Judaizing, Jews, and Gods
In the late first century CE, the emperor Domitian indicted his kinsman Flavius Clemens, Flavius’s wife Flavia Domitilla, and unnamed others for the crime of ἀθεότης, “atheism.” As Cassius Dio explains, these high-ranking Romans were so charged because they had drifted into “Jewish ways” (τὰ τῶν Ἰουδαίων ἤθη; Hist. Romana 67.14.1–2).
How did “Jewish ways” constitute “atheism”? After all, Mediterranean culture was very commodious, with outsiders not infrequently adapting and adopting aspects of the social, cultural, and ritual practices of others.Footnote 1 True, Greek and Roman cultural patriots deplored the pollutions of foreign rites,Footnote 2 though the record of their disapproval might give us an indirect measure of how common this Mediterranean mixing could be. “Judaizing” in particular, however, as Domitian’s action suggests, seems to have attracted special opprobrium, presumably because it could lead to what we call “conversion.”Footnote 3 And the problem with male “conversion to Judaism” was that it in principle entailed the radical Judaizer’s renunciation of his own ancestral customs and cult. Juvenal’s Satire 14 gives a perfect snapshot of this progression, wherein the satirist lambasts the Judaizing father who keeps the Sabbath because, eventually, the man’s sons take to circumcision and commit further to other Jewish practices while abandoning Romans ones. Such men, complains Tacitus, desert their native obligations to family, fatherland, and gods (Hist. 5.5.2).Footnote 4 In other words, in the view of such observers as Juvenal and Tacitus, and implicit in Domitian’s accusation, the potential problem with Judaizing and the actual problem with Judaism was the exclusiveness of Jewish belief: Jews were monotheists.
But how “monotheistic” was Jewish “monotheism”? How “exclusively monotheist” were ancient Jews? What, indeed, do we mean when we use “monotheism” as a term of historical description?
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “monotheism,” introduced in the 1660s, means the belief that there is only one god. So similarly its cognates: “polytheism” means belief that many gods exist (cf. Philo, Opif. 170–171; Mut. 205); “atheism,” belief that no god exists.Footnote 5 These “theisms,” however, sit athwart the religious sensibility of ancient peoples. The first problem is with the idea of “belief.” The second is with the idea of “only one god.”
“Belief” as moderns construe and enact it is first of all a mental operation. It indexes conviction, the intellectual assent and psychological and emotional commitment to a proposition. (One “believes” sincerely or strongly.) This idea of “belief” in turn coheres with and accommodates modern definitions of “religion,” embodied socially as institutions and communities that one can move into and out of. Modern religion is a detachable aspect of individual identity.Footnote 6
Ancient “religion”—a people’s relations with their god(s)—was configured differently. Συγγένεια, “kinship,” bound members of a people-group together with each other (both synchronically and, across generations, diachronically) as well as with their gods.Footnote 7 For this reason, terms describing what we call “religion”—protocols for showing one’s god(s) deference, loyalty, affection, and respect—bespeak inheritance, specifically patrimony: τὰ πάτρια, παραδόσεις τῶν πατέρωv, mos maiorum, fides patrum. Words that we frequently translate as “belief” (πίστις, fides) and as “piety” (εὐσέβεια, pietas) in their ancient context meant “loyalty to” or “faithfulness to” or “deference to” or respectful “confidence in” these ancestral customs, which choreographed inherited observances, food ways, cult, calendars, and rituals whether domestic, civic, or imperial. Ancient intellectuals in particular valued “right thinking about the gods.” But “right” theological thinking, these same intellectuals argued, manifested as “right” ritual behaviors; it did not displace them.Footnote 8 Actions, not mentation, coordinated heaven and earth.Footnote 9
What about monotheism’s other defining aspect, the idea of “only one god”? The elasticity native to ancient usages of θεός/deus complicates the concept. “Divinity” was a register of power, traveling along a graded continuum between gods and humans in antiquity’s geocentric universe, even for those ancient Jews and, later, Christians whom we habitually identify as “monotheist.”Footnote 10 Israel’s god, further, was never the only god, not even in his own book. Jewish scriptures teem with other deities. In situations of war, they contest with YHWH. But they also converse with him. They attend his heavenly court. They bow down to him. They serve as the gods of the nations. Eventually, ancient Jews generated myths domesticating these other superhuman powers as errant angels or as rather dim political subordinates. Those Jews (and, later, gentile Christians) of sufficient (pagan) philosophical education might argue for these powers’ ontological contingency on the One God. In biblical narrative, however, these other divine forces are often simply there.Footnote 11
Once Jews moved into the Hellenistic city—itself a pagan religious institution— foreign gods took on a higher cultural tone. In ways different from their earlier Canaanite and Philistine colleagues, Greek gods were deeply integrated into the life of the polis. Through the literary canon that shaped Hellenistic culture, these gods dominated education itself. And much of the life of the polis pulsed around public displays of respect to these gods. This was simple prudence: gods superintended the well-being of their cities.Footnote 12
Jews in the western diaspora acknowledged the existence of these other gods, as our inscriptions attest. After all, they now lived within these gods’ territories. Jewish ephebes honored the gods of their gymnasia, and as citizens must have improvised demonstrations of respect to the gods of their cities of residence as well (though cf. Josephus, Ap. 2.65). Jews, like their pagan neighbors, called upon gods to witness synagogue manumissions. Jews both watched and funded events dedicated to these gods and, if contestants, also participated in them.Footnote 13 Jewish town councilors, actors, and athletes, soldiers and gladiators, though in principle not active participants in public cult (a point to which we shall return), would at least have been respectfully present when such cult was enacted. By way of analogy, we might note the pass given by that great ideologue of separation, Tertullian—in De idololatria no less—for Christians to be passively present at celebrations, including sacrifices, of domestic cult (Idol. 16).
Even for Jews, then, God was not the only god. Like their pagan and, later, Christian contemporaries, ancient Mediterranean Jews organized their cosmos hierarchically. “One god”—for Jews, the god of Israel; for pagan “monotheists” and hypsistarians, their own particular “highest” god—reigned “on top,” with as many others as cosmology, local culture, and personal experience required ranging beneath. In brief, all ancient “monotheists”—be they pagan, Jewish, or, eventually, Christian—were, by modern measure, “polytheists.” Israel’s god, the θεὸς ὕψιστος of Greek Jewish scriptures, was famously idiosyncratic on the issue of sacrifices, insisting that he be the sole object of his own people’s cultic worship (λατρεία). This demand could and did cause complications for Jews in their diaspora cities of residence (so Josephus, regarding Alexandria, C. Ap. 2.65; cities in Ionia, Ant. 12.125–126). But Jewish cultic exclusivity did not preclude other sorts of lower-level engagements between Jewish humans and non-Jewish deities, as our amulets, inscriptions, and papyri attest. Antiquity’s universe was a god-congested place. Jews knew this as well as did the next ancient person.Footnote 14
At issue was not “belief,” but rather a commonsense construal of divine (thus, ethnic and local) multiplicity: different peoples and places had different gods. Of course, therefore, more than one god existed. One’s own god, however, was the best. Angelos Chaniotis has observed that even the phrase εἷς θεὸς ἐν οὐρανῷ, “one god in heaven,” asserted superiority, not singularity. For this reason I like the alternative formulation that he suggests: “megatheism,” not “monotheism.”Footnote 15 My god is bigger than your god; but your god of course also exists, and has real effects, both cosmic and social.
Some modern scholars have problems with ancient Jews. Jewish magicians, or Jews who went to pagan magicians, must have been the exceptions, not the rule. Those whose synagogue inscriptions call both on the Jewish god and on other gods, or who honor pagan holidays as well as Jewish ones, were not themselves Jews, or possibly they were exceptionally assimilated Jews. Perhaps, say these scholars, all of our ancient evidence for ancient Jews’ normal participation in god-filled Roman antiquity is actually nonrepresentative of how a truly conscientious, “loyal” Jew would think and act. “Good” Jews or “true” Jews, in this modern view, were “strictly monotheist.” “Assimilated” or “acculturated” Jews were only messily “monotheist” (indeed, they were low-grade “polytheists”), believing despite their own tradition in the existence of other gods.Footnote 16
Such an appraisal of the ancient evidence, in my view, tells us more about the religious sensibilities of the modern scholar than about those of their ancient subjects. And part of the problem, surely, is the reliance on the idea of “belief” and the assumptions entailed by the term “monotheism.” To see how this is so, I would like to consider three Jews of the early imperial period who themselves highly identified as Jews. First, and briefly, Philo of Alexandria, on nonhuman and on human gods; then, again briefly, Herod the Great, on human gods. Finally, and at greater length—because of the insistence on first-century “pure Jewish monotheism” current among some New Testament scholars—we will look at the apostle Paul.Footnote 17
My goal is to trace the ways in which these three men each acknowledged gods other than the “highest,” Jewish god. Their respective social locations, of course, were wildly different. Philo was a wealthy aristocratic philosopher, an intellectual, and a sometime diplomat. Herod was king of the Jews (or at least of the Judeans as well as assorted gentile others). And Paul was a wandering charismatic teacher, prophet, and wonder worker, proclaiming to ex-pagan assemblies the impending— and Jewishly conceived—end of history. As part of their working day, however, all three men took account of other gods as well. Paul in particular, I will argue, depended upon these gods to define Jesus as the eschatological Davidic messiah, Jesus Christ.
Gods and the One God
A. Philo of Alexandria
Throughout his writings, Philo routinely repeats the standard tropes of Jewish anti-pagan rhetoric, repudiating the gods of the nations as dumb images and as lifeless idols (e.g., Mos. 38.205). Nonetheless, referring to Exod 22:28 LXX, he endorses the sacred text’s injunction not to revile “the gods,” θεούς. (The Hebrew biblical text had had ֱאֹלהים, “Do not revile God.”) Why? “Because reviling each other’s gods,” observed the philosopher, “always leads to war” (QE 2.5). Mere good manners? Social prudence? Theological politesse? Philo’s sacred scripture, in its Greek voice, did not disclose Moses’s reasoning, only his directive, endorsed by Philo, to treat the gods of the nations with some degree of respect.Footnote 18
The translator(s) of Exod 22 had themselves made new room for these other θεοί. The translator(s) of Psalms took a different tack. The Hebrew of Ps 96 had denounced the gods of the nations as “idols.” Ps 95:5 LXX, however, said that these gods were not mere images, but δαιμονία. This is a distinction with a difference. An “idol” is a material representation of a god. A δαιμόνιoν is a “lower” god, the power itself. Any human can destroy an idol. No human can destroy a god. This translation and transition from the Hebrew “idols” to the Greek “godlings” did double duty, at once elevating and demoting foreign deities. The very vocabulary granting that they were more than mere statuary nonetheless placed them, qua δαιμονία, in positions subordinate to the Jews’ “highest god” on Hellenism’s own theo-cosmic map.Footnote 19
Philo the Middle Platonist also reflects this idea of real-though-subordinate multiple divinities in his commentary on Genesis, De opificio mundi. Reviewing the days of creation, Philo observes that, when establishing the firmament, God created “the most holy dwelling place of the manifest and visible gods” (θεῶν ἐμφανῶν τε καὶ αἰσθητῶν, Opif. 7.27). This cosmic realm is made of “the purest οὐσία,” as befits its holy tenants, the stars and planets. These celestial beings, he says here, are divine intelligences (θεοί in Philo’s Greek); elsewhere, he notes that they providentially guide humans across land and sea (39.114).Footnote 20
Philo’s assertion that these higher cosmic gods are both “visible” and “manifest” also works in two ways. Though acknowledging their divinity (presumably meaning their power, beauty, and immortality), he at the same time and through the same means demotes them relative to Israel’s god. Middle Platonism’s highest god was utterly incorporeal, therefore invisible, outside of space and place. As “visible” and “manifest” entities, then, these astral and planetary deities are at the same stroke characterized as “lower,” both locally and metaphysically, to the highest god who, in Philo’s view, is Israel’s god.Footnote 21 Indeed, traditional Jewish aniconism—expressed liturgically in the temple, with its empty inner sanctuary; and in the synagogue, devoid of both a cult image and sacrifice—when interpreted through the lens of philosophical paideia, prompted even some pagan commentators to associate the Jewish deity with philosophy’s “highest god.”Footnote 22
So elastic was the idea of ancient divinity, so easily admitting of degrees, so variously applicable, that Philo can comfortably speak of God’s demiurgic lieutenant, the λόγος, as “angel” (Somn. 1.228–239; Cher. 1–3), as God’s first-born “son” (Conf. 63), and as a “second god” (QG 2.62; Leg. 3.207–208; Somn. 1.229–230). Even more remarkably, Philo also attributes this supramundane quality to a human figure, Moses. On account of his moral and spiritual excellence, Philo writes, Moses “was named god (θεός) and king of the whole nation.”Footnote 23
How can the same demiurgic entity be at once the divine λόγος, the divine son, an angel, and another god? Such a claim caused no problem for Philo nor, about a century later, with reference to Christ, would it agitate Justin.Footnote 24 But humans? How could they be gods? Variously, but there they are, across Mediterranean populations, even “monotheist” ones: Moses was θεός for Philo; David and Paul were, for Origen, “gods.”Footnote 25 In this connection, pagans too distinguished between gods who had (always) been immortal and gods who were (currently) immortal. Deities in that latter category had begun life as humans. Ancients of all persuasions, it seems, accommodated the ideas of multiple divinities, and of varying degrees of divinity, for human as well as for nonhuman gods.Footnote 26
B. Herod the Great
Philo’s Moses was wreathed in antiquity, his singular status sanctioned by scripture and tradition. Herod the Great, king of the Jews, had a much more contemporary, visible, and manifest deity to deal with: the emperor Augustus. If the normal polytheism of ancient “monotheism” can be a difficult concept to grasp, antiquity’s comfort in designating very special human contemporaries—that is, emperors—as “gods” is no less so.Footnote 27 Modern scholars often regard this attributed status with some skepticism. It was just a Greek way of flattering Roman power, say some.Footnote 28 Or, the claim was manifestly metaphorical, since emperors die, whereas gods by definition are immortal.
This last observation—that human mortality told against human divinity— misconstrues the issue.Footnote 29 No one in this period ever claimed that human flesh was immortal, thus divine. Soul or spirit was the immortal part of human being. Death in fact propelled further the emperor’s divine status, through apotheosis. The immortal part of the emperor ascended ad astra, where the other gods dwelt, while his flesh of course stayed put where it belonged, in the sublunar realm. Perhaps surprisingly, the cult of the emperor continued under and after Constantine. As late as the fourth century, in the opening of his work in praise of Constantine, Eusebius described the deceased monarch in such elevated terms that his language slips elusively between Constantine and Christ. I assume that the rhetorical ambiguity was deliberate.Footnote 30
Cultic etiquette honored imperial deity. Offerings before images, incense, priesthoods, festal days, public liturgies, ubiquitous portrait busts that were themselves invested with numen and regarded as places of sanctuary: if somebody thought that emperors were not divine, no one was acting as if they thought otherwise.Footnote 31 The idea seems less strange if we recall, again, that ancient divinity was a category of power, dispersed along a gradient spanning heaven and earth. Though on a lower register than some other θεοί and dii, emperors themselves— as Moses for Philo; as David and Paul for Origen; as Amphairaus for the Roman senate—were also gods.Footnote 32
Rome did not mandate imperial cult. Provincial cities, rather, petitioned the emperor that they be permitted to establish the cult locally. Wealthy aristocratic patrons underwrote the costs, which could be considerable. And these same aristocrats served as its priests. The imperial cult, in short, was an elaborate and expensive Mediterranean way of cementing good patron-client relations with the ultimate terrestrial patronus, the current imperial ruler. The hope was that establishing the cult would ingratiate one’s city and province to the emperor. The city would worship the divine emperor; and he, in turn, would direct his benevolent gaze toward the city. Initiative had its rewards.
Builder of Jerusalem’s beautiful temple complex, Herod the Great also erected temples to the god Augustus, though not in his Jewish areas.Footnote 33 His option would have been to do what Caligula later tried (and failed) to do: to integrate imperial cult within the temple of Judea’s high god. But sacrifice in Jerusalem could be offered to Israel’s god alone: the Maccabean revolt had settled that issue some two centuries earlier.Footnote 34 So Herod built imperial temples off-site, in his gentile or mixed-ethnic areas. Caesarea held one. So did Sebaste, in Samaria; so, also, Caesarea Philippi.
It all made good sense. By building dedicated temples, Herod ensured and protected the interests of his own kingdom, all the while ingratiating himself to Rome. Interestingly, though obliging imperial cult in this way, Herod did not observe one of its usual protocols: neither he nor any of his extended family— Judea’s premier aristocrats—served as imperial priests. Nor on this account did Augustus take offense. He evidently was acquainted with the idiosyncrasies of Jewish ancestral custom. In the sacred citadel of Israel’s god, meanwhile, prayer and sacrifice were offered for the emperor, not to him. Augustus—a long-distance god-fearer of a very special sort—endowed these sacrifices himself (so Philo, Legat. 157 and 317).Footnote 35 In 66 CE, it was the refusal to continue making these offerings for the well-being of the emperor (at the time, Nero) and of the empire that marked the outbreak of the first Jewish revolt.
For Herod, then, was Augustus a (type of) god? On the evidence, the king’s behavior certainly implies as much. He built imperial temples. He endowed priesthoods. He bankrolled sacrifices to the emperor. Such behaviors bespoke Herod’s fides and pietas toward Augustus and, thus, to Rome. We might be tempted to view this sponsorship cynically, as evidence of Herod’s compromised religious identity and his pliable politics—though we would then have to extend that same interpretation to the multitude of Nicene priests and prelates who continued to enact rituals of respect for the numen of Constantine and his imperial image. Herod, however, construed his pietas toward imperial cult consistently with his other commitments as king of the Jews. Neither he nor any member of his family personally supervised offerings made to Augustus. And the Jewish god’s temple itself remained untouched by such worship. In Jerusalem, sacrificing on behalf of the emperor was nothing like sacrificing to the emperor.Footnote 36
C. Paul the Apostle.
Of our three late Second Temple Jews, however, it is Paul who speaks most emphatically about the social agency, the presence, the power, and the cosmic (thus, religious) significance of pagan gods. These gods played a defining part in Paul’s vision of his own role as Christ’s emissary to the nations. And these gods also served in crucial ways to shape the apostle’s christology.Footnote 37
As he traveled the eastern Mediterranean spreading his εὐαγγέλιον, Paul perforce dealt with these gods at close quarters: after all, he roamed in their territories. For example, corresponding with his gentile community in Corinth, he complained that “the god of this age” had blinded the minds of unbelievers (θεὸς τοῦ αἰῶνος τούτου, 2 Cor 4:4). Modern commentators will insist that by “god” in this sentence, Paul must intend “the Devil,” that is, Satan. But that is not what Paul says. He is perfectly capable of naming Satan when he wants to: 1 Thess 2:18 (cf. 3:5); 1 Cor 5:5, 7:7; 2 Cor 2:11, 11:14, 12:7; Rom 16:20. His frequent recourse to “Satan” in fact makes Paul’s use of θεός in 2 Cor 4:4 that much more striking, because deliberate. Which particular god did Paul have in mind? He does not say.
Elsewhere, Paul simultaneously sounds the biblical tropes of denial and defiance when speaking of these gods. Thus, at 1 Cor 8:4–6, instructing his ex-pagan gentile assembly, he states: “We know that ‘an idol has no being in the world’ and that ‘there is no god but one.’ For even if there are so-called gods either in heaven or on earth—as indeed there are many gods and many lords—yet for us there is one God, the Father, … and one lord, Jesus Christ.” Verse 6 does not deny the truth of verse 5, which plainly acknowledges the theological congestion of the first-century cosmos. Rather, it situates Paul’s hearers within their newly Judaized cosmos: the existence of these many gods and other deities (κύριοι) notwithstanding, Paul’s people are to adhere solely to Paul’s god, enabled to do so through the spirit of that god’s son, the messiah (χριστός).Footnote 38
Who are these many “gods” and “lords”? We might look, first, to the stars and planets encircling the earth, divine intelligences for all ancient peoples.Footnote 39 In his letter to Rome, Paul names hostile heavenly intermediaries (ἄγγελοι), principalities (ἀρχαί), and powers (δυνάμεις; Rom 8:38). Communicating with his assembly in Philippi, he invokes the divine plenum of celestial, terrestrial, and subterranean superhuman beings (Phil 2:10). The nations wrongly sacrifice to such godlings (δαιμονία; 1 Cor 10:20), while the celestial “rulers of this age” (ἄρχοντες τοῦ αἰῶνος τούτου) had crucified the divine son of Paul’s god (1 Cor 2:8).Footnote 40 Cosmic elements (στοιχεία), themselves “not gods by nature (φύσει)”—though once considered and worshiped as gods by those in Galatia—had previously “enslaved” Paul’s ἔθνη (“gentiles”) before he had brought them to the exclusive worship of his own god (Gal 4:3–9). And, as we have seen, “the god of this age” often got in Paul’s way (2 Cor 4:4).
How had Paul and his gentile communities ended up on the wrong side of these gods? Why, given the extremely uneven distribution of power, did he and his people think that they could possibly prevail? And in what ways did pagan gods actually confirm Paul’s conviction that Jesus was indeed the final, Davidic christ?
To answer these questions, we need to glance backwards, briefly, to Jesus of Nazareth, and to events in and around Jerusalem some two-plus decades prior to Paul’s letters. An itinerant prophet, exorcist, and healer, Jesus had gathered around himself a core group of followers. And he deputized them to work the same acts of power as he himself did, and through which he established his own authority to pronounce his message. For, like his mentor John the Immerser before him and like Paul his apostle after him, Jesus too proclaimed the imminent approach of God’s kingdom. “The Kingdom of God is at hand!” (Mk 1:15).Footnote 41
Whatever other end-time hopes Jesus may have attached to this message, the coming resurrection of the dead must have figured prominently. The intensity of his followers’ expectation of this event alone accounts for their behavior in the wake of Jesus’s crucifixion as “King of the Jews.”Footnote 42 They were convinced, despite his death, that Jesus lived on. Their community relocated permanently to Jerusalem, terrestrial epicenter of the coming Kingdom (Rom 11:26). From the largest court of the Temple Mount, they continued to proclaim Jesus’s message, linked now to their belief that Jesus would himself play a defining role in its establishment. Within a few years, some began to fan out, continuing to promulgate their messiah’s message to Israel via the networks of synagogue communities ringing the Mediterranean—Joppa and Caesarea in Roman Judea; Damascus and Antioch further abroad.
It was there, within the Jewish communities of ethnically mixed cities, that sojourning apostles encountered a social reality that their earlier itineraries through Jewish villages in the Galilee and Judea had not prepared them for: the presence of interested pagans, “god-fearers.”Footnote 43 Some of these synagogue-going pagans, too, responded positively to the apostles, who in turn welcomed them into the assemblies of Christ-followers forming within the synagogues’ penumbra. But joining the Christ-assembly came with a radically Judaizing demand, one that urban synagogues themselves had never made of local pagan sympathizers. Christ-following non-Jews, insisted the apostles, had to break, completely, with their native gods.
This drastic requirement—universally demanded, so far as we know, by all factions of the Christ-movement—gives us another measure of its intense anticipation of God’s kingdom. The nations’ repudiation of their “false” gods and their turning to the “living and true god” (1 Thess 1:9) was an apocalyptic trope featured prominently in Jewish end-time prophecies.Footnote 44 By mid-century—the point by which, with Paul’s letters, we begin to have written evidence—various apostles of Christ disagreed heatedly over how to integrate (male) ex-pagan gentiles into their movement. (Circumcision? Immersion alone? Immersion plus circumcision?Footnote 45) But no one seems to have disputed gentile inclusion per se. Indeed, the phenomenon itself was another confirmation of the movement’s core message: if gentiles voluntarily repudiated gentile gods, then the Kingdom must indeed be at hand.
How did their gods feel about this? Temperamental at the best of times, gods were quick to take offense. And offended gods acted out. Earthquake or flood, fire or famine, disease or violent death: ancient people were all too familiar with these expressions of divine displeasure. Greco-Roman cities represented intricate religious ecosystems whose dynamic equilibrium was maintained by human solicitude: attention to traditional repertoires of showing respect to the gods. The phenomenon of gentile “god-fearing”—a typical Mediterranean both/and model of dealing with divine diversity—enabled Jewish diaspora communities to settle comfortably within these ecosystems. And why not? Absent apocalyptic aspirations, the paganism of majority culture was entirely normal. The nations of course had their own gods. Israel had theirs (see Deut 32:8–9).Footnote 46
The gospel message—spreading from itinerant apostles to resident gentiles via diaspora synagogues; turning the local synagogue’s pagans into ex-pagans— disrupted this careful balance of relations between heaven and earth. Little wonder, then, that Paul experienced so much push-back: from anxious synagogue authorities, from angry urban mobs, from Roman magistrates attempting to keep the peace (e.g., 2 Cor 11:24–29, 12:10), and, as we have seen, from the gods themselves.Footnote 47 Yet he and his gentile ἐκκλησίαι continued to defy their opposition, whether human or divine. Paul and his people were bound together—literally and materially—by a stronger power: the holy pneuma of Christ, and of Israel’s god.Footnote 48
Paul assigns god-like attributes to Christ, despite his notable reticence about calling him a god tout court. Rather, he insists, Christ is a “human being,” albeit “from heaven” (ἄνθρωπος ἐξ οὐρανοῦ, 1 Cor 15:47). In his supramundane state, Christ had been in “god-form” before his descent into “slave-form” (μορφὴ θεοῦ/ μορφὴ δούλου, Phil 2:6–7), that is, into a body of flesh and blood. Presumably, in his postmortem manifestations—the only way that Paul would have experienced him—Jesus appeared in or as his pre-descent, god-form, a σῶμα πνευματικόv (which was the sort of body that characterized ancient divinity more generally). Transformation into pneumatic body, Paul taught, was guaranteed to believers whether living or dead: flesh and blood (“which cannot inherit the Kingdom of God”) would transition into spirit (1 Cor 15:50, cf. v. 44; Rom 8:29).Footnote 49
Paul’s phrasing sometimes implies that the risen Christ presented as a visual object (Ἰησοῦν τὸν κύριον ἡμῶν ἑόρακα, 1 Cor 9:1; Χριστὸς … ὤφθη, 15:5–8). More often, though, he uses locative language: Christ or his spirit is “in” Paul, “in” the body of the believer, “in” the assembly at large (e.g., Gal 1:16, God revealed his son ἐν ἐμοὶ; 1 Cor 6:12–19, spirit is “in” the body both of the individual and of the group). Christ’s indwelling spirit manifests by enabling charismatic acts: works of power, divinatory expertise, prophecy, angelic speech, exorcisms and healing. In effect, this sharing of spirit binds the assembly into “one body,” or specifically into Christ’s body (e.g., 1 Cor 12:12–13, 27–31).Footnote 50
The key indices of πνεῦμα for Paul the Pharisee, however, were ritual and ethical. Christ’s πνεῦμα had enabled his pagan ἔθνη to become those long-prophesied “eschatological gentiles” who (finally!) worshiped the right god in the right ways despite their naturally sinful φύσις. Paul’s ex-pagans were thus nothing less than a “new creation,” reformatted through pneumatic infusion to live according to (idealized) Jewish standards. Their newly Judaized conduct in fact gave the empirical measure of πνεῦμα’s efficacy. Worship only Israel’s god; no other gods; no idols; chaste marriages; settle disputes within the assembly; contribute funds for the group back in Jerusalem; and a lot of other Jewish community behaviors, summarized by Paul as “fulfilling the Law.” Spirit had separated Paul’s gentiles from those ἔθνη who did not know God, uniting them with Abraham’s σπέρμα (“seed”), the “eldest of many brothers,” Christ (Rom 8:29). Spirit effected gentile υἱοθεσία into God’s family, making them “sons” and thus heirs, together with Israel, of God’s kingdom. How long could these ex-pagan ἅγιοι (“holy ones”) keep on keeping on? Until Christ manifested to the cosmos as God’s Davidic son. The happy elect few, chosen both from Israel and from the nations, already knew that “the ends of the ages have come” (1 Cor 10:11). Soon everybody would know (Rom 16:20, 26).Footnote 51
Scholarly analyses of Paul’s letters often view the first generation of the Jesus-movement as a series of accomplished or anticipated punctiliar events. “The” baptism of Jesus. “The” mission of Jesus. “The” resurrection. “The” apostolic community in Jerusalem. “The” gentile mission. “The” Parousia. But as Paul’s letters imply, as the depictions in the later gospels and Acts suggest, and as the physics of ancient material πνεῦμα would support, all of these events—Jesus’s activities and exorcisms; his various and continuing postmortem manifestations;Footnote 52 the movement’s settling in Jerusalem and then spreading abroad; its acceptance of ex-pagan gentiles; the commitments and behaviors of Paul, of his apostolic rivals and colleagues, and of his ex-pagan assemblies—do not describe a series of discrete moments. They define a zone, a single kinetic arc of eschatological divine empowerment and redemption, soon to transform the cosmos at and as the Kingdom. The medium of that empowerment—continuous from Jesus’s immersion by John (Mk 1:10 –12 and parr; cf. Jn 1:32–33)—was divine πνεῦμα. Its eschatological means of conveyance was Christ.
“Messiah”/χριστός was a term that could admit of many meanings.Footnote 53 Its application to the figure of Jesus testifies to that semantic versatility. But for Paul, Christ’s function as Davidic messiah is surprisingly, recognizably traditional.Footnote 54 Manifesting in the quotidian to and in an elect few, those called from Israel and from the nations who are already being transformed (2 Cor 3:18), Jesus’s status as God’s son—thus, as the royal Davidic warrior—will be manifest in power, globally, when he raises, thus transforms, the dead (Rom 1:3–4; cf. 1 Cor 15:51–52).Footnote 55 But to do that, Christ first needs to get past the nations’ gods.
Paul, like many other Jewish apocalyptic visionaries, foresees a final battle between the forces of good (Israel’s god, his son the Davidic messiah, good angels and archangels) and evil (cosmic gods, “every ἀρχή and every ἐξουσία, and every δύναμις,” and even death itself, 1 Cor 15:24–26). Paul’s language in this passage of 1 Corinthians resonates with Davidic enthronement psalms: the messiah will reign “until he [God] has put all his [the Davidic king’s] enemies under his feet” (15:25; cf. Ps 110:1).Footnote 56 In 1 Corinthians, Christ “destroys” or “abolishes” these cosmic forces.Footnote 57 In 1 Thessalonians, he descends from heaven “with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call and the sound of the trumpet of God” (1 Thess 4:16)— more martial imagery. In Phil 2, Paul’s exalted Christ returns—presumably in his μορφὴ θεοῦ—to subjugate these gods: nonhuman knees, celestial, terrestrial, and subterranean, all “bend” to their messianic conqueror, ultimately acknowledging his father, the god of Israel (cf. Ps 97:7, “all gods bow down to him”).Footnote 58
In short: redemption, for Paul, is preceded by a cosmic theomachy. The pacification of the pagan cosmos will occur once the Redeemer manifests from the Temple Mount, Zion, to gather humanity—“the fullness of the nations and all Israel” (Rom 11:25–26). Then, transformed into bodies of πνεῦμα, Paul proclaims, the redeemed will enter their celestial commonwealth, ascending ἐν οὐρανοῖς above the lunar border, to God’s kingdom (Phil 3:20–21; 1 Cor 15:20–44).Footnote 59 It was via his defeat of these other deities that biblically sanctioned royal lineage and Davidic valor came together to define Jesus as the eschatological Christ.
Cosmos and Theos
We have wandered far from Domitian’s charging Flavius Clemens with ἀθεότης for having drifted into “Jewish ways.” Whatever social and religious (or financial) motivations fed this imperial censure, Domitian’s disapproval of an absence of “belief”—the definition of our term “atheism”—cannot have been among them. Flavius Clemens lived in the same universe the day after his assumption of “Jewish ways” as he did the day before, and that universe was still full of gods.
As we have seen from our brief review of Philo, Herod, and Paul—and our sideways glance at some Jewish inscriptions, incantations, and amulets—native Jews, too, were well aware of “the gods of the nations.” The stars in Philo’s firmament are divinities, created as gods by his god. Herod handsomely builds, supports, and bankrolls imperial cult. And besides skirmishing with offended lower deities in the course of his own mission, Paul narratively deploys them. They are essential to his christology. Pagan gods define Jesus’s role as God’s end-time champion. No opposition, no final battle; no final battle, no Davidic messiah. Paul’s messianism is of course “Jewish.” But that Jewish messianism sits within its defining, broader, and native first-century context, Greco-Roman paganism.
What set (most? many? some?) Jews apart from their pagan contemporaries was their (attributed) behavior, not their “beliefs.”Footnote 60 Jews generally seemed to decline (or were thought to decline) to sacrifice to foreign gods, even if that god were the emperor. And this Jewish disinclination was respected, save by Caligula, because it was grounded in ancestral custom, the hallmark of respectable religion.
Voluntary ex-pagan Jews were another matter altogether. It was their denial of their own native ἤθη, their new refusal to offer cult to those deities that were theirs by birth and blood, that made these “voluntary” Jews the particular objects of pagan umbrage.Footnote 61 But Jews, whether begotten or made, were clearly present at pagan cult. They filled the theaters, the council chambers, the gymnasia and stadia and schools of their Mediterranean cities. They availed themselves of the public baths and of mixed professional guilds. They served as soldiers and as gladiators, as actors and as athletes. They managed, doubtless variously, to do what they thought they could do or should do to attenuate cultic participation—though, as our inscriptions and papyri attest, they also directed attention to various divinities as circumstance required. It was their ascribed behavior regarding pagan civic and imperial cult—not their “beliefs,” and certainly not a more generalized Jewish cultural self-segregation—that stimulated classical authors’ rhetoric of ἀμιξία and ἀσέβεια. But Jews did “mix” (variously) with pagans, both human and, as we have just seen, divine.Footnote 62
Our scholarly reliance on “monotheism” as a term of historical description occludes this vibrant and vital aspect of ancient Mediterranean religiousness.Footnote 63 It distorts much more than it putatively clarifies. It invites anachronism, allowing austerely monotheistic theologies to be imputed to Jews and, later, to Christians, theologies that our Jewish and (retrospectively) Christian texts themselves belie. And it leaves us as historians unprepared, even unable, to see what stands before us in our evidence: the many gods who look back at us from the stones of the eastern Empire, from the songs of the ancient Psalmist, from Philo’s learned commentaries, and from the urgent epistles of the apostle Paul.
