“To gods they did not know”: arguing for an alternative conception of [delta alpha iota mu omicron nu iota omicron nu] in 1 Corinthians 10:20-21

Because Paul warns his Corinthian audience that food sacrificed to idols has been sacrificed to demons and not to God (1 Cor. 10:20), the natural question arises: what exactly is a demon? In light of the paucity of its usage in his Undisputed letters, To Gods They Did Not Know argues that rather than the typical attribution of this statement to the same possessive evil spirits at play in the gospels, Pauls understanding of the term in 1 Corinthians is closer to that used elsewhere within the Greco-Roman world in describing lesser or intermediary deities/divine beings. By examining Pauls metaphysical world within the argument of 1 Cor 8:1-11:1, the concept of a demon and the semantic range of in select documents from 200BCE-200CE, and principles of lexical semantics such as Illegitimate Totality Transfer and polysemy, this study determines how the sense of intermediary being fits into the argument of 1 Cor 10:19-22, as well as the larger argument of 8:1-11:1.