Avodah Zarah is a Jewish term that literally means “foreign service” or “strange worship,” and it refers to worship that turns a created thing into a god or treats God in a way that distorts who He really is.

 Simple definition in Christian terms

For a Christian, it can be explained like this: avodah zarah is what the Bible calls idolatry—serving or trusting in anything created (objects, people, powers, images, ideas) as if it were God, or trying to worship the true God in ways He has not allowed.

Any violation of the Apostolic Decree of Acts 15 would be avodah zarah.

 Core idea

– There is one Creator, and everything else is created; avodah zarah starts when something created is treated as if it shares in God’s divinity, power, or ultimate authority.[5][6][3]

– Even if a person says “I believe in the one God,” if they bow to, pray to, or rely on a created thing (angel, saint, star, spirit, force, image) as a spiritual source in its own right, that is still avodah zarah.

 How it goes beyond “statue worship”

It must be stressed that avodah zarah is broader than “people in ancient times bowing to statues”:

– It includes worship of any other “god” or spiritual power alongside the one God of Israel (polytheism, occult powers, spirits).

– It also includes worshiping the true God through physical images and treating those images as channels of His presence or power, which Jewish law classifies as a form of false worship.

We can say: “If you give God’s honor—prayer, trust, sacrifice, ultimate loyalty—to anything else, or to God as you imagine Him rather than as He truly is, that’s what we call avodah zarah.”

 Helpful biblical bridge

Connecting this to familiar Christian language we can point to:

– The first and second commandments about having no other gods and not making images to bow down to, which Jewish teaching sees as the root of the prohibition of avodah zarah.

– New Testament warnings against “idols” not only as statues, but as anything that takes God’s place in the heart—greed, powers, and “other gospels,” which mirrors the Jewish concern with any deification of created things or false concepts of God.

Avodah Zarah In one sentence:  

“Avodah zarah is what the Bible calls idolatry: any time we give God’s place—His worship, trust, and glory—to something He created, or to a distorted picture of Him, instead of to Him alone.”

Avodah Zarah from an Apostolic/first‑century Jewish perspective

The New Testament treats classical avodah zarah (idols, images, “other gods”) exactly as Tanakh and Chazal do, and extends the category to certain inner loyalties and practices.

Continuity with Jewish avodah zarah

Side note: “Chazal” is a Hebrew acronym חז״ל that stands for Ḥaḵameinu Zikhronam Livrakhah – “our Sages, of blessed memory.”

In traditional usage:

• It refers collectively to the rabbis of the Mishnaic and Talmudic eras (roughly late Second Temple through the completion of the Talmud, c. 250 BCE–6th/7th c. CE).
• This includes groups like the Zugot, Tannaim, Amoraim, and associated sages whose teachings form the core of the Oral Torah: Mishnah, Tosefta, Midrashim, and both Talmuds.
• When someone says “Chazal say…,” they mean, “The classic rabbinic sages teach…,” usually invoking the normative authority of those rabbis in halakhah and rabbinic interpretation of Tanakh.

• The New Testament presupposes the strict Jewish rejection of idols: there is “one God” over against “so‑called gods … many ‘gods’ and many ‘lords’,” echoing the biblical and later rabbinic polemic against other elohim.
• Idolatry is presented as the paradigmatic betrayal of the covenant God—precisely the way later rabbinic sources speak of avodah zarah as denying the entire Torah.

So, at the level of definition—worship of any other power, and the use of images or cults of other gods—the New Testament stands inside the Jewish avodah zarah tradition, not against it.

Paul, idols, and sacrificial meals

A key “Apostolic Judaism” text is 1 Corinthians 8–10, where Paul, as a Pharisaic Jew, addresses eating meat associated with idols.

• He acknowledges that idols are “nothing,” but insists that participation in the cultic meal brings one into fellowship with demonic powers behind the idols, a classically Jewish way of speaking about avodah zarah as contact with real spiritual forces.
• He prohibits any direct participation in idol‑temple banquets and commands believers to “flee idolatry,” in continuity with Torah’s demand to separate from foreign worship.

From an Apostolic Jewish standpoint, then, the Corinthian issue is not merely about kasrut or social optics, but about avoiding real avodah zarah in Greco‑Roman settings.

Expanded inner sense of avodah zarah

While maintaining the classical prohibitions, New Testament writers radicalize avodah zarah by moving it inward, in a way that parallels later Jewish association of idolatry with the yetzer hara.

• Greed/covetousness is called “idolatry,” and trusting wealth, power, or empire can be framed as serving other “lords,” conceptually close to worshiping other elohim.
• The Apocalypse’s critique of emperor cult and economic compromise functions as a Jewish prophetic denunciation of state cult as avodah zarah, akin to biblical and later rabbinic attacks on syncretism with imperial religions.

For Apostolic Judaism, then, avodah zarah is not only statues and temples but any rival ultimate allegiance that displaces the God of Israel.

Relationship to later rabbinic avodah zarah

If you read 1 Corinthians 8–10 and Revelation with “Bavli Avodah Zarah” [the tractate Avodah Zarah (“idolatry”) in the Babylonian Talmud] in mind, the continuities are striking:

• Both focus on meat, wine, and commerce around pagan cults, and on how close one may approach an idol’s sphere without participating in its avodah.
• Both assume that idolatry is forbidden not only to Jews but to the nations (Noachide framework), even if the New Testament’s language for this is different.

So from an Apostolic‑Jewish reading, New Testament teaching on avodah zarah is best seen as one Second‑Temple Jewish stream of rigorous anti‑idolatry, continuous with Torah and a precursor parallel to rabbinic Avodah Zarah, rather than as introducing a distinct or looser category.