Paul and the Politics of Idolatry: Ancient Mediterranean Cult Images and Iconic Ritual in the Letters of Paul

Abstract

This thesis is a comparative project of redescription and contextualisation, the overarching aim of which is to reinstate the discourse of 'idols' (εἴδωλα) and 'idolatry' (εἰδωλολατρία) in the letters of Paul within the wider world of ancient Mediterranean religion involving cult images and iconic ritual. The focus of this thesis lies most broadly in the political and ethnic dynamics of Paul's ritual demand that gentiles renounce the iconic cult of their own ancestral customs (so-called 'idolatry'), turning from images of gentile gods (so-called 'idols') to serve exclusively the Jewish god, without becoming Jews in the process. My specific enquiry along these lines explores how wider ethnopolitical traditions involving images inform the intelligibility and recognisability of Paul's ritual demand among gentiles. While Paul has been studied time and again alongside other early Jewish polemicists, there has been no full treatment of his claims in light of the wider image-laden world he inhabited—much less from the perspective of Greeks, Romans, and other non-Jews sympathetic to iconic piety and sensitive to its internal politics. That is to say, in Pauline scholarship on 'idols' and 'idolatry', the intelligibility and recognisability of Paul's claims among his own gentile followers have been all but overlooked. The distinctive contribution of this thesis arises from this lacuna. It is my contention that Paul creatively deployed an ancestral Jewish discourse of 'idols' and 'idolatry' to facilitate the social formation of his gentile assemblies, but that, in so doing, he operated within and innovated upon an iconopolitical strategy of cultural production that was otherwise common among Greeks and Romans, no less than Jews. This widespread tradition of 'image politics' configured social power relations between humans and their gods and constructed social identity among competitive ethnic groups through the manipulation of their images. The goal of this thesis, then, is to contextualise Paul within ancient Mediterranean religion more broadly by redescribing his claims about 'idols' and 'idolatry' in terms of sociopolitical practices and ethnic group-making strategies involving images of the gods, which were, on any account, ubiquitous across the Mediterranean basin in the Hellenistic and Roman periods. By approaching Paul from the vantage point of social practices, ritual perspectives, and ethnopolitical strategies involving ancient Mediterranean cult images and iconic ritual, this thesis not only offers fresh illumination to key passages on a topic at the heart of his gentile mission, but it historicises the Jewish discourse Paul deployed in the social formation of his gentile assemblies in a way that renders it intelligible and recognisable among his own gentile followers.