Revised Common Lectionary (Semicontinuous)

¹⁶ So Paul waited in Athens. While he was there, his spirit was stirred up as he saw the whole city absolutely full of idols. ¹⁷ He argued in the synagogue with the Jews and the godfearers, and in the marketplace every day with those who happened to be there. ¹⁸ Some of the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers were disputing with him.

“What can this word-scatterer be on about?” some were saying.

“He seems to be proclaiming foreign divinities,” declared others—since he was preaching “Jesus and Anastasis.” (“Anastasis” means “resurrection.”) ¹⁹ So they took him up to the Areopagus.

“Are we able to know,” they said, “what this new teaching really is that you are talking about? ²⁰ You are putting very strange ideas into our minds. We’d like to find out what it all means.”

²¹ All the Athenians, and the foreigners who live there, spend their time simply and solely in telling and hearing the latest novelty.

Paul among the philosophers

²² So Paul stood up in the midst of the Areopagus.

“Men of Athens,” he said, “I see that you are in every way an extremely religious people. ²³ For as I was going along and looking at your objects of worship, I saw an altar with the inscription, TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. Well: I’m here to tell you about what it is that you are worshiping in ignorance. ²⁴ The God who made the world and everything in it, the one who is Lord of heaven and earth, doesn’t live in temples made by human hands. ²⁵ Nor does he need to be looked after by human hands, as though he lacked something, since he himself gives life and breath and all things to everyone. ²⁶ He made from one stock every race of humans to live on the whole face of the earth, allotting them their properly ordained times and the boundaries for their dwellings. ²⁷ The aim was that they would search for God, and perhaps reach out for him and find him. Indeed, he is actually not far from each one of us, ²⁸ for in him we live and move and exist; as also some of your own poets have put it, ‘For we are his offspring.’

²⁹ “Well, then, if we really are God’s offspring, we ought not to suppose that the divinity is like gold or silver or stone, formed by human skill and ingenuity. ³⁰ That was just ignorance; but the time for it has passed, and God has drawn a veil over it. Now, instead, he commands all people everywhere to repent, ³¹ because he has established a day on which he intends to call the world to account with full and proper justice by a man whom he has appointed. God has given all people his pledge of this by raising this man from the dead.”