The Politics of Paul’s Image Parodies: Material Epiphany, Human-Divine Reciprocity and Social Power
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.042 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".