Paula Fredriksen is one of the top Pauline scholars in the world and she gave a talk about Jewish henotheism, the idea Paul thought the world was saturated with many gods but that Paul thought his Jewish God was the highest. Here are a couple of ideas from the presentation that I thought were particularly meaty:

All monotheists in antiquity were polytheists in that there were many lesser gods under the highest god (henotheism) and Paul shares in this understanding, especially since Paul was working with the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew scripture, which emphasized this. These gods were constantly in contact with humans in various ways, such as athletic games which were enacted in honor of the gods. Greco Roman and Jewish cities were not secular places but primarily set up to honor the gods, which then was good for the people.

Paul is telling the pagans not to show respect to their native gods, but to his Jewish god. Paul is in a struggle between the pneuma of Christ that is in Paul and Christian believers and the divinity Paul calls “the god of this age” who is blinding people from seeing Paul is right and a transition needs to be made from respecting the pagan gods to the Jewish God. In 1 Cor 8 Paul says there are many gods and many lords. Paul thinks he can win because he is powered by pneuma, the spirit of Jesus protecting believers from hostile gods. Christ is the son of the highest God.

Paul is working in an old prophetic Jewish tradition such as Isaiah 2 and Tobit that at the end of the age all nations will turn from their gods and worship the Jewish God, and as per Philippians 2 the other gods will bow to the Jewish God. Paul knows this because the general resurrection of the dead was supposed to happen at the end of time and Paul considered the resurrected Jesus to be what he calls the “first fruits” of the end time harvest of souls. Christians are in the process of transmuting from physical bodies to pneuma or spiritual bodies that will not remain on earth but go up into the heavens and replace the pagan gods, who Christ will defeat upon his return- Christ being a Davidic messiah and a cosmic warrior as David was a terrestrial one.