Abstract Early Jewish parodies of ancient Mediterranean cult images have long been taken as a point of cat- egorical difference between Jews and non-Jews. The basic logic can be stated with maximal brevity: Jews were aniconic, indeed ‘anti-idolic’, while Greeks and Romans were iconic. When it comes to the question of so-called idolatry and Jewish polemics against it, Jews were ostensibly unique within the wider world of ancient Mediterranean religion. In this article, I interrogate such claims specifically as they relate to the apostle Paul, as one such Jewish polemicist, who wrote to a predominantly gentile audience well accustomed to image piety and sensitive to its internal politics. I argue that early Jewish image parodies, including Paul’s own, are better understood to be situated within an iconopolitical strategy of cultural production that was otherwise common among Greeks and Romans, no less than Jews. By caricaturing cult images as non-existent, disabled or dead, it is my contention that Paul operated within and innovated upon a widespread tradition of ancient Mediterranean image politics, which configured social power relations between humans and their gods by abducting, mutilating or destroying their images, and that Paul's parodies were intelligible and recognisable as such among his gentile followers. After outlining the comparative problems of ‘idolatry’, I draw from classical and art-historical scholarship to theorise the epiphanic and reciprocal dynamics of images in ancient Mediterranean religion, and then redescribe Jewish image parodies in Paul’s letters as operating within these same dynamics, even while polemicising against them.
Alexander Chantziantoniou (Tue,) studied this question.