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Philo, Herod, Paul, and the Many Gods of Ancient Jewish “Monotheism”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2022

Paula Fredriksen
Paula Fredriksen*
Affiliation:
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem; augfred@bu.edu
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Abstract

Many gods lived in the Roman Empire. All ancient peoples, including Jews and, eventually, Christians, knew this to be the case. Exploring the ways that members of these groups thought about and dealt with other gods while remaining loyal to their own god, this essay focuses particularly on the writings and activities of three late Second Temple Jews who highly identified as Jews: Philo of Alexandria, Herod the Great, and the apostle Paul. Their loyalty to Israel’s god notwithstanding, they also acknowledged the presence, the agency, and the power of foreign deities. Reliance on “monotheism” as a term of historical description inhibits our appreciation of the many different social relationships, human and divine, that all ancient Jews had to navigate. Worse, “monotheism” fundamentally misdescribes the religious sensibility of antiquity.

Keywords

monotheismgodsJewsPaulpneuma
Type
Articles
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Harvard Theological Review , Volume 115 , Issue 1 , January 2022 , pp. 23 - 45
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© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the President and Fellows of Harvard College

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Footnotes

Memoriae Larry Hurtado sacrum

*

Special thanks to Clifford Ando, for help with gods; to David Frankfurter and Joseph Sanzo, for help with magic; to Jonathan Price, for help with Jewish inscriptions; to Sarah Pearce, for help with Philo; to Carl Holladay and Stanley Stowers, for generous bibliographical guidance; and to the anonymous colleagues who reviewed my initial submission with salubrious critical attention. I dedicate this essay to the memory of my beloved friend Larry Hurtado, colleague praeclarissimus, who disagreed with every word of it, thereby (knowingly) helping me to strengthen and to clarify my arguments.

References

1 Antiquity’s habit of ethnic “verbing” gives a linguistic register of this openness to adapting and adopting another group’s cult and culture, taking the name of an ethnic group and adding a verbal ending (-ΐζειν): to Persianize, to Hellenize, to Judaize, and so on. See esp. Brent Nongbri, Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013) 46–50; specifically on “Judaizing,” Shaye J. D. Cohen, The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties (HCS 31; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999) 185–92; also Steve Mason, “Jews, Judeans, Judaizing, Judaism: Problems of Categorization in Ancient History,” JSJ 38 (2007) 457–512.

2 Classical ethnographers were equal-opportunity stereotypers: finding a Greek or Roman writer with a kind word to say about ethnic others can be a challenge. For a breakdown of classical authors’ ethnic slurs by specific people-groups, Benjamin Isaac, The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); on Jews in particular, Menachem Stern, Greek and Latin Authors on Jews and Judaism (3 vols.; Jerusalem: Dorot Press, 1974–1984), hereafter GLAJJ.

3 “Conversion” implies that religious orientation is a personal option. That idea suits the modern context but not the ancient one, when an individual’s particular social-ethnic identity (family, citizenship, people-group, what we call “ethnicity”) entailed maintaining relations with particular gods. On the ethnic embeddedness of ancient divinity, and the family relationships between peoples and their gods, Christopher P. Jones, Kinship Diplomacy in the Ancient World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999); Paula Fredriksen, “How Jewish Is God? Divine Ethnicity in Paul’s Theology,” JBL 137 (2018) 193–212; also, below, n. 7. When expressing what we call “conversion,” ancient authors speak of forging new political alliances (thus Philo, Spec. 4.34.178: incomers join the Jews’ πολιτεία), or of abandoning one’s native laws (Juvenal, Tacitus, nn. 4 and 5 below; so too Josephus, on Tiberius Julius Alexander, Ant. 20.100).

4 If the father observes (“fearing”) the Sabbath (metuens sabbata), worships the sky, and avoids pork, the sons eventually circumcise and revere “the law that Moses handed over in his arcane scroll.” That is, Juvenal complains, the sons of a Judaizing father will eventually “convert” (the marker being circumcision; Sat. 14.96–102). Note, again, that Juvenal has no word for “conversion,” instead using the language of deserting romanas leges for foreign ones, the ius of Moses, ll. 100–101; for extensive discussion, GLAJJ 2.102–7, No. 301; also Emil Schürer, A History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ (3 vols.; rev. ed.; ed. Geza Vermes, Fergus Millar, Matthew Black, and Martin Goodman; New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2014) 3:150–76 (hereafter HJP). The earliest lesson that proselytes receive, grumbles Tacitus, “is to despise the gods, to disown their own country (patria), and to regard their parents, children, and brothers as of little account” (Hist. 5.5.2; GLAJJ 2.19, 39–41). From the other side, Philo seems to confirm these points of pagan critique, praising “incomers” for “forsaking the ancestral customs (τὰ πάτρια) in which they were bred” (Spec. 1.309; cf. 1.52). More on sympathetic pagans (also known as “god-fearers”), content to Judaize while continuing in their native allegiances, below and n. 43.

5 Tim Whitmarsh, Battling the Gods (New York: Knopf, 2015), explores ancient philosophical atheism. The word qua term of derogation, however, most often indicates allegiance, not to no divinity, but rather to the “wrong” divinity. This seems to be the problem at issue with Domitian’s move against Flavius Clemens; cf. Josephus, C. Ap. 2.148; also, the polemical back-and-forth between Polycarp and the crowd of pagan spectators in Smyrna, M. Poly. 9.2.

6 Nongbri, Before Religion, 106–59. For an exhaustive examination of the range of ancient definitions of fides or πίστις, ancestors of our word “belief,” Teresa Morgan, Roman Faith and Christian Faith: “Pistis” and “Fides” in the Early Roman Empire and Early Churches (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). On modernity’s gradual development of “monotheism” (Cambridge Platonists), together with the “disenchantment of the universe” (Weber) and the post-Cartesian emphasis on individual religious sensibility (“faith”; Schleiermacher), see Stanley K. Stowers, “Gods, Monotheism and Ancient Mediterranean Religion” (paper presented in the Brown University Seminar for the Culture and Religion of the Ancient Mediterranean, 11 September 2012) 18–21.

7 Mediterranean gods were local in two senses, attaching both to peoples and to places. Divine/ human attachment, συγγένεια, could be construed as biological lineage: gods took human sexual partners, from which unions might issue rulers, citizens of a given city (described as a γένος, a kinship-group), or whole peoples. Ancient Greco-Roman diplomats, appealing to these lineages, built and stabilized political treaties. Intercity relations rested upon shared divine descent, on which see Jones, Kinship Diplomacy (n. 3 above). The Jewish god’s sexual solitude forced Hasmonean rulers to improvise: through an encounter of Heracles with a granddaughter of Abraham’s, they constructed diplomatic συγγένεια between Judea and Sparta (1 Macc 12:21; 2 Macc 5:9; cf. Josephus, Ant.1.240–241; 12.226). The family language of lineage also linked Jews to their own god: God was their “father” and Israel his “sons,” Davidic kings especially so (on which, see esp. M. David Litwa, We Are Being Transformed [Berlin: de Gruyter, 2012] 109–15). But this family connection was affective and covenantal rather than biological, hence Paul’s scrupulous use of υἱοθεσία, “sonship” through adoption, when characterizing the relationship of his συγγενεῖς with their god (Rom 9:4).

8 For “right thinking” as a functional equivalent of “belief,” Teresa Morgan, “Belief and Practice in Graeco-Roman Religiosity: Plutarch, De Iside et Osiride 376c,” in Christianity in the Second Century (ed. James Carleton Paget and Judith Lieu; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017) 200–213. Morgan brings examples from Plutarch, Quintilian, and Cicero (202–9); cf., e.g., Justin, 1 Apol. 26, on bad behaviors as the consequence of muddy theological thinking (said here against other gentile Christians).

9 On the prioritizing of individual internal convictions (“belief” or “faith”) over external actions (“ritual”)—one of the scholarly sequelae of Reformation anti-Catholic rhetoric—and the ways that this affects modern historiography on ancient Judaism and Christianity, Jonathan Z. Smith, Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1990). On Roman religion and this scholarly “mépris du ritualisme,” John Sheid, Quand faire, c’est croire. Les rites sacrificiels des Romains (Paris: Aubier Flammarion, 2011) 7, with further bibliography. On vows, actions, and votive offerings as expressing the “religion of everyday social exchange” between humans and nonhuman powers or social agents, Stanley K. Stowers, “The Religion of Plant and Animal Offerings versus the Religion of Meanings, Essences and Textual Mysteries,” in Ancient Mediterranean Sacrifice (ed. Jennifer W. Knust and Zsuzsanna Várhelyi; New York: Oxford University Press, 2011) 35–56.

10 On “god” as a category of power, e.g., Mark Smith, God in Translation: Deities in Cross-Cultural Discourse in the Biblical World (FAT 57; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008) 14–15. For Greek gods, the essays assembled in What Is A God? Studies in the Nature of Greek Divinity (ed. Alan B. Lloyd; Swansea, UK: Classical Press of Wales, 2009). “Power was the essence of divinity,” Robin Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians (New York: Knopf, 1986) 98. See, too, Arthur Darby Nock, Essays on Religion in the Ancient World (ed. Zeph Stewart; 2 vols.; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972) 1:34–45. Further, on taxonomies, various numina, and grades of “god-ness,” Litwa, Being Transformed, 41–57, 263–72. For “power” and Israel’s god, see n. 11.

11 A small sampling: Exod 12:12, “On all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgments”; 15:11, “Who is like you among the gods?”; 18:12, “Now I know that the Lord is greater than all [other] gods.” Ps 97:7, “All the gods bow down to him.” Deut 32:43, “Worship him, all you gods.” Ps 82:2, “In the midst of the gods he gives judgment.” Mic 4:5, “All the peoples walk, each in the name of its god; but we will walk in the name of the Lord our god forever and ever.” Jer 43:12, God captures the gods of Egypt; 46:25, he brings punishments upon these gods; 49:3, he sends the Ammonite god into exile. Isa 8:19 and 1 Sam 28:19 also refer to the dead as “gods.” In a now-classic essay, A. Peter Hayman issued a summons to rethink scholarly vocabulary in “Monotheism: A Misused Word in Jewish Studies?” JJS 42 (1991) 1–15. See, too, William Horbury, “Jewish and Christian Monotheism in the Herodian Age,” in Early Jewish and Christian Monotheism (ed. Loren T. Stuckenbruck and Wendy E. S. North; Early Christianity in Context; London: T&T Clark, 2004) 16–44 (esp. 20–21, for many primary references in Jewish sources to “gods”). Mark S. Smith, The Origins of Biblical Monotheism: Israel’s Polytheistic Background and the Ugaritic Texts (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), reviews the complexities of ancient Jewish theologies; and, closer to our period, Peter Schäfer, Two Gods in Heaven: Jewish Concepts of God in Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020). See, too, Benjamin D. Sommer’s lengthy appendix covering “monotheism and polytheism in Ancient Israel” in idem, The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) 145–74. Sommer urges that the Bible’s insistence on God’s absolute control of the world (including of its other gods) renders “monotheist” an appropriate descriptive term: “Although the Hebrew Bible mentions the existence of other gods, those other gods never appear in biblical narrative as independent actors” (171). One wonders, then, why God “executes judgments” on them or battles them. In light of this divine superfluity, biblical declarations of God’s unique supremacy (e.g., Deut 4:35, 39; Isa 43:10–11; 44:6; 45:14), like corresponding pagan statements to similar effect (such as exclamations of εἷς θεός), should be understood as an index of his or her people’s cultic and affective loyalty. For both groups, “unique divinity” declaims the power of the divinity in question, not his/her solitary existence.

On this “rhetoric of power” in Jewish texts, and misreadings of it as “monotheism,” Saul M. Olyan, “Is Isaiah 40–55 Really Monotheistic?” JANER 12 (2012) 190–201. On the Jewish god’s “oneness” and the Bible’s divine multiplicity, Litwa, Being Transformed, 229–47. On the vocabulary and polemical logic of Jewish texts coping with categorizing these superhuman powers while concerned “to assert the incomparable power of the high God” of Israel, Emma Wasserman, “ ‘An Idol Is Nothing in the World’ (1 Cor 8.4): The Metaphysical Contradictions of 1 Corinthians 8.1–11.1 in the Context of Jewish Idolatry Polemics,” in Portraits of Jesus: Studies in Christology (ed. Susan E. Myers; WUNT 2/321; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012) 201–27, quotation from 227; further, eadem, Apocalypse as Holy War: Divine Politics and Polemics in the Letters of Paul (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018).

12 For Greek and Hellenistic education, the great study of H. I. Marrou, The History of Education in Antiquity (trans. George Lamb; Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982). On citizen efforts to keep city gods in a good mood, David Potter, “Roman Religion: Ideas and Actions,” in Life, Death, and Entertainment in the Roman Empire (ed. D. S. Potter and D. J. Mattingly; Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999) 113–67; Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians, 27–101 (especially to divert divine anger); John Scheid, The Gods, the State, and the Individual: Reflections on Civic Religion in Rome (trans. Clifford Ando; Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). On these gods as local powers, fellow residents, citizens, and decuriones of their cities: Cicero, Leg. 2.26; Tertullian, Nat. 2.8.7; Clifford Ando, The Matter of the Gods (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008), 123, 162–64; also Christian Marek, with Peter Frei, In the Land of a Thousand Gods: A History of Asia Minor in the Ancient World (trans. Stephen Randall; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016) 509–18.

13 Some examples of Jewish acknowledgment of Greek and Roman gods: 1) Moschos Ioudaios son of Moschion placed his inscription in a local temple on account of a dream at “the command of the gods Amphiaraos and Hygieia,” 3rd cent. BCE, in Greece (Inscriptiones Judaicae Orientis 1, Ach45); 2) Niketas from Jerusalem gave 100 drachmas in support of the Dionysia festival, c. 150 BCE (IJO 2, 21; CIJ 2, n. 749); 3) a synagogue manumission inscription calls upon the witness of sky, earth, and sun: Zeus, Gē, Helios, a legal formula (IJO 1, BS20); 4) Glykon (in Phrygia) names both Jewish and pagan festivals: Pesach, Shavuot, and Kalends (IJO 2, 196); 5) The names of ephebes Jesus son of Antiphilos and Eleazar son of Eleazer appear on a stele dedicated to Heracles (brawn) and to Hermes (brain; Lüderitz CJZC 6–7). For discussion of many of these sources, see Margaret H. Williams, The Jews among the Greeks and Romans: A Diasporan Sourcebook (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998); also Pieter W. van der Horst, Saxa iudaica loquuntur: Lessons from Early Jewish Inscriptions (Leiden: Brill, 2014) esp. ch. 2 (“Early Jewish Epigraphy: What Can We Learn?”). Further on the ethnicity and the religious Jewishness of these inscriptions, Tessa Rajak, The Jewish Dialogue with Greece and Rome (Leiden: Brill, 2002) 366–70. On Jews in pagan places and pagans in Jewish ones, Paula Fredriksen, Paul: The Pagans’ Apostle (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017) 32–60. HJP 3.1:1–176 provides a still valuable survey of diaspora communities.

14 Apotropaic charms and amulets show that Jews, whether as clients or as adepts, attributed much power to gods, angels, and pneumata, especially in local, multireligious contexts: e.g., the Sicilian amulet that calls on angels to help Judah escape the negative attentions of a Greek goddess: “Artemis, flee from Judah!” #33, ll. 13–14, in Roy Kotansky, Greek Magical Amulets (Wiesbaden: Springer Fachmedien, 1994); cf. Mika Ahuvia’s analysis of an incantation bowl, “An Ancient Jewess Invoking Goddesses: Transgression or Pious Adaptation?” AJS Perspectives (Spring 2017), http:// perspectives.ajsnet.org/transgression-issue/an-ancient-jewess-invoking-goddesses-transgression-or-pious-adaptation; also eadem, “Gender and the Angels in Ancient Judaism,” JSQ 29 (2022) 1–21. Gideon Bohak addresses the ambiguous invocation of gods’ names in the PGM in Ancient Jewish Magic: A History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011) 247–57. Further on the local variations and quotidian practicalities of Jewish “reciprocal exchanges” with lower divinities (designated in his article by the etic term NEBs, or “nonevident beings”), Stanley K. Stowers, “Why ‘Common Judaism’ Does Not Look Like Mediterranean Religion,” in From Strength to Strength: Essays in Appreciation of Shaye J. D. Cohen (ed. Michael L. Satlow; BJS 363; Providence, RI: Brown Judaic Studies, 2018) 235–55, esp. 247–51.

15 Angelos Chaniotis,“Megatheism: The Search for the Almighty God and the Competition of Cults,” in One God: Pagan Monotheism in the Roman Empire (ed. Stephen Mitchell and Peter van Nuffelen; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) 112–40. See also, in the same collection, the essay by Nicole Belayche, “Deus deum … summorum maximus [Apuleius]: Ritual Expressions of Distinction in the Divine World in the Imperial Period,” 141–66, on divine hierarchy and plurality; also, eadem, “Hypsistos: Une voie de l’exaltation de dieux dans le polythéisme gréco-romain,” Archiv für Religionsgeschichte 7 (2005) 34–55. Current work in ancient pagan “monotheism” expresses what earlier scholars deemed “henotheism,” one god among many: see, most recently, Christian Gers-Uphaus, “Paganer Monotheismus anhand der

θεὸς ὕψιστος- und εἷς θεός-Inschriften,” JAC 37 (2017) 5–82; but “henotheist” describes ancient Jews and Christians as well. Pagans who invoked theos hypsistos need not have had the LXX’s god in mind, on which, Dorothea Rohde, “Die religiöse Landschaft einer Hafenstadt im Wandel,” in Juden-Christen-Heiden? (ed. S. Alkier and H. Leppin; WUNT 400; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2018) 197–217, esp. 210; cf. Christian Marek, “Nochmals zu den Theos Hypsistos Inschriften,” in ibid., 131–48. As Marek points out, commenting on the Oenoanda inscription, Apollo—one of the Olympian gods—demotes himself to the status of messenger (“angel”) vis-à-vis the highest, self-existing god, 143–44. By contrast, Clement of Alexandria speaks of “gods” and “angels” as two distinct and nonhierarchically arranged categories of superhuman powers in Strom. 7.3.20.4; discussion in Marek, Thousand Gods, 501–8. Cf. Celsus’s ranking of these entities as the greatest god, gods, angels, daemons (which can be good or evil), and heroes; Origen, Cels. 7.68. In sum: “god” was a flexible and a graduated category.

16 Thus, e.g., Louis Feldman, Jew and Gentile in the Ancient World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), who assesses diaspora Jews’ behaviors in terms of their (orthodox?) levels of “observance”; cf. John M. G. Barclay, Jews in the Mediterranean Diaspora: From Alexander to Trajan (323 BCE–117 CE) (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996), on the anachronism of assignments of “orthodoxy” and of “deviance,” 83–102. Barclay’s own analytical categories, “assimilation, acculturation and accommodation,” however, can also seem to essentialize what counts as ancient “Jewish” behaviors, while (in his view) rendering Paul always the exceptional outlier, 381–96.

17 The current vogue in early very high christology—an insistence that Paul and his Christ-following contemporaries, anticipating Nicea and Chalcedon by several centuries, “identified” Jesus as God— requires the construct of such a “pure Jewish monotheism.” In this line of thought, Israel’s god is uniquely divine, uncreated; everything else is created, a strict binary that allows for no divine intermediaries. Christ’s resurrection, according to these scholars, (somehow) revealed to his earliest followers that he, too, was “uncreated.” This construct of “monotheism” depends on the late Middle Platonic philosophical idea—born well after Paul’s lifetime—of creatio ex nihilo. For the philosophical sources, George Boys-Stones, Platonist Philosophy 80 BC to AD 250: An Introduction and Collection of Sources in Translation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); for discussion, Litwa, Being Transformed, 259–81. For a recent florilegium of these christological arguments, see the essays assembled in Monotheism and Christology in Greco-Roman Antiquity (ed. Matthew V. Novenson; Leiden: Brill, 2020); Novenson reviews the current debate in his introduction, 1–8. Contra this construct, my own essay, “How ‘High’ Can Early High Christology Be?” in ibid., 293–319, esp. 299–305; earlier, Frances Young, “Creatio ex Nihilo: A Context for the Emergence of the Christian Doctrine of Creation,” SJT 44 (1991) 139–51. As she notes, “Creation out of nothing was not just a doctrine about the world. It was a doctrine about God,” 150.

18 On the LXX’s rendering of Exod 22:28(27) and its “liberal” interpretation by Philo and by Josephus, see Pieter W. van der Horst, “Thou Shalt Not Revile the Gods,” SPhilo 5 (1993) 1–8. Philo may be cautious just about these gods’ peoples, and not the gods themselves; but, as we shall shortly see, Philo, like his pagan contemporaries, also names sidereal intelligences, cosmic intermediaries, and special humans as “gods.” For a brisk overview of Philo’s literary corpus, HJP 3.2:809–68.

19 That is, according to this biblical verse, these superhuman powers truly exist. They are simply demoted ontologically (in terms of power), spatially (they are closer to the earth than are the “high” gods, like stars and planets), and (according to some Jews, like Paul) ethically (they are only evil, never good). For Plato, centuries before our period, these divine beings function as cosmic intermediaries, an ethereal World Wide Web enabling communications between higher gods and humanity; Symp. 202E–203A. On the “idiosyncrasy” of Plato’s daimōn as its own category, John D. Mikalson, Greek Popular Religion in Greek Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010) 22–27; cf. Acts 17:18 NRSV (rightly translated as “gods”). Further on demonic divinity, e.g., Origen, Cels. 5.5 (they are always evil); Augustine, Civ. 9.23 (“gods” and “demons” are different terms for the same entities); Maijastina Kahlos, Debate and Dialogue: Christian and Pagan Cultures c. 360–430 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007) 172–81; eadem, “Refuting and Reclaiming Monotheism: Monotheism in the Debates between ‘Pagans’ and Christians in 380–430,” in Monotheism Between Pagans and Christians in Late Antiquity (ed. Stephen Mitchell and Peter van Nuffelen; Leuven: Peeters, 2010) 167–79.

20 It might be objected that Philo deliberately “Hellenized” his discourse in order to interpret Judaism to pagans, and that he deployed such language to build a bridge to pagan intellectual salons. But Philo’s Greek biblical text, read weekly in community, itself spoke of multiple deities. Also, since Tcherikover, scholars have seen Philo’s works—and especially his biblical commentaries—as addressed primarily if not exclusively to other Jews. Feldman, Jew and Gentile, argued otherwise, e.g., 318–19 on Philo’s intended audience; but Feldman still labored under the idea, since put to rest, that Hellenistic Judaism was a “missionary religion.” Ellen Birnbaum, The Place of Judaism in Philo’s Thought: Israel, Jews, and Proselytes (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1996) 17–21, suggests that, for his commentaries on biblical books, Philo’s intended audience was “most likely … Jews like himself” (19), though perhaps pagans might number among his hearers of the political writings, Flacc. and Legat. Further on Philo’s Jewish audience, Sarah Pearce, “Philo of Alexandria and the Memory of Ptolemy II Philadelphus,” in Israel in Egypt: The Land of Egypt as Concept and Reality for Jews in Antiquity and the Early Medieval Period (ed. Alison Salvesen, Sarah Pearce, and Miriam Frenkel; Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity 110; Leiden: Brill, 2020) 216–58, at 227–28 and nn. 75–79, against Feldman’s reconstruction.

21 For a clear exposition of the criteria of philosophical deity, see John Dillon, The Middle Platonists (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977); for the sources, Boys-Stones, Platonist Philosophy, cited n. 17 above.

22 That educated Hellenistic Jews—“Aristeas,” Aristobulus, Philo—regarded their own god as “the highest” comes as no surprise. But some pagans also elevated the aniconic Jewish deity to philosophy’s (de-ethnicized) highest god, e.g., Tacitus, Hist.5.5.4 (aniconic worship—presumably in diaspora synagogues—as mente sola; cf. Rom 12.1, λογικὴ λατρεία). The idea that high gods neither want nor need sacrifices, but lower gods do, was originally pagan, hence Porphyry’s reference to Theophrastus, On Abstinence 2.27.1–3. Hellenistic Jews’ philosophical reformatting of YHWH, combined with their aniconic worship and, in the diaspora, the virtual absence of sacrificial cult, prompted some pagans to identify Jews themselves as a nation of “philosophers.” The roll call of these admirers (Theophrastus, Megasthenes, Numenius, and so on) may be found in any treatment of Hellenistic Judaism (e.g., Feldman, Jew and Gentile, 201–32); where fragments exist, they can be consulted in GLAJJ. So too Origen, Cels. 5.43, the lowest Jew worships the high God; 5.50, even pagans call “the god of the Hebrews” the supreme god; cf. Julian, on Jerusalem’s temple as dedicated to the worship ὑψίστου θεοῦ, Ep. et leg. No. 134 (Bidez and Cumont).

23 Philo, Mos. 1.158, consistent with the text of Exod 7.1 (Moses vis-à-vis Pharaoh); cf. Somn. 2.189; Sacr. 9–10; QU 2.29 and 40; Leg. 1.40. Further on Philo’s views on Moses’s divinity, M. David Litwa, “The Deification of Moses in Philo of Alexandria,” SPhilo 26 (2014) 1–27.

24 Justin, too, will name Christ “another god” and an “angel” (Dial. 56.4, 59.1; 1 Apol. 63.15) as well as λόγος (61.1).

25 David and Paul, says Origen, “sine dubio non erant homines sed dii”; Comm. ad Rom. 2.10, 18 (SC 532, 438).

26 On various kinds of divinities (gods both “not made” and “made”), Litwa, Being Transformed, 41–50, 158–61. This latter status—gods who were formerly human—could have tax consequences. The Roman senate, deciding on the local holdings of the god Amphairaus, ruled that these could be taxed, since Amphairaus, though indeed a god, had begun life as a mortal; Cicero, Nat. D. 3.49; Ando, Gods, 3–10.

27 On imperial divinity in the early empire, Michael Peppard, The Son of God in the Roman World: Divine Sonship in Its Social and Political Context (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011) 31–49; on the sanctity and numen both of the emperor (whether pagan or Christian) and of his image, Jaś Elsner, Imperial Rome and Christian Triumph (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) 53–87; further, Keith Hopkins, “Divine Emperors, or the Symbolic Unity of the Roman Empire,” in idem, Conquerors and Slaves (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 197–226. Emperor worship, minus blood sacrifices, continued under Constantine and his successors; A. H. M. Jones, The Later Roman Empire, 284–602: A Social, Economic, and Administrative Survey (2 vols.; Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1964) 1.93 (with comments on Constantine’s personal approval of various dedicated cultural competitions and gladiatorial games under the supervision of an imperial priest); G. Bowersock, “Polytheism and Monotheism in Arabia and the Three Palestines,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 51 (1997) 1–10; Ramsay MacMullen, Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth through Eighth Centuries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997) 34–39, on the cult of the Christian Roman emperor. The point about the (robust) Constantinian imperial cult is that even the man who convened and oversaw the Council of Nicea was perfectly happy—as were his bishops—to regard himself, and to be regarded, as endowed with numen, in some special way “divine.”

28 Simon R. F. Price, Rituals and Power: The Roman Imperial Cult in Asia Minor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) 213, holds that the imperial cult enacted a respectful façon de parler; Ittai Gradel, Emperor Worship and Roman Religion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), urges that these ancients be taken at their word: the emperor was divine.

29 As Whitmarsh, Battling the Gods, 149, seems to: “Kings are not gods: they die.” Far from being a disqualification, death facilitated deification: cf., e.g., G. E. M. de Ste. Croix, “Why were the Early Christians Persecuted?” Past & Present 26 (1963) 6–38, at 10.

30 Eusebius, Vit. Const. 1.1-5. As late as the 5th cent., Constantine was venerated in Constantinople “as a god”; Philostorgius, HE 2.16. On the complications of imperial divinity in the Christian era, Jonathan Bardhill, Constantine: Divine Emperor of the Christian Golden Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); for the continuing numen of Christian emperors, Maijastina Kahlos, “The Emperor’s New Images: How to Honour the Emperor in the Christian Roman Empire?” in Emperors and the Divine: Rome and Its Influence (ed. M. Kahlos; Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, 2016) 119–38.

31 Note, too, Philo’s cautious remark on the divinity of rulers “who, say the poets, are of the same seed as the gods,” QE 2.5, the same passage referenced above and in n. 18.

32 Further on “power,” divinity, and ruler cults, see Litwa, Being Transformed, 47–50.

33 See Josephus, Ant. 15.328–330 and 16.157–159 for Josephus’s disapproving account of these honors that Herod lavished on the emperor (and, perhaps, wished for himself). Monika Bernett, “Der Kaiserkult in Judäa unter Herodischer und Römischer Herrschaft,” in Jewish Identity in the Greco-Roman World (ed. Jörg Frey, Daniel R. Schwartz and Stephanie Gripentrog; Leiden: Brill 2007) 205–53, examines the cult within its 1st-cent. BCE/CE political context, distinguishing Herod’s Hellenistic-style politics from Jewish tradition. She conjectures that Herod’s elaborate building program at Jewish sites (Hebron, Mamre, and especially, spectacularly, in Jerusalem) deliberately offset his imperial-pagan one, 227.

34 On which, E. P. Sanders, Judaism: Practice and Belief (Philadelphia: Trinity Press International 1992) 15–20. Cultic etiquette vis-à-vis the emperor, colliding with the Jewish god’s monopoly in Jerusalem, turned Pilate’s installation of imperial shields when visiting the city into a notable diplomatic gaffe: Philo, Legat. 299–305; Josephus, J.W. 2.169–174. On Caligula’s efforts to forcibly introduce the imperial cult of Zeus/Gaius in Jerusalem, Philo, Legat.; Josephus, J.W. 2.203 and Ant. 18.305–307.

35 But cf. Josephus, C. Ap. 2.77, who maintains that Jews covered these expenses. As Miriam Pucci ben Zeev points out, “Philo and Josephus may simply be viewing the matter from different angles, if the cost … was actually defrayed out of the provincial taxes”; Jewish Rights in the Roman World (Texts and Studies in Ancient Judaism 74; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1998) 472; on Jews and the imperial cult, 471–81. See also below, n. 43, on pagan “god-fearing.”

36 Whitmarsh, Battling the Gods, 192, seems confused on this point: he states that sacrifices were offered to Nero in Jerusalem. They were not.

37 I will consider here material drawn from only six of the seven undisputed epistles. Philemon— basically a memo about the return of a runaway slave—is irrelevant to our topic. See J. Albert Harrill, Paul the Apostle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2012) 18.

38 1 Cor 8:5, ὥσπερ εἰσὶν θεοὶ πολλοὶ καὶ κύριοι πολλοί: note the indicative mood of the verb. On gods as “lords,” 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; though, as Harrill points out, “kyrios” also functioned regularly as a term of respectful address to any social superior, human or divine; Paul the Apostle, 88.

39 Thus Philo, as we have seen, Opif. 7.27. For a clear pagan statement of this common idea, Sallustius, Concerning the Gods and the Universe (ed. and trans. Arthur Darby Nock; Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1966) 6–7; for an earlier Christian statement, Origen, On First Principles (2 vols., ed. and trans. John Behr; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017) 1.7; 2.9.3–8. Litwa, Being Transformed, 154–57, discusses classical sources on celestial divinity and pneuma.

40 Are the ἄρχοντες of 1 Cor 2.8, qua cosmic powers, responsible for Christ’s crucifixion? In Constructing Jesus: Memory, Imagination, and History (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2010), building a case for Paul’s naming the Romans as Jesus’s executioners, Dale C. Allison Jr. refutes this reading at length, citing much supporting secondary literature, 395–98, esp. 396 n. 41; and Rom 13:3 clearly refers to human governments. Nonetheless, those entities currently combatting Paul, soon to be overwhelmed by the victorious Christ, are clearly super-or nonhuman powers, interpreted as such by an early deutero-Pauline pseudepigraph, Eph 6:12: “For our conflict is not against blood and flesh [i.e., human opponents], but against the principalities, against the powers, against the cosmic rulers of the present darkness, against evil pneumatic beings in the heavens” (ὅτι οὐκ ἔστιν ἡμῖν ἡ πάλη πρὸς αἷμα καὶ σάρκα, αλλὰ πρὸς τὰς αρχάς, πρὸς τὰς ἐξουσίας, πρὸς τοὺς κοσμοκράτορας τοῦ σκότους τούτου, πρὸς τὰ πνευματικὰ τῆς πονηρίας ἐν τοῖς ἐπουρανίοις). Planetary “rulers” cohere with this cosmos. For definitions of ἀρχή, ἐξουσία, and δύναμις as independent cosmic forces (that is, “gods”), see BDAG; for discussion, Litwa, Being Transformed, 177–79.

41 For two recent studies repatriating Jesus and the later traditions about him to their native (thus, foreign-feeling) 1st-cent. context of contesting spirits, demonic possession, and mortiferous impurities, see Giovanni B. Bazzana, Having the Spirit of Christ: Spirit Possession and Exorcism in the Early Christ Groups (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020) 1–101; and Matthew Thiessen, Jesus and the Forces of Death: The Gospels’ Portrayal of Ritual Impurity within First-Century Judaism (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2020).

42 “Easter faith may have been born after the crucifixion, but it was conceived before. Schweitzer saw the truth: the ‘resurrection experiences’ are ‘intelligible’ only if they were ‘based upon the expectation of the resurrection, and this again as based on references of Jesus to the resurrection.’ Without antecedent expectation of the imminent resurrection of the dead in general, there would have been no proclamation of the resurrection of Jesus in particular”; Allison, Constructing Jesus, 59, citing n. 129 to Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001 [orig. 1906]) 343.

43 The centurion Cornelius, fictive or not, provides a ready example (φοβούμενος τὸν θεὸν; Acts 10:22); cf. Juvenal’s metuens Sabbata, above, n. 4. Confusion still characterizes scholarly references to “god-fearers.” These pagans were not “halfway” converts, nor had they renounced idolatry, nor did they represent some formalized category of adherents. They were ad hoc, voluntary Judaizers: non-Jews who assumed some interest (to some degree or other) in Jewish practices; active pagans who added the god of Israel (to whatever extent) to their native pantheons. For a review of the inscriptional evidence, beyond the studies of Williams and of van der Horst cited above, n. 13, see also Irina Levinskaya, The Book of Acts in Its Diaspora Setting (BAFCS 5; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996) 51–82. Emphasizing such persons’ continuing “paganism,” Paula Fredriksen, “If It Looks Like a Duck, and It Quacks Like a Duck … : On Not Giving up the Godfearers,” in A Most Reliable Witness: Essays in Honor of Ross Shepard Kraemer (ed. Susan Ashbrook Harvey et al.; BJS 358; Providence, RI: Brown Judaic Studies, 2016) 25–34; eadem, Paul, 54–60, 73–77.

44 A brief sample: At the End, the nations will stream to Jerusalem and worship together with Israel (Isa 2:2–4); they will together eat on the Temple Mount the feast that God will prepare (Isa 25:6). Gentiles will accompany Jews at the ingathering (Zech 8:23); they will themselves carry exiles back to Jerusalem (Pss. Sol. 7:31–41). Gentiles will bury their idols and direct their sight to uprightness (1 En. 91:14). Many nations will come from afar to the name of the Lord God, bearing gifts (Tob 13:11), and, after the temple is rebuilt, all the nations will turn in fear to the Lord, and bury their idols (14.5–6). Once God restores Jerusalem, “all who are on the earth” will know that he is the Lord God (Sir 36:11–17). At the coming of the Great King, the nations will bend knee to God (Sib Or 3:616), going to the Temple, they will renounce their idols (715–24), and from every land they will bring incense and gifts to the Temple of the great god (772). For a review of these traditions—and an appropriate refusal to attempt to systematize them—see Terence L. Donaldson, Judaism and the Gentiles: Jewish Patterns of Universalism (to 135 CE) (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2007).

45 Matthew Thiessen, Paul and the Gentile Problem (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), argues not only that Paul was a strict constructionist on the timing of covenantal circumcision (that is, on the eighth day of the male infant’s life, cf. Phil 3:5), but also that Paul was against proselyte circumcision, not because he thought that gentiles should not “become” Jews, but because he thought that gentiles could not become Jews: only spirit, not “flesh” (the site of circumcision) adequately altered gentile “nature”; 15, 117 n. 3.

46 Condemnations of pagan worship abound in Jewish literature (though Deut 4:19 allots worship of celestial bodies, not of their images, to the nations); but in the normal course of events, absent apocalyptic commitments, “all the peoples walk, each in the name of its god” (Mic 4:5). The insistence that all other peoples will acknowledge the monarchy of Israel’s god characterizes (only) end-time visions, an apocalyptic expectation that informs the improvisations of the early Christ-movement’s “policy” toward incorporating non-Jews; see Fredriksen, Paul, 30–31, 73–93.

47 On fear of heaven as the fundamental reason for pagan hostility both toward Jewish apostles and toward Christ-following gentiles, see Martin Goodman, “Galatians 6:12 on Circumcision and Persecution,” in From Strength to Strength (ed. Satlow), 275–80. That “neglect of the traditional observances” offended “against the gods and therefore against the state” accounted for this hostility was seen already by de Ste Croix, “Why Were The Early Christians Persecuted?,” 32–33. This diaspora urban context of angry and anxious pagans (human and divine) and vulnerable resident Jewish communities accounts for Paul’s experience with “persecution,” both giving and getting: Fredriksen, Paul, 61–93.

48 On Paul and pneuma (which is constituted of fine “matter,” not of not matter), esp. Troels Engberg-Pedersen, Cosmology and Self in the Apostle Paul: The Material Spirit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

49 For Paul’s views on bodily (though not fleshly) redemption, see esp. Thiessen, Paul and the Gentile Problem, 129–60. On Christ’s god-form preceding his slave-form, see Fredriksen, Paul, 133–41; see, too, Paul Holloway’s comments on this passage in his Philippians (Hermeneia; Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2017) 114–24.

50 For two recent and generative redescriptions of “spirit” in Paul’s letters, see esp. Bazzana, Spirit, 103–205, interpreting Paul’s language and these performative phenomena by appeal to cross-cultural studies of spirit-possession; and Jennifer Eyl, Signs, Wonders, and Gifts (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), situating such taxonomies of empowerment within their broader Mediterranean context of divine/human reciprocity and allegiance (pistis).

51 For spirit-infused ἔθνη—not the “church” in general—as καινὴ κτίσις (“new creation”), Gal 6:15, 2 Cor 5:17; this despite sinful gentile nature (φύσις) (Gal 1:15, cf. Rom 11:24 the ἔθνη grafted into the eschatological olive tree παρὰ φύσιν [“against (their) nature”]). On Christ as Abraham’s “seed,” Gal 3:16; pneumatic adoption and inheritance, Gal 4:4–7, cf. Rom 8 passim. On πνεῦμα’s enabling ex-pagans to “fulfill the Law,” Gal 5:14, cf. Rom 13:8–10. On pneumatic adoption, as opposed to fleshly circumcision, Thiessen, Paul and the Gentile Problem, 129–60; Fredriksen, “How Jewish is God?” 205–9. On the ethnic specificity of Paul’s ethics, eadem, “Judaizing the Nations: The Ritual Demands of Paul’s Gospel,” NTS 56 (2010) 232–52; also Stephen L. Young, “Ethnic Ethics: Paul’s Eschatological Myth of Jewish Sin,” NTS 2022 (forthcoming).

52 Christ’s followers call down his spirit when they are assembled. ᾽επικαλούμαι, the middle voice form of ἐπικαλέω (“to call upon”) is extremely common in “magical” adjuration, used to summon the god; see Fredriksen, Paul, 238–39 n. 15. On the “performance” of such spirit-possession, see Bazzana, Spirit, 167–205. Empowerment by πνεῦμα, both that of the apostles and, eventually, of their hearers (the Jews first and also the Greeks), should not be underestimated as a cause of this movement’s successes: Fredriksen, Paul, 145–48 and notes; Eyl, Signs, Wonders, esp. 87–169, detailing divinatory “taxonomies” and healings.

53 On the varieties of Jewish messianism, two recent fine studies by Matthew V. Novenson: Christ among the Messiahs: Christ Language in Paul and Messiah Language in Ancient Judaism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), and The Grammar of Messianism: An Ancient Jewish Political Idiom and Its Users (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).

54 Though, as Novenson points out, “manifest diversity” describes even the specific subcategory of “Davidic messiah”: “Paul has a Davidic messiah who dies and rises from the dead (Rom 1:3–4). 4 Ezra has a Davidic messiah who dies but does not rise from the dead (4 Ezra 7:28–9). The Qumran Community Rule has a Davidic messiah who is an accessory to a priestly messiah (1 QS IX, 11). The epistle to the Hebrews has a Davidic messiah who is himself a priestly messiah (Heb 7:11–17). Bavli Sanhedrin even has a Davidic messiah who judges cases by a divinely inspired sense of smell (b. Sanh. 93b). All of these texts represent defensible ancient interpretations of certain biblical house of David texts, but they do not remotely constitute a single model of the Davidic messiah”; Matthew V. Novenson, “The Messiah ben Abraham in Galatians: A Response to Joel Willitts,” Journal for the Study of Paul and His Letters 2 (2012) 163–69, at 165.

55 On reading Rom 1:4 not as Christ’s own resurrection from the dead but as “the resurrection of the dead”—which is what the Greek happens to say (ἐξ ἀναστάσεως νεκρῶν; cf. 1 Cor 15:12–21)— Fredriksen, Paul, 141–45; with thanks to Augustine, Ep. ad Romanos expositio inchoata 5.11; cf. Bazzana, Spirit, 121–24.

56 Even though “messiah” does not appear in these lines, it occurs four times in the lines immediately preceding. As Novenson, Christ among the Messiahs, 146, concludes, “The Davidic messiahship of Jesus is not the point of 1 Cor 15:20–28, but it is axiomatic for the argument.”

57 1 Cor 15:24, “At the End,” Christ descends and “delivers the Kingdom to God the Father, ὅταν καταργήσῃ πᾶσαν ἀρχὴν καὶ πᾶσαν ἐξουσίαν καὶ δύναμιν.”

58 See, too, Rom 8, another collage of bodily transformation, pneumatic adoption, and cosmic conquest; cf. Eph 3:10, 6:12–13. On Phil 2:10 as presuming Christ’s final, cosmic manifestation, Fredriksen, Paul, 133–41. Intriguingly, Paul’s language here (mysteriously) echoes the fetial formula given in Livy, Ab urbe condita 1:32.9–10 where, in a different sort of martial situation, highest gods are invoked together with all other gods, omnes caelestes, vosque, terrestres, vosque, inferni.

59 For Paul’s ideas on pneuma, star-bodies, and sidereal redemption, see esp. Thiessen, Paul and the Gentile Problem, 133–60. Believers will meet the returning Christ in the sublunar “air” (1 Thes 4:17) then, transforming into pneumatic body, they will ascend even higher, to the upper heavens (ἐν οὐρανοῖς, Phil 3:20).

60 So too Larry W. Hurtado, “ ‘Ancient Jewish Monotheism’ in the Hellenistic and Roman Periods,” Journal of Ancient Judaism 4 (2013) 379–400. Note the scare quotes around “ancient Jewish monotheism.” Hurtado acknowledges the difficulties with deploying this term in the ancient context (380–82) but defends its continued use by redefining it, emphasizing behavior rather than “belief.” “Monolatry” in fact defines what his scare quotes signal.

61 No mechanisms were ever in place, before 250 CE, to monitor public cult acts, whether of Jews or of anyone else, including, eventually, gentile Christians. Decius’s initiative to regularize cult for the protection of the battered mid-3rd-cent. empire resulted in an administrative nightmare, and in improvised efforts at certification (libelli): see esp. James B. Rives, “The Decree of Decius and the Religion of the Empire,” JRS 89 (1999) 135–54.

62 Accusations of antisocial behaviors were common coin for interethnic insult, as Isaac’s Invention of Racism details (above, n. 2). Mixing was the rule, not the exception. No less a personage than Rabban Gamaliel—unclothed, one assumes, and in the immediate company of unclothed pagans—frequented the baths at Akko, mAZ 3:4; and, as the canons of the Council of Elvira (c. 300) reveal, Christians, pagans, and Jews of all sorts shared food, sex, public entertainments, and assorted liturgical acts involving various divinities. See, further, Paula Fredriksen and Oded Irshai, “ ‘Include Me Out’: Tertullian, the Rabbis, and the Graeco-Roman City,” in L’identité à travers l’éthique. Nouvelles perspectives sur la formation des identités collectives dans le monde gréco-romain (ed. Katell Berthelot et al.; Turnhout: Brepols, 2015) 117–32.

63 Speaking of post-late antique/pre-Carolingian theological developments, David Brakke observes that “entire classes of lower gods and goddesses had either disappeared or suffered demotion” while “new faces”—human saints—“joined the celestial regions. The once bustling community of diverse daimones settled into a stable two-party system of angels and demons”; David Brakke, “Valentinians and Their Demons: Fate, Seduction, and Deception in the Quest for Virtue,” in From Gnostics to Monastics (ed. D. Brakke, S. J. Davis, and S. Emmel; Leuven: Peeters, 2017) 13–28, at 13.