2000 Articles

No longer Male: Masculinity Struggles behind Galatians 3:28?

Kahl, Brigitte W.

Feminist and liberation oriented readings rather commonly have treated the baptismal formula of Gal. 3.26-28 as a kind of ET, a lovely lonely alien unhappily trapped in the hostile matter of a Pauline letter. While testifying to an egalitarian life practice in the congregations before, besides, and against Paul, it is considered to fit only loosely into the specific context of Galatians: Paul mainly quotes the baptismal unity of Jew and Greek as he wants to dissuade the Galatian Gentiles from getting circumcised as Jews. The emancipatory message, however, of slave/free and male/female becoming one in Christ—if it is emancipatory at all—is mostly irrelevant to the rest of the Galatian debate and to the patriarchal mindset of Paul in general.