Acts 17 Footnotes

17:6 Turning “the world upside down” was a phrase used of Jewish nationalists causing riots in the empire. Here it referred to the effects of spreading the gospel.

17:7 Declaring anyone besides Caesar as king was a serious crime; Romans feared any competing ruler. Jesus was condemned by Pilate for this (note the inscription on the cross, Lk 23:38).

17:16 Athens was a center of intellectual, philosophical, and religious discussion. Many of its monuments, like the Parthenon, were connected to pagan worship. This greatly dismayed Paul, who knew the One True God and his Son Jesus Christ.

17:18-19 Two leading philosophical schools—Epicureanism and Stoicism—attracted many followers who discussed contemporary issues. Epicureans were practical materialists, believing that gods were uninvolved in human affairs, that humans should pursue pleasure, and that there was no afterlife/judgment. Stoics were pantheists, believing God was the soul of the universe. They were also determinists, assuming virtue consisted in dispassionately enduring life’s inevitable hardships. Some listeners—with noticeable arrogance—considered Paul an ignorant show-off (lit a “seed picker”), who had picked up a few insignificant ideas here and there.

17:19,22 Paul’s informal speeches and conversations in Athens resulted in an invitation to address the Areopagus—originally a court. Paul was not on trial in a formal sense. At this time in the history of Athens, the Areopagus was a place where new ideas were heard and tested.

17:22-31 A model apologist, Paul developed an argument based on God’s self-revelation in nature (natural revelation, see Rm 1:19-32) to build bridges—and to challenge prevailing beliefs. He complimented the Athenians’ evident religious inclinations, drew from observable data from the natural world regarding God’s nature, identified this God for them, established a relationship between God and humans, announced the coming judgment of the world by God, and even marshaled evidence from the pagan (Stoic) poets for his analysis (Epimenides; Aratus, who hailed from Paul’s own Cilicia).

17:23 Although no inscription with the singular “To an Unknown God” has been found, Paul likely saw such an inscription in Athens. Many parallels to unknown gods exist in inscriptions and writings lest any gods were overlooked.

17:27 Paul proclaimed in terms understandable to Athenians that God was near to each human, who (through God-given faculties) could get some indication of who God is.

17:34 Though the response to Paul was less dramatic than elsewhere (partly due to the disparity of Paul’s worldview with that of the Athenians) and no church was apparently founded, some of the converts included Dionysius (a member of the prestigious Areopagus) and Damaris (a woman of distinction, being singled out by name). Some charge that Paul’s visit was a dismal failure, prompting him to change his methods. However, this is most likely incorrect both because it’s an argument from silence and since Paul utilized a similar tactic—which appealed to natural revelation—at Lystra (14:15-17). Further, why would Luke have devoted so much space to a failed approach?