Paul at Athens

By the time Paul arrived in Athens, around the year 50, the city was no longer a great power, but it was still the university town of the Roman world, proud of its philosophers, its temples and its past. Paul had left Berea in a hurry and was waiting for Silas and Timothy, and Luke says that 'he was deeply disturbed in his spirit to see that the city was full of idols' (Acts 17:16). The verb is a strong one, the word for being provoked or stirred to anger. A Jew who had prayed the Shema all his life was walking past statues of gods and heroes on every corner, and it grieved him.

What he did with that distress is the first lesson of the passage. 'So he reasoned in the synagogue with the Jews and God-fearing Gentiles, and in the marketplace with those he met each day' (17:17). He did not withdraw, and he did not only denounce. He went to two kinds of place. In the synagogue he could reason from the Scriptures, as he had at Thessalonica in the previous lesson's anchor. In the agora, the open public square where Athenians bought and sold and argued, he had to talk to whoever was there. The agora was where Socrates had questioned passers-by four and a half centuries earlier, and the painted colonnade from which the Stoics took their name stood on its edge. Paul went where the questions were being asked.

There he met two schools of philosophy, and Luke names them both. The Epicureans, followers of Epicurus, who died around 270 BC, held that the world was made by the chance movement of atoms, that the gods exist but live far off and pay no attention to human beings, that death is the end of the person, and that the good life is a quiet one free from fear and pain. The Stoics, founded by Zeno of Citium around 300 BC, held that a rational divine principle, the Logos, runs through the whole universe and orders it, so that God is close to being the soul of the world; that a wise man lives in agreement with nature and reason; and that the universe passes through great cycles. These were not foolish people. Both schools were serious attempts to live well in a world without the knowledge of the living God, and many educated people in Paul's day lived by one or the other.

Their first reactions were mixed. 'What is this babbler trying to say?' asked some (17:18). The word is spermologos, literally a seed-picker, a bird that pecks up scraps, used of someone who picks up bits of other people's ideas without understanding them. Others said, 'He seems to be advocating foreign gods', and Luke explains why: 'Paul was proclaiming the good news of Jesus and the resurrection.' The Greek word for resurrection is anastasis, a feminine noun, and many commentators think some hearers took Paul to be announcing two new deities, a god called Jesus and a goddess called Anastasis. The charge of bringing in foreign divinities would have sounded familiar in Athens. It was one of the charges on which Socrates had been condemned.

So they brought him to the Areopagus, which was both a rocky hill near the Acropolis and the name of the ancient council that met there and still had authority over religious and moral matters. The New Testament Survey track, in its lesson Paul on the Road, notes that Luke does not make clear whether this was a formal hearing or a public discussion, and the question need not be settled here. Either way, Luke tells us the mood of the room: 'all the Athenians and foreigners who lived there spent their time doing nothing more than hearing and articulating new ideas' (17:21). Paul's audience was curious, clever, sceptical and slightly amused. Many modern audiences are the same.

Paul begins: 'Men of Athens, I see that in every way you are very religious' (17:22). The adjective is deisidaimonesteros, built from words meaning to fear and spirits. It can be a compliment, very devout, or an insult, very superstitious, and the King James Version, which is in the public domain, chose the second: 'Ye men of Athens, I perceive that in all things ye are too superstitious.' Most modern translations choose the first, partly because an orator addressing a council would hardly open with an insult, and partly because ancient rules of rhetoric discouraged it. Paul may well have chosen a word that could be heard both ways. He was telling the truth: they were very religious, and that was both the point of contact and the problem.

Then he names the evidence: 'For as I walked around and examined your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD' (17:23). Notice the verbs. He walked around and examined. He had been studying the city, looking carefully at its religion rather than only reacting to it. No altar with exactly that inscription in the singular has been found, but ancient writers confirm the practice. Pausanias, who travelled in Greece in the second century, mentions altars of gods called unknown near Athens, at the port of Phalerum. Diogenes Laertius, writing a little later, tells a story about the Cretan seer Epimenides, who was said to have ended a plague at Athens long before by letting sheep loose from the Areopagus and sacrificing each one where it lay down to the god concerned, which is why, he says, altars without a name were still to be found around Attica. The Athenians, it seems, were careful not to offend any god they might have overlooked.

Paul takes the altar and turns it into the opening of his argument. 'Therefore what you worship as something unknown, I now proclaim to you.' Two things are happening at once. He is affirming something true: these people know there is more to the divine than their gods and temples, and they admit they do not know it. That admission is a real point of contact, and he honours it. But he is also exposing a lack. In the Greek text the BSB translates, the word for what is neuter: Paul does not say that they already worship the true God under another name, only that they worship something they do not know. The King James Version, following a different Greek text, has 'Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you.' Either way the key word is ignorance. The altar is a confession that they do not know God, and Paul offers to make him known.

This is the move that defines the speech and that every apologist must learn. Paul does not pretend that Athenian religion is fine as it is, and he does not pretend that it is nothing. He finds the place where their own religion points beyond itself, names it honestly, and walks through it. The unknown god becomes the God who made the world. A modern apologist who wants to do the same has to do what Paul did first: walk around and look carefully, until he knows what the altars in his own city say.

Read Acts 17:24-31 as a whole and you will see that it moves in a clear order. First the Creator: 'The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples made by human hands' (17:24). Then God's self-sufficiency: 'Nor is He served by human hands, as if He needed anything, because He Himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else' (17:25). Then the unity of humanity and God's rule of history: 'From one man He made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and He determined their appointed times and the boundaries of their lands' (17:26). Then God's purpose: that people would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, 'though He is not far from each one of us' (17:27). Then two quotations, and an argument against idols. And finally a turn: God has overlooked the ignorance of earlier times, but now commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day of judgment, by a Man he has appointed, and has given proof of it by raising him from the dead (17:30-31).

Paul does not quote scripture to the Areopagus, because his hearers did not accept it. But the speech is built from scripture. The Creator who gives breath to all echoes Isaiah 42:5. The God whom temples cannot contain echoes Solomon's prayer, 'The heavens, even the highest heavens, cannot contain You, much less this temple I have built' (1 Kings 8:27), and Isaiah 66:1-2. The God who needs nothing echoes Psalm 50:12, 'If I were hungry, I would not tell you, for the world is Mine, and the fullness thereof.' The boundaries of the nations echo Deuteronomy 32:8. The mockery of gods of gold and silver and stone is the mockery of Isaiah 44. The common ground Paul chooses is ground the Bible had already claimed.

Then he quotes their own writers, first 'For in Him we live and move and have our being', and then, 'As some of your own poets have said, "We are His offspring."' (17:28). The second line comes from the Phaenomena of Aratus, a poet from Soli in Cilicia, Paul's own home province, written in the third century BC. A very similar line appears in the Hymn to Zeus by the Stoic Cleanthes. The first line has been traced, through a commentary by the ninth-century Syrian bishop Isho'dad of Merv, to a poem attributed to Epimenides of Crete, though that attribution is not certain. In their original settings both lines were about Zeus. Paul takes them and fills them with a new meaning. If we are God's offspring, he argues, then God cannot be like an image made of gold or silver or stone (17:29). The poet said more than he knew, and Paul uses the poet's own words to correct the poet's religion.

Look at where Paul agrees and disagrees with each school. With the Epicureans he agrees that God needs nothing from human beings; against them he insists that God is near, that history is not chance, and that there will be a judgment. With the Stoics he agrees that we live in God and are his offspring; against them he insists that God made the world and is not the world, that history is heading for a fixed day rather than turning in endless cycles, and that a dead man has been raised bodily. He has used each school's truths against each school's errors. And he has said nothing of Jesus by name. He calls him only 'the Man He has appointed' (17:31), perhaps because he was interrupted before he could say more.

The interruption came at the resurrection. 'When they heard about the resurrection of the dead, some began to mock him, but others said, "We want to hear you again on this topic."' (17:32). For an Epicurean, the dead were atoms dispersed; for many Greeks, the body was something the soul was well rid of. The resurrection was the point at which common ground ran out, and Paul did not stop short of it. He could have closed with an agreeable account of a God in whom we live and move. He went on to the one claim the Areopagus would find hardest to accept, because it was the one claim the gospel cannot do without.

Luke reports three responses: some mocked, some wanted to hear more, and 'some joined him and believed, including Dionysius the Areopagite, a woman named Damaris, and others who were with them' (17:34). Dionysius was a member of the council itself; the second-century bishop Dionysius of Corinth, quoted by Eusebius, says he became the first bishop of Athens. (The mystical writings that later circulated under his name are from around 500 and were not written by him.) Interpreters have disagreed about what to make of that result, and their disagreements bear directly on how an apologist should work.

Some have read Athens as a disappointment. The Scottish archaeologist and New Testament scholar William Ramsay, in St Paul the Traveller and the Roman Citizen (1895), argued that Paul was dissatisfied with the result and changed his approach, pointing to what Paul wrote to the church at Corinth, the next city he visited: 'When I came to you, brothers, I did not come with eloquence or wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God. For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified' (1 Corinthians 2:1-2). On this reading Paul learned at Athens that philosophical common ground was a detour, and resolved to preach the cross plainly. Those who hold this view have a real text and a real worry: that apologetics which begins with the hearer's categories may never arrive at the cross. Most modern commentators, among them F. F. Bruce, reject the reading. They point out that Luke gives no hint of failure, that he presents this as one of Paul's three model speeches in Acts, that a council member and others believed, and that 1 Corinthians 2 is about style and boasting in a city proud of rhetoric rather than about abandoning reasoned address. They add that Paul does reach the resurrection at Athens, and that the resurrection is the heart of the gospel he preaches in 1 Corinthians 15. Defenders of the disappointment reading reply that Luke's silence is not the same as praise; that no church at Athens is mentioned again in the New Testament, while Paul calls the household of Stephanas 'the first converts in Achaia' (1 Corinthians 16:15), the province in which Athens lay; and that 'I resolved' in 1 Corinthians 2:2 sounds like a decision taken for a reason. The question is still argued, and both sides are reading the same two chapters.

A second debate is about whether the speech is really Paul's at all, or at least what kind of thought it contains. The German scholar Martin Dibelius, in an influential essay of 1939, argued that the speech is essentially Hellenistic, a Stoic-flavoured natural theology foreign to the Paul of the letters, and composed by Luke. The Swedish scholar Bertil Gärtner replied in The Areopagus Speech and Natural Revelation (1955) that its framework is thoroughly Jewish and Old Testament, and that its use of Greek ideas is the use a Hellenistic Jewish preacher would naturally make. Many readers note how closely the speech matches Romans 1:19-23, where Paul says that God's eternal power and divine nature are understood from creation and that people exchanged the glory of God for images. The debate is still alive in the scholarship, but for an apologist the point holds either way: Acts presents this as the way the gospel was taken to pagans.

The third debate brings back the previous lesson, because the rival schools of apologetics each claim Athens. Classical apologists read the speech as a model of their two steps: first the existence and nature of the Creator, reasoned from creation and from what the hearers already grant, and only then the resurrection and the appointed Man. Evidential apologists point out that the climax and the proof Paul offers is a historical event, the resurrection, 'He has given proof of this to everyone by raising Him from the dead' (17:31). Presuppositional apologists read it quite differently. Cornelius Van Til wrote a short study called Paul at Athens, and Greg Bahnsen developed the reading in an essay on the encounter of Jerusalem with Athens: on their view Paul does not argue up to God from neutral premises at all. He announces the Creator on his own authority, exposes the Athenians' ignorance, which their own altar confesses, uses their poets only to show that even their own best insights condemn their idols, and calls them to repent. Cumulative case apologists see Paul drawing several lines together, creation, providence, human nature, conscience and history, into one case. Each reading has real features of the text on its side. A student should notice that the speech can bear all of them, which is itself a warning against claiming that any one method is the only biblical one.

What does Athens teach an apologist who will never stand before a council of philosophers? First, that common ground is real. Paul took seriously what the Athenians already knew. The speech at Lystra did the same with rain and harvests (Acts 14:17), and Romans 1 says that what may be known about God is plain to all. Every culture has altars of a kind: beliefs, proverbs, songs and practices that show people know there is a God they have not fully found. An apologist who refuses to look for them will talk past the people he is trying to reach.

The question becomes urgent in Africa, and it has divided African theologians in a way the student should know. John Mbiti of Kenya, in African Religions and Philosophy (1969) and later works, argued that African peoples knew the one God long before missionaries arrived, under names such as Ngai, Olodumare, Nyame and Mulungu, and that the gospel came to complete rather than replace that knowledge. Kwame Bediako of Ghana, in Theology and Identity (1992) and Christianity in Africa (1995), developed the argument further, comparing Africa's primal religions to the Greek philosophy that Justin Martyr treated as a preparation for Christ. The Gambian historian Lamin Sanneh observed that when missionaries translated the Bible into African languages they usually adopted the local name for God, and so affirmed that the God of the Bible was not a stranger. On the other side, the Nigerian theologian Byang Kato, in Theological Pitfalls in Africa (1975), warned that this line of thought could slide into universalism and syncretism, treating traditional religion as if it already saved, and blurring the line between the knowledge of God in creation and the knowledge of God in Christ. Kato's concern is the one Ramsay's reading of Athens raises: common ground that never leads to the cross is not common ground but a resting place. Mbiti and Bediako's concern is the one Paul's opening raises: a gospel that ignores what God has already shown a people will be heard as a foreign religion. Both concerns are serious, and both are found in Acts 17.

The American missionary Don Richardson, in Eternity in Their Hearts (1981), collected stories from many peoples whose own traditions, he argued, contained what he called redemptive analogies, points where the culture already pointed towards Christ, and he opened the book with the altar at Athens. Many missionaries have found the idea fruitful; some anthropologists and missiologists have criticised it for reading Christian meanings into other cultures too easily. Used with care, it is what Paul did. Used carelessly, it can make a culture's religion say what the missionary wishes it said.

Second, Athens teaches that common ground has an edge. Paul agreed with the Athenians up to the point where agreement would have cost the gospel, and then he did not agree. He said that God is not like their images, that they must repent, that judgment is coming, and that a man has been raised from the dead. A Christian speaking with a Muslim friend can gladly agree that God is one, that he created the world, that he sent prophets, that Jesus was born of a virgin and will return; and then he must say, gently, that Jesus died on the cross and rose, which the Qur'an at 4:157 is usually read as denying. A Christian speaking with a secular friend can gladly agree that human beings have dignity, that cruelty is wrong and that truth matters; and then he must ask where those convictions come from in a world without God. A Christian speaking with a relative devoted to the ancestors can honour the love of family and the respect for elders, and then he must say that the living God alone is to be worshipped and that Christ has authority over every spirit. The point of contact is where you start, not where you stop.

Third, Athens teaches that results are mixed and that the apologist does not control them. Some mocked. Some wanted to hear more. A few believed. That is a realistic picture of what happens when the gospel is presented honestly to clever and sceptical people, and it is not failure. Paul left the Areopagus (17:33) without having won the room, and the church at Athens began with Dionysius, Damaris and a few others. Your conversations will often end the same way, and you will rarely know which of the people who said they wanted to hear more did in fact come back.

In your defence notebook, turn to a fresh page and write at the top: The altars in my town. Then do what Paul did in 17:23: walk around and examine. Over this week, notice what people around you say and do that shows their beliefs about God, the spirit world, right and wrong, and death. Listen to proverbs, to the words of popular songs, to what is said at funerals and weddings, to what people say when something goes badly wrong. Write down at least five of these, without names.

Beside each one, write a T if a Christian can honestly agree with it, a C if the gospel must correct it, or both letters if it contains something true that needs completing. Be honest in both directions. Do not mark something as true just because you would like to have an easy way in, and do not mark something as false just because it comes from outside the church.

Then choose one of the three objections you marked in your first lesson's list. Using what you have found, write a short outline, no more than eight lines, of how you might answer it in the way Paul answered Athens: start with something your hearer already believes and you can honestly affirm; show where it points beyond itself; say clearly where the gospel must disagree; and end with Christ, his death and his resurrection. Do not leave out the last step. This outline will become part of your capstone, and you will test its tone in the next lesson.