“O, Foolish Galatians”: Imagining Pauline Community in Late Antiquity

Abstract

This essay analyzes how late antique commentators on Paul's epistle to the Galatians used the issue of theological disobedience to elaborate the precise meaning of Christian kinship and community in their own times. Paul's anger and frustration at the Galatians, in particular, provided a convenient rhetorical platform for theorizing the nature of and impediments to Christian community in late antiquity. While most Pauline exegetes of the fourth and fifth centuries read the Galatians’ disobedience as a conscious choice born of ignorance, misunderstanding, and weak-mindedness, Jerome located the source of this indiscipline in the Galatians’ ethnic or national disposition. For him, the Galatians were an ethno-theological object—a template upon which he could propose a correlation between Christian error or heresy, on the one hand, and ethnic disposition, on the other. The differences and factions that Paul described in his letters were reimagined in late antiquity as both exemplars of Christian heresy and as heresies of ethnological origin. Ultimately, however, the process of transforming Paul into a heresiologist served only to emphasize the complexity of interpretive maneuvers deployed to define the terms of Christian community vis-à-vis other types of social, political, and ethnic affiliation.

Teologi Raputallang: Sebuah Konstruksi Teologi Lokal dengan Perspektif Robert J. Schreiter atas Hermeneutika Galatia 6:2 sebagai Dasar Rekonsiliasi Konflik dalam Gereja

“…Berzon mengatakan bahwa sebutan "saudara-saudara" pada teks tersebut ditunjukkan kepada semua pengikut Kristus tanpa memandang ras, sosial, etnis, golongan, ekonomi, dan aspek-aspek perbedaan lainnya. Artinya, tidak ada yang dibeda-bedakan, karena semuanya saru dalam Kristus (Berzon, 2016). Merespon kalimat yang dituliskan oleh Berzon tersebut, dalam bukunya František Ábel menuliskan hal menarik, yakni: "They are now "already members in the community of God," Paul's rhetoric implies that the Gentiles in Christ have gained a hybridized ethnic identity; They adopted Jewish attributes but remain Gentiles of a special sort.…”

Teologi Marsiadapari: Sebuah Konstruksi Teologi Lokal Dalam Perspektif Robert J. Schreiter Atas Hermeneutika Galatia 6:2

“…Todd S. Berzon menjelaskan bahwa sebutan saudara-saudara ditujukan bagi setiap umat Galatia yang menjadi pengikut Kristus dengan mengatasi dan membuang perbedaan baik etnis, sosial, golongan, dan ekonomi. 28 Maka jelaslah bahwa mereka yang terlibat dalam terwujudnya kasih melalui tindakan tolong-menolong tersebut adalah mereka yang tidak membedabedakan satu dengan yang lain, tetapi secara partisipatif berkontribusi. František Ábel menjelaskan kalimat menarik berikut:…”