food, usually meat, that has been offered to an idol in a pagan sacrifice and is then eaten
The word is a compound of two others: the word for an idol (εἴδωλον) and the verb meaning "to sacrifice" (θύω). Together they name a thing rather than an act. An animal killed at a pagan altar fed three parties: part was burned for the god, part went to the priests, and the rest was eaten on the spot at a banquet or sold on to the meat market. So this food was not exotic. It was most of the meat a city had, and it turned up at civic festivals, trade guild dinners, family celebrations, and the ordinary butcher's stall.
The word also carries a verdict. The worshipers themselves would not have called it this. Their term was "sacred offering," a respectful name for food that had been given to a god. This word renames the very same meat from the outside, as something belonging to an idol, and it turns up in Jewish and Christian writing rather than in the wider Greek world. Every time it appears in the New Testament it appears inside an argument about whether believers may eat it.
All nine uses mean the same thing. What changes is the ruling attached to it:
- The letter from the Jerusalem council puts it first in a short list of things Gentile believers are to keep away from (Acts 15:29; Acts 21:25).
- Paul takes the word up from a question the Corinthians had written to him, and answers that an idol is nothing, and yet that a fellow believer's conscience is not nothing (1 Corinthians 8 and 10).
- The risen Christ names eating it, alongside sexual sin, as the mark of teaching he holds against two churches (Revelation 2:14; Revelation 2:20).
How far the word reaches is debated. Some scholars limit it to food eaten inside a temple as part of the worship, and point out that when Paul turns to meat bought at the market he switches to a different, politer term. Others take it to cover any food that came from a sacrifice, wherever it was later eaten. The difference decides whether Paul and Revelation are saying the same thing or different things.
Disputed
How far the word reaches: whether it names only food eaten within the setting of pagan worship, or any food that came from a sacrifice, including meat later sold in the public market.
- contestedThe word denotes food consumed in a temple or shrine as part of the cult, which is why Paul switches to the term hierothyton when he turns to meat bought in the market at 1 Corinthians 10:25 to 28.; Ben Witherington III, "Not So Idle Thoughts about EIDOLOTHUTON," Tyndale Bulletin 44 (1993): 237-254; Gordon D. Fee, The First Epistle to the Corinthians, NICNT, rev. ed. (Eerdmans, 2014)
- contestedThe word denotes any food that has passed through a sacrifice, wherever it is later eaten, so Paul's counsel and the prohibitions of Acts and Revelation address one and the same category.; Alex T. Cheung, Idol Food in Corinth: Jewish Background and Pauline Legacy, JSNTSup 176 (Sheffield Academic Press, 1999); Peter D. Gooch, Dangerous Food: 1 Corinthians 8 to 10 in Its Context (Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press, 1993)