NOVENSON. Now the chapter with the mischievous title, and a genuinely revisionist thesis. We know Paul fiercely opposed proselyte circumcision for his gentiles-in-Christ. But who was promoting it? The secondary literature treats the answer as obvious — Jewish people, whether Christ-believing or not — and that obviousness is naivete or bluster. It is a colossal non sequitur, an axiom dating to the birth of modern Pauline criticism in 1830s Tübingen: Baur's Hegelian scheme of Petrine Jewish Christianity against Pauline gentile Christianity, a two-hundred-year-old grand unified theory still, somehow, given the benefit of the doubt. Walk the letters instead. The Jerusalem pillars — James, Cephas, John — expressly agreed with Paul that gentiles-in-Christ should not undergo proselyte circumcision. At Antioch, Paul accuses Cephas of hypocrisy — believing the right thing and pretending otherwise — over table-separation; these bothersome 'people from James' do not urge proselyte circumcision upon anyone. And οἱ ἐκ περιτομῆς means 'those from among the Jews' — the common rendering 'the circumcision party' is an imposition. Paul's one secure clash with Jewish apostles is 2 Corinthians 10–13 — 'Are they Hebrews? So am I!' — and those super-apostles, quite possibly Apollos and his circle, show not the slightest hint of interest in circumcising anyone; as Watson puts it, they were Jewish Christians uninterested in imposing circumcision on gentiles. The demographics of Galatians and Philippians are exactly the inverse. Here I stand on Johannes Munck's shoulders — Aarhus, 1954, cooly received ever since — for the positive evidence: Galatians 6:13, 'those getting circumcised do not even keep the law themselves' — a present participle; Philippians 3, where Paul pleads not equality with his rivals, as in Corinth, but superiority — 'circumcised an eighth-dayer, of the race of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin' — a boast that only works if the bad workers have not-eighth-day circumcision, which is to say, proselyte circumcision; the dogs and the 'incision,' κατατομή, Paul's obscene wordplay on περιτομή; Romans 2:17's man 'calling himself a Jew.' In short: recently circumcised gentile proselytes — 'foreskins by nature,' not 'Jews by nature'; in the book's phrase, gentile poseurs. Draw the Venn diagram: the overlap between Paul's Jewish opponents and Paul's circumcision-preaching opponents is nil. Surprisingly to us, perhaps, in the matter of the proselyte circumcision controversy, it was Paul versus the gentiles.
NOVENSON. And the second century corroborates it. Ignatius warns the Philadelphians against hearing Ἰουδαϊσμός — from whom? 'It is better to listen to Χριστιανισμός from a man who has circumcision than Ἰουδαϊσμός from a foreskin.' The imagined preacher of Judaism is an uncircumcised gentile. The Epistle of Barnabas frets that its own gentile audience might become proselytes; Rothschild calls the whole letter a theater for gentile Christians arguing with other gentile Christians about Jewish things; Murray documents a self-replicating gentile Christian judaizing. And the texts that plausibly come from ethnic Jewish Christ-believers — Matthew, James, the Didache, Revelation — betray no interest whatsoever in circumcising gentile converts. Which is consistent with the verdict of non-Christian Jewish sources on the question: Jews do not make proselytes; proselytes present themselves.
SANDERS. 'A two-hundred-year-old grand unified theory still given the benefit of the doubt' — that sentence deserves engraving over several doors I could name. I spent my career digging one anachronism out of the field; Matthew has found the older one lying beneath it. Baur's scheme — thesis, antithesis, early-catholic synthesis — was always more Hegel than history, and we taught it to our students anyway, for a hundred and fifty years. Two disciplines, though. First: someone at Jerusalem did argue otherwise — Paul's 'false brothers' — and Jerusalem is a Jewish city; the chapter itself concedes 'a good chance, but by no means certain.' Keep the concession visible. Second — and here I echo Barclay's old objection to Munck — it would be precarious to build the thesis on Galatians 6:13 alone; Matthew answers, fairly, that he builds on 5:3 and Philippians 3 and Romans 2 besides. Still: insults tell you what a man was angry about; they are poor evidence for who his enemies were, and I would not want the weight resting on them alone. I find the thesis probable. I decline to find it proved. It is possible I am being too cautious. It has happened.
FREDRIKSEN. Whereas I find it overdue. Of course it was the proselytes. The recently converted are always the fiercest — a man who has just paid the knife's price for belonging will not stand by while the next man gets the seat free. And it locks into my gods: these are deserters of Zeus and of the ancestors, men who have jilted the gods of their fathers and can still hear them muttering behind the door. Naturally they reached for the whole Torah — the fullest regimen on offer, circumcision worn like an amulet against the powers they had just betrayed. Paul's fury is the fury of the exorcist who finds his converts lighting lamps again at the old shrines: the End had dethroned those beings, and here were his own people paying them the tribute of fear. The gods were the problem; the proselytes were the panic the problem produced.
HART. And let a translator savor the overthrow: two centuries of criticism deduced 'Jewish Christianity versus gentile Christianity' from a scheme of German idealism wearing exegesis as a laboratory coat, while the letters themselves were saying 'the incision — beware the dogs' about men freshly under the bandage. I rendered those epithets at full strength and was scolded for coarseness; it turns out the coarseness was load-tested by the apostle for exactly this argument. I concede the chapter its triumph entire — and note only that it makes the tragedy of reception history worse, not better: a polemic of gentile against gentile was read for two millennia as God's brief against the Jews.
PAUL. Now hear the man who wrote the letters, because Matthew has read my participles and two centuries of professors did not. The pillars gave me the right hand of fellowship — James, Kephas, John; we disputed a table at Antioch, never the knife; the men from James shamed Kephas into eating apart, which was cowardice, not a circumcising mission. And when I cursed — the dogs, the incision, those whose god is their belly — open the letter and look at the hands I was cursing: 'those who are getting circumcised do not even keep the law themselves.' Getting circumcised. I chose the tense. They were converts fresh from the knife, zealous to bind on others what they had just bound on themselves. Do you want to know how angry I was? I wrote to Galatia that I wished the men unsettling them would take the knife the rest of the way and geld themselves. I wrote that. It stands in the text at the twelfth verse of the fifth chapter, and let the translators blush who have softened it — I was not writing for the squeamish, I was writing for my children, whom these men were carving. That is how angry. And mark at whom the anger ran: not at Israel — μὴ γένοιτο — at converts, at poseurs, at men freshly bandaged and already preaching the bandage. Every fire lit from those verses was lit by men who could not read a participle. Ed asks for proof rather than probability; brother, I could tell you their names, but I notice the Professor has done honest work without them, and I will not spoil the trade of historians, which is the only honest gambling left.