Chapter 2 (The Biblical Portrayal of Transgressive Worship): In this chapter, I focus on the texts of the Hebrew Bible. I argue that these texts, when they picture the worship of other gods or the reverence of their icons, consistently assume that such worship is sincere (or, at the very least, do not question its sincerity).

Chapter 7 (Conclusion): In this chapter, I summarize the major finding of the book – that a transition took place around the third century BCE in the Israelite/Jewish portrayal of pagan worship – and then seek to offer a causal explanation for it. I propose a number of potential causes, but suggest that the most important among them was a major reduction in the Jews’ own attraction to the worship of other gods – a lack of attraction that they then projected onto those engaged in such worship.

Chapter 5 (Sex and the Bad Faith Argument): In this chapter, I focus on the shifting relationship that ancient authors imagined between sex and the worship of other gods. Within the Hebrew Bible, I argue, sex precedes such “transgressive” worship and leads to it causally, whereas in the literature of the late Second Temple and tannaitic periods pagan worship precedes sex and is performed only as a means to achieve sex.

In September 1522, Martin Luther published his German translation of the New Testament. Each of the four Gospels opened with a woodcut initial depicting its apostle seated with a codex. Each apostle was identified by his symbol; otherwise, Matthew, Mark (lion), and Luke (ox) might have been taken for humanists in their studies, small cramped spaces with narrow windows. Lucas Cranach depicted Matthew (Figure 28), Mark, and Luke each holding a stylus, seated at a desk writing in the codex; Matthew and Mark are writing at the bottom of the right-hand page of a codex. John (Figure 29) was significantly different: seated not at a desk, not in a study, but outdoors in a landscape framed by a medieval town and mountains. He, too, held a stylus, but on a page already lined past his hand, a specific place in what was so visibly a complete text. Alone among the four, John was depicted in apostolic robes.

In this chapter, I examine Moses Maimonides’ conception of worship, concentrating on two questions: (1) On what grounds is a being worthy of worship? and (2) How is worship enacted? Concerning (1), I begin with Maimonides’ objects of false worship, aka idolatry, which are not only material but paradigmatically the intellects that were taken to be the ultimate causes of change in the world. Indeed thinking of God Himself as an intellect is the height of anthropomorphism and idolatry for Maimonides. Instead, the deity is worship-worthy as the unknowable necessarily existent being in virtue of itself on which the existence of everything else is causally dependent. Our attitude of radical contingency on this being is the ultimate grounds for His worship. Addressing (2), I argue that what enacts Maimonidean worship are not bodily acts but totally devoted, constant intellectual activities to achieve the humanly possible understanding of God and the natural world. Worship is not distinct from intellectual activity but a manner of engaging in it – worshippingly – and a way of life that embraces everything the worshipper does. Finally, I argue that idolatrous or false worship really consists in activities of the mind directed toward the wrong beings on which we are not contingent – and specifically ourselves and our own intellects.

The Bible and religious tradition imply that 1. It is wrong to worship anything other than God, and 2. There is no good excuse for worshipping anything other than God. One question (1) raises is, wrong for whom? Jews and Christians, certainly. I suggest that there is no clear case that idolatry is a sin for Gentile pagans in the Hebrew Scriptures. Christian belief that (1) applies to pagans stems from New Testament texts and philosophy. I consider some broadly philosophical arguments that all idolatry is wrong, no matter by whom. I then argue that (2) rests inter alia on a robust doctrine of “general revelation,” and suggest some of what must go into that doctrine if it is to support (2).

Various strands of religious thought distinguish veneration from worship. According to these traditions, believers ought to worship God alone. To worship anything else, they say, is idolatry. Yet many of these same believers also claim to venerate – but not worship – saints, angels, images, relics, tombs, and even each other. What’s the difference? Tim Bayne and Yujin Nagasawa (: 302) are correct that “it seems to be extremely difficult to distinguish veneration from worship.” Many have argued throughout history that veneration collapses into worship and that those who venerate saints or icons are guilty of idolatry. In this essay, we distinguish worship from veneration in two stages. First, we give a formal account of their difference. Drawing from St. John of Damascus (c. 675–749 AD), we argue that worship is a determinate of the determinable veneration. Second, we give more substantive accounts of both that explain both their differences and similarities. Drawing again from St. John, we argue that acts of veneration and worship signify subordination. Their difference, however, lies in the fact that worship alone requires absolute subordination.

Like religious leaders in any period, the prophets functioned within a religious world that was broader and more diverse than a surface reading might suggest. In “The Book of Isaiah in the History of Israelite Religion,” Christopher B. Hays analyzes various religiohistorical aspects of the book, such as the role of writing and symbolic action; the supernatural images of the divine throne room; the book’s role in developing ideas about death and afterlife; its central role in the formulation of biblical monotheism, including its polemics against idols; and its relationship to the Jerusalem Temple and its priests.

Chapter 6 examines the ‘rediscovery’ of the Buddha when, during the ‘Age of Discovery’ in the sixteenth century, accounts from Catholic missionaries in China and Japan began to appear in Europe. Despite the inclination of the Jesuit missionaries to view all Asian idolatry as inspired by the Devil, they were instrumental in discerning that, while there were many idols referred to by many names, they were only local variations of a single figure: many idols, and many gods, but only one man – the Buddha. That said, it was a time of many imaginings, of multiple confusions, and numerous blind alleys – of the Hindu understanding of the Buddha as an incarnation of Vishnu, of the Buddha as the equivalent of the patriarch Noah or the gods Mercury, Wod, and Oden, and of the African origins of the Buddha – as he was variously read into fanciful eighteenth-century readings of the origin of all religions in the time of Noah and the universal Flood.

This chapter argues that the indictment of idolatry and immorality in Romans 1:18–32 is not limited to gentile sins but instead, building on biblical prophetic declarations that Israel has effectively “gentilized,” systematically includes Israel as having broken the two great commands by engaging in the behaviors condemned throughout the passage, effectively breaking down any distinction between Israel and the nations. The first chapter of Romans thereby sets up the rhetorical shift in Rom 2, which argues that Jews and gentiles alike are subject to God’s impartial judgment.

This chapter explores transformations in the embodiment of the sacred and the profane through the study of a series of objects that emerged from belief systems of the Native peoples, such as cemis, or Europeans, such as chalices, and which were then resignified during colonial encounters. Surveying a wide range of historical and geographical contexts, including the early stages of European colonization of the islands of the Caribbean and later attempts at the colonization of what is now the US Southwest, this essay explores how the resignification of objects, which transition from sacred to profane depending on the cultural context they inhabit, points to an ongoing questioning of the hierarchical nature of spiritual and religious discourses.