1. Introduction: Idolatry and the Problem of Comparison
It would be difficult to exaggerate the lasting legacy of early Jewish polemics against ancient Mediterranean cult images (traditionally, ‘idols’).Footnote 1 For many Jewish polemicists, such as the unknown writers of Greek Isaiah, the Wisdom of Solomon, and the Letter of Jeremiah (to name a famous few), images of gentile gods are parodied as powerless, πνεῦμα-less, dead or disabled (e.g., OG Isa 46.7; Wis 13.18, 15.15; Let Jer 8, 18, 25–6, 40–1).Footnote 2 A succinct example can be found in the Greek Psalter, which includes many of the tropes repeated elsewhere:
Paul the apostle, a Jewish polemicist himself, was no stranger to such polemics. The ancestral images rejected by his gentile followers are similarly parodied as speechless and πνεῦμα-less (1 Cor 12.2–3), implied to be false and dead (1 Thess 1.9), and dismissed as non-existent (1 Cor 8.4; 10.19).
In the history of comparative religion, such parodies have more often marked a point of categorical difference between Jews and non-Jews, rather than a point of comparison. Jews have long been identified as distinctive, even ‘unique’, within their religious environment, precisely on the basis of their relation to images. As Jaś Elsner once put it: ‘Images were at the centre of traditional religion in the Greco-Roman world’, whereas early Judaism (and, mutatis mutandis, Christianity), in stark contrast to the world it inhabited, was ‘the most un-iconic (indeed anti-iconic) of religions’.Footnote 3 The preponderance of this perspective has been copiously documented, but, in recent decades, it has been increasingly resisted by art historians and archaeologists. Already by the end of the twentieth century, the divide between Jews and non-Jews on the basis of ‘aniconism’ (i.e., the lack of figural images and/or the use of non-figural images) was dubbed ‘a deep and persistent historiographic myth’Footnote 4 – one which Steven Fine influentially set out ‘to finally lay to rest’ by demonstrating that Jewish art and iconography in fact participated in Greek and Roman visual culture.Footnote 5
But even in the revisionist work of scholars such as Fine, Jews nevertheless retain their uniqueness. They were ‘fundamentally at odds’ with Greeks, Romans and other non-Jews, not because they were ‘aniconic’ or even ‘anti-iconic’ in a generic sense (i.e., opposed to visual imagery as such), but because they were ‘anti-idolic’ in a religious sense (i.e., opposed to cultic statuary in particular).Footnote 6 As a result, the true point of ‘wholesale incompatibility’ between Jews and non-Jews, for Fine and his followers, is located not in a cultural divide between Judaism and ‘Hellenism’ (visual, material or otherwise) but in an ostensibly religious divide between Judaism and ‘paganism’ – a taxonomic distinction that subtly privileges ‘religion’ as a sui generis category marked out from other ordinary human modes of cultural production.Footnote 7 In other words, the Judaism/‘Hellenism’ divide is effectively replaced by a Judaism/‘paganism’ divide, demarcated above all by Jewish polemics against images of gentile gods (what Fine calls ‘anti-idolism’).Footnote 8 So, in what is perhaps the most important treatment of the topic in the past thirty years, Moshe Halbertal and Avishai Margalit continue to represent the majority: ‘The prohibition of idolatry is the thick wall that separates the nonpagans from the pagans’.Footnote 9 Or, as Sonja Anderson succinctly summarises the issue: ‘When it comes to idolatry there is literally no comparison between the groups.’Footnote 10
In contrast, it is my contention that early Jewish image parodies, including Paul’s, should be situated precisely within the political economy of cult images in ancient Mediterranean religion. By parodying images as disabled, dead or non-existent, Jewish polemicists operated within and innovated upon an iconopolitical strategy of cultural production that was otherwise common among Greeks and Romans, no less than Jews. This is an especially important point in the case of Paul, since, as scholars now routinely acknowledge, he wrote his letters to a predominantly gentile audience, many of whom remained ‘well accustomed’ to the internal logic of images (1 Cor 8.7). For the remainder of this article, I aim to situate Paul not over against or apart from so-called paganism, but, as it were, within it, by redescribing his parodies in terms of ancient Mediterranean image politics, that is, an iconopolitical strategy that configures social power relations between humans and their gods through the manipulation of their images.Footnote 11 I begin by theorising the politics of images in ancient Mediterranean religion, in order to supply the concepts and categories for a redescription of Paul’s image parodies in similar terms.
2. Theorising the Politics of Images in Ancient Mediterranean Religion
Ever since the ‘iconic turn’ inaugurated in Germany with the work of Gottfried Boehm and the corresponding ‘pictorial turn’ in America with the work of W. J. T. Mitchell, there has been an explosion of interest among classicists and art historians in iconicity (or ‘icon- ology’) in ancient Mediterranean material culture – not least as it relates to images of gods.Footnote 12 As scholars widely acknowledge, previous research had long been prejudiced by the legacy of Jewish and Christian polemics. Alice Donohue put it bluntly: ‘On the whole, the scholarly imagination has been iconoclastic, and few analyses have moved far enough away from the iconoclastic position to entertain seriously the possibility of approaching the images as the images that the Greeks insisted they were.’Footnote 13 Over the past twenty years, however, scholars have increasingly wrestled with ‘questions of agency and the degree to which Graeco-Roman viewers ascribed to material artefacts the capacity for presence, sentience, and the exertion of power’, precisely in the attempt to reassess ‘emic operations’ of divine images among Greeks and Romans themselves.Footnote 14 In this section, I outline three aspects of this recent research – material epiphany, human-divine reciprocity and social powerFootnote 15 – which, on my account, together inform the operative principles of image power politics. The first two summarise basic premises already widely accepted among classicists and art historians (but still unknown to many New Testament scholars), while the third extends them in a new, political direction.
2.1. Material Epiphany
The view that has come to dominate the field in recent decades is that cult images constitute ‘material epiphanies’ of the gods. That is to say, divine images serve as a material mode of presencing gods among mortals: they make seen and accessible normally non-obvious beings, who were, for all intents and purposes, out of sight and out of touch to most mortals most of the time.Footnote 16 In fact, this view was anticipated already by Donohue, who argued that ‘the phenomenon of epiphany is central’, lying at ‘the heart of Greek iconism’ and providing the ‘key to understanding the Greek images of the gods’.Footnote 17 But it has since been developed most fully by Verity Platt and Georgia Petridou,Footnote 18 who built on the influential work of Jean-Pierre Vernant (and the so-called École de Paris that pooled around him) on the physiology of the gods and its manifestation among mortals.Footnote 19 On this approach, the relation between gods and images is not one of dualistic ‘representation’; nor is it one of straightforward ‘identification’. Rather, in the famous coinage of Vernant, it is a technology of ‘presentification’, that is, facilitating the material production and visual perception of divine presence at local sites.Footnote 20 As Michael Squire put it: ‘images did not simply re-present the divine, then, but could also render deities literally present before a viewer’s eyes’.Footnote 21
Unsurprisingly, material epiphany could be conceptualised in different ways by different viewers.Footnote 22 As classicists and art historians have convincingly shown, many could conceive of cult images as empty ‘vessels’ or ‘receptacles’ that housed the presence of divinity within them.Footnote 23 But others could see them as ‘seats’ temporarily facilitating divine presence upon them,Footnote 24 or as statuary ‘disguises’ akin to bodily metamorphosis, concealing divine presence for safe interaction with unsuspecting mortals,Footnote 25 or as living ‘doubles’ or ‘second like objects’, standing in for the deity as an avatar.Footnote 26 Still others could intellectualise images with a clearer cognitive dissonance between the stuff of divinity (e.g., πνεῦμα/numen, power, immortality) and that of statuary (e.g., wood, stone, gold, ivory), while nevertheless conceding their epiphanic utility to make distant deities present for human-divine interaction.Footnote 27 What is important for our purposes is that the ritual perspective of cult images as material media of presencing gods remains consistent in the everyday lived religion of Mediterranean antiquity by the time of Paul in the early Roman period.Footnote 28
2.2. Human-Divine Reciprocity
But images do not make gods present for no reason. Precisely as technologies of material epiphany, images make gods locally accessible and ritually available for the practical purpose of everyday social exchange with their devotees. As Cicero observes, images were manufactured among the masses for worship ‘in the belief that in so doing they had direct access to divine presence’ (Nature of the Gods 1.77; trans. Rauckham, LCL). In other words, images make gods present for ‘real physical interactions’ with mortals as sites of human-divine reciprocal relations.Footnote 29 David Morgan explains: ‘Sacrificial offerings before (and often to) images are the material form of an economy of exchange that allows believers to enter into a relationship with deities, which is intended to result in mutual satisfaction. Images make the god or saint or spirit available for petition, praise, offering, and negotiation.’Footnote 30
The central role of reciprocity in social practices involving divine images is highlighted by the term most commonly used to denote them. In literary and epigraphical sources from the Archaic period well into the so-called Second Sophistic, the dominant word by far is ἄγαλμα. According to Apollonius Sophista, the designation refers to ‘anything in which one takes pleasure’ (πᾶν ἐφ ᾧ τις ἀγάλλεται, Lexicon Homericum 6.30) – a definition accepted for centuries thereafter (e.g., Hesychius A 263; Eustathius, Commentary on the Odyssey 1.313.22). Strictly speaking, ἄγαλμα does not denote a specific cultic artefact, such as a statue, so much as it connotes the affective qualities and reciprocal dynamics of ‘a pleasing gift’, which elicits human θαῦμα (‘wonder’, ‘astonishment’) and divine χάρις (‘gift’, ‘benefaction’), and thereby creates an ongoing relationship of gift-giving and reciprocity between deity and devotee.Footnote 31 As a result, the term can be applied to a range of ritualised acts of gift-giving: ‘A cult statue can be an agalma, but agalma does not simply mean “cult statue”.’Footnote 32 But, as Mary Depew argues, all forms of ἀγάλματα share a reciprocal function: ‘All of these offerings typically display and represent, via deictic expressions suitable to their own medium, the acts of giving and receiving, and thus the reciprocal relation of pleasure and recognition between god and human dedicant that such communication effects, a relation summed up by the word charis.’Footnote 33
From the fourth century bce onwards, however, ἄγαλμα was increasingly restricted to apply to cult images as perhaps the most popular reification of the economy of exchange in ancient Mediterranean religion, such that it was used almost exclusively in this way by the second century ce.Footnote 34 As an ἄγαλμα, a cult image is inseparable from its ritual purpose of enacting and eliciting χάρις, which is fundamental to the ‘function of exchange’ that images facilitate.Footnote 35 So, in an Archaic Greek inscription on the supporting column of a small bronze image of Athena, we find the following: ‘Virgin, Telesinos of Kêttos set this up as an ἄγαλμα on the Acropolis; may you, taking pleasure (χαίροσα) in it, grant (διδοίες) him to set up another’ (CEG 227; trans. Day, slightly modified).Footnote 36 The image installed by Telesinos is given as a pleasing gift to the goddess to evoke divine pleasure and so inspire divine favour in return. In this case, the countergift he requests is that Athena grant him the ability to set up yet another pleasing gift (i.e., the health and wealth required to manufacture, install and dedicate another image), thereby perpetuating an ongoing relationship of reciprocity with the goddess. The inscription suggests a dual purpose for images in social exchange, which can serve both as the basis for divine return and a countergift offered in response to divine favour. This ongoing cycle of gift-giving and reciprocity is made clear in an inscription that textualises an image of Athena as a countergift, returning χάρις for χάρις, while simultaneously providing the grounds for future χάρις: ‘Mistress, Menandros dedicated this as a first fruits offering, in fulfilment of his vow, giving back χάριν to you; … protect him, daughter of Zeus, returning χάρ[ιν] in exchange for this’ (CEG 275; trans. Parker, modified).
While the first inscription above signals a pious request to set up additional images, the second points to the fact that considerably more could be expected of the divine χάρις that images elicit, namely, divine protection. So, for example, in an inscription dating from the second century ce (thus bookending the period signalled above), a dedicant sets up a herm ‘for the gods who ward off evil and protect us from catastrophe’.Footnote 37 And in another herm from the same century, the dedicant either venerates or petitions the god for cosmic favour:
While these latter two inscriptions lack our two watchwords – ἄγαλμα and χάρις (or χαίρω) – the underlying theme of human-divine reciprocity is operative all the same. The herms were dedicated as pleasing gifts with the reception of divine favour explicitly in view. It is unclear whether these images were offered in return for gifts already given (i.e., thanking gods for cosmic favour) or as a petition for gifts to be given (i.e., asking gods for cosmic favour); but it is possible, as Jennifer Eyl suggests, that they point in both directions at once, standing in the middle of an ongoing relationship of gift exchange.Footnote 39 Either way, dedicatory inscriptions reveal just how much could be at stake in the iconic ritual maintenance of human-divine reciprocity, ranging from personal piety to divine protection to cosmic prosperity.
In fact, human-divine reciprocity was so central to image piety that it was even acknow- ledged by philosophers who were otherwise critical of images in the everyday religion of social exchange (e.g., Plutarch, On Stoic Self-Contradictions 1034b–c; Dio Chrysostom, Oration 12.48; 12.55–60; Seneca, apud Augustine, City of God 6.10).Footnote 40 So, in no less eminent a figure than Plato, we find a clear cluster of the core concepts we have seen thus far:
The ancient laws of all people concerning the gods are twofold: some of the gods whom we honour we see clearly, but of others we set up images (εἰκόνας) as pleasing gifts (ἀγάλματα), and we trust that when we worship these, lifeless though they be, the living gods beyond feel great goodwill and beneficence (χάριν) towards us. (Laws 931a).
Plato’s Athenian Stranger insists on a distinction between images as such (which are ‘lifeless’) and gods as such (who are ‘living’). But he nevertheless affirms that images make visible those gods who are otherwise invisible to human sense perception (thus, a strategy of material epiphany), and that, when such images are offered as pleasing gifts, the living gods beyond respond with benefaction (thus, the economy of reciprocal exchange).
2.3. Social Power
Taken together, the social significance of ancient Mediterranean cult images as modes of material epiphany and their ritual function as sites of human-divine reciprocity combine in the configuration of social power. Jeremy Tanner explains: ‘Possession of an image was tantamount to control of the sacred power it embodied, and the presence of the physical image was necessary to realise that power for particular purposes’.Footnote 41 This is demonstrated in no uncertain terms in a dramatic scene depicted by Plutarch:
But the Pellenians themselves tell us that the image of the goddess (τὸ βρέτας τῆς θεοῦ) usually stands untouched, and that when it is removed by the priestess and carried forth from the temple, no man looks upon it, but all turn their gaze away; for not only to mankind is it a grievous and terrible sight, but trees also, past which it may be carried, become barren and cast their fruit. This image, then, they say, the priestess carried forth from the temple at this time, and by ever turning it in the faces of the Aetolians robbed them of their senses and took away their reason. (Aratus 32.2–3; trans. Perrin, LCL)
Here, a priestess wields the presence and power of the goddess Artemis through the stra- tegic manipulation of her image.Footnote 42 The epiphanic quality of the image is exploited in the political interests of the Pellenians and leveraged in a competitive act of power against the Aetolians.
More often, however, image power politics proceed not by wielding divine presence as a weapon against others but by creating divine absence among others through the abduction, deportation, mutilation or destruction of their images. According to Pausanias, this was in fact a longstanding tradition, practiced by Augustus among a host of others (Description of Greece 8.46.1–5).Footnote 43 ‘It is clear that Augustus was not the first to carry away votive offerings and images of gods (ἕδη θεῶν) from the vanquished, but was only following an old precedent’ (8.46.2), which was ‘a custom in vogue among the Greeks and barbarians from of old’ (8.46.4).Footnote 44 The basic logic is relatively simple: to steal someone’s images is to steal their gods, and stolen gods are absent gods – no longer present to participate in reciprocal relations with their peoples. In other words, precisely because divine images are modes of presencing gods, the abduction, mutilation or destruction of those very images were competi- tive strategies of absencing gods.Footnote 45 Such acts constitute a kind of ‘godnapping’, a ‘reversed epiphany’, with the disastrous result of disrupting the ritual maintenance of human-divine reciprocity.Footnote 46
A clear example can be found in Livy, who tells of a time when Marcus Aemilius brought an envoy from Ambracia to testify to the Senate against Marcus Fulvius Nobilior (Histories of Rome 38.42.1–7). Fulvius, they claim, enslaved their families, seized their properties and plundered their temples of images. But it is the latter that ‘disturbed them most of all;, because it had the following effect:
the statues of the gods (simulacra deum) – no, the gods themselves (deos immo ipsos)! – had been torn from their dwellings and carried off, and all that the Ambraciots had been left to worship, and offer prayers and supplications to, was bare walls and doorposts. (38.43.6–7; trans. Yardley, LCL)
By abducting their images, the Ambracian gods themselves were displaced from their temple, and the Ambracian people were left without gods to engage in the economy of social exchange (in this case: worship, prayer, supplication). This, in turn, left them vulnerable to calamity, subjugation or even destruction by removing their access to divine presence, power and protection.Footnote 47 It is for this reason that the abduction, mutilation or destruction of divine images was considered such a deviant act of political power, punishable by exile or even execution.Footnote 48
Iconopolitical acts of social power could proceed through the abduction of divine images, but they could also proceed through their mutilation or destruction. To mutilate the eyes, ears, mouth or nose of an image is to disable the deity’s sensory agency to see her people, hear their prayers, smell their incense or speak in response to them, effectively disabling the image as blind, deaf, anosmic or mute.Footnote 49 It is an iconoclastic strategy of deactivating divine presence or impairing divine agency by targeting sensory organs, deliberately disrupting the ability to participate in human-divine transactions. This point has been elucidated most fully by Philip Kiernan:
the destruction of heads and faces on cult images prevented … human interaction with the pagan gods. Heads were considered important for fairly obvious reasons: this was the part of the body through which the gods experienced ritual activities directed toward them, through which they saw sacrifices, smelt burnt offerings, tasted libations, and heard prayers. The removal and deposition of the head prevented all of this, while the destruction of their hands and feet left the gods unable to act or move. It quite effectively deprived them of exercising any agency that they may have still been deemed to possess.Footnote 50
Remarkably, this could also be done through discourse, whereby the verbal attribution or textual representation of abuse done to images was tantamount to acts of violence done to the gods themselves in the ritual perception of the speaker/hearer.Footnote 51 Images could be mutilated and inscriptions erased, lest the memory of disgraced rulers or discredited gods continue unabated (e.g., Cicero, Against Piso 93; Tacitus, Annales 1.38.3). But decrees could also demand a public discourse of disgrace and dishonour, especially in cases where icono- clastic retaliation was politically unfeasible, as a way of ‘waging war … with written and spoken words, which are their only strength’ (Livy, History of Rome 31.44.8). The mutilation and destruction of images function, then, as a ‘direct visual equivalent’ to discursive vili- fications of the gods they image, assuming or imposing a narrative that controls public perception of their presence and power.Footnote 52 It is for this reason that some intellectualising experts, such as Plutarch, did not like it when non-experts straightforwardly referred to images by the names of the gods themselves: it led them unwittingly to accept actions done to images as actions done to gods, such as taking off their clothes or burning them with fire.
It is an excellent saying current among philosophers that those who have not learned to interpret rightly the sense of words tend to bungle their actions. For example, there are some among the Greeks who have not learned nor habituated themselves to speak of the bronze, the painted, and the stone as images of the gods and dedications in their honour, but to call them gods; and then they have the audacity to say that Lachares stripped Athena, that Dionysius sheared Apollo of the golden locks, and that Jupiter Capitolines was burned and destroyed in the civil war, and thus they unwittingly take over and accept the vicious opinions that are the concomitants of these names. (Isis and Osiris 379c–d; trans. Babbitt, LCL, modified)
Time and space forbid us from delving any deeper here and now. It is high time to get back at last to Paul, to see how his parodies of ancient Mediterranean cult images operate within and innovate upon the iconopolitical acts of power we have seen thus far.
3. Redescribing Jewish Image Parodies in the Letters of Paul
In contrast to the Judaism/‘paganism’ divide discussed at the start of this paper, I join a small but growing chorus among scholars who insists that early Jews such as Paul should be situated squarely within the many modes of ancient Mediterranean religion – not as an exception to but an example of widely shared assumptions about the gods and variously linked social practices involving the presence and power of those gods among mortals.Footnote 53 And it is my contention that Paul’s ‘anti-idolism’ is simply no exception: his parodies of and polemics against images of gentile gods are best understood within, not apart from or over against, so-called Graeco-Roman paganism.Footnote 54
Paul’s image parodies configure social power relations between humans and their gods through the abduction, mutilation and destruction of divine images – not, however, in the form of physical force but in the form of performative discourse. In other words, as Anderson has argued, Jewish polemicists such as Paul create as social realia what they depict at the level of caricature in the ritual perspective of their target audience.Footnote 55 In this way, I propose, Paul’s image parodies can be understood as a discursive strategy of ancient Mediterranean image politics. Like other minoritised groups for whom physical acts of violence against dominant powers put them at risk, Paul was ‘waging war … with written and spoken words, which is [his] only strength’ (Livy, History of Rome 31.44.8). And he did so by appropriating an ancestral discourse of Jewish image parody, creatively redirected at a target gentile audience. In what follows, I briefly outline the genre of image parody before redescribing such parodies in terms of ancient Mediterranean image politics.
3.1. Early Jewish Image Parody
Image parody is a poetic literary genre developed in exilic/post-exilic Israelite writings in the Hebrew Bible (e.g., Jer 10.1–16; Isa 44.9–20; Pss 115.1–9; 135.13–18), and further expanded in early Jewish writings in the Hellenistic period (e.g., Wis 13–15; Bel; Let Jer).Footnote 56 Such parodies proceed by classifying images of gentile gods in satirical terms that reduce them to their caricatures in order to differentiate Jews from ‘the ways of the gentiles’ (τὰς ὁδοὺς τῶν ἐθνῶν, Jer 10.2). Despite their diversity across a range of corpora, image parodies share ‘common terms, structures, and themes’, such that they can be viewed ‘synoptically’ as an ancestral discourse with a shared set of textual resources in the service of a shared social function, which could be creatively reappropriated by early Jewish polemicists for their own strategic purposes. In particular, the poems in which they developed oscillate between parodies of foreign images, which are caricatured as powerless, dead, false or disabled in body and mind (e.g., deaf, blind, mute, immobile, foolish or cognitively impaired), and hymns to the Jewish god, who is praised in opposing terms as powerful, living, true or able in body and mind (e.g., hearing, seeing, speaking, moving, wise or cognitively advanced).Footnote 57
The central point of gravity around which Jewish image parodies revolve, then, is a hierarchical comparison between the Jewish god and images of gentile gods, in order to deter Jews from the adoption of or attraction to foreign images. As Pseudo-Jeremiah makes clear, image parodies are deliberately designed to quell the fear of cult images and to curb the enticement of Jews towards ‘becoming at all like the foreigners’ (Let Jer 1). In other words, the social function of image parodies is to delegitimise, deactivate or disempower the images of others in the ritual perspective of a target Jewish audience, providing social rationale and ideological reinforcement to dissuade them from fearing such images or defecting to their use in iconic ritual (16, 23, 29, 65, 59).Footnote 58 Such parodies were so deeply ingrained in the discursive reservoir of ancestral Jewish texts that they often appear in nuce (with or without their accompanying hymns), even when images of gentile gods are only mentioned in passing.Footnote 59 Paul, I suggest, put this ancestral discourse to similar use, albeit creatively appropriated for a different target audience in a new social context, namely, providing social rationale and ideological reinforcement for gentiles to turn from their own ancestral images, while continuing to navigate social life in a world still full of them.Footnote 60
3.2. The Politics of Paul’s Image Parodies
It takes no special insight to think that Paul’s image parodies would be seen as less than generous among his gentiles. While gentiles could affirm the epiphanic agency of images – able to see, hear, smell, speak, sing, bleed and so on – animated by πνεῦμα/numen at their dedication and installation as gods (on speaking alone, e.g., Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities 8.56.3–4; Plutarch, Life of Coriolanus 37.4; Suetonius, Life of Gaius 57.1; Callistratus, Descriptions 9), Paul parodies them as ‘mute images’ (τὰ εἴδωλα τὰ ἄφωνα), unable to speak because they have no πνεῦμα in them (1 Cor 12.2–3). He further implies that they are dead or lifeless (1 Thess 1.9; 2 Cor 6.16). While gentiles could associate their images with the high gods, who dwelt out of sight, beyond the lunary realm with its daimonic inhabitants (e.g., Plato, Laws 931a; cf. 41a; 821; Timaeus 41a), Paul subordin- ates them as associated instead with lower divinities (δαιμόνια) in his own cosmopolitical hierarchy of divine order (1 Cor 10.19–21). While gentiles could fashion their images out of precious materials most conducive for conjuring the pneumatic physiology of gods in the visuality of their beholders (e.g., Artemidorus, Interpretation of Dreams 2.39), Paul parodies them as mere material stuffs – component parts of the cosmos but little else besides – which, by their very ‘nature’ as such, are ‘not gods’ (τοῖς φύσει μὴ οὖσιν θεοῖς) and are thus impoverished and powerless to ‘know’ their devotees the way Paul’s god can (Gal 4.8–9). And while images of gods were, on any account, ubiquitous across the Mediterranean basin, with some 73,000 said to be found in the city of Rhodes alone and ‘no fewer’ in Athens, Olympia and Delphi (Pliny, Natural History 34.36; cf. Dio Cassius, Roman History 60.25.2–3), Paul incredulously insists that, so far as he and his followers are concerned, there is no image in the world (1 Cor 8.4; cf. 10.19). To summarise the evidence throughout Paul’s letters: images of gentile gods are parodied as disabled, dead, powerless, πνεῦμα-less, subordinated, and, in an extraordinary feat of wilful ignorance, even non-existent.
It is perhaps no wonder, then, why scholars still sometimes accuse Paul (and other Jewish polemicists) of misunderstanding and so misrepresenting ancient Mediterranean cult images. On the surface, such parodies appear to differ substantially from the social practices and ritual perspectives of Greeks and Romans themselves, suggesting what Verity Platt has recently dubbed ‘a very different visual theology from that of Greco-Roman religion’.Footnote 61 Indeed, for James Rives, this is not wholly surprising: image parodies were produced by polemicists who neither knew nor cared about the images they disparaged, and who misunderstood and misrepresented the images of others in the process of their polemicising.Footnote 62 But Wilfred Cantwell Smith put it more bluntly still. Jewish (and Christian) image parodies represent ‘a failure to understand, let alone appreciate, what is going on in the spiritual life of communities served by images’, and so they are ‘doubly in error’: they are both ‘intellectually wrong’ and ‘morally wrong’, both ‘grossly arrogant’ and ‘repugnantly insensitive’.Footnote 63 It is not my place in this article to excuse (or accuse) Paul’s parodies of moral evaluations about ‘arrogance’ and ‘insensitivity’. But I do take exception to the claim that he fundamentally misunderstood the images he parodied. As a Jewish expert in foreign religion, writing to gentiles who were themselves well accustomed to their own ancestral images (e.g., 1 Cor 8.7), I suspect he knew exactly what he was doing – as did his followers.
It is important to note, at this point, that image parodies were not a uniquely ‘Jewish’ phenomenon, unknown or unintelligible to non-Jews. The pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus parodied images put to use in everyday Greek religion as empty houses, with those who pray to them parodied as carrying on conversations with walls (frag. 5). Herodotus parodies the construction of an Egyptian cult image as a well-used footbath that was chopped up, fashioned into an image of a god and installed for public cult: ‘the image had come into being from a footbath, into which the Egyptians formerly vomited and pissed and washed their feet, but at present they revere it greatly’ (Histories 2.172.3–5). Similarly, Horace parodies the construction of a Roman cult image from its own perspective: ‘Once I was a fig tree, a worthless log, when a craftsman, after hesitating whether to make me a stool or a Priapus, decided for a god – and a god I became’ (Satires 1.8.1–3; trans. Fairclough, LCL, modified). The image was offered cult until its wooden buttocks split open, the loud (and crude) noise of which scared its devotees away: ‘For loud as the noise of a bursting bladder was the crack when my fig-wood buttock split. Away they ran into town’ (1.8.46–47; trans. Fairclough, LCL). Strabo parodies the proportions of Phidias’ colossal image of Zeus at Olympia, which was too large for the god to stand up and move about in his temple: ‘for he showed Zeus seated but almost touching the roof with his head, thus making the impression that if Zeus arose and stood erect he would unroof the temple’ (Geography 8.3.30; trans. Jones, LCL). Lucian also parodies Phidias’ famous images, focusing not on their outsized proportions but on their hollow interiors: if one could pry the images open and look inside, all one would see is rotting wood with nails jutting out and legions of mice and rats (Gallus 24).
But no one would suggest that any of these Greek and Roman philosophers or satirists somehow misunderstood the images they parodied. I propose the same for Jewish polemicists, including Paul himself. In what is now by far the best and fullest treatment of image parodies to date, Nathaniel Levtow has demonstrated in some detail that their literary producers in fact betray a much more sophisticated knowledge of and ritual mastery over social practices involving cult images than scholars tend to acknowledge – not least including the epiphanic power of images and its exploitation in power politics.Footnote 64 Such polemicists are, according to Levtow, ‘parasitic on the power of images’, exploiting their ritual perception as material media of divine epiphany in the competitive attempt to subordinate, delegitimise or altogether absence the gods of others through the ‘ritual reversal’ of divine presence, sentience and power.Footnote 65 ‘They appear to dismiss the power of iconic foci of cult over the formation and configuration of societies, but in fact they operate through this very power to achieve these very same goals.’Footnote 66
So, for instance, in the aetiological mythmaking about the invention of images at the heart of his parody, Pseudo-Solomon demonstrates a clear-eyed understanding of images as technologies of material epiphany:
For a father, consumed by untimely grief, after making an image (εἰκών) of a child who was too quickly taken away from him, now honoured as a god (ὡς θεόν) what was once a dead human (νεκρὸν ἄνθρωπον), and passed down the mysteries and rituals to his dependents. Eventually, the impious custom, strengthened over time, was kept as law (νόμος), and images (γλυπτά) were worshipped at the command of monarchs. When people were unable to honour them in their presence, since they lived far away, they made a visible image (ἐμφανῆ εἰκόνα) of the honoured king, modelling a likeness at a distance, in order that they might flatter the absent as though present (ὡς παρόντα τὸν ἀπόντα κολακεύωσιν) through their zeal. (Wis 14.15–21)
Here, cult images are ‘visual’ (ἐμφανῆ) media that make ‘present’ (παρόντα) non-obvious beings, who are otherwise ‘absent’ (ἀπόντα) or inaccessible to human sense perception (i.e., a deceased child or a distant ruler). And their social significance is to make those who ‘dwell at a distance’ (τὸ μακρὰν οἰκεῖν) visually present and locally available to receive cult as gods (Wis 14.17).
But Pseudo-Solomon, like Paul and others, nevertheless parodies these very images as powerless (Wis 13.10; cf. 1 Cor 8.3; 10.19; Gal 4.8–9),Footnote 67 πνεῦμα-less (Wis 15.16–17; cf. 1 Cor 12.3),Footnote 68 disabled (Wis 3.16, 18, 19; 15.15; cf. 1 Cor 12.2)Footnote 69 and dead (Wis 13.10, 17–18; 14.29; 15.5, 17; cf. 1 Thess 1.9; 2 Cor 6.16).Footnote 70 This is not because Pseudo-Solomon and Paul misunderstand their epiphanic power, but the opposite. By depicting images in the way they do, image parodies not only have the effect of delegitimising and deactivating their epiphanic agency, but they disrupt their social function to facilitate the economy of reciprocal exchange. That is to say, images parodied as powerless, πνεῦμα-less, disabled or dead are thereby incapable of actively participating in the ritual transaction of gift-giving and reciprocity.
When he [an iconodule] prays about possessions and his marriage and children, he is not ashamed to address a lifeless thing; and for health, he calls on that which is weak; for life, he supplicates that which is dead; for a good journey, that which cannot take a step; for livelihood and work and success with his hands, he asks strength from that which has no strength at all in its hands. (Wis 13.17–19)
Gifts are offered with the request of benevolent return, but images that are πνεῦμα-less, disabled or dead are ill-equipped to answer: the dead cannot make alive, the weak cannot give good health, the impaired cannot guide safe travel, and so on.
Nor are such images able to receive gifts given in the first place. So, Pseudo-Jeremiah: ‘Gifts are presented to them as to the dead’ (Let Jer 26). Similarly, the Sibyl: ‘For what reason do you give vain gifts to the dead and sacrifice to images (θύεις τʼ εἰδώλοις)?’ (Sibylline Oracles 3.545). So, too, Ben Sira: ‘What benefit is an offering to an image (εἴδωλῳ), since it can neither eat nor smell?’ (Sir 30.19). To offer sacrifices to an image is like pouring fine drink onto ‘a mouth that is closed’ or disposing fine food atop ‘a grave’ (30.18). No gifts received, no gifts returned. Significantly, the reason Pseudo-Jeremiah gives for both the impairment of images (Let Jer 25–6) and their consequent failure to facilitate reciprocal exchange (26–8) is that there is no divine πνεῦμα in them (24). Paul seems to suggest something similar himself: images are ‘mute’ or ‘speechless’ (ἄφωνα) because they do not have divine πνεῦμα enabling them to speak (2 Cor 12.2–3). This effectively reverses the rite of consecration.Footnote 71 The result is that sacrificial meals may be offered to images, alongside extravagant clothing and impassioned prayers, but they ultimately go uneaten, unworn and unheard by images that are ‘not able to repay it’ (Let Jer 28–32):
They cannot set up a king or depose one. Similarly, they are not able to give either wealth or money. If one makes a vow to them and does not keep it, they will not require it. They cannot save anyone from death or rescue the weak from the strong. They cannot restore sight to the blind. They cannot rescue one who is in distress. They cannot take pity on a widow nor do good to an orphan. (34–8)
Such parodies empty images of divine presence and power, the upshot of which is to disrupt the ritual maintenance of reciprocal exchange. In other words, Jewish image parodies proceed as a discursive strategy of image power politics, absencing the gods of others in the ritual perspective of a target Jewish audience through caricatures that trade on the practical understanding of divine images as media of material epiphany and sites of human-divine reciprocity.
By naturalising ancestral Jewish image parodies as a ‘given’ among gentiles for whom they were not formerly normative, Paul reconfigures their ritual perspective (and, as a result, their lived experience) of reality, such that, for them, images effectively lose their power to presence gods, and iconic ritual likewise fails to facilitate human-divine reciprocal exchange. Paul’s image parodies are not, then, evidence of a ‘failure to understand’ images of gentile gods. Quite to the contrary. They are evidence of image politics in a discursive mode, an iconopolitical act of ‘symbolic power’ that reifies reality in the ritual perspective of his gentile followers through performative discourse, which reclassifies their images as dead (1 Thess 1.9; 2 Cor 6.16), false (1 Thess 1.9), disabled (1 Cor 12.2), powerless and impoverished (Gal 4.9), or simply non-existent (1 Cor 8.4; 10.19).
This is an act of ‘symbolic power’ – that is, ‘a power of constituting the given through utterances’ – because Paul’s parodies possess the power of ‘making people see and believe, of confirming or transforming their vision of the world and, thereby, action on the world and thus the world itself, an almost magical power which enables one to obtain the equivalent of what is obtained through force’.Footnote 72 It is in this sense that Paul’s parodies create as social realia what they depict at the level of caricature. Paul was well aware that his gentiles were once ‘led towards mute images’ (12.2), and that ‘some were so accustomed to images’ that they remained altogether unable to disassociate from their former frame of reference (8.7). So, he aims to delegitimise their perception of images through the production of ‘knowledge’ (γνώσις) that reduces images of gentile gods to their caricatures, making them non-existent in the cult and conscience (συνείδησις) of his gentile followers (8.7–13; 10.25–8). In this sense, Paul’s parodies can be understood as an early discursive strategy of what would later come to be known as ‘nullification’, the underlying logic of which is that a change in the ritual perspective of gentiles necessarily entails a change in the status of their images.Footnote 73 Paul’s parodies are not, then, as many scholars still assume, a ‘monotheistic’ falsification of gentile gods simply as such (the existence of which Paul took for granted), but an iconopolitical strategy of absencing gentile gods in the ritual perspective of his gentile followers, thereby collapsing the economy, or even the attraction, of reciprocal relations between them.
4. Conclusion
Paul’s image parodies should be situated within the political economy of cult images in ancient Mediterranean religion. By parodying the images of others as non-existent, disabled or dead they serve as a discursive strategy of image politics that was otherwise common among Greeks and Romans, no less than Jews. As such, Paul’s parodies are performa- tive utterances that create what they caricature in the ritual perspective of gentiles who accept his claims as authoritative for governing their newfound relation to the Jewish god.
Like Greeks, Romans and other non-Jews who absence the gods of others and so disrupt human-divine reciprocal relations through the abduction, mutilation or destruction of their images, Paul strategically achieves the same reverse-epiphanic and reciprocity-disrupting effects by parodying images as non-existent (thus, ‘abducted’), disabled (thus, ‘mutilated’) or dead (thus, ‘destroyed’). Levtow explains: ‘These parallels are not always simple, but the effect is the same.’Footnote 74 Stolen images are abducted or deported, whereas Paul parodies images as ‘nothing’ or ‘non-existent’ (1 Cor 8.4; 10.19). But in both cases, gentiles are robbed of everyday access to divine presence. Mutilated images have their mouths removed, whereas Paul parodies images as ‘mute’ or ‘speechless’ (1 Cor 12.2). But in both cases, images are disabled as speechless and communication with the gods is silenced. Destroyed images are burned down or toppled over, whereas Paul parodies images as implicitly dead and false (1 Thess 1.9; 2 Cor 6.16). But in both cases, the very possibility of ritual transaction is damned to oblivion.
In this way, Paul’s image parodies proceed as symbolic acts of violence done to divine images – abducting them, mutilating them, destroying them – in order to effect the absence, impairment or demise of gentile gods in the social formation of his gentile assemblies, trading precisely on the ritual perception of cult images as media of material epiphany and sites of human-divine reciprocity. So, while Paul’s parodies may seem on the surface to suggest ‘a very different visual theology from that of Greco-Roman religion’, the very differences they contain in fact operate within and innovate upon a similar set of social practices involving images of gods and their exploitation in image power politics.
Acknowledgements
Earlier iterations of this article were presented at the University of Cambridge (the New Testament Research Seminar at the Faculty of Divinity and a conference at the Faculty of Classics), a panel on ‘Paul within Paganism’ at the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature and a conference at Acadia Divinity College. In each case, I am grateful to the organisers for their gracious invitations: George van Kooten, Logan Williams and Max Leventhal, Paula Fredriksen, and Grace Au. Thanks are also in order to the 2024 Achtemeier Award selection committee and to the two respondents on the award panel, Heidi Wendt and Robyn Faith Walsh. Many others have helped me improve the piece or kindly listened to me drone on about it, to whom I am indebted for their support: Jim Aitken, Sonja Anderson, Ryan Collman, Jennifer Eyl, Hannah Fytche, Emily Gathergood, Ahreum Kim, Nathaniel Levtow, Matthew Novenson, Isaac Soon, and, as usual, especially Simon Gathercole and again Paula Fredriksen.
Competing interests
The author declares none.
