That Paul and other Jews and then
later Christians were polytheists, that is, that they believed in the existence
of more than one god even as they almost universally rejected the worship of
gods other than the God of Israel, remains a controversial claim in some
circles. It should not be. Such was the shared theology of the ancient
Mediterranean world. After all, the central Jewish Scriptures that we call the
Pentateuch frequently refer to other gods. In his contest with Pharaoh, Yhwh
strikes down the firstborn animals and humans of Egypt of Egypt in a sobering
execution of his judgment on the Egyptian gods (Exod 12:12). As God leads
Israel out of Egypt, Moses and the Israelites hymn this question: “Yhwh, who is
like you among the gods [Hebrew, elim; Greek, theoi]?” (Exod
15:11). In the wilderness, Jethro declares that Yhwh is greater than all the
gods (Exod 18:11: Elohim/theoi) and Moses claims that Israel’s god is
the “God of gods and Lord of lords” (Deut 10:17), asserting that this God
divides the nations according to the numbers of the gods (Deut 32:8).
Israel’s god is the Supreme God,
reigning over all other gods who necessarily must exist if Israel’s god is to
reign over them (cf. Ps 82:1; 95:3; 96:4; 97:7).
The Pentateuch and other sacred
Jewish texts also refer to a group of lower deities as the sons of God (bene
ha-elohim/hoi huioi tou theou: Gen 6:2-4; Job 1:6; 2:1; 38:7; and bene
elim/huoi theou: Ps 29:1 [LXX 28:1]; 89:7 [LXX 88:7]). Like their
neighbors, ancient Israelites were polytheistic even as many of them devoted
themselves to the worship of one God. Believing in the existence of multiple
divine beings was not the same as devotion to or worship of them. I will not
rehash all the evidence in later periods of Judaism, which is incontrovertible
to all but the most obstinate modern monotheists. But I briefly point to this
small amount of important data to serve as a launching pad for thinking about
Paul’s mission to gentiles. The terminology differs—gods, sons of God, angels,
even daimonian—but the genus remains the same: Divine beings. (Matthew
Thiessen, “Paul among the Sons of God,” in Paul Within Paganism: Restoring
the Mediterranean Context to the Apostle, ed. Alexander Chantziantoniou,
Paula Fredriksen, and Stephen L. Young [Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2025], 95-96)
