Laudator Temporis Acti

G.W. Bowersock, The Crucible of Islam (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017), pp. 35-37, with notes on pp. 169-170:

It is not easy nowadays to use the word “paganism” in discussing religious beliefs, simply because it has no clear meaning. It is usually defined by what it is not, and in the Graeco-Roman Mediterranean context that meant neither Jewish nor Christian. The word “pagan” (paganus) evokes a Latin word for a rustic or country person, and it is certainly true that many local cults, such as those that worship trees, springs, and other natural features, would explain such a designation. But in Greek the early Christian word for pagan (ethnikos) pointed simply to ethnic or national differences. It was formed from ethnos (nation), a word much like goy in Hebrew, which meant “nation” in the Bible but later changed to designate any non-Jew, and the Septuagint translation of the Bible into Greek naturally facilitated this change. Greek ethnikos was then literally matched by the Latin equivalent gentilis, and both eventually came, like goy, as well as the English Gentile, to designate non-Jews.⁴

Meanwhile, ethnikos in the sense of pagan gave way in later Christian texts to hellēn (Greek) because after Constantine the cultivation of classical Greek culture was generally linked to pagan Greek religion — neither Christian nor Jewish. But hellēn, although an increasingly common word for paganism in later Greek, never wholly lost its connection with Hellenism, and this could be profoundly embarrassing for a Christian like Gregory of Nazianzus, who had been educated in classical Greek learning.⁵ In general, the word “polytheism” is infinitely preferable to paganism because, unlike paganism, it has a precise meaning, which is the worship of many gods.

Surprisingly it took scholars of the modern era a long time to come to the banal realization that pagan cults that were indisputably polytheist often showed a hierarchy of gods, with a supreme god such as Jupiter or Zeus over all. Consequently this realization has inspired a flood of attempts to legitimate something called “pagan monotheism” or even “soft monotheism.”⁶ But no one familiar with Greek cults could possibly imagine that the pre-Christian Greeks were monotheists, even if in later antiquity various unnamed gods were occasionally perceived as parts (merē) of a single god. That is most famously shown in the so-called Tübingen Theosophy, from which one oracle appears on an inscription at Oenoanda in Anatolia.⁷ But such thinking arose from the philosophical reflections of later Platonism, and ideas of this kind shared their roots with Christian theology as it spread throughout the Roman Empire. These ideas may have actually been influenced by Platonism, since paganism and Christianity had much more fruitful interaction than is sometimes imagined. It is hardly a secret that many of the Church Fathers, like Gregory of Nazianzus, were steeped in the works of Plato. The recently fashionable attention to pagan monotheism, traces of which can undoubtedly be found, as the Tübingen Theosophy shows, is limited in its application. Paganism that was polytheist did not die, and it goes without saying that there can be no such absurdity as polytheist monotheism, nor even soft monotheism.

4. Ishay Rosen-Zvi, “Paul and the Invention of the Gentiles,” Jewish Quarterly Review 105 (2015): 1–41. This thorough and important analysis might have been clearer if the author had avoided discussing the issue by reference to the English “Gentile,” which obviously Paul did not use. Rosen-Zvi rightly highlights the sense of ethnos in relation to goy, but Paul’s ethnê, which included barbarians (Rom. 1:14), can be more inclusive than Gentile. Paul sometimes conveys the idea of Gentile by hellēn (Greek), as in Romans 1:16, 2:9, and 2:10.

5. See Gregory of Nazianzus’s indignation over Julian’s appropriation of Greek learning in Orat. 4: A. Kurmann, Gregor von Nazianz, Oratio 4 gegen Julian, Ein Kommentar (Basel: Reinhardt, 1988).

6. Pagan monotheism owes its prominence in current scholarship to the publication of Pagan Monotheism in Late Antiquity, ed. P. Athanassiadi and M. Frede (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999). For pre-Islamic Arab paganism, see G. R. Hawting, The Idea of Idolatry and the Emergence of Islam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); and P. Crone, “The Religion of the Qur’ānic Pagans: God and the Lesser Deities,” Arabica 57 (2010): 151–200.

7. Louis Robert, “Un oracle gravé à Oenoanda,” CRAI (1971): 597–619, reprinted in Opera Minora Selecta (Amsterdam: Hakkert, 1989), 5:617–639.