They Are Not Gods! Jewish and Christian Idol Polemic and Greco-Roman Use of Cult Statues

Excerpt: One set of trademark convictions of early Judaism and Christianity includes their aniconic tradition, monotheistic commitment, and polemic against idols. In the late second or early third century c .e ., for example, Christian apologist Minucius Felix mocked pagan idol worship with these words: “When does the god come into being? The image is cast, hammered, or sculpted; it is not yet a god. It is soldered, put together, and erected; it is still not a god. It is adorned, consecrated, prayed to—and now, finally, it is a god once man has willed it so and dedicated it” (see Oct. 22.5). The Christian haranguing of idolatry goes back to the Jewish Scriptures, most notably Jeremiah, Isaiah, and the Psalms.2 Similar polemical statements can be found in Habakkuk (2:18-20). This tradition is expanded in early Jewish texts such as Bel and the Dragon, Wisdom of Solomon, Apocalypse o f Abraham, the tractates of Philo, and, most extensively, the Epistle of Jeremiah.3 We find idol polemic in the NT in places such as Acts 19:26 and Rev 9:20.4 The wider idea that stands behind almost all Jewish and Christian idol-polemic texts is this: Do not worship statues, because they are not gods! (So Jer 16:20: “Can people make for themselves gods? Yes, but they are not gods!”; cf. Isa 37:19; Josephus A.J. 10.4.1 §50; Epistle of Jeremiah passim). According to this logic, idols should not be worshiped because they are handmade works; they are creations, not creators. As far as the early Jews and Christians were concerned, pagans worshiped blocks of metal, stone, and wood, and this was improper because such materials could never amount to a real “god.

The Truth about Parmenides\u27 Doxa

In a recent article in this journal, Néstor-Luis Cordero has offered an interesting account of how scholars may have been misreading Parmenides\u27 poem for centuries, as well as some provocative suggestions on how to correct that misreading. He calls into question the prevalent notion of the Doxa as Parmenides\u27 account of the phenomenal world, and he challenges the standard arrangement of the fragments that assigns lines featuring \u27physical\u27 topics to that portion of the poem. The \u27Doxa of Parmenides\u27, if that phrase is understood to imply that Parmenides himself embraced doxai of any kind is, Cordero claims, an imaginary fusion, like Centaurs or Sirens, of two independently legitimate notions. [excerpt

The Myth of the Last Judgment in the Gorgias

In contrast with the standard interpretations of the final myth of judgments in the Gorgias, this article interprets it as a metaphorical way to address the contrast between rhetoric and philosophy. More specifically, the age of Chronos and the age of Zeus are not, according to the author, meant to convey Plato's own views on the afterlife. Rather, they are meant to represent two different attitudes towards life: the rhetorical attitude is exemplified by the age of Chronos, while the philosophical attitude is exemplified by the age of Zeus

Big Data\u27s Other Privacy Problem

Big Data has not one privacy problem, but two. We are accustomed to talking about surveillance of data subjects. But Big Data also enables disconcertingly close surveillance of its users. The questions we ask of Big Data can be intensely revealing, but, paradoxically, protecting subjects\u27 privacy can require spying on users. Big Data is an ideology of technology, used to justify the centralization of information and power in data barons, pushing both subjects and users into a kind of feudal subordination. This short and polemical essay uses the Bloomberg Terminal scandal as a window to illuminate Big Data\u27s other privacy problem

Ways of Saying, Ways of Seeing. Public Images of Teachers (19th-20th Centuries)

The article is organized into three main sections: In the first section, inspired by the work of Martin Jay, I try to show the denigration of vision in historical thinking, suggesting that images are demanding new theoretical and methodological approaches susceptible of elucidation in their own terms. In the second section, I attempt an analytical interpretation of a collection of public images of teachers, dating from the second half of the nineteenth century, in order to show the heuristic potential of this material in the historical treatment of educational matters. Finally in the third section, I outline some trends of historiographical renewal, giving attention to the way images can help to reshape the remembering-imagining and the space-time relationships in the History of Education field