It was part of the religious common sense of the classical world that images of the gods could and should be made, some of which could and should be the focus of various cultic practices. For presumably many viewers, the cult statue was more than a simple representation, a reminder, a useful focusing tool for worship. Rather, it embodied or mediated the divine, making it in a way really present and therefore engaged with the ritual being performed with it. In short, the kind of idolatry condemned in the Old Testament was ubiquitous in the Roman world, and the Jewish and Christian rejection of
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