For his part, Paul does not have
an express theory of the angels of the nations à la Deuteronomy 32:8-9, but one
passage suggests that he probably assumes some such scheme. At the end of Romans
8, Paul imagines a rogues’ gallery of divine beings trying and failing to
hinder himself and his coreligionists, over against the force of god’s love
which ensures the cosmic victory of all the baptized. Paul writes, “I am
certain that neither death nor life nor angels nor rulers nor present things
nor future things nor powers nor height nor depth nor any other creature will
be able to part us from the love of god in Christ Jesus our lord” (Rom
8:38-39). Here “angels” are coordinated with several other, related taxons, in
particular “rulers” (archai) and “powers” (dynameis). This is not
accident. As Emma Tasserman has shown, these and related terms are widely used
in Hellenistic-period Jewish texts (including the Book of the Watchers, Animal
Apocalypse, book of Daniel, and more) for lower ranks of divinities deputized
by the high god to oversee their respective jurisdictions, whether in the sky
or on the earth. When speaking of Jewish texts, we often politely call these
lower ranks of divinities “angels” (rather than “gods”), as Paul himself does
here in Romans 8.
. . .
One suspects that these undone
“rulers and authorities and powers” are precisely the “many gods and many lords”
of 1 Corinthians 8, . . . (Matthew V. Novenson, “The Universal Polytheism
and the Case of the Apostle Paul,” in Paul Within Paganism: Restoring the
Mediterranean Context to the Apostle, ed. Alexander Chantziantoniou, Paula
Fredriksen, and Stephen L. Young [Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2025], 69-70, 71,
emphasis in bold added)
