Thursday, November 24, 2022

Stanley E. Porter on Romans 1:23

  

. . . as a result of their foolishness, Paul says, these humans ‘exchanged’ the glory of the ‘incorruptible’ God for the corruptible likeness of images of humanity and birds and four-footed creatures and other ground creatures such as reptiles and snakes (note paratactic conjunction) (Rom. 1.23). Paul says that they exchanged actual glory for the incorruptible God for the ‘likeness’ of an ‘image’ (Rom. 8.29; 13.4; and elsewhere), that is, they exchanged something substantial for something insubstantial and several times removed from reality (it is only a likeness). The exchange was for images of ‘corrupt’ humans (the lexeme ‘corrupt’ is the unprefixed form of ‘incorrupt’), ‘birds’ (only time used in Paul), ‘four-footed creatures’ (only time used in Paul; cf. Acts 10.12; 11.6), and ‘reptiles’. These animal images draw upon the kinds of images typical in pagan worship that were created to capture the characteristics of the divine, with the last set perhaps drawing upon the use of animals in Egyptian religion that may have been imported to Rome (see Pearson 2001: 161-81). Regardless of their origins or widespread use, the positive image of God is contrasted with the benighted response of humanity that has fallen victim to substituting for the grandeur of God the ridiculous and laughable images of slithering snakes and other earth-bound creatures. This theological inversion sets the stage for human behavior in the second set of images [in Rom 1:24-27]. (Stanley E. Porter, The Letter to the Romans: A Linguistic and Literary Commentary [New Testament Monographs 37; Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2015], 66)