“Remember that the fool in the eyes of the gods and the fool in the eyes of man are very different.”
–Oscar WildeFootnote 1I. Introduction: Galatians in Late Antiquity
Scholars of the New Testament have long noted that Paul's epistle to the Galatians captures the apostle at his most rhetorically frustrated and intemperate.Footnote 2 In the words of Mark Nanos, “where common decorum called for offering a word of thanksgiving for the recipients of a letter—a move familiar in all his other extant correspondence” in Galatians “Paul does not pause for such pleasant formalities.”Footnote 3 In lieu of this customary thanksgiving, the apostle offers instead an “ironic rebuke,” expressing his dismay at the corrosive and degenerative behavior of the GalatiansFootnote 4 : “I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel” (Gal. 1.6). Paul's astonishment is further amplified at the start of the letter's third chapter, where he poses a rhetorical question not simply to express his frustration with the Galatians but to shame them for their behavior: “O foolish Galatians, who has ensnared you? It was before your eyes that Jesus Christ was publicly exhibited as crucified! The only thing I want to learn from you is this: Did you receive the spirit by doing the works of the law or by believing what you heard? Are you so foolish? Having started with the spirit, are you now ending with the flesh?” (Gal. 3.1–3). But the fact that “the epistle is full of anger,” as John Chrysostom wrote in the late fourth century, “is clear to everyone everywhere from even a first reading.”Footnote 5 “It is necessary,” he insists, “to say why he is angry toward the disciples.”Footnote 6 For late antique thinkers, to grapple with the implications of Paul's rebuke was ultimately to identify and confront the obstacles—some manageable and others intractable—that thwarted Paul's vision in Galatians of a unified community organized around a singular gospel. And just as early Christian writers echoed Paul's frustrations over communal discord and disintegration, they, in turn, labored to clarify the language the apostle had used to describe the ideal of a uniform, harmonious Christian community.Footnote 7
“The fourth and fifth centuries,” as Andrew Jacobs has noted, “witnessed a heightened interest in the figure of Paul, a sort of late ancient ‘century of Saint Paul,’ during which ‘the Apostle’ was pressed for answers on ascetic virtue, ecclesiastical discipline, and human participation in salvation.”Footnote 8 In the Latin West, the first full commentary on Galatians was written circa 363 CE by Marius Victorinus. Ambrosiaster produced (the first version of) his own commentary before 378;Footnote 9 Jerome wrote his in 386, Augustine in 394/395, and Pelagius between 405–410.Footnote 10 In the east, Chrysostom delivered a series of homilies on Galatians (ca. 393/394 CE) that has come down to scholars as a verse-by-verse commentary.Footnote 11 Before John, Origen had written a lengthy five-book commentary on the letter. And while Origen's text does not survive—several excerpts can be found in Pamphilus's Apology for Origen Footnote 12 —its influence in late antiquity is firmly attested.Footnote 13 Jerome enumerated, at the very start of his commentary, his profound debt to Origen: “Being aware of the feebleness of my own abilities, I have (rather cautiously and hesitantly in my opinion) followed the commentary of Origen. For he wrote five books of his own on Paul's epistle to the Galatians.”Footnote 14 For Jerome, Origen's work on Galatians served as an interpretive and intellectual template (quite literally) on which he would base his own reading of Paul.Footnote 15 It is telling that in wake of his hasty departure from Rome in 385 CE Jerome not only turned his attention to Paul's letters, but that he chose to make heresy (and the heretics) the centerpiece of his exegesis of the apostle.Footnote 16
Eric Plumer and Stephen Cooper, in their studies of Augustine and Victorinus respectively, have both examined the relationship between these various commentaries and commentators.Footnote 17 And while the details of the parallels they identify are beyond the scope of this essay, it is important to stress, as both Cooper and Plumer do, that these commentaries should be treated as parts of an exegetical whole; that is, as components of a larger rhetorical project to which a close and strategic interpretation of Paul's letters provided a way to enumerate the idea and contours of Christian community. Insofar as Ambrosiaster, Jerome, and Augustine all knew Victorinus, Augustine knew Jerome, Jerome knew Origen, and Pelagius knew Augustine, etc., their commentaries constitute an interpretive chain.Footnote 18 But to think of these texts as part of a textual tradition is not necessarily to specify literary dependence; rather it is to investigate how these texts evince interlocking, overlapping, and contradictory but always purposive solutions to the challenges presented by Paul's often opaque language. The range of interpretive possibilities and divergences between commentaries illustrate the challenges of re-imagining Paul's letters for the changing and changed Christian landscape of late antiquity. Guided by the words of the apostle himself, early Christian authors cemented Paul's legacy by portraying him not simply as the foundational orthodox theologian but also, and just as importantly, as the quintessential and, indeed, first heresiologist.
This essay investigates how theological disobedience and Pauline anger were confronted, explained, and utilized in fourth and fifth-century commentaries on the epistle to the Galatians. Through a survey of the interpretation history of Galatians 3.1, it analyzes the techniques early Christian writers, including Victorinus, Ambrosiaster, Augustine, John Chrysostom, and Jerome used to theorize the causes and persistence of theological indiscipline and regression. By embracing a “different gospel” and thus confusing the terms of Christian existence as understood by these late antique exegetes, the Galatians had fomented communal discord, disorder, and disagreement. In other words, the Galatians became a case study in the causes and condition of heresy itself. For late antique writers, Paul's letters had established unity and spiritual existence as the mantra of Christian orthodoxy while discord and temporal existence were the defining characteristics of heresy and its theological sibling, Judaism.Footnote 19 Over centuries, however, the meaning ascribed to Paul's exasperation expanded; it became about much more than the need to discipline Christians for thinking that they were Jews (or Judaizers) and therefore needed to—or should—behave as such.Footnote 20 By laying out these attempts to specify an underlying cause and rationalization for the theological backsliding of the Galatians, on the one hand, and Paul's anger, on the other, I demonstrate that Paul's letter functioned for its interpreters as a call—we might even say a challenge—to articulate the contours of, barriers to, and maintenance of Christian community and cohesion.Footnote 21 Paul's frustration with the Galatians propelled to the fore a seemingly straightforward yet inordinately complex set of questions about membership within the ideological conception of “Christianity” to which these late antique authors subscribedFootnote 22 : (1) what were the social and kinship dimensions of identifying oneself as a Christian; (2) what exactly was connoted (and denoted) by speaking of persons being “one in Jesus Christ”Footnote 23 ; and (3) how should Christians imagine and describe their communities in relation to other associations and identifications?Footnote 24
To answer these questions, this essay offers three distinct but interrelated lines of inquiry. I begin by discussing the way in which Marius Victorinus, Ambrosiaster, Augustine, and John Chrysostom accounted for Paul's anger. Each of these commentaries, tellingly, makes the same essential point about the Galatians: that they deliberately chose to Judaize (to embrace Jewish praxis). It was the deliberateness of their choice (and the consequences thereof) that forced Paul to employ such angry and hostile language. For these later authors, Paul's anger provided a justification—a scriptural precedent and rhetorical model—for their own vitriolic heresiological discourses as polemical touchstones of the fourth and fifth centuries. The next section turns to Jerome's Commentary on Galatians, and his discussion of the Galatians’ Judaizing errors as driven, instead, by their ethnic disposition. The Galatians were foolish by blood, and that is the source of Paul's frustration. Jerome extends this observation outward to suggest that there is a fundamental connection between heresy and ethnicity, on the one hand, and orthodoxy and universality, on the other. According to Jerome, the tension between orthodoxy and heresy was, in some sense, a tension between “ethnic” and “universalizing” conformity. Finally, this article details the connections these late antique interpreters draw between Paul's anger and his model of and model for a cohesive community. It proposes that Paul's letter provided a foundation for a relentless, vigorous defense of the terms of Christian community and Christian orthodoxy. Jerome's reading of Gal. 3.1a in particular overtly entangles Paul's displeasure with the ontological and associative meaning of the baptismal formula of Gal. 3.28, that “there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male or female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”Footnote 25 Late antique exegetes used Paul's anger in Galatians to explain how individuals could and should think about their status as Christians in a world marked by various and often competing modes of identification.Footnote 26 Paul's interpreters were “working hard to reorder the multiple identifies of gentiles-in-Christ” and to set that reordering within an overarching framework—perhaps even an ideology—of Christian cohesion.Footnote 27 It is the substance, rhetorical tone, and intended effects of this project that I investigate below.
II. Fools by Choice: The Rhetoric of Regression
In the very opening lines of his commentary, Marius Victorinus (ca. 280–366 CE)Footnote 28 explains that the issue that had so exasperated Paul was, in fact, quite simple: the Galatians had embraced a “corporeal understanding” that compelled them to “observe the Sabbath and circumcision.”Footnote 29 And, as he avers, “upset by these things, Paul wrote the letter wanting to correct them, and to summon them back from Judaism in order to keep the faith.”Footnote 30 The foolishness of the Galatians’ corresponded to their conscious decision to move back to the flesh from the spirit. In his discussion of 3.1a specifically, Victorinus augments his initial observation by stressing Paul's use of fascinare (to cast a spell).Footnote 31 Spells (fascina) are cast, he argues, to halt or reverse the actions of people who “are going strong in something good,” “to make [them] renounce [their] own good.”Footnote 32 For Victorinus, the stupidity of the Galatians signified an interlocking chain of errors.Footnote 33 It was a mark of what they had done wrong: “They were persuaded to observe Judaism.”Footnote 34 It reflected their ignorance about their erroneous choice of conduct: “You fail to understand the wrong you are doing.”Footnote 35 And it indicated their acquiescence to “the Jews who were persuading you to pursue Judaism.”Footnote 36 Indeed, as Victorinus charged, “because you did not fight back, you are on that account stupid.”Footnote 37 It is the Galatians’ unwillingness to contest these external pressures—to embrace these other gospels without argument—that magnifies their offense. To that end, the Galatians’ foolishness was an acquired designation—a gauge of their changed status—insofar as it reflected their actions and inactions. It served as a composite characterization of their weak-mindedness, naivety, oblivion, feebleness, and regression.Footnote 38
In his interpretation of Gal. 3.1a, Ambrosiaster does not merely echo the sentiments expressed by Victorinus he actively expands them.Footnote 39 Ambrosiaster observes that Paul's opening remarks foreground not simply the regression of the Galatians—that “the Galatians passed over from freedom and safety to servitude and sorrow” by moving from the spirit to the flesh—but, more problematically, they indicate that the Galatians had failed to understand that they had regressed at all.Footnote 40 The Galatians, Ambrosiaster writes, “had gotten so warped as to not recognize that that they had been tricked.”Footnote 41 Ambrosiaster uses Paul's introductory excoriation at Gal. 3.3 (“Are you so foolish? Having begun in the spirit, are you now ending in the flesh?”) to accentuate that this warping and trickery caused the Galatians to turn away from Christianity. Ambrosiaster bemoans that, “the Galatians have taken a step back and subjected themselves to worry about the flesh.”Footnote 42 He further notes that while the apostle had expressed a similar anger at the Corinthians for acting carnally, Paul's remarks were of a different degree precisely because the Corinthians “had not at any rate been taken captive in their mind to the point of allowing themselves to be circumcised.”Footnote 43 While Victorinus had claimed that by embracing circumcision the Galatians “have lost Christ and his goods from [their] soul,” Ambrosiaster added a more corporeal consequence.Footnote 44 “The Galatians,” he posited “are said to be stupid and without understanding since they did not manage to take any consideration for the pain of their own flesh. For when people are being taken in, they tend to go as far as provides pleasure or does not bring pain.”Footnote 45 In other words, Paul's excoriation was an indication (and/or indictment) of the full scope of the Galatians’ ignorance. They failed to understand not simply the spiritual fallout of their decision but also its fleshy repercussions. The foolishness of their behavior was not simply in turning away from the spirit but in turning toward the flesh in such a painful manner.Footnote 46 Circumcision is all risk—of two very different types—and no reward.
The question confronting Paul's interpreters was not only why Christians should be disciplined—that is, for what reasons—but also how such corrective discipline should to be conveyed. What are the proper boundaries for expressing rhetorical displeasure? Augustine's reading of the pejorative “foolish” connected the cause of Paul's anger (Augustine's effort to explain its reason) to the legitimacy of its rhetorical expression (Augustine's justification of Paul's word choice).Footnote 47 In the same way that he had insisted to Jerome that scripture could not lie—“I regard it as absolutely disastrous to believe that there is a lie in the holy books,” Augustine defended Paul's language as integral to the precision and perfection of scripture.Footnote 48 “In his role as biblical author Paul must be regarded as infallible,” and so must his language.Footnote 49 Furthermore, Paul's rhetoric was not simply accurate, but it was justified by the situation. Augustine's interpretation was, then, grounded in his determination to defend the exactitude of scripture's language.Footnote 50 Tellingly, then, Augustine expresses his conclusion about the propriety of Paul's language before he cites let alone explains the verse in question: “He rightly (recte) says to them, ‘O foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you?’”Footnote 51 It is only after his prefatory remark that Augustine clarifies his interpretative position. “It would not be right,” he argues, “to say this about people who had never made progress, but [it is right to say] about people who had abandoned their progress.”Footnote 52 Paul meant what he said and said what he meant. By linking the legitimacy of Paul's language to the Galatians’ behavior, Augustine accentuated Paul's legitimacy as a divinely selected apostle.
While John Chrysostom (349–407 CE) likewise situated Paul's anger in the context of the Galatians’ spiritual regression, he insisted that Paul's own intellectual path “in Christ” as an apostolic authority undergirded his rhetorical choices.Footnote 53 Chrysostom writes: “For in the preceding chapters he has shown that he was not an apostle of humans, nor through humans, nor that he was in need of instruction from the apostles. Here, next, having established himself as a trustworthy teacher, he speaks with greater control.”Footnote 54 In Chrysostom's reading, Paul labors over the course of the entire epistle to justify his status as an apostle from God, which ultimately enables him to express himself without reserve. Thus, according to John, while Paul “was in throes of labor with his irritation . . . now that he has made his defense from the charges against him, he openly breaks forth with his anger and discloses it after his demonstration.”Footnote 55 It was Paul's position as a teacher, then, that had fixed his language. As John puts it at the very start of his commentary: “For to always converse with one's disciples with gentleness when they are in need of vehemence would not be the role of a teacher but that of corrupter or enemy.”Footnote 56 For both Chrysostom and Augustine, Paul as apostle sent “through Jesus Christ and God the father” (Gal. 1.1) was an errorless, didactic authority. For God himself, “though he often spoke gently to his disciples, in certain instances he spoke more harshly, sometimes he blesses them, and other times he rebukes them.”Footnote 57 To coddle one's followers was to betray one's status as a divinely empowered pedagogue.
Chrysostom's exegesis, even more explicitly than Augustine's, reads Paul's language as not simply defensible and proper but, in fact, as required by the events in Galatia. Chrysostom argued that Paul's rhetoric toward the Galatians was attuned to principles of corrective decorum laid down by Christ himself. As he explains, “Do not be surprised if he calls them foolish; for to do this is not a transgression of Christ's command that said not to call one's brother a fool, but rather to observe it strictly (Matt. 5.22). For it does not simply say, ‘anyone who calls his brother a fool’ but one who does so without reason. And who is more fitting than them to receive this appellation, who, after such great things, held on to the past, as if nothing had happened?”Footnote 58 By expressly linking Paul's rhetoric to the demands of pastoral discipline, as articulated by the gospels, Chrysostom reads Paul's epistle as a heresiological exordium. Paul, John insisted, wrote expressly “to stop the mouths of the heretics” (Ἐμφράττει . . . τῶν αἱρετικῶν τὰ στόματα).Footnote 59 For Chrysostom, in fact, the Jews in Paul's letter were themselves heretics.Footnote 60 Thus the Judaizing “irregularities” of the Galatians’ conduct corresponded to the contemporaneous heretical and Judaizing pressure felt by members of John's own congregation.Footnote 61 Judaizing, for both Paul and Chrysostom, was emblematic of the pernicious dangers of dissension. Indeed, Chrysostom had already passionately and violently excoriated the Jews of Antioch for persuading members of his congregation to participate in Jewish festivals and practices: “By their words they prepare much bait to catch in their traps those who are so simple and so foolish as to be caught off guard.”Footnote 62 As Margaret Mitchell suggests, “Chrysostom understands Paul as the oratorical adversary of Jews and Judaizers par excellence, whose person and voice he seeks to emulate.”Footnote 63 In using rhetorical vehemence to communicate the gravity of the situation, Chrysostom had done his best not simply to imitate Paul himself, but to convey to his congregants the tools through which they too could become like the apostle.Footnote 64 The stinging rhetoric directed at the Galatians, like that communicated to the Judaizers of Chrysostom's Antioch (who were explicitly analogized to the Jews of Galatians), was as a cry designed to recast the human weaknesses of wayward Christians.Footnote 65
The through line of these four commentaries is not simply that the Galatians have erred, but that they have consciously adopted an unnecessary and destructive set of practices and perspective on the temporal world. For these commentators, it was precisely because the Galatians chose to embrace Jewish Law and its ideology of the flesh—to Judaize—that they had earned the apostle's anger. Paul had used rhetorical ire not merely to stress the need to reject the Jewish Law but to convey the far-reaching stakes and implications of the Galatians decisions to do exactly that. The Galatians’ culpability lay in the deliberateness of their action even though they had failed to appreciate the consequences of their choice. Their error was a direct result of sins of commission and omission. They earned Paul's rebuke on account of their conscious choices and conscious failures. In the fourth and fifth centuries, Paul's polemical language came to be seen as quintessentially heresiological. By vehemently combating and contesting the errant choices of those who claim to be followers of Jesus Christ, Paul had become a heresiologist before heresy.Footnote 66 He was the proto-heresiologist par excellence. In fact, Ambrosiaster began his commentary by interpreting Paul's situation through the language of Christian heresy. He writes, “Everyone who believes in Christ but observes the law of deeds does understands Christ badly, just like the Symmachians . . . keeping the entire law, they claim to be Christians in Photinus's way, defining Christ not as God and human, but as only human.”Footnote 67
III. Foolish by Blood: Jerome and the Gens Galatia
Nearly three and a half centuries after Paul had reproached the Galatians for their spiritual regression and return to the works of the law, Jerome, writing in Bethlehem, examined anew the conditions under which the Galatians had earned Paul's anger.Footnote 68 Paul's anger, Jerome agrees, is the central feature of his epistle to the Galatians. As he explains at the outset of his Commentary,
I advise you to be aware that the subject of Paul's epistle to the Galatians is the same as that found in the letter written to the Romans. But there is this difference between them: in the latter epistle he has made use of loftier meaning and more profound arguments, whereas in Galatians he writes to those of whom he says in what follows, “Oh foolish Galatians,” and, “so you are foolish?” He has restrained himself by using this sort of language in which he is rebuking rather than teaching.Footnote 69
Even as Jerome stresses, as had Marius Victorinus before him, the importance of Paul's anger to the epistle as a whole, his fixation on anger and its implications nonetheless deviates sharply from the readings of his fellow commentators. For Jerome, Paul's heated rhetoric did much more than establish an authoritative polemical discourse from which to excoriate the heretics of his own time; it supplied the foundation for a protracted disquisition about the origin and essence of Christian heresy. It was Jerome who used Paul's polemical language to translate the concept of heresy into a Christian vernacular of difference and divergence. It was Jerome who saw in Paul's anger a microcosmic gloss on the underlying reasons behind a fractured humanity and thus an intractably divided community in Christ. Jerome offers an explanation of Paul's condemnation of the Galatians’ conduct through a fused theological-ethnographic framework. Derived, in all likelihood, from Origen's now lost commentary, Jerome posits a relationship between the disposition of Galatians as a gens and their theological obstinacy.Footnote 70 “This locus (verse),” he posits of 3.1a, “can be understood in two ways: either that the Galatians, who are moving from greater things to lesser things, are called foolish because they have started in the spirit yet have finished in the flesh or on account of the fact that each and every provincia possesses its own character.”Footnote 71 The Galatians’ inability to internalize the gospel of Christ is, in one reading of the verse, then, the natural product of a deeply ingrained and seemingly intractable disposition.Footnote 72
Jerome uses the genetic condition of the Galatians qua gens as an expansive lens with which to cast Paul's critique beyond mere description of the Galatians’ spiritual problem and, instead, to investigate its underlying cause and origin. When Jerome restates this initial bipartite reading later in his exegesis of 3.1a, he distinguishes these two interpretations in slightly different and more pronounced terms: the Galatians are either “convicted of foolishness through which they are unable to judge the spirit and letter of the law, or through a vice of their nation they are unable to be corrected because they are not teachable; they are stupid and sluggish in respect to wisdom.”Footnote 73 Jerome's distinction between foolishness and vice frames the tension between a correctable (chosen) folly and an inherent (inherited) foolishness. Appealing to the words and works of poets, historians, rhetoricians, emperors, and scripture, Jerome signals the ethnological basis of the Galatians’ spiritual intransigence by appealing to a litany of national stereotypes: the Cretans are lazy liars, the Moors are vain, the Dalmatians are savage, the Phrygians are cowards, the Athenians have finer minds, though the Greeks are fickle, and the Israelites have hard hearts and stiff necks.Footnote 74 In Jerome's reading, Paul's rhetorical posturing seized upon the ancient convention of rhetorical stereotyping. The Galatians were yet another people, albeit one with its own distinctive qualities, within an expansive ethnological and thus hierarchizing discourse. As Jerome suggests, “I think the apostle too has stamped the Galatians as possessing a unique characteristic of their region.”Footnote 75
When Jerome marshals stereotypes of provincial character to decipher and contextualize Paul's rhetoric as the necessary response to his (innately) disobedient interlocutors, he segues into a discourse about the causality of biblical diversity more broadly:
They say that the Tyrians, likewise the Sidonians, the Moabites and Ammonites and Idumeans, the Babylonians and Egyptians, and all the nations (gentes), which are named in scripture, have certain unique qualities (quaedam idiomata) owing to antecedent causes and from the merit of their former works. Lest the equity of God would come into doubt, when each and every nation (gens) is claimed to have a good or evil that another does not have.Footnote 76
While he does not specify the nature of these antecedent causes and former works, Jerome hedges, as evidenced by his immediate qualification, against implicating the divine in some natural or primordial ordering of human difference. The uniqueness of the nations, Jerome's logic suggests, is a realized (i.e. caused) phenomenon in time following from earlier works. God's justice, so it must follow, depends upon the possibility or opportunity for equanimity among all the peoples of the world. If the differences among the nations are measured by the positivity and negativity of certain habits, customs, dispositions, etc., those customs must be born of action and events, however innate they seem to be.Footnote 77 Learned habits—the way of life of various nations—are now understood to be entrenched ethnic natures and cultures.
Although Jerome initially insisted that Paul's rhetorical charge could be read in two different ways, the ethnological interpretation he proposes in actuality encompasses the first. The latter reading offered by Victorinus, Augustine, Ambrosiaster, and Chrysostom—of a straightforward spiritual regression—had been subsumed, for Jerome, by an ethnological history. Ethnology explained the Galatians’ backsliding by positing a natural, and ethnically determinative, cause for their stupidity and senselessness. The fact that the Galatians are unteachable as an entire people—that their national character is an obstacle to faith—supplies an explicit causal connection between heritage and the ability to “judge the spirit and letter of the law.”Footnote 78 By Jerome's reckoning, the error and obstinacy of the Galatians was the product of ancient ethnic disposition, the traces of which Jerome noted “remain to this day.”Footnote 79 Their affirmative choice of the flesh over and against the spirit was, in some sense, not a choice at all. Jerome's sweeping generalizations about the Galatians drew upon and amplified the far-reaching outlook of the epistle, which was addressed to the “churches of Galatia” (ecclesiis Galatiae).Footnote 80 For, as Jerome noted, “one should note that only here does he write generally, not to a single church of one city, but to the churches of a whole region.”Footnote 81 Insofar as Paul's words were meant for an entire region rather than a lone city or assembly, Jerome argued that the rhetoric of the epistle targeted a entire national consciousness. Jerome argued that theological and ecclesiological plurality was united by a national disposition. The logic of Paul's charge was that the entire population of Galatia suffered from a provincial disposition, an uncorrectable stupidity, which was sufficiently endemic to muddy and preclude their adherence to the gospel. By returning to their ethnic nature, the Galatians acted in contravention of their Christian spiritual essence precisely because they re-erected identificatory barriers. Indeed, as Jerome maintained, “the fence and the dividing wall that stood between the Jews and the Gentiles is said to be destroyed. It is demolished so that there may be one flock and one shepherd.”Footnote 82
The question raised at 3.1—why does Paul call the Galatians senseless—resurfaces at the opening of Book II of the commentary (at 3.10 in Paul's letter), when Jerome circles back to ponder their national character: “Who are the Galatians? Where did they come from and migrate to? Did the land they now inhabit produce them as natives, or did it receive them as foreigners? Did they lose their language by intermarriage, or learn a new one and lose their own.”Footnote 83 With the aid of writers such as Marcus Varro, Lactantius, and Hilary of Poiters, Jerome offers a brief description of the Galatians as an ethnic community: a named population “with shared ancestry myths, histories and cultures, having an association with a specific territory and a sense of solidarity.”Footnote 84 In foregrounding their origins (ethnogenesis), migration history, colonization, phenotype, and national consciousness, Jerome produces a portrait of the Galatians not as a purely theological community—as the recipients of the letter to the Galatians—but as an independent, pre-existing ethnic clan.Footnote 85 It is a point that, Jerome stresses, Paul himself had made in his epistles. Cycling through Paul's descriptive opinions of the Romans, Corinthians, and Macedonians, (an ethnography of the early followers of Jesus), Jerome insists that, “the apostle identifies each province by its own unique characteristics.”Footnote 86 The ethnographic implications of Paul's writings are so fulsome that Jerome insists it would be impossible to “take note of the virtues and vices of each of the nations from the apostle and from all of scriptures.”Footnote 87 Jerome contends that Paul's letters—beyond his ire for the Galatians—were the express result of ethnic deficiencies.Footnote 88 Writing of his correspondences to the Thessalonians, Jerome insists that, “lest anyone think that this admonition [1 Thess. 4.10–12] is reflective of the duty of a teacher rather than a defect of the race, he drives it home and repeats it in the second letter [to them].”Footnote 89 Where Paul's ethnographic descriptions occurred, he issued them in an ad hoc fashion, addressing particular concerns rather than characterizing essential (national or ethnic) dispositions.Footnote 90 Whatever their precise purpose for Paul himself, however, his excoriation of the Galatians laid the foundations for the ethnological reasoning of Jerome's commentary. Obedience to the gospel of Christ (as transmitted via Paul) revealed a community's underlying orientation. Theological obedience and disobedience re-conceptualizes the meaning of ethnographic knowledge; theology becomes part of the discourse of ethnographic observation. The Galatians’ history had been reinterpreted in relation to the theological promise of Christ insofar as their ethno-history was an obstacle to the harmony of their Christian community.
An expansion of Paul's narrowly defined quarrel, Jerome's elaboration of theological disobedience in ethnic or national terms pushes a particular source of irreconcilability to the fore of the Christianity's ability to gain traction within certain pockets of the Mediterranean. While ethnic particularity served to explain Paul's anger, which, in turn justified his harsh rhetoric, it simultaneously suggested that there were ingrained, irreversible barriers to the faith. Jerome's reading brings into especially high relief Tertullian's famous dictum that “Christians are made, not born” (fiunt, non nascuntur Christiani).Footnote 91 That distinction, for Jerome at least, helped to explain the competing worldviews that obstructed adherence to the faith. In making Paul a blameless apostle and pedagogue, Jerome entrenched obstacles to faith. Jerome, however, conscious of the implications of these ethnological hurdles, insisted on their subordination to the theological truths of Christianity. Noting, for instances, that Paul at turns lauds and rebukes the Roman people, Jerome reads into Paul's oscillating rhetoric an overarching and fundamental Christian unity:
Where else [but in Rome] do crowds frequent the churches and the tombs of its martyrs with such great zeal? Where else does the Amen resound so loudly, like heavenly thunder, and shake the empty idol-temples? It is not that the Romans have a different faith than what all the churches of Christ have; but devotion is greater among them [as is] the simplicity of their faith. On the other, they are convicted of levity and arrogance.Footnote 92
Ethnological particularity did not preclude the coherence of Christianity even as Paul excoriated various communities on account of their ethnic heritage. Jerome's comments served as the intellectual launch pad for the larger project of exegetical possibility and divergence: to define Christian universality over and against ethnic traditions. Jerome, via Paul, did not deny the existence of the nations or ethnicities, but he did suggest that “true” Christians lived above their nationality whereas the heretics did just the opposite.Footnote 93 Above all else, Jerome's exegetical remarks are designed to define a difference between those who behave correctly and those who do not; those who facilitate communal unity and those who disrupt it; those who recognize that Christianity was a new way of life and those who looked to the past.Footnote 94
Jerome's commentary establishes itself still more pointedly when he professes his knowledge of the afterlife of Paul's message in Galatia. It is a history marred by the theological disputation owing to an ancient senselessness:
Anyone who has seen by how many schisms the city of Ancyra, the metropolis of Galatia, is rent and torn, and by how many varieties of false doctrines the place has been violated, knows this as well as I do. I say nothing of the Cataphrygians, Ophites, Borborites, and Manichaeans; for these are now familiar names of human woe. Who ever heard in any part of the Roman Empire of the Passaloryncitae, and the Ascordrobi, and the Artotyritae, and the other portents—I can hardly call them names. The traces of this ancient foolishness remain to this day.Footnote 95
Jerome's segue from the qualities of the nations (and the Galatians above all others) to the emergence of the heretics—these twin pillars of human diversity—signifies an important rhetorical move by which ethnicity or provinciality informs a theological barrier or devolution. To be a Christian was, then, about overcoming and jettisoning the ingrained obstacles to faith, whether they were social, ethnic, familial, or economic. Jerome utilized Paul's Galatians to elucidate the contestations of later types of Galatians. For Jerome, the Galatians were an ethnographic plaything—a canvas upon which he could propose a correlation between Christian error, on the one hand, and ethnically determined mentalities, on the other. By embracing their former disposition (even as that disposition led them to Judaize, to be come Judaizing heretics), the more heretical the Galatians seemed to become. Ethnological reasoning functioned as a scale by which one adjudicated orthodoxy. The factionalism and dissension (αἰρέσεις) that Paul naturalized in 1 Cor. 11.19 were imagined by Jerome as heresies of philosophical, theological, and ethnological origin.Footnote 96 In casting of theological error as both an effect and echo of patterns or dispositions of ethnic habits, Jerome suggested a fundamental tension between orthodoxy and ethnic identification. It was not simply that Christians transcended their ethnic pasts, but that heresy, because it was patterned as the theological manifestation of ethnological difference, actively reinvigorated this dormant past. As an apostle of Christ, the late antique Paul had solidified his position as a transformative teacher, who, in turn, enabled the transformation of individuals and communities across the Mediterranean. Interpreting Paul meant interpreting the very nature of community itself.
IV. Obstacles to Faith as Obstacles to Community
Jerome was clear that the Galatians’ past as a gens had betrayed their present and future in Christ; Galatianness had threatened to destroy their conformity to the principles of the gospel. While their theological Judaizing clearly signified an ethnic mentality, what remained unclear was whether by becoming Christians, the Galatians had erased or at the very least supplanted their ethnic affiliation. Were the Galatians still Galatians? Denise Buell has persuasively argued that Christians deployed a discourse of ethno-racial reasoning that was at once, and somewhat paradoxically, fluid and fixed. This ambiguous discourse enabled early Christian writers to argue that Christianity supplanted existing ethnicities, while also claiming that this transformation was itself ethno-racial as Christians constituted a new race. The Christian discourse of universalism, she argues, “used culturally available understandings of human difference,” namely ethnicity and race, “to define themselves relative to ‘outsiders’ and to compete with other ‘insiders’ to assert the superiority of their varying visions of Christianness.”Footnote 97 Christian universalism was or, more precisely, could be articulated in ethno-racial language. While Paul's late antique interpreters build upon this idea, they also complicate and undermine it. Some commentators persistently and explicitly conceptualized Christianity, as defined through Paul's epistle, as something that eschewed all manner of what Victorinus would call “forms of external identity.”Footnote 98 For them, Christianity was decidedly not a new race in the way that race had theretofore been understood; it was a new type of association above and beyond all manner of temporal kinship.Footnote 99 Augustine, by contrast, argued that Christianity existed alongside though distinct from these temporal affiliations. This ideological tension is amplified most emphatically in interpretations of Gal. 3.28. Victorinus, Ambrosiaster, Augustine, and Jerome each, in their own way, articulated exactly how the manifestation of Christian groups—the process of Christian community-making—impacted and related to notions of ethnicity, class, and gender.Footnote 100
In this light, Jerome's exegesis of 3.1a should be read not simply as an ethnological excursus but as a meditation on the problems, some volitional and conscious and others not, of separating one's new birth in Christ from one's old way in the flesh both individually and communally. I would further suggest that Jerome's ethno-history at 3.1a— elaborated upon, as noted above, at the beginning of Book II of the commentary—was intimately connected to his reading of Gal. 3.28. The former verse elaborated the Galatians’ contravention of the communal principles laid down by latter. As Jerome identified the obstacles that had and would continue to undermine the creation of a unified Christian faith, he lamented the history of Christian disharmony. His exegetical excursus perpetuated a dichotomy between those who had been transformed by and in the Holy Spirit and those who had not. To follow a Christian way of life was not simply to do or believe certain things, but to adhere to these practices and beliefs in the context of a reborn, recreated self. To that end, while Buell has argued that “the specific contexts in which early Christians define themselves matter not because, for example, Galatians were inescapably shaped by their ‘Celtic’ heritage,” this heritage is precisely what distressed Jerome.Footnote 101 It was “preexisting ethnic or civic identifies”—ethnic stereotyping—that defined his interpretive framing of Galatians.Footnote 102 Galatians, he insisted, was about the Galatians. Indeed, the Galatians were not a complete abstraction—a mere name in the title of a letter—but a people whose history, disposition, and tradition explained and justified Paul's ire. Heresiological rhetoric was fixed to and by ethnological facts. Their historical heritage was precisely the problem. Because the Galatians were bound to a fixed disposition, Paul's anger signified not simply his displeasure with their error but to the fact that their error threatened the entire Christian project: the discourse of universal participation (of transformation and essence), which was at once accessible yet firmly established. Their error bred disunity and distinction in a manner that expressly undercut the atemporal, communal, and spiritual dimensions of the gospel. “For,” as Jerome explains, “he saw that the whole province was troubled by a sudden persuasion, a province that he himself had converted from idolatry to faith in Christ by his own blood and dangers. And from his apostolic grief, from the grief of a father, he could not control himself.”Footnote 103
In his analysis of Gal. 3.28, Jerome extends his observations from 3.1 to explain—via Paul's own metaphor of clothing oneself in Christ—the transformation generated by baptism in Christ. To “put on Christ,” Jerome argues, is to “have Christ as [one's] garment.”Footnote 104 In clothing oneself anew through baptism, Christ envelops all forms of human distinction. To become spiritual was to live “‘by the command of the mind, rather than by slavery to the body.’”Footnote 105 For, as Jerome writes, “when someone has once and for all put on Christ, and having been cast into the fire, glows with the ardor of the Holy Spirit, it is not understood whether he is gold or silver. As long as the heat takes over the mass, there is on fiery color, and all diversity of race, condition, and body is taken away by such a garment.”Footnote 106 In removing “the entire distinction between race, condition, and body,” Christ's baptism had created a new “state of things.”Footnote 107 Chrysostom, likewise, insisted that putting on Christ meant to become like him” and, thus, to be brought “into one family and one nature.”Footnote 108 Christian community was, for both Jerome and Chrysostom, both epistemological and ontological kinship: it was not only a unified way of perceiving reality (an understanding) but also a unified reality itself (a harmonious nature).Footnote 109 While to be in Christ was ultimately to be “Abraham's seed” (Gal. 3.29), it was a manner of existence that used the language of kinship even as it rejected its ordinary sense.Footnote 110 Chrysostom, likewise, insisted that putting on Christ meant to become like the Son and, thus, to be brought “into one family and one nature.”Footnote 111 To assume “the dignity of Abraham's race” was not a bodily act or experience but a spiritual one built upon “of faith and preaching.”Footnote 112
For Jerome, it was disobedient Christians—heretics—who had refused to embrace the transformative teachings of Christianity and instead hewed to the trappings of their ethno-racial traditions. His polemic against ethnicity was the necessary outgrowth of a discourse of detachment between past and present forms of existence.Footnote 113 In his reading of Gal. 3.28, Jerome likewise reinforces his earlier association between ethnicity and heresy. Heretics are those individuals who, despite receiving baptism, fail to undergo or comprehend the implications of their nullificatory transformation. “Heretics,” he laments, “appear to receive baptism, but I do not know whether they have Christ as their garment.”Footnote 114 They fail to reorient themselves beyond the flesh and beyond the external world.Footnote 115 Jerome had made it clear in the excursus that opened Book II of his commentary that ethnicity was the quintessential condition of the flesh.Footnote 116 Ethnicity was, Jerome notes, quoting Lactantius, inscribed on the body: “‘the ancient Gauls were called Galatians from the whiteness of their bodies.’”Footnote 117 Later in Book III, Jerome reinforces the temporal qualities of heresy and dissension. Explaining the significance of each term in Paul's long list of “works of the flesh,” he writes that heresies were “recorded among the work of the flesh” because they were “at enmity with God.”Footnote 118 Their animosity was a product of the fact they understood “the scripture differently than the understanding of the Holy Spirit.”Footnote 119 Jerome's logic, however, goes beyond noting that heresy and ethnicity were both markers of the flesh. They were connected not simply typologically—from their shared failure to internalize the erasure of external distinction—but also genealogically. Jerome's ethno-history of the Galatians, which seamlessly connected ethnic diversity with theological diversity, suggests that heresy itself was ethnically inflected. Heresy was, in short, ethnic Christianity.
Insofar as language of Christian rebirth, through baptism, behavior, and belief, signified a rejection of the heretical notion of works of the flesh, it created intense communal and ideological rifts.Footnote 120 For, as Victorinus observed, “By necessity, one who begins to live spiritually, while casting off worldly things, while with the new self one has to endure the malevolent gaze of Greeks and uncultured peoples—it is necessary that one would suffer many things, which Paul says the Galatians certainly suffered.”Footnote 121 To be a Christian was to stand apart from the world while living in the world. To be “in Christ” was to create, through the Holy Spirit, “a linkage akin to that of birth but quite distinct from it—especially in Paul's mind.”Footnote 122 It is this embrace of a spiritual life and the formation of a spiritual community that, Victorinus explains, fomented tension and discordance not only between Christians but also between Christians and their non-Christian neighbors. Ethnic identification operated as a two-way polemic that differentiated those who, embracing Christ, chastised those who had remained in the flesh (who had kept their bodily ethnicity) and those who, remaining in their ethnic condition, judged persons for eschewing their ethnic heritage. Indeed, Victorinus's comments operated from the assumption that becoming Christian was fundamentally an act of rejection, a rejection of all forms of temporal existence. It is a position he makes explicitly clear in his reading of 3.28:
Paul has annulled the outstanding forms of external identity (Tollit ergo reliquas personas)Footnote 123 which can accrue to human beings on the basis of social status, human nature, or ethnicity (vel ex conditione vel ex natura humana vel ex gente). For we are liable to be divided amongst ourselves by these, such that one person is a Jew and another a Greek, one person a slave and another free. These latter sets of distinctions exist on the basis of social status or law, but the other pair is natural: there is neither male nor female, he says. So what? When all these distinctions have been annulled, you are all one, he says, in Christ Jesus. Now, because you are one with the reception of the Spirit from Christ, you are Christ. You are therefore sons of God in Christ.Footnote 124
By redefining existence in the world, Christians sought to link the discourse of worldly rejection to participation in the Christian ontological essence. Consequently, commonplace institutions and affiliations had been redefined, re-evaluated, and redirected; ethnicity, gender, and social status operated as false indices for experiencing, seeing, and interpreting the social and religious world. Victorinus's reading of Paul described Christianity as the center of a new understanding of human existence.
What Daniel Boyarin has written (controversially, it should be noted) of Paul himself is emphatically true of Victorinus's portrait of Paul: “What drove Paul was a passionate desire for human unification, for the erasure of differences and hierarchies between human beings, and that he saw the Christ event, as he had experienced it, as the vehicle for this transformation of humanity.”Footnote 125 In nullifying all types of human difference and division, what Chrysostom, aptly referred to as Christ's “ατύπον,” Christianity had brought the world together through a singular cultural representation that blurred ontology and epistemology.Footnote 126 “Christians,” as Buell has noted, “depicted Christianness simultaneously in terms of ‘essence’ and ‘transformation.’”Footnote 127 Chrysostom thus defined the “new creation” of Gal. 6.15 as a psychical transformation: “because our soul, having grown old in the old age of sin, has been renewed by baptism all at once, as if it had been created again.”Footnote 128 When individual persons solidified their experience of the Christ event through baptism, they were in or part of Christ, where essence had supplanted transformation. As Victorinus proclaimed, “in Christ Jesus there is no social status or any discrimination . . . provided one is reborn and becomes a new person by the Mystery.”Footnote 129 Paul's anger at the Galatians’ regression, then, emphasized the fact that Christianity, despite the transformation worshippers of Christ underwent, was a conditional and thus reversible state of existence.
By defining the community in opposition to bodily existence and instead in spiritual terms, Paul recognized (even as he excoriated) or so his interpreters surmised, the limits and consequences of conditional devotion. Augustine's interpretation of Gal. 3.25–28 pertains both to the conditions (or status) for entry into the community of Christ and to the maintenance of said community. On the one hand, God's wisdom was accessible to all via Christ. When Paul says to the Galatians that “all are sons of God through faith,” it is designed, in Augustine's reading, to convey to Gentiles that they are not excluded from membership in the Christ-community.Footnote 130 They are or, rather, can be made sons by “participation in wisdom.”Footnote 131 Paul's words were about accessibility, the lack of identificatory barriers to believing in and entering the community of faith. They had been interpreted as the foundational effort at finding and imagining the right terms—in existing language—for expressing the novelty of Christianness. Ambrosiaster, indeed, read the verse as a commentary on the openness of Christian community. He declared simply that “what they were before they believed would not be held against anyone.”Footnote 132 Unlike Ambrosiaster, however, Augustine's reading contained a caveat. He insisted that, following Jerome, Paul's words at 3.28 described the composition of the Christ-community after its differently situated members have been baptized. It is, he propounds, “in this faith” that “there is no distinction” (in qua fide non est distantia).Footnote 133 The existential distinction that Augustine posited, however, was not absolute—it was not nullificatory in its effect—but rather a matter of simultaneity:
For now, although we have “the first-fruits of the spirit” (Rom. 8.23), which is life, on account of the righteousness of faith, yet because the body is still dead on account of sin, that difference, whether of peoples or of legal status or of sex, while indeed already removed in the unity of the faith, remains in this mortal life. That this order is to be observed on this life's journey is the teaching of the apostles, who hand down very salutary rules as to how Christians should live together with regard to differences of people (Jews and Greeks), status (masters and slaves), sex (husbands and wives), and the like; and it is also the teaching of the Lord himself, who said earlier: “Give to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's.” For there are some things which we observe in the unity of the faith without any distinction, and other things which we observe in the order of this life as on a journey, “lest the name and teaching of God be blasphemed” (1 Tim. 6.1).Footnote 134
Insofar as individuals are on a journey—in a state of transformation—they remain in this world and thus defined by its various distinctions. Augustine proposes a simultaneous existence—as members in a unified community in the faith and as individuals living “in this moral life”—that ultimately served to solidify the difference between the two. In the world of Caesar, Christianity was not, as Christ and the apostles had both noted, a totalizing or exclusive existence.
Even as the world of Caesar had become the world of Constantine and would eventually become the world of Theodosius, that is, the world of imperial Christianity, Augustine maintained, in this context, a distinction. This distinction reflects what Peter Brown has described—admittedly in the different though related context of religious coercion—as Augustine's tendency to, all at once, “embrace and resolve tensions.”Footnote 135 Augustine's analysis of Paul's language of Christian transformation—specifically, the phrase “new creation” (nova creatura)— focuses on the irregularity of Paul's own words.Footnote 136 “It is difficult,” he notes “to find (examples of the term) creation being applied to people who have come into the adoption of sonship by believing.”Footnote 137 While in 2 Cor. 5.17–18 Paul did use creation to designate people, in Rom. 8.21 and 8.23, by contrast, “he distinguishes those who have believed from the name ‘creation.’”Footnote 138 Paul's rhetorical vacillations similarly mapped onto his designating followers of Christ as, on certain occasions, human beings, and on other occasions, as decidedly not.Footnote 139 Augustine's fundamental observation was that attainment of a Christian essence through the protracted process of living, behaving, and believing remained incomplete in the world of Caesar.Footnote 140 And the partialness of that transformation, Augustine claimed, preserved a distinction between transformation in the flesh and transformation of the flesh: “But in whomever these desires do not exist, not only does he not sin, but he does not even have sin. And even if, in many ways, this may be possible in this life, it must not be hoped for in every way until the resurrection and the alteration of the flesh.”Footnote 141
V. Conclusions: Universalism and the Problem of Fluidity
Paul's anger was a daunting yet capacious rhetorical template, which late antique interpreters seized upon to define the condition of their movement both in relationship to and contradistinction from the world of Caesar. Precisely because apostolic voices were said to be orthodox voices and orthodox voices were said to be apostolic voices, Paul's rhetoric, for better and for worse, served as the foundational language for articulating the orthodox terms of Christian community. But the late antique world, as we know all too well, was a world marked by intense theological and political controversy.Footnote 142 It is ironic, of course, that the very period that had given rise to the reinvigoration of Paul's legacy had itself become increasingly removed from Paul's unrealized wish for a uniform faith in Christ. Although the desire for coherent Christian community remained and would remain a hallmark of Christian exegetical discourse, the fourth and fifth centuries witnessed a period of intense struggle not only over how to communicate the terms of such order but also over the actual maintenance of any such order. Even as the realities of Donatism, Manichaeism, Marcionism, Origenism, and Arianism generated intense focus on the terms and conditions of Christian harmony—to reiterate through reinterpretation the apostolic ideal of communal existence—these very same controversies served only to magnify the disjuncture between rhetoric and reality. Paul's anger was no rhetorical or theological exception; rather, it had become—much to the dismay of his inheritors—the rule in late antiquity.
For late antique exegetes, communal harmony served as the barometer of Paul's orthodox legacy. Galatians became a roadmap to the dangers of dissension and disruption, which, in late antiquity, had become synonymous with heresy and the heretical disposition. The true danger of heresy, regardless of its particular form or features, was its disruption of the communal integrity that Paul had so passionately advocated. Paul's rhetorical exasperations were foundational in constructing and formalizing (through laws, creeds, and councils) the origins and essence of Christian heresy. Defining the terms of Christian community in opposition to ethnicity and heresy was about exegetically enacting the legacy and genealogy of Paul. It was about finding a vernacular that expressed the meaning behind the apostle's words and realizing his vision for the Galatians on a much broader scale. For late antique thinkers, the narrative that Paul adduced in his letters, wherein “decline and the difference between Jew and gentile is a means to a soteriological end that effaces, even as it depends on and is articulated through, the logics of universal history and ethnology,” generated a protracted disquisition over how to communicate the distinctive terms and composition of Christianity and Christian community.Footnote 143 As much as Paul's words were foundational for the late antique discourse of Christian kinship, they were by no means interpreted as self-evidently fluid, multiple, and pluralistic.
Although the details of scriptural exegesis were, in many respects, intellectually removed from the lives of everyday Christians, arguments over the logic behind Paul's rhetoric nonetheless capture the intensity of the concern over a deteriorating communitarian and thus Pauline ideal. However one chooses to read Paul's baptismal proclamation for a united community in Christ, the supersessionist, universal interpretation has an identifiable and discernible hold in the writings of late antique Christians. It does not simply emerge ex nihilo among post-Enlightenment scholars of the New Testament. There is clear evidence that in late antiquity Paul had been made into not only the quintessential Christian but also the quintessential universalist.Footnote 144 To insist that there was an interpretive chain in early Christian discourse—built upon Paul's formulation at Gal. 3.28—that presented Christianity and ethnicity in fundamental tension is not to privilege the truthfulness of this claim; it is not to accept as a historical fact that Christianity on the ground, that is, in the cities and churches of the ancient Mediterranean, provided a transcendent, universal status, which supplanted provincial ethnicity. Rather, it is to suggest that Victorinus, Ambrosiaster, Jerome, and Pelagius, constructed a Paul that advocated for this precise constellation of worldviews. And even where writers such as Jerome deploy so-called ethno-racial language, they do so in a way that conceptualized communal lineage not in terms of territory, blood, or even shared history but through the spiritual kinship defined by faith. When Pelagius says that the unity created through Abraham was “not from the seed of flesh” he is explicitly reimagining the language of descent and kinship.Footnote 145 Early Christian authors propounded a view that Christianity was incompatible with the temporal, bodily condition denoted by ethnicity by reimagining it.
Late antique readers of Paul exploited the apostle's rhetoric to define Christianity as both a part of and yet apart from the ethnic, economic, religious, and political landscape of the fourth century.Footnote 146 Paul's anger was read as a demonstration that Christianity was not simply a perspective on the world (an epistemology) but also a perspective in the world (an ontology; to ask “of what does being a Christian consist?”), which, taken together, complemented and obviated other expressions of self-identification, kinship, and group affiliation.Footnote 147 Stanley Stowers has argued, in fact, that Paul set in motion the overarching discourse that would come to define Christian notions of community: “The theological or ideological origins of the totalizing role of community in the Christian imagination about early Christianity can be pinned on Paul and his letters. Paul did not merely try to persuade those whom he wanted as followers that they ought to become a very special kind of community. He told that them they had in their essence already become such a community.”Footnote 148 To ask, then, why Paul's anger mattered—and why it mattered in late antiquity—is to ask how Christianity, as an ever-expanding institutional and imperial entity, operated to create communal coherence and order. Late antique interpreters of Paul read Galatians as a foundational meditation (in polemical language) on the way in which Christianity both did and did not transform one's sense of self and communal belonging. By looking to Paul's later exegetes, one sees the inner-workings of a debate over the terms that defined and organized the coherence of Christianity as a sacred community, comprised of diverse peoples in diverse places defined by their own leaders, traditions, and politics.Footnote 149
By reinterpreting the logic and rules of kinship, Christians sought to obviate the countervailing, destructive discourse of external identity. But it is in the very act of calling baptism a rebirth, imagining blood as seed, or in deploying the idea of spiritual kinship that Christians signified the limitations (i.e. discursive dependency) of their proposed alternative vernacular of community.Footnote 150 Christians, after all, were not born, they were made . . . by being reborn! And while Paul's anger had set in motion the ensuing debates over the terms of Christian community, his wrath had also codified the impossibility of the task. To read Galatians in the fourth and fifth centuries, then, was to acknowledge that ethnic affiliation remained an entrenched discourse precisely because it was employed to characterize the ascendency of the heretics. The struggle to reconceptualize the terms of kinship resonated beyond Galatians. It encapsulated the protracted effort to situate a growing community of believers in a world from which their Christianity was thought to be distinct from other meaningful social constructions of affiliation. In other words, it was to try and imagine a mode of identification that facilitated a desire to be part of and yet apart from the late ancient world. To imitate Paul was not simply to embrace (and perpetuate) the notion of a singular Christianity across the Mediterranean basin, but to acknowledge the difficulty of explaining the apostle's understanding of the transformative and essentialist shift embodied in this community of believers. For late antique thinkers, Paul's anger attested the perplexing challenge of communicating the particular terms of Christianity as a discrete category of both human and supra-human experience.Footnote 151
