Abstract
It is not easy to justify writing an entire book on a single biblical verse, although admittedly Galatians 3:28 (‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus’) is one of the few verses for which a plausible case might be made. But even for such a verse, it is not easy to write a book-on-a-single-verse good enough that, after finishing it, the reader regards it as having been well worth the time. Karin Neutel, however, has accomplished both of these difficult feats with A Cosmopolitan Ideal (hardback ed. 2015, paperback ed. 2016), a revision of a very impressive Groningen PhD thesis.
The book is recognizably Groningen-school in its approach, which is to situate its chosen New Testament writer squarely in an ancient Graeco-Roman philosophical discourse. In this instance the New Testament writer is the apostle Paul, and the philosophical discourse is utopianism, that is, speculation about the ideal ordering of human society. As Neutel writes, ‘Paul’s statement about unity in Christ [in Gal 3:28 is] a contribution to the first-century conversation about ideal ways to live and to organize society. By describing unity in Christ in terms of these three pairs, Paul made a claim for his specific vision that addressed contemporary concerns and spoke to a first-century ideal of social harmony’ (p. 16).
There is a polemical edge to Neutel’s use of the innocuous-sounding phrase ‘in the context of first-century thought.’ She rightly argues that Gal 3:28 is, in a sense, a victim of its own modern usefulness. This logion of the apostle has proved so (understandably) irresistible to modern ecumenists, universalists, post-Holocaust theologians, advocates of the New Perspective on Paul, critical race theorists, abolitionists, feminists, womanists, queer theorists, and others that it has tended to evade historical-contextual interpretation. To be sure, many of these modern uses are manifest ethical goods, but it is bracing to read a strictly ancient-philosophical interpretation of this passage, which also has the secondary effect of forcing modern readers to take responsibility for where our own ethical positions (e.g., on gender equality) are simply other than Paul’s.
In between a short introduction and conclusion, Neutel devotes a chapter to ancient philosophical utopianism, a chapter to the ‘neither Jew nor Greek’ clause, a chapter to the ‘neither slave nor free’ clause, and a chapter to the ‘no male and female’ clause. Her apt point is that, while modern interpreters have usually seized upon one or another of the three clauses according to their respective purposes, a historical-contextual reading must give an even-handed account of all (and only) the three pairs that Paul invokes. It is striking, for instance, that Paul does not mention the distinction between rich and poor, or between Greeks and barbarians, or between continentals and islanders, all commonplaces in other similar, contemporary texts. A Cosmopolitan Ideal is not altogether without weaknesses, but in a short review such as this, the most important thing to say is that this single biblical verse does in fact warrant Neutel’s book about it.