appropriated by faith. He is thought to have been refuting Judaism as a religion of work righteousness. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Pauline scholars treated Paul more as a Christian theologian articulating his theological truth in Greek philosophical categories (the Old religionsgeschichtliche Schule) or in the Jewish frame of reference (the New religionsgeschichtliche Schule). In the former approach, Judaism was labeled as an inferior religion, particularistic, ethnocentric, and teaching work righteousness, while, in the latter, Christianity was portrayed as a superior religion, universalistic, and the religion of grace. The by-product of such theological enterprises was to label Paul in an "either/or' polar opposite category, a straight-jacket approach, which guided their interpretations of his letters. The problem with such approaches is that they overlook Paul's mixed cultural location, the associated interpretive complexities, and his occasional essentialist posture as his strategic response (both towards cultural dynamic and political realities) in a postcolonial context. They disconnect Paul from his real historical context which, I contend, was beyond cultural binaries as a result of Roman colonization of vast lands, peoples, and cultures. They either over-simplify his cultural location or ghettoize his identity by playing one against the other (his Jewish background over against his Hellenistic context or vice versa). Often, the significance of the fact that Paul is a Jew from Tarsus, a Greco-Roman imperial city, and a Roman citizen is overlooked yielding dissatisfactory portrait/understanding of his persona and thereby the significance of the radical gospel he preached.
It must be borne in mind that the world in which Paul carried out his missionary activity (Greece, Italy, Macedonia, Asia Minor, or Galatia) was saturated with the two dominant cultures of the imperial powers; at first. Hellenism (language, culture, art, architecture, and philosophical categories) from the time of Alexander the Great, and secondly, Roman hegemony/imperial ideology propagated both by verbal and non-verbal means of communication." The then known world, urban and rural, was deeply impacted by these two dominant discourses of power. In addition, the Jewish matrix of the birth of Christianity makes Jewish culture the third partner in forming Paul's transcultural location. To put it differently, Paul, the apostle to the nations, lived, formed his thought, and fulfilled his mission in a complex world of 'mixed' cultures.
**Contents and Sample Pages**
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