¹⁶ Now while Paul waited for them at Athens, his spirit was provoked within him as he saw the city full of idols. ¹⁷ So he reasoned in the synagogue with the Jews and the devout persons, and in the marketplace every day with those who met him. ¹⁸ Some of the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers also^[a] were conversing with him. Some said, “What does this babbler want to say?”

Others said, “He seems to be advocating foreign deities,” because he preached Jesus and the resurrection.

¹⁹ They took hold of him and brought him to the Areopagus, saying, “May we know what this new teaching is, which you are speaking about? ²⁰ For you bring certain strange things to our ears. We want to know therefore what these things mean.” ²¹ Now all the Athenians and the strangers living there spent their time in nothing else, but either to tell or to hear some new thing.

²² Paul stood in the middle of the Areopagus, and said, “You men of Athens, I perceive that you are very religious in all things. ²³ For as I passed along and observed the objects of your worship, I also found an altar with this inscription: ‘TO AN UNKNOWN GOD.’ What therefore you worship in ignorance, I announce to you. ²⁴ The God who made the world and all things in it, he, being Lord of heaven and earth, doesn’t dwell in temples made with hands. ²⁵ He isn’t served by men’s hands, as though he needed anything, seeing he himself gives to all life and breath, and all things. ²⁶ He made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the surface of the earth, having determined appointed seasons, and the boundaries of their dwellings, ²⁷ that they should seek the Lord, if perhaps they might reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. ²⁸ ‘For in him we live, move, and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘For we are also his offspring.’ ²⁹ Being then the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Divine Nature is like gold, or silver, or stone, engraved by art and design of man. ³⁰ The times of ignorance therefore God overlooked. But now he commands that all people everywhere should repent, ³¹ because he has appointed a day in which he will judge the world in righteousness by the man whom he has ordained; of which he has given assurance to all men, in that he has raised him from the dead.”

³² Now when they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some mocked; but others said, “We want to hear you again concerning this.”

³³ Thus Paul went out from among them. ³⁴ But certain men joined with him and believed, among whom also was Dionysius the Areopagite, and a woman named Damaris, and others with them.