Hostname: page-component-74656f9884-skzmx Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-11-05T22:27:26.362Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Divine-Hero Christology in Paul? Reading Romans 1:3–4 in Its Mythic, Religious, and Imperial Contexts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 October 2026

Daniel B. Glover
Daniel B. Glover*
Affiliation:
Lee University; dglover@leeuniversity.edu
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article seeks to answer how Paul’s Roman audience, composed mostly of non-Jews, would have understood Rom 1:3–4. It argues that the closest available frameworks would have been the myths of heroized demigods and the more recent imperial propaganda of deified emperors. This reading makes good sense of a number of emphases within Rom 1:3–4, aligns with others throughout the remainder of the Epistle to the Romans, and coheres with Paul’s concepts of the resurrected body and glorification elsewhere in his epistolary corpus (e.g., 1 Cor 15; Phil 2:5–11). The article then discerns three key reasons why Paul would have characterized Jesus in this way: 1) to draw from an existing religious grammar, 2) to justify cultic veneration of Jesus, and 3) to position Paul as a purveyor of divine truth or mysteries.

Keywords

deificationapotheosisdivine heroesdemigodsimperial cultruler cultHeracles/Herculesancient cosmology

Information

Type
Article
Information
Harvard Theological Review , Volume 119 , Issue 3 , July 2026 , pp. 359 - 379
Check for updates
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2026. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the President and Fellows of Harvard College

Introduction

Romans 1:3–4 is a passage fraught with complexity. Once acclaimed as the most-discussed New Testament text,Footnote 1 these two verses have accrued distinct interpretive traditions. In the first, scholarship on Rom 1:3–4 has occupied itself with reconstruction. Convinced that these verses preserved a pre-Pauline “Christological confession” (or verses from a “Christological hymn”), scholars whittled the verses down to its bare and ostensibly original form (“Jesus Christ of the seed of David, appointed Son of God through the resurrection of the dead”) to reconstruct the content’s pre-Pauline Sitz im Leben.Footnote 2 Almost in unison, these scholars identified this passage as vestigial early “Jewish-Christian Christology,” which was also “adoptionist.” Indeed, Jewish messianic discourse saturates these two verses. Several critical terms coalesce in this passage (e.g., “prophets,” “holy writings,” “seed of David,” “messiah,” and perhaps others) that would have reminded Paul’s audience of Jewish traditions, Scriptures, history, and messianic discourse.Footnote 3

Yet, Paul did not write only to Jews, nor did Paul’s Judaism live, move, or have its being in isolation from its ancient Mediterranean environs. Paul’s intended or imagined audience for Romans was predominantly if not exclusively non-Jewish.Footnote 4 Furthermore, the Judeans’ God, practices, and history were topics of conversation and curiosity among Greek and Roman intellectuals (e.g., Plutarch’s Quaest. conv. 4.6 [671C–72C]), suggesting that Paul’s Jewish, messianic discourse might not only be interpreted in broader Mediterranean religious categories but also have deliberately evoked them. Hence, a second tradition of scholarship on this passage has sought to appreciate its broadly ancient Mediterranean religious influence.Footnote 5 This scholarship coalesces with recent movements in the study of Christian origins, which situate early presentations of Jesus’s life and status alongside other significant mythic-religious and political figures.Footnote 6 Because of this work, it is now clear that early Jesus-followers imagined Jesus and communicated him to others in ways that were congruent with their ancient Mediterranean religious and political environment.

This article focuses upon one particularly fraught and complex text (Rom 1:3–4) in order to enrich our knowledge of specific ways Paul navigated this environment as a religious expert. A close reading of this passage reveals with greater clarity how Paul communicated both the significance of Jesus and his own position as Jesus’s herald within this ancient Mediterranean religious context. We shall see that Paul has combined two discrete concerns—the first messianic and the second deifying. Paul so merges ancient Mediterranean religious and political concepts with Jewish messianic discourse that his language describing Jesus as “son of God” would have resonated with his Roman audience on both mythic/religious and political/messianic levels. The article proposes that Paul’s Roman audience would have interpreted Jesus’s attainment to the status of a “son-of-god-in-power” by his resurrection from the dead in light of pervasive traditions about deified heroes and emperors.Footnote 7 Paul’s claim in Rom 1:3–4, then, uses the religious and political language available in his milieu as a grammar in order to characterize Jesus’s divinity as a deified (or: heroized) son of God. Consequently, in navigating this religious milieu, Paul here characterizes himself as a reliable purveyor of hidden divine mysteries.

This argument unfolds in four movements. First, I contextualize Paul’s literary activity as ancient Mediterranean religious expertise in order to demonstrate the plausibility that Paul knows and uses a shared religious-mythic grammar to characterize Jesus as a Mediterranean god. Second, I offer a close reading of Rom 1:3–4, which clarifies and itemizes the discrete claims that Paul makes about Jesus in Rom 1:3–4, setting the stage for the comparison that follows. Third, I demonstrate the similarity of Greco-Roman mythic and imperial translation/heroification narratives to our passage. Fourth, given that Rom 1:3–4 resembles Greco-Roman translation myths when it describes Jesus’s divine filiation, I evaluate how Paul’s claims about Jesus might be interpreted in relation to similar claims about the Roman emperor. Finally, I turn to Paul’s literary and religious procedure to elucidate the effect these verses have for understanding Paul’s self-characterization and claims about Jesus.

Paul’s Religious-Literary Activity in Context

Recent studies on Paul from a comparative religious and sociological point-of-view situate his epistolary activity within the broader ancient Mediterranean phenomenon of religious expertise and cultural production.Footnote 8 First, on Paul as a religious expert: Heidi Wendt’s study of religious expertise in the ancient Mediterranean demonstrates that Paul engages in religious activities similar to figures like Proteus Peregrinus and Alexander of Abonoteichus, whom she calls “freelance religious experts.” For Wendt, a freelance religious expert is “any self-authorized purveyor of religious teachings and other practices who drew upon such abilities [divination, initiations and other foreign rites, esoteric teachings, atypical sacrifices, and healing, among others] in pursuit of various social benefits and often more transparent forms of profit.”Footnote 9 Such figures achieved “recognition and legitimacy through demonstrations of skill and learning” by offering goods such as “education, moral instruction or another form of self-improvement, healing, divination, a better afterlife, and so forth.”Footnote 10 Wendt’s argument that Paul fits this type of religious expert is persuasive.

In composing epistles, Paul is also engaging in literary production, an elite field which would have served to establish Paul’s credibility as a religious expert. As his letters illustrate, Paul was quite well-educated. Since Hellenistic enkyklios paideia was fairly standardized, we can assume Paul’s familiarity not only with rhetorical and grammatical structures, which we find throughout his letters, but also with the Greek literary canon, including Homer, Euripides, Aesop, Epimenides, and Aratus, around which Hellenistic paideia was structured.Footnote 11 As an educated textual producer, therefore, Paul would have known quite well Greek and Roman myths, not to mention the political propaganda which put those classic myths to new use.Footnote 12 Therefore, it can be expected that, as a religious expert with a high degree of social capital (i.e., Hellenistic education), Paul will have engaged the cultural, mythic, religious, and imperial milieux in which he operated when writing his letters.

That is precisely what we find in Rom 1:3–4. Here, Paul marshals discourses native to both Jewish messianism and Mediterranean religion and politics in order to make himself, his gospel, and his God intelligible to his Roman audience. Not only that, but we shall also see how Paul, by characterizing Jesus as messiah with language redolent of demigods, heroes, and emperor worship, establishes his credibility as a religious expert.

A Close Reading of Romans 1:3–4

Before clarifying and itemizing the ways Paul describes Jesus in Rom 1:3–4, we need to offer two important caveats: first, we need to dispense with the later theological category “adoptionism” as analytically useful for understanding this passage.Footnote 13 Not only is this label anachronistic; it also obscures the Jewish and Greco-Roman mythic and imperial contexts in which Paul wrote by privileging a later, (un)orthodox Christian perspective on the apostle and his letters. Second, it is important to begin not with a hypothetical reconstruction of the text, but with what is present to us. The tools of historical criticism are simply too blunt to remove vestiges of Pauline redaction from earlier hymnic, poetic, or other sorts of religious tradition. Even in the event that the lines do come from a pre-Pauline tradition, who can say that the Pauline redaction, whatever it was, did not simply bring out what was already theologically present in nuce, especially if it brings out what was present in any potential lines of the tradition not quoted? We shall, therefore, proceed under the assumption that Paul meant to write what he wrote, and that what he wrote affirms something about his first-century understanding of Jesus.

As we turn to a close reading of Rom 1:3–4, it is worth presenting the text in full:Footnote 14

1a Παῦλος δοῦλος Χριστοῦ Ἰησοῦ,
1b κλητὸς ἀπόστολος
1c ἀφωρισμένος εἰς εὐαγγέλιον θεοῦ,
2a ὃ προεπηγγείλατο
2b διὰ τῶν προφητῶν αὐτοῦ
2c ἐν γραφαῖς ἁγίαις
3a περὶ τοῦ υἱοῦ αὐτοῦ
3b τοῦ γενομένου ἐκ σπέρματος Δαυὶδ
κατὰ σάρκα,
4a τοῦ ὁρισθέντος υἱοῦ θεοῦ ἐν δυνάμει
4b κατὰ πνεῦμα ἁγιωσύνης
4c ἐξ ἀναστάσεως νεκρῶν,
4d Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ τοῦ κυρίου ἡμῶν		 1a Paul, a slave of Messiah Jesus,
1b called as an apostle,
1c set apart for God’s good news,
2a which he promised in advance
2b through his prophets
2c in the holy writings
3a concerning his son,
3b who was born from the seed of David
according to the flesh,
4a and was marked out as a son of God in
power
4b according to a pneuma of holiness
4c by resurrection from the dead,
4d Jesus Messiah our Lord.

We must observe, first of all, that Paul already identifies Jesus, around whom this passage revolves, as “his son” (περὶ τοῦ υἱοῦ αὐτοῦ)—that is, as a son of God—in 1:3a. Whether this be a status or title or ontological state, Paul calls Jesus a “son of God” in 1:3a, before he speaks about the resurrection (1:4c) or even Jesus’s birth, “according to the flesh” (1:3b).Footnote 15 Scholars have typically interpreted Paul’s “son of God” language within the context of Jewish messianism, and for good reason. However, no one meaning inheres in the phrase “son of God,” which Paul uses again in 1:4a (υἱοῦ θεοῦ). As Adela Yarbro Collins has argued in a pair of articles, attending particularly to Jewish or Greek and Roman traditions about the phrase υἱὸς θεοῦ can produce very different readings.Footnote 16 If Paul drew from the former, then he would be speaking primarily of Israel’s king as God’s son. If the latter, then Paul would be speaking of Jesus primarily as Greeks and Romans regarded the likes of Heracles/Hercules, Asclepius/Aesculapius, and Dionysus/Bacchus—demigods who were mortals sired by gods—and/or the divine emperor, who was often called a υἱὸς θεοῦ (or, more frequently, θεοῦ υἱός). Certainly, we should affirm that Paul’s language of Jesus as υἱὸς θεοῦ drew upon “traditionally Jewish” (i.e., royal messianic) concepts for his son-of-God language. Nevertheless, this need not rule out that he also drew from Greek and Roman concepts, a point I shall soon argue. He must have known that his non-Jewish audience could hardly help but look for frameworks familiar to them. However, even if Paul exclusively drew upon Jewish messianic concepts for his son-of-God language, which I do not believe is likely,Footnote 17 these concepts would probably not have been the first available to his non-Jewish audience.

Next, Paul presents “[God’s] son” as experiencing human birth “from the seed of David” (ἐκ σπέρματος Δαυὶδ) and “according to the flesh” (κατὰ σάρκα) (1:3b). This second phrase, “according to the flesh” (κατὰ σάρκα), sometimes has negative associations, but here as elsewhere it simply means “genealogically.”Footnote 18 Jesus as a “son of God” is not obviously a demigod—a half-human, half-god sired by a divine father in a mortal mother. He is, rather, presented as a human descendant of David. From this, Paul’s readers would assume that Jesus is fully human. But nevertheless, the text does call him God’s son, introducing an ambiguity into Jesus’s origins. Even if Paul had 2 Sam 7:14 primarily in mind, there is no reason to suppose that this intertext exhausts the Christological significance of Rom 1:3–4. Nor can we assume that his non-Jewish audience would have, or could have, made that same intertextual move.

Paul’s audience may have, instead, read these verses as affirming something like what Andrew Lincoln has called “double paternity.”Footnote 19 Lincoln claims that Greco-Roman biographical literature often recorded competing traditions about the ambiguous conception and birth of outstanding individuals, attributing to them both a human father (such as Alexander’s father Philip) and a divine one (Ammon-Zeus).Footnote 20 Theseus, for instance, was said to have been sired by the human Aegeas and Poseidon (Plutarch, Thes. 2, 6, 36), Pythagoras by Mnesarchus and Apollo (Porphyry, Vit. Pyth. 2–4), and Augustus by Gaius Octavius and Apollo (Suetonius, Aug. 94). Ancient biographers present competing traditions about the suspicious, ambiguous circumstances surrounding their subject’s filiation, though they usually take one position (sired by the human) or another (sired by the god). Later “Christian” texts indicate that the circumstances of Jesus birth were likewise considered suspicious and ambiguous. The authors of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke take a side by clearly distinguishing Jesus’s divine filiation from his human father, but suspicion still lingers when John 8:19 and 9:29 are written and continues well into the second century. Celsus, if he did not invent it himself, cites a tradition that Jesus was fathered neither by Joseph nor by a god but by a Roman soldier named Panthera (Origen, Cels. 1.32). If the Romans saw Jesus’s filiation as unclear or ambiguous like that of Alexander, Theseus, and others (as later Christians and their critics did), then they also would have recognized Paul’s claim of Jesus’s divine sonship as a claim to special religious knowledge—a point to which we shall return in a later section below.

In any event, Jesus’s genealogical descent underscores his royal lineage, which Paul affirms by calling Jesus “messiah” (Χριστός), twice in 1:1a, 4d. The messiah-son-of-David was something of a contested question in certain corners of Jewish antiquity. The possibility of the messiah’s Davidic filiation serves as a kind of riddle in the Synoptic Gospels (Mark 12:35–37; Matt 22:41–46; Luke 20:41–44).Footnote 21 Paul clearly affirms it, but he holds it together with Jesus’s divine sonship. In the text, Jesus is called a son of God (Rom 1:3a) before he is a son of David (1:3b). The language about Davidic “seed” (σπέρμα) in 1:3b apparently serves to underscore Jesus’s royalty. In fact, Matthew Novenson has pointed to the vocabulary overlaps between this passage and 2 Kgdms 22:51/LXX Ps 17:51, in which the terms “Christ,” “seed,” and “David” occur together, as here, and which speak of the “Christ” or messiah as the king of Israel. For our present concern, it does not matter whether Paul had either of these specific passages in mind when writing Rom 1:3–4 but only that the language is that of royal messianism, originating in the Jewish Scriptures.Footnote 22 Paul’s close association of the messiah with David underscores the thoroughly royal mold into which he casts Jesus.

Paul’s language of “lordship” in 1:4d, therefore, makes good sense in this royal context. In Hellenistic and Roman antiquity, the term κύριος often came to expression in Greek and Roman ruler and benefactor cults.Footnote 23 Long ago, Wilhelm Bousset wrote, “the title Kyrios had a dominant role in this ruler cult.”Footnote 24 While much of his Kyrios Christos has not stood up to scrutiny, this claim has. Ptolemy V Epiphanes (OGIS 1.90), Ptolemy XIII Theos Philopator (OGIS 1.186), the same and Cleopatra (SAB 1902), the Herodians,Footnote 25 Tiberius (OGIS 606; Josephus, War 2.179), Caligula (Suetonius, Cal. 22),Footnote 26 Claudius (P.Oxy 37.5–6), Nero (ILS 8794), Vespasian (Josephus, War 7.70–71), Domitian (Suetonius, Dom. 13.2), and especially HadrianFootnote 27 —all of these rulers were honored and deified with the title κύριος or its Latin equivalent, dominus.Footnote 28 Hence, Martial writes of Caesar: “He is lord and god of the whole world” (Epic. 8.2.5–6).Footnote 29 The title belongs first and foremost to gods and deified men or demigods (such as Asclepius or Heracles),Footnote 30 and so Greek and Roman rulers received it as a deifying honor. In such contexts, the term refers to the divine right and ability to rule. Its application to Jesus, then, seems to serve the same function.

While Jesus is already “God’s son” in 1:3a, these verses suggests that as the narrative progresses, something changes in Jesus: following his resurrection from the dead (1:4c),Footnote 31 Jesus is promoted to “a son of God in power” (ἐν δυνάμει, 1:4a), according to “a pneuma of holiness” (1:4b). The passive voice of the participle is important here. Jesus receives the promotion; he does not take it or claim it for himself. Evidently, then, God is the implicit actor behind the participle’s action. Paul uses ὁρισθέντος (1:4a) to describe the event of this divine exaltation. While the term is mostly used as a geographical or cartographical term for marking out or delimiting regions,Footnote 32 Paul evidently employs the term here in the sense of “marked out” or “appointed.” Consequently, Jesus becomes something he was not before. Precisely what he becomes, however, is not yet clear.

Paul calls what Jesus becomes—i.e., what he is marked out as—a “son-of-God-in-power.” This is one of those exceedingly rare passages where Pauline scholars are in broad agreement about its meaning. Unfortunately, what they agree on is its opacity. Grammar bears some responsibility: we may understand the phrase ἐν δυνάμει as modifying ὁρισθέντος (“marked out”) or υἱοῦ θεοῦ.Footnote 33 Grammatical debate can hardly settle the issue, though the distance between ἐν δυνάμει and ὁρισθέντος may support the second option. More conclusive is the differentiation between this post-resurrection status as a “son-of-God-in-power” (1:4a) and Jesus’s earlier status as “his son” (1:3a). Jesus’s resurrection does something to him. Hence, the second option seems preferable.

The phrase ἐν δυνάμει makes most sense as referring to Jesus’s newly resurrected mode of existence. He now exists not merely as a son of God, as he was earlier, but as a son of God in a state of power, whereas before Jesus’s mode of existence was fleshly, human. Presumably, his humanness has not been totally obliterated, but it has been altered. To draw attention to an earlier Pauline epistle, Paul refers to Jesus’s resurrected body as σῶμα πνευματικόν (1 Cor 15:43). Once resurrected, Jesus, the “last Adam,” becomes a “life-making pneuma” (εἰς πνεῦμα ζῳοποιοῦν, 15:46–47). The terms δύναμις and πνεῦμα are interlacing and, indeed, often synonymous terms in this period. Luke 1:35, for instance, places the two in synonymous parallelism, and the Stoic, Middle Platonist, and medical discourses of Paul’s day equated the two and understood them as a kind of material substance, which could be embodied. Indeed, as many scholars have noted,Footnote 34 Paul seems to do the same in 1 Cor 15:42–44, which reads,

42 Οὕτως καὶ ἡ ἀνάστασις τῶν νεκρῶν. σπείρεται ἐν φθορᾷ, ἐγείρεται ἐν ἀφθαρσίᾳ· 43 σπείρεται ἐν ἀτιμίᾳ, ἐγείρεται ἐν δόξῃ· σπείρεται ἐν ἀσθενείᾳ, ἐγείρεται ἐν δυνάμει· 44 σπείρεται σῶμα ψυχικόν, ἐγείρεται σῶμα πνευματικόν.

42 So also with the resurrection of the dead: Sown in mortality, raised in immortality; 43 sown in dishonor, raised in glory; sown in weakness, raised in power (ἐν δυνάμει); 44 sown a psychic body, raised a pneumatic body (σῶμα πνευματικόν).

In 1 Cor 15, then, Paul describes Jesus’s resurrection body as ἐν δυνάμει, in a state of power, which he understands as essentially equivalent to pneuma, the “stuff” of the gods, in accord with popular philosophical cosmology. It makes good sense, therefore, to read Paul’s enigmatic ἐν δυνάμει in Rom 1:4a also as qualitative: Jesus is raised as a son of God in a state of power, conditioned by his pneumatic body.

The pneuma is the implied subject of this resurrection cum ontological exaltation. Some scholars have discerned a contrast between Jesus’s royal messianic status “according to the flesh” (κατὰ σάρκα, 1:3b) and his divine-sonship-in-power effectuated by the pneuma/spirit (1:4), since Paul counterposes these terms elsewhere to that effect (as e.g., Rom 8:1–11). However, flesh and pneuma are not everywhere so adversative (as e.g., 2 Cor 3:3; 7:1). In any case, the pneuma here effects exaltation from a prior status, and Paul’s use of the term would have turned the attention of his non-Jewish audience to popular philosophical cosmology, since Paul mentioned it in such close proximity to the phrase ἐν δυνάμει. In short, Jesus’s resurrection happens by (κατά, 1:4b) the divine (or holy) pneuma and transforms him into a dynamic, pneumatic state.Footnote 35

Finally, why did God, by the pneuma and by raising him from the dead, exalt Jesus as a “son-of-God-in-power”? The question seems to presume the answer: he was raised because he was obedient unto death, a point Paul also makes in Phil 2:8–9. Because of his obedience in dying, God, through the pneuma, raised his son Jesus from the dead and exalted him into a pneumatic existence which he describes as ἐν δυνάμει. Such emphasis upon Jesus’s obedience is not absent from Romans. In fact, in Rom 5, the obedience/disobedience motif figures prominently in Paul’s Adam/Christ typology. There, Paul is clear that Christ’s obedience won something for him and for those he represents.Footnote 36 Likewise, if Paul’s phrase πίστις Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ in Rom 3:22 (cf. Gal 2:16; 3:22; Phil 3:9) is taken as a subjective genitive, then we have much the same idea here, too. It is not difficult to imagine Paul already had something like this on his mind, or that his audience would be able to make the connection between obedience and exaltation in this passage by the time they encountered Rom 3:22 or Rom 5.

So, to summarize: whatever else Rom 1:3–4 claims, it 1) presents Jesus, a son of God, being born as a descendant of David, 2) emphasizes his royal lineage and present rule by naming him “messiah” and “lord,” and 3) portrays his exaltation to a new, pneumatic status following the resurrection. All this, says Paul, comprises “the gospel of God” (1:1c). We are left now to identify comparands, which could have influenced or given shape to the interpretation of this passage among Paul’s audience.

Sons of God, Resurrection, and Heroification in Greek and Roman Context

In discerning relevant comparanda for these verses, two discrete categories emerge, which likely influenced this Roman Christ-group’s interpretation of our passage: heroized/immortalized demigods and the deified Roman emperor. We shall take up each of these in turn.

A. Heroized Demigods of Classical Mythology

In Mediterranean antiquity, many figures were born as “sons of god” as a result of divine-human intercourse—most often involving Zeus but also Apollo and others. As the offspring of one divine and one human parent, such a figure was known in Greek as ἡμίθεος or in Latin as semideus (“a demigod”), literally “a half-god.” Demigods inherit qualities from both parents. On the one hand, they receive from the divine parent the power to do marvelous deeds or accomplish incredible feats and, therefore, a type of divinity.Footnote 37 On the other hand, their human half consigns them to mortality. For those seeking to escape their mortal fate, it was necessary to live a life worthy of such glorification. That is, only by using one’s divinely-given abilities to dispense godlike benefactions could a demigod hope to achieve immortality, as indeed some did, by being exalted (or deified) as a “hero” (ἥρως)Footnote 38 upon death or bodily disappearance.Footnote 39 Heroes, who were once mortal (demigods or not), had been exalted ontologically through their immortalization to the status of a lower-level god, sometimes equivalent to daemons.Footnote 40 The most famous of the heroized demigods, Heracles, may serve as our first example.Footnote 41

Heracles was the offspring of the mortal Alcmene and divine Zeus (Ps.-Apollodorus, Libr. 2.4.8–10). His divine parentage supplied him with great size and strength, but like other demigods, he inherited his mother’s mortality. As a result, once Heracles had completed his twelve eponymous labors—labors which only his divine strength allowed him to perform—he died. His death was not particularly noble. Heracles’s recent bride, Deianira, gave the demigod a cloak which had been soaked in the blood of the centaur Nessus, whom he had killed. The blood worked as a poison, eating away at Heracles’s skin, until he ascended the pyre in a frenzy of pain and suffering to set himself ablaze (Ovid, Metam. 9; Sophocles, Trach. 555–1256). Yet, because Heracles accomplished his great labors, his father Zeus heroized him by exalting him to heaven (Ovid, Metam. 9.270–73).Footnote 42 The example of Heracles is particularly apt because it involves a post-mortem translation, which can be described as both pneumatic and embodied (cf. Lucian, Dial. d. 15.1). On the one hand, his whole mortal nature (i.e., human body) was burned away, now replaced by a divine nature. Even so, Ovid writes that Heracles increased in gravitas (“majesty” but also “weight” or “size”), and, as a result, Atlas felt his pondus (“weight”) as he entered heaven (9.273). This pattern of divine parentage ➔ outstanding/euergetic life ➔ death in service to that euergetism ➔ deifying resurrection pervades literature in this period.

Asclepius could serve as another example of this pattern. Asclepius, the divine doctor, was born the son of Apollo by the human Coronis (Hym. Hom. Aesc. 16. 1–4; Ovid, Metam. 2.620; Diodorus Siculus, Bibl. 5.74.6). His father’s divinity supplied him with the sagacity to learn the art of healing, for which he paid a great price. Hades, concerned that Asclepius was impinging upon his domain, complained to Zeus, who struck Asclepius down with a thunderbolt (Diodorus Siculus, Bibl. 4.71.3). However, at Apollo’s pleas, Zeus relented, raised Asclepius back to life, and exalted him to heaven where he became a star, thereby deifying him (Ovid, Fast. 6.735–62).

Two other examples are Pelops and his father, the demigod Tantalus. Tantalus is a negative example. Although the son of a god, Tantalus did not merit posthumous exaltation like Heracles or Asclepius. Rather, Tantalus committed two grave sins: without permission from the gods, he revealed divine secrets to humanity, and he abused the sacred custom of hospitality.Footnote 43 For these reasons, he was punished continually in the underworld.Footnote 44 The second of his sins is more germane, since it involves his son Pelops. When receiving Zeus and other gods into his home, Tantalus tried to deceive them by serving for dinner his own son, whom he had killed. But the gods were not deceived, and they punished Tantalus for this transgression. Pelops, on the other hand, was restored to lifeFootnote 45 and became a hero.Footnote 46 Like some other heroes (e.g., Protesilaus), Pelops’s body and bones linger at his shrine. Although we have no narrative depicting his translation to heaven or the Isle of the Blessed, Pindar nevertheless speaks of Pelops even now as “alive” (βίοτον ἔχει), “reclining” (κλιθείς) by his shrine near the Alpheus, partaking of blood sacrifices, and enjoying Olympic races (Ol. 1.90–99).

Closer to home for most Romans, Aeneas, the son of the Trojan Anchises and Aphrodite,Footnote 47 and Romulus, the twin son of the mortal Rhea and Mars, likewise earned a place among the gods through their heroizations.Footnote 48 In both cases, Jupiter immortalized the demigods at the behest of their divine parents, wherefore the demigods came to share in the gods’ immortality and power. These two examples are important for Rom 1:3–4, for in both, the deified hero served the role of Kulturbringer; both figures, in their own ways, helped found the city of Rome and its people. Their divine filiation, that is, undergirds their power to found and to rule.

While not all demigods were heroized, not all heroes were once demigods, either. We have scores of examples from Greek and Roman antiquity of persons who are translated to heaven (in body, spirit, or otherwise), signaling their deification.Footnote 49 This is not limited to non-Jewish contexts. Josephus, for instance, preserves two traditions of Moses’s heavenly assumption. Josephus clearly regards the first case as mistaken. He writes in Ant. 3.95–97 about Moses’s forty-day sojourn on Mount Sinai, where he stayed so long that the Israelites began to believe he had died. Josephus writes of a disagreement among the people: “some said he had been killed by wild animals… while others said that he had returned to the divinity.… But those who were sober-minded… thought it was reasonable to assume that he had been translated by God on account of his virtue” (3.96–97).Footnote 50 Here, it is important to note two things: 1) Josephus is sympathetic to the view that Moses—commonly known as the “servant” (or “son”!) of God (παῖς, e.g., LXX Josh 1:7)—had been translated to heaven and describes those holding this view as σώφρονας (“wise”). This view bespeaks Moses’s outstanding virtue in life—so outstanding, it could have ensured his deification. 2) Josephus nevertheless presents the belief as mistaken; Moses returns from the mountain alive as ever.

The second case is less clear; Josephus may affirm or undermine it. In Ant. 4.326, he writes: “Now while he was greeting Eleazar and Jesus [= Joshua] and still talking with them, a cloud suddenly stood over him and he disappeared (ἀφανίζεται) down in a certain ravine. So, he wrote that he died in the sacred scrolls, because he was afraid that someone may venture to say that, because of some excess of virtue, he had returned to the deity.”Footnote 51 Many scholars have perceived this account to imitate Dionysius of Halicarnassus’s accounts of Aeneas’s and Romulus’s translation/apotheosis.Footnote 52 Josephus, then, is either claiming that Moses wrote of his own death in order to disprove future claims of his apotheosis (of which we have other examples),Footnote 53 or he is claiming that Moses merely wrote of his own death (that is, he was assumed like Enoch or Elijah) in order to prevent others from venerating him, perhaps out of humility.Footnote 54 Under either interpretation, a tradition of Moses’s post-mortem translation and apotheosis was so close to hand that Josephus felt the need to comment upon it, in spite of the absence of such a tradition about Moses in the Jewish Scriptures.Footnote 55 Perhaps it will come as little surprise that Moses, too, was sometimes regarded as a ruler (or king) over Israel and was also called “a god” in such contexts.Footnote 56

These varied traditions about post-mortem exaltation and deification of divine sons of gods form a close analog to Jesus’s glorification in Rom 1:3–4. In both, 1) a divine son of god 2) receives promotion to a new, higher status (i.e., is heroized) following his death 3) by being raised from the dead and translated to heaven. This divine son of god 4) also shows some special aptitude for kingship or rule. If this last point was less significant for these figures, it becomes much more so for the following ones.

B. In Imperial Contexts and Propaganda

In addition to the “mythical” context, Paul’s claims in Rom 1:3–4 also echo Roman imperial propaganda. The deified Roman emperor often experienced a heavenly translation at his death. It is also significant that this figure was regarded as both a son of god and of a human father.Footnote 57 A few examples are in order.

Imperial propaganda flowing from the Julian dynasty drew from the mythology of heroes to deify Julius Caesar. Following Caesar’s sudden death, a comet appeared in heaven, convincing the Romans that he had been assumed to heaven, transformed into a star, and thereby become a god, a judgment which the senate then ratified (Suetonius, Jul. 88).Footnote 58 This imperial propaganda found its way into poetry (Ovid, Metam. 15.843–51) and history (Valerius Maximus, Mem. 1.8.8; cf. 4.5.6), which report that certain individuals had seen Caesar after his death.

Although we have no narrative depicting Julius’s divine filiation as we do with Augustus and others, one inscription from Ephesus shows that such ideas were nevertheless current. It writes the following of Julius Caesar: “The god manifest from Ares and Aphrodite, and common savior of human life” (SIG 4 2.760).Footnote 59 Likewise, Dio Cassius (Hist. rom. 43.21) reports that following his three victories over Egypt, the kingdom of Pontus, and Africa in 46 BCE, Caesar received a four-day triumph. On the first day, when Caesar ascended the Capitol, he overlooked an inscription naming him a “demigod” (ἡμίθεος), indicating some speculated he was fathered by a god.Footnote 60

Following Julius, Augustus was both the adopted son of the divine Caesar—and therefore the adopted son of a god—and was also reputed to be Apollo’s progeny (Suetonius, Aug. 94.1–7).Footnote 61 Consequently, an Egyptian inscription (OGIS 2.655) dating to 24 BCE calls Augustus θεοῦ ἐκ θεοῦ (“god from god”).Footnote 62 Already during his lifetime (9 BCE), a famous inscription from the city of Priene describes Augustus’s birth as the “birthday of the god,” which, in the inscription, serves as “the beginning of the good news (εὐανγελίων) for the world” (OGIS 2.458.31–42). Like his adopted father, and not unlike the heroic Heracles, Augustus was seen post-mortem, ascending to heaven, following his cremation (Suetonius, Aug. 100), signifying his heroization.Footnote 63 Following in their wake were also Claudius (Suetonius, Ner. 9; Seneca, Apocol.), Vespasian (Dio Cassius, Hist. rom. 66.3; cf. Suetonius, Vesp. 23.4), Hadrian (Dio Cassius, Hist. rom. 70.1.1), and others.Footnote 64

Imperial propaganda took over from heroized demigods the pattern of divine birth (or at least the identification of an individual as a “son of god” [divi filius, θεοῦ υἱός]) and deification/heroization following or immediately preceding death. The emperor’s heroization was signaled by the translation of his body or soul to heaven. The connection between the deified Roman emperor and heroes was intuitive, since important figures in Rome’s history, such as Romulus and Aeneas, were already thought to have been heroized in a similar fashion. In Greek and Roman myth, great men from the past, because of their virtue or benefactions, were regularly deified/heroized by their heavenly transferal, including many of divine birth. In the Roman social imaginary, the emperor most closely fit that bill—powerful as well as (one would hope) virtuous and euergetic (cf. Dio Cassius, Hist. rom. 52.5–6)—so Romans were primed to expect his heavenly transferal cum heroization.

The Effect of Romans 1:3–4

To this point, I have sought to explain how Paul’s Roman audience, comprised mostly if not exclusively of non-Jews, would have understood Rom 1:3–4 by locating it within a framework that would have been most readily available to them. I have argued that the traditional myths of heroized demigods and the more recent imperial propaganda of deified emperors would have served as that framework by which they incorporated Paul’s Jewish messianic claims about Jesus. Interpreting the passage within this religious and political framework helps to make good sense of a number of peculiar emphases within Rom 1:3–4, aligns with others throughout the remainder of the Epistle to the Romans, and coheres with Paul’s concept of the resurrected body elsewhere in his epistolary corpus (e.g., 1 Cor 15). It also helps to avoid anachronistic, heresiological judgments about whether this passage is (or is not) “adoptionistic,” a question that would have been unintelligible to those readers. This interpretation furthers our understanding of Paul’s presentation of Jesus as a son of God in two different senses, corresponding to his pre- and post-resurrection state. By attending to Jewish and Greco-Roman traditions, this reading allows us to hear Rom 1:3–4 as different members of the audience would have: some with greater familiarity with Jewish traditions (especially those about the messiah) and those with greater familiarity with Greek and Roman ones.Footnote 65 Irrespective of familiarity, however, Paul’s claims in these verses are congruent with both, and both are mutually illuminating.

Finally, given my argument, we should pause to consider what effect this reading would have had. Put differently: Why would Paul—who was educated in the myths of the Greeks, engaged with Greek and Roman religion, and well acquainted with emperor worship—have characterized Jesus so similarly to a heroized son of God? The true answer is probably multifaceted and probably more complex, but I would like to venture three reasons: because 1) it serves as familiar and intelligible language to Paul’s Roman audience, which 2) justifies cultic veneration of Jesus, and 3) it rhetorically positions Paul as a privileged knower and purveyor of divine mysteries.

First, on intelligibility: If Paul wants to introduce his Roman readers to his message of the gospel,Footnote 66 then it ought to be comprehensible. In order to characterize Jesus immediately from his birth (and perhaps before) as a son of God, whom the resurrection elevated to a new, higher mode of existence, in which the believing audience can expect to participate eschatologically,Footnote 67 Paul needs to place these claims into a familiar framework. The framework of heroized sons of god—and especially heroized emperors—does much of that work for him. Like the deified emperor, Paul’s Jesus is a ruler (κύριος, 1:4d) and specifically a Jewish ruler (χριστός, 1:1a, 4d). Like the deified emperor, he was already a son of God in his lifetime, is now resurrected, and resides in heaven. Like the deified emperor, he should be worshipped and supplicated as an immortal god (or: hero), and as such, Jesus cares about the on-going life of the community who serves him. This framework, therefore, supplies Paul the religious expert with the kind of theological and religious grammar necessary to translate his proclamation about Jesus. Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza has used the term “reflective mythology” to describe this sort of religious, intellectual labor. In her words, reflective mythology “appropriate[es] mythical language, material, and patterns from different myths and us[es] these patterns, motifs, and configurations for its own theological concerns.”Footnote 68 Whether we call Paul’s own procedure “myth-making” or “theology,” we must acknowledge that he is working, and communicating with others who exist, within a particular milieu. The language, the beliefs, the myths are a shared feature of their ancient past, and a full account of Paul’s claims about Jesus in Rom 1:3–4 needs to take stock not only of its messianic elements, but the ways those elements would have been received among Paul’s non-Jewish audience.

Second, on justification: By portraying Jesus as a hero, Paul is able to justify and to introduce his cultic veneration. By the first century CE, resurrection and heavenly ascent were among the strongest indicators of divinity. For this reason, only after testimony that one has seen the posthumous emperors Julius (Valerius Maximus, Mem. 1.8.8) and Augustus (Dio Cassius, Hist. Rom. 56.46.2–3) alive were they officially heroized. The latter case is explicit:

ἐκείνη δὲ δὴ Νουμερίῳ τινὶ Ἀττικῷ, βουλευτῇ ἐστρατηγηκότι, πέντε καὶ εἴκοσι μυριάδας ἐχαρίσατο, ὅτι τὸν Αὔγουστον ἐς τὸν οὐρανόν, κατὰ τὰ περί τε τοῦ Πρόκλου καὶ περὶ τοῦ Ῥωμύλου λεγόμενα, ἀνιόντα ἑορακέναι ὤμοσε. καὶ αὐτῷ ἔν τε τῇ Ῥώμῃ ἡρῷον ψηφισθὲν μὲν ὑπὸ τῆς γερουσίας οἰκοδομηθὲν δὲ ὑπό τε τῆς Λιουίας καὶ ὑπὸ τοῦ Τιβερίου ἐποιήθη, καὶ ἄλλοθι πολλαχόθιFootnote 69

And so, she [Livia] granted Numerius Atticus, a certain senator who had held the office of general, 250,000 [denarii] as a gift because he swore that he had seen Augustus ascending to heaven, in accordance with what is said about both [Julius] Proclus and Romulus. So, both in Rome and in other places, a hero shrine (ἡρῷον) was decreed for him [Augustus] by the Senate and erected by Livia and Tiberius.

Here we see clearly that it is only after and because Augustus is physically seen ascending to heaven that he receives a hero shrine (ἡρῷον) and, therefore, cultic veneration, after the manner of heroes like Romulus. Depicting Jesus as a son of God, like the emperor, who comes back to life, like heroes and heroized emperors, allows Paul to appropriate the contemporary religious grammar to say: “Jesus, like (or, perhaps, instead of) Romulus or the emperor, deserves your worship.”

Finally, on Paul’s rhetoric and characterization: Paul’s language of dual paternity (Jesus as “a son of God” and “seed of David, according to the flesh”) instills the apostle with religious authority. Paul’s self-characterization in these verses positions him closer to Cadmus than Pentheus of Euripides’s Bacchae, or Anaxarchus and Agis than Clitus (Arrian, Anab. 4.8–10), or the helmsman in the Homeric Hymn to Dionysus 7, who all know religious truths kept from their peers. In Rom 1:3–4, Paul represents himself as knowing the mysterious truth of Jesus’s divine origins and identity, which appeared ambiguous and was perhaps contested on the basis of his suspicious filiation.Footnote 70 Throughout his other letters, Paul contends that he possesses special religious knowledge that had been divinely and, in some cases, uniquely revealed to him. For instance, in the Corinthian correspondence, Paul professes a divine and divinely-revealed wisdom surpassing the human wisdom of the Corinthians. Indeed, this wisdom surpasses even the wisdom of the archons.Footnote 71 Paul’s claims to other revealed religious knowledge (e.g., Gal 1:11–12), some of which he refuses to speak (2 Cor 12:1–7), rhetorically establish him as a reliable purveyor of inaccessible divine or heavenly knowledge and his message as trustworthy. In hearing Paul’s laconic description of Jesus’s dual filiation (by God and as David’s “seed”), the effect on the Romans would be much the same: like Paul’s Jesus, Paul’s message had divine origins.

Conclusion

By performing a close reading of Rom 1:3–4, we have observed several ways Paul negotiates his Mediterranean religious context. By bringing first-century Jewish messianism into dialogue with the ancient Mediterranean religious and imperial frameworks of demigods, heroes, and deified emperors, Paul manages to construct an intelligible grammar for communicating the significance of Jesus. The result is what we might call Paul’s “hero Christology” or “hero messianism.” Jesus, like immortalized demigods and emperors, is heroized on the basis of his faithfulness to death and by his resurrection. Now that Jesus has received an elevated status (“son-of-God-in-power”), Paul insists that Jesus merits cultic veneration. But the religious marketplace of the ancient Mediterranean was highly competitive. In order to establish himself as a reliable and desirable religious expert, Paul lays claim in these verses to secret heavenly knowledge. He knows not only that Jesus was resurrected and exalted, but that Jesus’s mysterious origins, like Paul’s knowledge, were divine.

Footnotes

*

The author is grateful to Beverly Roberts Gaventa for reading a much earlier version of this paper years ago, and to John Genter, Collin Cornell, and the anonymous reviewers at Harvard Theological Review for engaging this more recent iteration.

References

1 Martin Hengel, Son of God: The Origin of Christology and the History of Jewish-Hellenistic Religion (trans. John Bowden; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1976) 59. I am not convinced Hengel was ever correct that more has (or had) been written about Rom 1:3–4 than any other NT text, but his point is certain: the secondary literature is legion. Engagement with it here, therefore, is necessarily judicious and selective.

2 See, e.g., Rudolf Bultmann, Theology of the New Testament (trans. Kendrick Grobel; 2 vols.; Waco: Baylor University Press, 2007 [orig. 1955]) 1:49–50; Hans-Werner Bartsch, “Zur vorpaulinischen Bekenntnisformel in Eingang des Römerbriefs,” ThZ 23 (1967) 329–39; Bernadin Schneider, “Κατὰ πνεῦμα ἁγιωσύνης (Romans 1,4),” Bib 48 (1967) 359–87; Peter Stuhlmacher, “Theologische Probleme des Römerbriefpräskripts,” EvTh 27 (1967) 374–89; Eta Linnemann, “Tradition und Interpretation in Röm 1,3f,” EvTh 31 (1971) 264–75; Heinrich Schlier, “Eine christologische und Credo-Formel der römischen Gemeinde. Zu Röm. 1,3f.,” in Neues Testament und Geschichte: Historisches Geschehen und Deutung im Neuen Testament. Oscar Cullmann zum 70. Geburtstag (ed. H. Baltensweiler and B. Reike; Zürich: Theologischer Verlag, 1972) 207–18; and, more recently, Michael Theobald, “‘Geboren aus dem Samen Davids…’ (Rom 1,3): Wandlungen im Paulinischen Christus-Bild?,” ZNW 102 (2011) 235–60. Lidija Novakovic (Raised from the Dead according to Scripture: The Role of Israel’s Scripture in the Early Christian Interpretations of Jesus’ Resurrection [Jewish and Christian Texts 12; Edinburgh: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2012] 133–46, at 134) succinctly summarizes the 20th-cent. status quaestiones: “Suffice it to say that scholars generally adopt one of two approaches: they either start from a hypothetical pre-Pauline formula and then investigate Pauline additions and the meaning of its text in its current literary context, or they start from the text in its current context and then explore its pre-Pauline form and functions.” More recently, see Bart Ehrman, How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee (New York: Harper Collins, 2014) 227–28; Dale B. Martin, Biblical Truths: The Meaning of Scripture in the Twenty-First Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017) 171.

3 See now Theobald, “Geboren,” 239–41; Nathan C. Johnson, “Romans 1:3–4: Beyond Antithetical Parallelism,” JBL 136 (2017) 467–90.

4 The classic study is Stanley Stowers, A Rereading of Romans: Justice, Jews, and Gentiles (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997). More recently, see Rafael Rodríguez, If You Call Yourself a Jew: Reappraising Paul’s Letter to the Romans (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2014); the various essays in The So-Called Jew in Paul’s Letter to the Romans (ed. Rafael Rodríguez and Matthew Thiessen; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2016); and Paula Fredriksen, Paul: The Pagans’ Apostle (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017) 2–3, 72, 107, 113, 118, 120–23, 133, 155–56, 165, who writes, “Whatever the actual ethnic makeup of the ekklesia in Rome, Paul addressed his letter solely and explicitly to its gentiles, while insisting on his own divinely granted authority to do so” (155). This claim need not be true for the following argument to remain valid, though it helps. For the countervailing view that Paul writes to both Jews (a minority) and non-Jews (the majority), see Peter M. Head, “The Greetings of Romans 16 and the Audience of Romans,” NTS 70 (2024) 275–81. If Head is correct that those greeted are among the addressees, then Paul wrote both to Jews and non-Jews, but Peter Lampe (From Paul to Valentinus: Christians at Rome in the First Two Centuries [trans. Michael Steinhauser; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003] 153–83) has shown that the demographic data of Rom 16 present, in all likelihood, essentially one Jew greeted for every two non-Jews.

5 A brief history: Friedrich Pfister (“Herakles und Christus,” AR 34 [1937] 42–60), followed by Arnold J. Toynbee (A Study of History [6 vols.; London: Oxford University Press, 1939] 6:465–76), argued that much of the gospel narratives and early Christology had been modeled upon Heracles. These scholars believed that various parallels (of varying degrees of precision and value) between Jesus’s life in the gospels and the Heracles legendaria could only be explained by genealogy: the gospel authors (more precisely: the author of a proto-gospel used by the Synoptists) had modeled various stages of Jesus’s life on that of Heracles. Herbert Jennings Rose (“Herakles and the Gospels,” HTR 31 [1938] 113–42) and, later, Marcel Simon (Hercule et le Christianisme [Strasbourg: Presses Universitaires de Strasbourg, 1955] 51–55) dismantled Pfister’s argument. Pfister imagined that the author of an Urevangelium had “before his very eyes” (vor Augen) a Cynic-Stoic biography of Heracles (“Herakles und Christus,” 59). The author of this Urevangelium then strictly followed various biographical data of Heracles’s life and then translated it to the life of Jesus. Rose and Simon, however, demonstrated that this portrait of Heracles was a pastiche, cobbled together from various sources, and ran roughshod over the differences, between both Heracles and Jesus as well as the various mythologies of Heracles. Consequently, many scholars wholly rejected the (again: genealogical) influence of Heracles myth on early Christology and gospel narratives (e.g., Abraham Malherbe, “Herakles,” RAC 14 [1988] 559–83, esp. 568–73). However, in a very important article (to which, in fact, the title of the present article is an homage), Wilfred L. Knox (“The ‘Divine Hero’ Christology in the New Testament,” HTR 41 [1948] 229–49) broadened the scope of comparison from Heracles to heroes more generally for understanding certain Christological passages in the NT, among them Rom 1:3–4, which he mentions only in passing (“Hero Christology,” 230, 231, 237). (Unfortunately, Knox continues by using Heracles almost exclusively as his model.) Both Knox and Simon would conclude that certain elements of early Christology were influenced by, or at least its language resonated with, the broader hero-concept. However, neither has reflected on how or why the concept was put to use nor given a sufficiently convincing explanation of the literary context or procedure.

6 Some important examples, which will feature below, include: Charles H. Talbert, “The Concept of Immortals in Mediterranean Antiquity,” JBL 94 (1975) 419–36; Adela Yarbro Collins, “Mark and His Readers: The Son of God among Jews,” HTR 92 (1999) 393–408; eadem, “Mark and His Readers: The Son of God among Greeks and Romans,” HTR 93 (2000) 85–100; eadem, “Ancient Notions of Transferal and Apotheosis in Relation to the Empty Tomb Story in Mark,” in Metamorphoses: Resurrection, Body and Transformative Practices in Early Christianity (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009) 41–58; Richard C. Miller, “Mark’s Empty Tomb and Other Translation Fables in Classical Antiquity,” JBL 129 (2010) 759–76; idem, Resurrection and Reception in Early Christianity (Routledge Studies in Religion; New York: Routledge, 2015); Andrew T. Lincoln, “Luke and Jesus’ Conception: A Case of Double Paternity?” JBL 132 (2013) 639–58; M. David Litwa, Iesus Deus: The Early Christian Depiction of Jesus as a Mediterranean God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2014).

7 Throughout this article, I describe certain readings as likely among Paul’s non-Jewish audience. Paul, the apostle to the uncircumcised, could scarcely be unaware of how his words would register among them, but he chose to use them anyway. Hence, I assume that the distance between this “reception” and Paul’s literary procedure is not great. For a similar point, see J. Louis Martyn, Galatians: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (AB; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997) 42.

8 See, inter alia, Heidi Wendt, At the Temple Gates: The Religion of Freelance Experts in the Roman Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016); Jennifer Eyl, Signs, Wonders, and Gifts: Divination in the Letters of Paul (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019); Stanley K. Stowers, Christian Beginnings: A Study in Ancient Mediterranean Religion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2024) 101–41. On cultural production, see Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature (trans. Randal Johnson; New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), whose sociological models Robyn Faith Walsh (in The Origins of Early Christian Literature: Contextualizing the New Testament Within Greco-Roman Literary Culture [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021]) has put to good use in studying the canonical gospel writers.

9 Wendt, At the Temple Gates, 10.

10 Ibid., 10–11; cf. 189.

11 See Raffaella Cribiore, Writing, Teachers, and Students in Graeco-Roman Egypt (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1996); eadem, Gymnastics of the Mind: Greek Education in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Teresa Morgan, Literate Education in the Hellenistic and Roman Worlds (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Steve Reece, The Formal Education of the Author of Luke-Acts (LNTS 669; London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2022).

12 Fredriksen, Paul, 38: “Through the works shaping the literary canon—Homer first of all; the classical playwrights; the work of Hellenistic grammarians and rhetoricians—[Greek] gods mediated paideia, higher education, thus culture.”

13 Jeremiah Coogan, “Rethinking Adoptionism: An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category,” SJT 76 (2023) 31–43.

14 All translations of ancient texts are my own, unless otherwise noted.

15 See now Oscar Cullmann, The Christology of the New Testament (London: SCM, 1959) 292.

16 Yarbro Collins, “Son of God among Jews,” 393–408; eadem, “Son of God among Greeks and Romans,” 85–100.

17 Indeed, by now, Jewish messianism and theology had swallowed certain Greek and Roman deification motifs. See, e.g., Ruben A. Bühner, Messianic High Christology: New Testament Variations of Second Temple Judaism (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2021).

18 E.g., Rom 4:1; 9:3, 5; 1 Cor 10:18.

19 Andrew T. Lincoln, “Luke and Jesus’ Conception: A Case of Double Paternity?,” JBL 132 (2013) 639–58.

20 E.g., See Gellius, Noct. att. 13.4.1–3; Lucian, Dial. mort. 13.1–2; Plutarch, Alex. 3.1–2; Ps.-Callisthenes, Alex. Rom. 1.4–7, 10; Arrian, Anab. 7.30.2.

21 On these texts, see Matthew V. Novenson, The Grammar of Messianism: An Ancient Jewish Political Idiom and Its Users (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017) 16.

22 Matthew V. Novenson, Christ among the Messiahs: Christ Language in Paul and Messiah Language in Ancient Judaism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012) 168. There were also, in Paul’s milieu, medical and philosophical theories available that could explain the divine fathership and human seed language we find here (e.g., Plutarch, Quaest. conv. 8.1.3 [Mor. 718a]), though Paul—along with most biographers (see, however, Plutarch, Num. 4.4)—does not overtly allude to them. However, see Matthew Thiessen, Paul and the Gentile Problem (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016) 105–29 (and notes on 213–23), which demonstrates Paul did use such frameworks elsewhere in his epistles.

23 In this respect, the studies of Wilhelm Bousset, Kyrios Christos: A History of the Belief in Christ from the Beginnings of Christianity to Irenaeus (trans. John E. Steely; Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2013) and Adolf Deissmann, Light from the Ancient East (trans. Lionel R.M. Strachan; London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1911) remain valuable. They reproduce a number of valuable epigraphic sources attesting to this use of κύριος.

24 Bousset, Kyrios Christos, 139. See also 139–448 and Deissmann, Light, 353–400.

25 OGIS 1.415 (Herod the Great), 1.418 (Herod Agrippa), 1.423, 1.425, 1.426 (Herod Agrippa II); Josephus, Ant. 16.134 (Herod the Great).

26 See also Ps.-Aurelius Victor, Caes. 3; Josephus, Ant. 18.296.

27 For many examples of Hadrian’s “lord-language,” see W. Weber, Untersuchungen zur Geschichte des Kaisers Hadrians (Leipzig: Teubner, 1907), esp. 157, 225–26, 241, 250; Craig R. Koester, “‘The Savior of the World’ (John 4:42),” JBL 109 (1990) 665–80, esp. 666–68.

28 Eleanor Dickey (“ΚΥΡΙΕ, ΔΕΣΠΟΤΑ, Domine: Greek Politeness in the Roman Empire,” JHS 121 [2001] 1–11) has convincingly demonstrated that widespread use of the vocative κύριε beginning in the 1st cent. CE derives from the Latin domine. She further shows that the two terms are polite but are suited to a very mundane use—that is, addressing neighbors, family members, equals, even those of lower status. She, however, also acknowledges that the vocative was more widely applicable than the nominative κύριος (“ΚΥΡΙΕ,” 10), which is our concern here. So, while neither is necessarily a terminus technicus, both κύριος and dominus still served as deifying titles for rulers and emperors, as, e.g., in Epictetus, Disc. 4.1.12; Suetonius, Dom. 13.2; Martial, Epig. 8.2.5–6, the latter two of which use dominus and deus hendiadytically. See further Nicole Belayche, “Kyrios and Despotes: Addresses to Deities and Religious Experiences,” in Lived Religion in the Ancient Mediterranean World: Approaching Religious Transformations from Archaeology, History and Classics (ed. Valentino Gasparini et al.; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2020) 87–113.

29 “Omni terrarium domino deoque.” See also Josephus, Ant. 16.118: “Caesar, the lord over all” (ἐπὶ τῷ πάντων δεσπότῃ Καίσαρι), speaking here of Augustus. Cf. Josephus, Ant. 17.244; War 2.2, 36; 3.402. For Martial, see M. Val. Martialis Epigrammata, OCT (ed. W.M. Lindsay; Oxford: Clarendon, 1902) 209. For Josephus, see Flavii Iosephi Opera (ed. Benedict Niese; 7 vols.; Berlin: Weidmann, 1885–1895) 4:21.

30 Bousset, Kyrios Christos, 142.

31 Some have argued that Paul refers here to the “general” resurrection of Jewish eschatology rather than to Jesus’s resurrection in particular, pointing to the lack of article preceding ἀναστάσεως (ἐξ ἀναστάσεως rather than ἐκ τοῦ ἀναστάσεως) and the lack of ἐκ preceding νεκρῶν (resurrection of the dead rather than from the dead; cf. 1 Cor 15:12–21 whence comes this distinction). Hence, the action of the participle ὁρισθέντος is still future, pointing to Jesus’s second coming and the concomitant resurrection. See Fredriksen, Paul, 141–45 for a recent iteration of this argument. I see at least two major issues with this interpretation. First, Paul does not distinguish sharply between the two resurrections. Jesus’s resurrection is the “fruitfruits” of the “general” resurrection (1 Cor 15:20, 23), the first of many others. Hence, Jesus’s resurrection is the resurrection, in a limited sense. Second, ὁρισθέντος is an aorist participle; it more likely communicates an action that already took place than one still future, just as the aorist participle γενομένου does in the preceding verse.

32 See, e.g., LXX Num 34:6; Josh 13:7, 27; 15:12; 18:20; 23:4; Ezek 47:20; Josephus, Ant. 1.153; 4.85, 95; 5.85, 87; 17.25; 20.86; J.W. 2.382; 3.40, 47, 51; 4.54; Philo, Leg. 3.171.

33 Modifying ὁρισθέντος: William Sanday and Arthur Headlam, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans (5th ed.; ICC; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1902); Frederic Louis Godet, Commentary on Romans (repr., Grand Rapids: Kregel Academic, 1977); Robert Jewett, Romans: A Commentary (Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2006). Modifying υἱοῦ θεοῦ: C.E.B. Cranfield, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans: Introduction and Commentary on Romans I–VIII (ICC; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1975); James D.G. Dunn, Romans 1–8, WBC (Waco: Word Books, 1988); Gordon Fee, Pauline Christology: An Exegetical-Theological Study (Peabody: Hendrickson, 2007) 241 n. 9.

34 See here Caroline Johnson Hodge, If Sons, Then Heirs: A Study of Kinship and Ethnicity in the Letters of Paul (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007) 74–76; Troels Engberg-Pedersen, Cosmology and Self in the Apostle Paul: The Material Spirit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) 19–22; Stephen P. Ahearne-Kroll, The Origins of the Corinthian Christ Group: Paul’s Chord of Gods (Edinburgh Studies in Religion in Antiquity; Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2024) 113–61.

35 This agential use of κατά is vague, but Paul speaks elsewhere of the pneuma as the agent of Jesus’s resurrection (e.g., Rom 6:4; 8:11).

36 Perhaps it is important to note that 1 Cor 15 uses the same typology to a similar end: Jesus’s obedience wins posthumous pneumatic exaltation for those he represents.

37 See Litwa, Iesus Deus, 69–85.

38 Latin lacks a corresponding word for the Greek ἥρως, though the word is sometimes glossed as lar/lares.

39 The literature on heroes is extensive. Some important studies include: Erwin Rohde, Psyche: The Cult of Souls and Belief in Immortality among the Greeks (trans. W.B. Hillis; London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1925) 115–55; Alfred Darby Nock, “The Cult of Heroes,” HTR 37 (1944) 141–74; Fritz Graf, Nordionische Kulte. Religionsgeschichtliche und epigraphische Untersuchungen zu den Kulten von Chios, Erythrai, Klazomenai und Phokaia (Bibliotheca helvetica romana 21; Rome: Schweizerisches Institut, 1985), esp. 128–35; Jennifer Larson, Greek Heroine Cults (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995); Gunnel Ekroth, “Altars in Greek Hero-Cults: A Review of the Archaeological Evidence,” in Ancient Greek Cult Practice from the Archaeological Evidence (ed. Robin Hägg; Stockholm: Svenska Institutet i Athen, 1998) 117–30; eadem, “Pausanias and the Sacrificial Rituals of Greek Hero-Cults,” in Ancient Greek Hero Cult (ed. Robin Hägg; Stockholm: Svenska Institutet i Athen, 1999) 145–58; eadem, “Heroes and Hero-Cults,” in A Companion to Greek Religion (ed. Daniel Ogden; Malden, MA : Wiley-Blackwell, 2007) 100–114; David Boehringer, Heroenkulte in Griechenland von der geometrischen bis zur klassischen Zeit: Attika, Argolis, Messenien (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2001); Jan N. Bremmer, “The Rise of the Hero Cult and the New Simonides,” ZPE 158 (2006) 15–26.

40 Depending on the text, a hero’s immortality might be imagined in various ways (e.g., they might inhabit the same “space” as the gods in heaven, or they might reside in the Elysian fields and manifest powerfully in the world of the living, or they might visit from the underworld, or they might linger around their tombs or shrines). The nature of the hero’s body was imagined variously, too. In Paul’s time, however, the most common way to signal heroization was through “resurrection” (that is, a return to life after death), ascension to heaven (either postmortem or a rapture just prior to death), and/or immortalization after death, usually signified by ascension.

41 Heracles is a complex case since, being born as a demigod and, later, worshipped as both a hero and Olympian god (Herodotus, Hist. 2.44; cf. also SVF 1.514), he blurs the lines between heroes and Olympian gods.

42 Some texts (Lucian, Dial. mort. 11.1–2) imagine Heracles’s translation as the division between his divine and mortal halves, something for which we do not have evidence for other heroes. This particularly Heraclean tradition probably derives from the presence of Heracles in heaven and his shade (εἴδωλον) in Hades in Od. 11.601–3. As the tradition of two Heracleses develops, ancient thinkers negotiate it in various ways. See, e.g., Herodotus, Hist. 2.44; Macrobius, Sat. 1.20.6, who posit the existence of several Heracleses.

43 Euripides, Orestes, 5–10; Pindar, Ol. 1.37–64.

44 Homer, Od. 11.582–92; Pindar, Ol. 1.56–58; Isthm. 8.10–12; Diodorus Siculus, Bibl. hist. 74.1–2.

45 Pindar, Ol. 1.65–96; Ovid, Metam. 4.403–11.

46 Pausanias, Descr. 5.13.

47 Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Ant. rom. 1.64.4–5.

48 Ennius, Ann. 112–120; Cicero, Resp. 2.10; Ovid, Metam. 14.811–28; Fasti. 2.475–511; Horace, Carm. 3.3; Dionysius of Halicarnassus 2.56.2–6, 2.63.3–4; Livy 1.16.1–8; Plutarch, Rom. 27–28; Num. 2.1–3; Fort. Rom. 8; Florus, Epit. 1.1; Arnobius, Adv. Gentes 6.1.41; Augustine, Civ. 3.15.

49 Miller, “Mark’s Empty Tomb,” 759–76; idem, Resurrection and Reception, 39–76 compiles an extensive list of examples. See also Talbert, “Concept of Immortals,” 419–36; Litwa, Iesus Deus, 141–79.

50 The Greek text (Josephus, Jewish Antiquities, Volume I: Books 1–3 [ed. H. St. J. Thackeray; LCL 242; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1930] 362) reads: ἦν γὰρ τοῖς ἀνθρώποις ἔρις, τῶν μὲν ἀπολωλέναι λεγόντων θηρίοις περιπεσόντα… τῶν δὲ πρὸς τὸ θεῖον ἀνακεχωρηκέναι… τοὺς δὲ σώφρονας… καὶ τὸ ὑπὸ τοῦ θεοῦ πρὸς αὐτὸν μεταστῆναι διὰ τὴν προσοῦσαν ἀρετὴν εἰκὸς νομίζοντας.

51 Josephus, Ant. 4.326, in Josephus, Jewish Antiquities, Volume II: Books 4–6 (ed. H. St. J. Thackeray and Ralph Marcus; LCL 490; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1930) 158.

52 Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Ant. rom. 1.64.4 and 2.56.2, respectively. See, e.g., note b at Josephus, Ant. 4.326 (LCL 490:158–59).

53 James D. Tabor, “‘Returning to the Divinity’: Josephus’s Portrayal of the Disappearances of Enoch, Elijah, and Moses,” JBL 108 (1989) 225–38.

54 Christopher Begg, “Josephus’s Portrayal of the Disappearances of Enoch, Elijah and Moses: Some Observations,” JBL 109 (1990) 691–93.

55 Roger David Aus, The Death, Burial, and Resurrection of Jesus, and the Death, Burial, and Translation of Moses in Judaic Tradition (Studies in Judaism; Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2008).

56 Philo, Mos. 1.148, 158. Wayne A. Meeks, “Moses as God and King,” in Religions in Antiquity: Essays in Memory of Erwin Ramsdell Goodenough (ed. Jacob Neusner; Supplement to Numen 14; Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1968) 354–71; Carl R. Holladay, Theios Aner in Hellenistic Judaism: A Critique of the Use of This Category in New Testament Christology (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1977) 108–29, though Holladay unfortunately limits Moses’s divinity to the conceptual framework of kingship. Philo calls Moses “a god” in the following passages: Leg. 1.40; Sacr. 9; Det. 39–40, 161–62; Migr. 84, 169; Mut. 19–20, 24–26, 125, 128–29; Somn. 2.187–89; Prob. 43–44.

57 See now Michael Peppard, The Son of God in the Roman World: Divine Sonship in Its Social and Political Context (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

58 Dio Cassius (Hist. rom. 56.34.2) comments upon another Caesar, who, having been caught up to heaven, “was included among the heroes” (τοῦ Καίσαρος ὅτι ἐς τοὺς ἥρωας ἐσεγέγραπτο). Cassii Dionis Cocceiani Historiarum Romanarum Quae Supersunt (ed. Ursulus Philippus Boissevain; 3 vols.; Berlin: Weidmann, 1895–1901) 2:546.

59 Sylloge Inscriptionum Graecarum (ed. Wilhelm Dittenberger; 4 vols.; 4th ed.; Hildesheim: Olms, 1960) 2:442.

60 Cassii Dionis (ed. Boissevain), 2:85. See Mary Beard, The Roman Triumph (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009) 154.

61 For discussion, see Michael Kochenash, “‘Adam, Son of God,’ (Luke 3.38): Another Jesus-Augustus Parallel in Luke’s Gospel,” NTS 64 (2018) 307–25.

62 Orientis Graecae Inscriptiones Selectae (ed. Wilhelm Dittenberger; 2 vols.; Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1903–1905; repr., Hildesheim: Olms, 1960) 2:365.

63 Dio Cassius, Hist. rom. 56.46.1–3 reports that the Romans built him a “hero shrine” (ἡρῷον). Cassii Dionis (ed. Boissevain), 2:555.

64 See further, Christian Bechtold, Gott und Gestirn als Präsenzformen des toten Kaisers: Apotheose und Katasterismos in der politischen Kommunikation der römischen Kaiserzeit und ihre Anknüpfungspunkte im Hellenismus (Schriften zur politischen Kommunikation 9; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011).

65 Candida R. Moss, in “The Transfiguration: An Exercise in Markan Accommodation,” BibInt 12 (2004) 69–89, takes the same approach to the Markan transfiguration narrative.

66 See Beverly Roberts Gaventa, “‘To Preach the Gospel’: Romans 1,15 and the Purposes of Romans,” in The Letter to the Romans (ed. Udo Schnelle; BETL 226; Leuven: Peeters, 2009) 179–95.

67 On believers’ participation in Jesus’s exaltation, see M. David. Litwa, We Are Being Transformed: Deification in Paul’s Soteriology (BZAW 187; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2012); David A. Burnett, “‘So Shall Your Seed Be’: Paul’s Use of Genesis 15:5 in Romans 4:18 in Light of Early Jewish Deification Traditions,” JSPL 5 (2015) 211–36. Thiessen, Paul and the Gentile Problem, 154–60 and the literature cited on 232–33, nn. 84–90.

68 Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, “Wisdom Mythology and the Christological Hymns of the New Testament,” in Aspects of Wisdom in Judaism and Early Christianity (ed. Robert Louis Wilken; Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975) 17–41, at 29. See also Charles H. Talbert, “The Development of Christology in the First 100 Years: A Modest Proposal,” in The Development of Christology During the First Hundred Years and Other Essays on Early Christian Christology (NovTSup 14; Leiden: Brill, 2011) 3–42, at 41–42.

69 Cassii Dionis (ed. Boissevain), 2:555.

70 I thank my anonymous reviewer for bringing to my attention this effect of Paul’s self-presentation in these verses.

71 1 Cor 2:6–8a: Σοφίαν δὲ λαλοῦμεν ἐν τοῖς τελείοις, σοφίαν δὲ οὐ τοῦ αἰῶνος τούτου οὐδὲ τῶν ἀρχόντων τοῦ αἰῶνος τούτου τῶν καταργουμένων· ἀλλὰ λαλοῦμεν θεοῦ σοφίαν ἐν μυστηρίῳ τὴν ἀποκεκρυμμένην, ἣν προώρισεν ὁ θεὸς πρὸ τῶν αἰώνων εἰς δόξαν ἡμῶν, ἣν οὐδεὶς τῶν ἀρχόντων τοῦ αἰῶνος τούτου ἔγνωκεν (“Now we speak wisdom among the perfect ones, though neither a wisdom of this age nor of the rulers of this age, which are passing away. But we speak a wisdom from God, kept hidden in a mystery, which God marked out before the ages for our glory, which none of the archons of this age knew”). See Origen, Princ. 1.5.2 for an early interpretation of these “archons” as supramundane, divine figures.