At this year’s Society of Biblical Literature meeting, I had the privilege of responding to Alexander Chantziantoniou’s paper, The Politics of Paul’s Image Parodies: Material Epiphany, Human–Divine Reciprocity, and Social Power, which received the Paul J. Achtemeier Award for New Testament Scholarship. It’s a richly argued, theoretically sophisticated work that reframes Paul’s polemic against “idols” in striking ways.
(You get it now 😊 What follows is my own interpretation of the discussion. I’m not speaking for the author, and I would never share unpublished material in detail. These reflections aim to capture the themes and questions raised—not direct quotations or definitive summaries.)
What’s at Stake in the Paper?
Chantziantoniou challenges the old binary of Judaism versus “paganism” and situates Paul squarely within the politics of images in the ancient Mediterranean world. His argument unfolds around three key ideas:
Material Epiphany
Cult images were not inert symbols; they were technologies of divine presence—“material epiphanies” that made gods locally accessible.
Human–Divine Reciprocity
Images mediated gift exchange between mortals and gods, sustaining a cycle of benefaction and obligation.
Social Power
Control over images meant control over divine presence. To abduct, mutilate, or destroy an image was to disrupt reciprocity and wield political power.
On this reading, Paul participates in these dynamics through discourse. His parodies of gentile images—rendering them mute, lifeless, and powerless—function as symbolic acts of “godnapping,” “mutilation,” and “destruction.” Words do what weapons cannot: they absence the gods of others and reconfigure social reality for his communities.
My Reflections: Literary Strategy over Cultic Realism
I find this approach compelling, especially its insistence on embedding Paul within Mediterranean image politics. But I want to nuance the frame. While the paper emphasizes ritual and material epiphany, I see Paul’s letters operating primarily in a literary and philosophical register.
Paul’s parodies resonate with a broader discursive tradition of satire and critique—think Heraclitus mocking prayers to walls, Horace’s Priapus lamenting his fate as a garden god, or Lucian ridiculing the hollow interiors of Phidias’s statues. These gestures do not aim to disable gods through ritual nullification; they function as rhetorical strategies to discredit rival intellectual frameworks.
In this sense, Paul’s parody of images is a trope, not a cultic act. It positions him within a competitive field of ideas, aligning him with Stoic and Cynic critiques of popular religion. The idol becomes a figure of thought—a proxy for philosophical contestation—rather than a target of ritual violence.
Why This Matters
Reading Paul as a rhetorical actor rather than a cultic iconoclast opens new interpretive horizons. It shifts the conversation from static theological categories to dynamic strategies of persuasion, situating Paul within the vibrant interplay of rhetoric, philosophy, and cultural politics in the ancient Mediterranean.
Again, these are my own reflections on the themes raised in the session. The debate is ongoing, and that’s a good thing. Questioning our assumptions—about images, power, and the politics of parody—keeps the field alive and intellectually honest.
Does it matter to anyone but scholars?