Gods, kings and benefactors : resisting the ruling power in early Judaism and Paul's polemic against iconic spectacle in Acts 17:16-32

Abstract

Paul's speech on the Areopagus represents the most developed narrative portrayal of Paul's missionary preaching to a gentile audience in the New Testament. As such, it provides indispensable data for interpreting the relationship between Paul's Gospel and the religions of the Roman Empire. This study sets out to interpret the political referents of the Areopagus speech by investigating (1) the relationship between the Hellenistic Jewish icon parody and deified political authority; (2) the hybrid media of gods and kings; and (3) the art of safe speech in Greco-Roman antiquity. Put another way, this study interprets the Areopagus speech's attitude toward empire by investigating its strategies of resistance along with its objects of resistance. New Testament Scholars have long noted the influence of the Isaianic icon parody upon the composition of Paul's speech on the Areopagus. The relationship between Paul's idol polemic and the Hellenistic Jewish icon parody, however, remains poorly understood: when the literary culture of early Judaism re-contextualized Isaiah's polemic amid the hybrid iconography of ruler cults, the referent(s) did not remain static or politically innocuous. This study animates the political dimension of the Hellenistic and Roman Jewish icon parodies' allusive objects of resistance through a detailed analysis of the dynamic relationship between gods and kings in the epigraphic record, the peri basileias literature and the system of benefaction underlying visual honors conferred on gods and kings. The integration of gods and kings in shared cult media and anthropomorphic representation placed the Hellenistic and Roman Jewish icon parodies in a new hermeneutical context one that did not critique religion sensu stricto but simultaneously resisted the iconic spectacle underlying the deification of political authority. In order to classify the icon parody as a type of Jewish resistance literature, a correlative concern of this study is to interpret the Hellenistic- and Roman-Jewish icon parodies within the broader contours of Jewish literary resistance movements that sought to polemically and apologetically defend Jewish conceptions of monotheism, monarchy and representation. In contrast to scholars who appeal to synthetic rhetorical devices to discern so-to-speak "antiimperial rhetoric" in the New Testament, this study suggests that Luke's composition of the Areopagus speech reflects a stronger relationship with the Wisdom of Solomon's polemic against gods and kings (Wis 13:1-15:19) than has heretofore been recognized, along with Greco-Roman orators' conviction that critiquing the ruling power with blunt speech (????????) was both unacceptable and artless, especially in contexts where the speaker's safety was in doubt. The conclusion of this study suggests descriptors for the political attitude of the Areopagus speech and presents Paul's polemic against idols as an alter-cultural rather than antiimperial confrontation with the philosophy of religion. This confrontation has implications for gods, kings and benefactors, whose visual honors are incompatible with the worship of the one God incarnated in Israel's crucified Messiah