Two years ago I wrote a little note on the occasion of the super bowl in order to promote a book of mine. It begins with the sentence:
“I have never seen a Super Bowl game in my whole life.” This statement is still true today – and probably very shocking for my American friends. With this effect in mind and still some copies of my book available, I decided to repost the text here on this blog.

I have never seen a Super Bowl game in my whole life. I have only a vague idea what kind of sport it involves and what the players have to do in order to win. Moreover, I had never heard of the “Super Bowl parade” until I read about it in George Guthrie’s Commentary on Second Corinthians in his analysis of Paul’s use of the verb θριαμβεύω in 2 Cor 2:14:

Writers of ancient Greco-Roman literature record over three hundred such processions, and depictions occur in paintings and plays and on coins, cups, arches, statues, medaillons, and columns of the era …, demonstrating that the pompa triumphalis was part of the cultural fabric of the time. This was, to draw an analogy from the American context, the Super Bowl parade of the Greco-Roman world. Thus the imagery as used by Paul was widely recognized in first-century Corinth and serves as a potent word picture.

If I – not an American to be sure, but still quite close to American culture due to social media – had no familiarity with this parade, can we really assume that, as Scott Hafemann puts it with regard to the Roman counterpart “everybody in the Roman empire knew about these parades”? We guys in the east are sometimes slow to learn new things …

To be fair, Plutarch also speaks of “one triumph meeting the other” (Mor. 323F). And the 320 triumphs Orosius (Hist. 7.9.8) mentions constitute an impressive number indeed.

However, the distribution over time is by no means equal: In the decade between 260 and 251 BCE twelve (!) triumphal processions took place in Rome … in 71 BCE even four in a single year! By contrast, from 19 BCE onwards, only the Roman emperor himself and his family enjoyed this privilege.

So how many triumphal processions led a Roman emperor (i.e., excluding triumphs by other members of the imperatorial family and smaller processions, so called ovations) did take place during Paul’s lifetime? What’s your guess?

The answer is: ONE.

Now, this seems to be quite an important observations. Does the fact alone that in some triumphal processions in the distant past captives had been executed justify Hafemann’s thesis that Paul imagines himself as being “led to death”? And is it even plausible that Paul is thinking about the Roman ritual at all? For if the triumphus was not an event as frequent as the Super Bowl parade, this might mean, after all, that when Paul uses the word θριαμβεύω he might have a totally different scene in mind? Maybe a pagan epiphany procession? After all, the God Dionysos had the by-name θρίαμβος (also the Greek translation of Latin triumphus). Or perhaps Paul used that verb to refer to YHWH’s eschatological victory celebration? Or what if the verb had already lost association with the idea of a procession of any kind at that time? (After all, when we use “to triumph” as a synonym for “to conquer” in English, we are also not thinking about a procession celebrating a victory … )

Or, perhaps Paul uses θριαμβεύω precisely because he has this single triumphal procession in mind that had taken place only a few years before he wrote his second (canonical) letter to the Corinthians? It seems at least prudent to test this possibility if the other options are not plausible. This is particularly true given the astonishing fact that almost no commentary even mentions this procession by Claudius (let alone refers to it as the background of 2 Cor 2:14).

Hence, we have to answer the following questions: Is there any evidence that Paul might have heard anything about this specific event? And if he really has this specific incident in mind, what does this imply for the function of the metaphor in his communication with the Corinthians and for his contribution to contemporary discourses on the Emperor Claudius?

If you want to read more on this, see here.

Update from 2019: Note that Guthrie and I discuss this matter a little bit further under the original Facebook note.

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Christoph Heilig is the author of Hidden Criticism? (Fortress, 2017) and Paul’s Triumph (Peeters, 2017). This research has recently received the Mercator Award in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Additionally, he has co-edited (with J. Thomas Hewitt and Michael F. Bird) God and the Faithfulness of Paul: A Critical Examination of the Pauline Theology of N. T. Wright (Fortress, 2017). In his most recent – and voluminous – project, which has just been completed, he discusses the importance of “stories” and “narrative substructures” for understanding Paul’s letters.