Ancients talked about the divine world, the activity of the gods, to explain how things are or why things are the way they are. Or as a way of expressing how Divine activity was beginning to move or act in a way that either is in keeping with other stories or counters the dominant story of the time. For the Jewish people, a people often beholden to an alien power, God was often moving counter to the dominant story of the time. Paul shares this in our passage from Galatians today.
11 For I want you to know, brothers and sisters, siblings and cousins, that the gospel that was proclaimed by me is not of human origin, 12 for I did not receive it from a human source, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ.
Using the divine realm gives a story
power and authority, a sense that what we participate in is a story bigger than
ourselves—even etched in stone.
Those
who have been with me in Bible 101 studies know one of the original questions
to ask of any Scripture verse is, “What is the macro-narrative, the defining
story, the matrix or context? And how do
we know it?” That larger question is
answered with other power questions such as:
·
Who owns the land?
·
Who owns the natural resources?
·
Who has access to food and water and its
distribution?
·
Who owns the means of production?
Those who tell the
macro-story put the story in a prominent place, a place where the story might
be seen and told over and over again.
One of the most
common ways ancient societies told stories was through their architecture. Paul’s gospel has a backdrop, a
macro-narrative, to which he is responding in his letter to the Galatians. Paul is telling the Christian gospel as a
response to the macro-story or narrative of the Roman gospel and how their gods
have ordained the status quo.
New Testament
scholar, Brigitte Kahl, points to the architectural marvel of the Great Altar
of Pergamon to help us better understand that Roman gospel. Just to give you a sense of scope for how
powerful that story was intended to be for people in the ancient world, here is
a photo of the Great Altar of Pergamon at its moder-day home in Berlin. Look at how huge that thing is! The story written into that architecture is
meant to dominate the landscape in the ancient world.
The historical matrix
for the altar begins with the Attalid Dynasty at the time of the Seleucid
Empire, at the end of the 3rd Century B.C.E. Kahl writes:
The
historical background of the altar is a series of successful military
operations of the Attalid dynasty of Pergamon directed against "marauding
Gauls" towards the end of the third century B.C.E. In the battle scenes of
the Great Altar, these historical Gauls became transformed into mythological
"Giants" in order to celebrate the archetypal and universal dimension
of Pergamon's victory over them. These are "our" Galatians.
"Marauding Gauls" is a common name for them at this time. And, they
are perceived as universal enemies and an almost cosmic security risk.
To understand this we have
to keep in mind that the Greek word for "Galatians" (Galatai) covers
Gauls and Celts in general.[1]
The Galatians were
the “northern barbarians” found all over what we now call Western Europe and also
found as far east as modern-day Turkey. These
barbarians troubled the Greco-Roman world for centuries. Late in the 4th Century BCE, the
Galatians forever seared themselves into Roman consciousness by conquering and
burning Rome. One hundred years later, in
279 BCE, savage tribes of Galatians attacked the Greek sanctuary of Apollo at
Delphi, referenced as the navel or center of the world. In another hundred years, in 189 BCE, “the
Roman general Manlius Vulso, in a ‘pre-emptive’ and highly disputed military
action, massacred or enslaved 40,000 Galatians, quoting them to be the
notorious enemies of Rome all over the world and a permanent threat to Roman
interests in Asia Minor, even if they had not taken up arms against Rome at
this point.”[2]
Two decades after Manlius Vulso, the Great Altar is erected, to capture the order of things and enshrine the Galatians as the universal barbarians, ancient terrorists, the common enemy uniting empires across centuries. The dominant story, the macro-narrative regularly refers to the Galatians as the terror et tumultus (the terror and the tumult).
And so it was
displayed at the Great Altar where the Galatians are portrayed as the
vanquished, the defeated, the ones who come from the
ground up, the outside and
below. They are portrayed as the
mythological Giants. In the sacred
victory over the barbarians, anarchy, the lawless, the Attalids have their
gods, protectors of law and order, coming from inside and above. The gods bring with them cosmic civilization
over and against barbarism, law and order over and against lawlessness and
chaos.
Rome legally inherits
the Great Altar and Pergamon becomes one of the early centers of the Roman
imperial cult in Asia Minor. The Roman
gods transplant the Greek ones: Zeus
becomes Jupiter, Athena becomes Minerva, Nike becomes Victoria, Aphrodite
becomes Venus. The Great Altar not only comes
to define the larger narrative for the Romans, the dominant people, New
Testament Professor Adela Yarbro Collins believes the Great Altar defined Roman
occupation for oppressed peoples like the Jews as well. Collins believes the Great Altar is what is
being referenced in Revelation 2, verses 12 through 16, as the “dwelling place”
or throne of several identities fused into one, the throne of Satan, Jupiter, and
Caesar.[3]
John of Patmos writes in Revelation:
12 “And to the angel of the church in Pergamum write: These are the
words of him who has the sharp two-edged sword:
13 “I know where you are living, where Satan’s throne is. Yet you are holding fast to my name, and you did not deny your faith in me even in the days of Antipas my witness, my faithful one, who was killed among you, where Satan lives.
From the Roman perspective,
the Great Altar was a reminder of your social location, who is in and who is
out, who are the sons of the gods and who are the others, the outsiders. We learn from the Great Altar, before we even
think about it, who brings law and order, and who brings terror and
tumult. The Jews, especially during the
First Century, had become fused with the Galatians, the barbarians, the other,
it was seen as the throne of Satan, the story of how the Romans justified their
domination and violence against the Jews.
In response to Rome as the first commercial empire, using debt to leverage
the loss of land, a people who understood land as given to them as a gift of
God would respond. Several times the
Jewish people revolted against Rome.
Again, take a look at the Great Altar of
Pergamon. Presently, it is found
at a
museum in Berlin. And one can see how
huge and imposing, its immensity as a communicator of Roman law and order.
This is a frieze or a panel showing Athena, the goddess of Pergamon, and Nike, the winged goddess of victory, doing battle. They ascend from on high, calmly in command, Athena with her hand in the nappy-headed hair of Aeschylus, the son of Gaia being separated from his mother who is coming up out of the earth from below. As legend would have it, Alkyoneus was considered immortal as long as he remained in contact with the earth, his mother’s energy flowing through him. Many of these giants like Alkyoneus are portrayed as sub-human, beastly, large serpent tails, trailing behind them.
This frieze, although damaged, shows the domination of the gods over against the Giants. Aphrodite, the goddess of civic order and war, is above these two Giants who appear in defeat and humiliation. This close-up clearly shows her foot pressing down on the face of a Giant. This is the sandal on the face, what we have come to say in the modern parlance, the figurative boot on the neck, the knee pressed down on the neck to not only indicate who is in charge but who can take life at a whim.
In
this frieze, one can see the goddess Hecate (right) fighting the Giant Clytus
with his
serpent tail. And the goddess Artemis (left) fighting the
Giant Otos with her dog biting the neck of another Giant on the ground.
I
know this is much more history than what you bargained for in a Sunday
sermon. But Paul’s letter to the
Galatians is one of the earliest written books we have in the New Testament,
and Paul quotes within it the earliest baptismal formula we have in
Christianity. How is Christianity
defining itself some twenty years after the death of Jesus, probably twenty
years before the earliest gospel is written?
How does Christianity understand itself in relation to its cultural
matrix or context?
Paul’s
letter to the Galatians is also critical because it has been widely understood
as dismissing Jewish legalism in favor of Christian freedom. When we never see Paul dismiss or renounce
his Jewish faith in his New Testament writings, why would we believe he would
dismiss the Mosaic covenant or the Law, a central identity for the Jewish people?
With
recent scholarship, focusing particularly on Paul’s choice for the word “law,”
we know he is focusing on Roman law and order.
If he is critiquing Jewish Law, he is only doing so to critique the way
Roman law and order has co-opted Jewish Law to become about who is in and who
is out, who brings civilization and order, and who brings terror and tumult.
The
Great Altar at Pergamon tells us not just how the Seleucid and Roman Empire
organized themselves but also tells us how imperial projects organize themselves
in making a group of people the down and out, the other, and then developing a
divine narrative which sanctifies State violence against them.
Who
do we call barbarian, terrorist in our time to justify severing then from their
life force? How do we justify the use of
law and order to maintain what we call civilization with what we believe to be
divinely ordained brute force?
In
Paul’s letter to the Galatians, he proposes an alternative to the
macro-narrative found at the Great Altar of Pergamon, a Roman narrative that
justifies pre-emptive force to slaughter people, wipe whole peoples off their
land, and believe that the gods have thus sanctioned the “othering” of another
people as subhuman, the spilling of blood in the name of the gods, and even the
destruction of the earth, a separation from our own life force.
Justification
for divine blessing in the Roman story is done through violence against peoples
we presume to be barbarians--violent, marauding, terrorists, beastly, less than
human.
The
Roman gospel said that there were some ethnicities that were insiders and other
ethnicities that were less than human.
There were some socio-economic classes that were acceptable and some
that the gods did not find to be of any worth.
In a patriarchal system, even with female goddesses, men were deserving
of public power with a divine right to navigate the world and its choices but
women were not.
Another
note on that original frieze I showed you, with Athena, the goddess of
Pergamon, separating the Giant, Alkyoneus, from his source of power, the earth,
defined by his mother, Gaia. Athena has
her hand in his hair, lifting him from the earth. Many of you probably know that Gaia has come
to be known, traditionally, as Mother Earth.
Not
surprisingly, what the Great Altar of Pergamon also represents is a domination
of and violence toward the earth itself, to bring it under control. Too often, historians have associated dominating,
violent, slave societies with advanced civilizations: Egypt, Greece, Rome.
When
Rome came into being in about 750 BCE, the soil was richly fertile for a wide
variety of food: olives, figs, and
grapes, peaches, apples, and pears, almonds, walnuts, and chestnuts. Gradually, though, certain Roman philosophers
began advancing the gospel that human technical skills could engineer “a second
world within the world of nature.” Rome
therefore pressured the good earth to produce more and more. Roman agronomists advocated plowing even more
than once a year to save on labor. That
plowing led to greater and greater erosion.
Once flourishing towns declined and their populations left.[4]
Eventually,
that erosion and degradation of the earth became so precipitous that the Roman
Empire could only feed its people by conquering new territory where fertile
topsoil was still available. David R.
Montgomery, professor of geomorphology at the University of Washington, writes,
“Rome didn’t so much collapse as it crumbled, wearing away as erosion sapped
the productivity of its homeland.”[5]
Rome’s
history is a reminder that the universe is not woven together on the backstrap
loom of violence, domination, and warfare.
In the end, if not only Gaia’s son but any of us are separated from
earth as our source and power, life will not be sustainable.
Rome
maintains their law and order through threats, actual violence, and armed
warfare. The gods ordain it, justify it,
bless it. The question for us, as people
who come to church to say we believe in the gospel of the crucified and
vanquished is whether our faith is justified in solidarity with the gospel of
Christ? Or, are we justified in another
way, a far more violent way, that says our path is made and secured through
violence, domination, and the boot on the neck of people we presume to be
barbarians? Paul’s letter to the
Galatians knows the Roman story. And he
does not want his Jewish faith co-opted by it.
Paul writes of a different gospel.
To which gospel will we give our loyalty? I pray we choose Christ crucified. I pray.
Amen.
[1]
Brigitte Kahl, “Reading Galatians and Empire at the Great Altar of Pergamon,” Union
Seminar Quarterly Review, p. 24.
[2]
Ibid, p. 25.
[3]
Ibid, p. 26.
[4]
Jay Griffiths, “Dwelling on Earth,” Emergence Magazine, https://emergencemagazine.org/essay/dwelling-on-earth/,
October 3, 2019
[5]
David R. Montgomery, dirt: the
erosion of civilizations, (Berkley:
University of California Press, 2007), p. 5.
