The Colonizers' Idols: Paul, Galatia, and Empire in New Testament Studies

In the book, I deconstruct the prevailing treatment of the New Testament as anti-imperial. I do it by contextualizing both New Testament scholarship and the Galatian experience within imperialist discourses that survived the dissolution of conventional 20th c. empires. I critique simplistic/naive treatments of empire as post-imperial (that is, replicating patterns of imperialist ideology, albeit unwittingly) and I propose a new interpretation of Galatians that reworks and complicates the portrait of the Galatians themselves—rather than focusing on Paul. The world that emerges using this approach is a diverse social world peopled by complex individuals with heterogeneous social and cultural identities. Throughout, I show how New Testament scholars who rehabilitate the Bible and Paul as anti-empire perpetuate the same imperialist modes of interpretation they seek to repudiate