Note: From Paul and Imperial Divine Honors (Eerdmans 2024). Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Citations have been omitted.
This book has two main goals. The first is to provide contextual reconstructions of imperial divine honors (more commonly known in New Testament circles as “imperial cult”) in the three cities in mainland Greece in which Paul established Christian churches and to which he composed letters: Philippi, Thessalonica and Corinth. By “contextual,” I mean using the latest Philippian, Thessalonian and Corinthian archaeological, epigraphic, numismatic (which means the study of coins) and statuary evidence as well as the ancient literary record (when such literature is available) to reconstruct for which Julio-Claudians Philippi, Thessalonica and Corinth established divine honors; who in these communities administered them and how and when these cities offered such honors. This book’s second goal is to bring these contextual reconstructions to bear on the relationships of early Christians in the cities in question with imperial divine honors, which in my estimation differed from city to city. My prayer is that by this book’s end, the reader will see that imperial divine honors were embedded into the public fabric of Philippi, Thessalonica and Corinth, what we today would call the social, political, economic and religious spheres of these cities, and that any suffering that early Christians experienced was not due to these honors alone but was for a more complex reason, the overturning of Greco-Roman pagan culture….
Interpreting imperial divine honors like Paul’s letters brings me to this book’s second and final goal: to use these contextual profiles of imperial divine honors in Philippi, Thessalonica and Corinth to reconstruct what relationship, if any, Paul and the earliest Christians in these cities had with the honors in question. The need for such an approach is evident from a survey of scholarship on this topic. New Testament scholars often use divine honors for Julio-Claudians to interpret various passages and to reconstruct the social, political and religious backgrounds of I-II Thessalonians, Philippians and mostly I Corinthians. However, many interpreters do so inappropriately and oftentimes incorrectly. Frequently, they wrongly assume the presence of a uniform centrally controlled Julio-Claudian “imperial cult” in the Roman Empire, and some scholars even contend that emperors desired, even demanded, their subjects sacrifice to them.
One major consequence of this incorrect presumption is that many New Testament scholars fail to consider the diversity of grants of divine honors for Julio-Claudians and that they all have specific contexts, as is evident in the two examples from Gythium and Rome. To this end, interpreters tend to generalize evidence for these honors, taking one grant of them for one Julio-Claudian or even one source attesting to such honors from one city and using it as the canon by which to judge all others. In the process, scholars often make broad conjectures about imperial divine honors. One of the commonest is that “the imperial cult” was the fastest-growing religion in the Roman Empire, or that all pagans in Rome’s sphere of influence believed the reigning emperor was a god. Some New Testament scholars attempt a degree of contextualization of the honors in question most often by noting that grants of them were diverse. This contextualization, however, is often limited to an emperor-by-emperor presentation of select evidence “demonstrating” that each emperor received divine honors, which in their minds justifies a generalized use of the data in question as an interpretive lens to read Paul’s letters. While more appropriate, this approach generalizes too much, because it still assumes that if one city offered divine honors to one Julio-Claudian, then all cities did. Finally, because of this flawed approach to imperial divine honors, some scholars conclude that Paul, his converts or both singled out and opposed these honors sometimes clandestinely, at other times openly. One prominent New Testament interpreter has coined the saying that has become axiomatic not only in the academy but also in today’s church, “Jesus is Lord; Caesar is not.” The underlying assumption is that early Christianity resisted and opposed an empire that, and an emperor who, promoted and demanded its, and his, subjects to worship the reigning monarch.
As we shall see, the actual evidence for imperial divine honors in Philippi, Thessalonica and Corinth – inscriptions, coins, statues, archaeological finds and in a few cases literary testimony – paints a different, more complex picture than the one just described. The data that I have gathered and present in the following chapters demonstrate the contextual nature of such honors in these cities and that Philippi, Thessalonica and Corinth established divine honors in keeping with their own unique traditions. Moreover, the evidence in question shows that local leaders of these cities made the conscious decision to interweave divine honors for Julio-Claudians into the public fabric of their communities in ways that made them inseparable from the spheres that today we would call political, religious, economic and social. For this reason, one cannot isolate such honors, much less claim that imperial divine honors are the main opponent for early Christianity in Philippi, Thessalonica and Corinth. As will be evident, while these honors were well known to Paul and his converts in those cities, their relationship to early Christianity varied from city to city because each community and each group of Christians in these cities were unique.
D. Clint Burnett, visiting scholar, Boston College
