Paul’s “Areopagus address” is one of the most famous set pieces in Acts and indeed in the whole New Testament. Luke seems to intend it to stand here at the heart of Paul’s mission to the non-Judean world. When Paul describes himself in his letters as “the apostle to the Gentiles,” he must be envisaging this kind of address.
We have to assume that Luke has given us a summary of Paul’s speech. You can read the speech out loud in Greek in under three minutes. Granted everything we know of Paul, there is no way that, if he was asked to address the high court in Athens, he would keep it that short! But Luke, in boiling his speech down to basics, hasn’t spoilt its balance.
The speech has been endlessly studied, not least by theologians who have discussed what at first sight appear to be Paul’s attempts to find “points of contact” with the pagan non-Judean world, shared assumptions on which he could build a gospel presentation.
What Is the Areopagus in Acts 17?
Many people have supposed that the Areopagus was a kind of philosophical debating society. Luke has just mentioned in verse 18 that Paul had been arguing with the Stoics and Epicureans. It’s been assumed that this address is Paul’s attempt to put his own position in that debate.
Well, there are indeed philosophical arguments going to and fro here, as we shall see. But the Areopagus was not a debating society. It was a law-court: the highest court in Athens, composed of leading citizens, founded jointly (according to the local legend) by the god Apollo and by Athens’s own tutelary deity, the goddess Athene.
The name “Areopagus” means “Hill” or “Rock” of Ares, Ares being the Greek version of Mars, the Roman god of war: hence the frequent translation, “Mars Hill.” The craggy hill in question is a mile or so to the west of the Acropolis, the larger hill in the city center on which to this day you see Athene’s great temple, the Parthenon, and sundry other temples and buildings. There are debates as to whether, in Paul’s day, the court actually met on that hill or somewhere closer to the middle of the town. But the point is that it was indeed a court, not a discussion group.
Paul on Trial
The court in question, the Areopagus, had been set up initially to try the most serious cases, including capital ones. Its first defendant was the legendary Orestes, on trial for avenging his father Agamemnon by killing his mother Clytemnestra. The point here is that Paul is being put on trial. When, in verse 19, Luke says they “took him” up to the Areopagus, the word epilambano means to “seize” or “arrest.” It certainly wasn’t about Paul being invited to give a learned paper at next week’s seminar.
So why the fuss? What is the charge? In verse 18, we hear the reaction of the Athenians to what Paul has been saying in the marketplace: he seems to be preaching “foreign divinities.” At one level, this seems trivial. They heard him banging on about “Jesus and Anastasis,” and they imagined that anastasis, “resurrection,” might be a new goddess, perhaps Jesus’s spouse. Well, Paul sorts that one out eventually.
But the point was that ancient towns and cities, though playing host to many gods and goddesses, distrusted the import of “foreign gods.” That might mean political subversion, bringing in a new divinity who might try to take over, undermining the social fabric with its tightly woven religious elements.
- Remember the shout in Thessalonica that Paul and Silas were turning the world upside down, teaching Judean customs, and claiming that there was another king, namely Jesus.
- Think ahead to Ephesus where the focus of the riot is that Paul and his friends are proving a threat to the goddess Artemis.
- And, with dark irony, when he gets back to Jerusalem he’s accused of polluting the Temple there. We’re picking up a regular theme.
The Charge of ‘Foreign Divinities’
Back to Athens. The city’s most famous trial was that of Socrates in 399 BC. He was charged with “impiety” and “corrupting the young.” The chief evidence offered against him was that he didn’t acknowledge the city’s official gods, and also — here it is — that he was introducing new divinities.
So we must read verse 19 differently. It isn’t an innocent enquiry, with the officials merely asking, “Can you please explain what you’re talking about?” It’s a suspicious, perhaps sneering, half-accusation: “Are we able to know what this new teaching really is that you are talking about?” The Greek here hints that Paul might have been introducing a new mystery religion, which only the initiates could grasp. Exactly the kind of thing that might arouse the suspicions of civic leaders. People meeting behind closed doors, sharing dark secrets. Learning to dance to a different drummer. Very bad for social morale, that kind of thing.
Granted, Luke suggests in verse 21 that the Athenians were simply out for novelty. But that looks to me like a way of scaling down the seriousness of what was going on. Luke can’t disguise the fact that Paul gets into trouble wherever he goes. But at least, instead of setting the mob on Paul, or staging a riot, his accusers here do the decent Athenian thing and bring him to a proper court.
How Paul Engages — and Confronts — Athenian Culture
So what is Paul doing in this dense and fascinating speech?
Here we have to avoid bringing in the categories of fairly modern debate. Yes, we can say if we want that he is beginning by referring to the local culture, starting with the altar to the unknown god, and (in verse 28) quoting Aratus, one of their own poets from 300 years earlier. Maybe, like many Judean thinkers, Paul could see that pagan culture did sometimes come close to the truth of God and his creation, even if it then usually distorted it. After all, Paul was a creational monotheist.
But Paul is also confronting the local culture. In a big way. The true God, he says, doesn’t live in handmade temples (“made by hands” was the regular Judean phrase to sneer at pagan idols). Nor does the true God, as Creator of all, need animal sacrifices.
Now it’s one thing to say this when you’re sitting in a seminar room, or in a synagogue with Judean friends. It’s quite another to say it on Mars Hill (or indeed almost anywhere else in central Athens), in full view of the Acropolis with its great temples — the Parthenon, the Temple of Nike, and so on. You can see these stunning works of ancient architecture, these architectural statements of local theology and religious practice, from both Mars Hill and the marketplace. As Paul was speaking, there might well have been a procession going by, with singing and dancing, on its way to offer sacrifice. And Paul just waves his hand at these amazing examples of Athenian high culture and declares that they’re a category mistake. They’re a waste of space.
This is hardly playing “nice” to the local sensibilities.
Answering the Charge
So the question of “Paul and culture” can go both ways. That suggests that it’s the wrong question, interesting though it is in its way. This is because that way of analyzing the speech begins at the wrong place. It begins by assuming that Paul is trying to make a philosophical argument for one type of god. But, as we’ve seen, the Areopagus wasn’t a debating society. It was a court. Paul’s speech is an answer to the charge of bringing in foreign divinities. If we begin from that point, we will see that some of his arguments are quite close to the arguments of a certain type of “natural theology.”
His underlying point is that he couldn’t be bringing in foreign divinities because the God he was proclaiming was already being worshipped at Athens, albeit in ignorance. This true God had indeed been glimpsed by poets, even though the philosophers had got him wrong. The God he was proclaiming could not be foreign, since he already had a shrine in the city. Once people realized who he was, they would realize that he was the creator and judge of all — and thus not, in other words, a Middle Eastern deity that Paul was trying to import into Athens. He was the God who already claimed the whole world, and who (to say it again) was already worshipped in Athens, even though in ignorance.
Ignorance!
Paul may be sailing close to the wind here. That, after all, had been Socrates’ point: everyone else thought they knew the answers, but he knew that he didn’t. Actually, the charge of ignorance means that the Apostle is putting the Athenians on the same footing as his Judean contemporaries: they have a zeal for God, he says, but it is not according to knowledge. So while the Athenians may be very religious, they admit their own ignorance by the existence of this altar to the unknown God.
And with that we arrive at the central substance of the speech.
Not Quite Apologetics
All this places Paul in a subtly different position from those in our own age who have written about “apologetics.” That word is frequently used to refer to the attempt to win over unbelievers by rational argument, presented in a supposedly “neutral” space or on “neutral” grounds. We make arguments, we present our evidence, and we hope to convince the sceptic that they ought at least to give the Christian faith a second look.
But for Paul in Athens (this may be quite relevant now for many believers in today’s world) it was a matter of explaining the faith to a hostile audience who were already suspicious that “Christianity” was a dangerous force in the world. It was about explaining that the gospel message was not going to be a “foreign body” in the culture, to be rejected out of hand, but rather that it offered the key, already present but unrecognized, to a badly needed wisdom and truth.
We should not be surprised at this slant on what Paul was doing. Many in our world today assume that Christians are committed to believing dangerous nonsense. Anyone known to embrace the faith can easily be portrayed, in the supposedly well-ordered world of Western secularism, as introducing alien assumptions and allegiances.
We today who, perhaps to our surprise, have to defend our right to our beliefs and our moral stance may learn from Paul what a wise defense might look like — and how it might turn, after all, into a genuine gospel message.
Excerpted and adapted from The Challenge of Acts: Rediscovering What the Church Was and Is by N.T. Wright.
From the renowned author of Into the Heart of Romans, N.T. Wright brings to the book of Acts his expert’s eye on theological nuance and cultural context, distilling it down into an introductory commentary, perfect for anyone looking to take their own reading a little deeper and discover the profound (and often forgotten) potential of the church and the Way of Jesus Christ.
N. T. Wright is the former bishop of Durham and senior research fellow at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford University. He is one of the world's leading New Testament scholars and the award-winning author of many books, including After You Believe, Surprised by Hope, Simply Christian, Interpreting Paul, and The New Testament in Its World, as well as the Christian Origins and the Question of God series.
