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
