Did Paul concede the divinity of
‘things called gods’ visible in the sky or, more importantly for this thesis,
made visible on the earth via their images (1 Cor 8.5)? Or is it possible, at
least, that his gentiles took him to? Paul’s later remark that those who sacrifice
to an ‘image’ (εἴδωλον) in fact sacrifice ‘to daimons and not to god’
(δαιμονίοις καὶ οὐ θεῷ) is often thought to suggest otherwise (10.19–20). But
Matthew Pawlak has convincingly argued that λεγόμενος rarely signals sarcasm in
postclassical Greek, even in parodical texts. He has also argued,
convincingly again, that Paul’s use of λεγόμενος in 1 Cor 8.5 can only be taken
to be counterfactually sarcastic (implying that gods so called are not
gods in fact) if it is first assumed that Paul was a ‘monotheist’. In
contrast, if Paul is understood instead to grant the existence of other gods—as
he does in our text (‘in fact, there are many gods and many lords’, ὥσπερ εἰσὶν
θεοὶ πολλοὶ καὶ κύριοι πολλοί)–then his use of λεγόμενος should be taken
instead to signal, at best, an ‘unironic concession’ of the presence of gentile
gods vis-à-vis their images, or, at worst, an instance of ‘non-counterfactual
sarcasm’ that reconfigures the power of gentile gods, whom he nevertheless
concedes to be present vis-à-vis their images. (Alexander Chantziantoniou, “Paul
and the Politics of Idolatry: Ancient Mediterranean Cult Images and Iconic Ritual
in the Letters of Paul” [PhD Dissertation; University of Cambridge,
September 2023], 143)
This last point is made most
fully and most provocatively in 1 Cor 8.1–11.1. As we have seen, Paul
acknowledges the existence of ‘many gods and many lords’ as things in the sky
or things on the earth that others call gods, but, he qualifies, ‘for us
(ἡμῖν) there is one god . . . and one lord’ (8.5–6). (Alexander
Chantziantoniou, “Paul
and the Politics of Idolatry: Ancient Mediterranean Cult Images and Iconic Ritual
in the Letters of Paul” [PhD Dissertation; University of Cambridge,
September 2023], 181)
The reference to Pawlak is:
Matthew Pawlak, “How
to Be Sarcastic in Greek: Typical Means of Signaling Sarcasm in the New Testament
and Lucian,” HUMOR 32, no. 4 (August 27, 2019): 548-49, 560-61
