by N. T. Wright
So when Paul was brought to the Areopagus, probably in late 50 or early 51, and when he began by declaring that temples to the gods were a category mistake, we should not suppose that he was engaging a philosophers’ debating society. Generations of readers, studying what has been called Paul’s “Areopagus address” in Acts 17:22–31, have supposed that he was trying to argue his way, on philosophical grounds, up to a statement of Christian belief. Many in the modern period who have wanted to construct what is sometimes called “natural theology”—arguing for the existence of God and perhaps the truth of Christianity by observation of the natural world alone, without appeal to special divine revelation—have hailed this speech as a forerunner of their efforts. And many who have wanted, for various reasons, to resist such “natural theology,” have looked at Acts 17 and declared that, whatever Luke may have thought, the Paul we know from the letters would never have gone in for that kind of discourse. That just wasn’t his kind of thing.
But all this is a misunderstanding. The Areopagus was a court. Paul was on trial. It was a dangerous moment. It could have gone badly wrong. He was all alone, or so it seems, still waiting for Silas and Timothy to join him. It appears that Timothy had come to him in Athens,1 but that Paul, anxious about the little church in Thessalonica, had sent Timothy back at once to see how they were getting on. He has important things on his mind; as he says on another occasion, there are battles outside and fears inside. He has no leisure, physical or mental, to play the detached philosopher. It is, however, utterly characteristic of the man that he would seize the opportunity not merely to defend himself—though that is what he is doing throughout the speech—but to do so in such a way as to challenge, with considerable rhetorical skill, the basic assumptions of the Greek worldview.
I say “with rhetorical skill,” but of course we have only a bare summary of what Paul said. If you read the Greek text of Paul’s speech as Luke reports it at the speed you might expect him to speak to a large gathering in the open air, it will take two minutes, or perhaps a little longer if you allow for a few well-judged rhetorical pauses. It is just possible that the court was busy that day, that Paul’s case was scheduled in between several others, and that the court officials told him (as I was once told in the House of Lords when we were debating “assisted dying” and far too many people wanted to contribute) that he could speak for only two minutes. But I find that highly unlikely. There is no evidence that the Areopagus rushed through business. And Paul, of all people, would not want to pass up a chance like this to address the highest court in the proud capital of ancient culture, the home of philosophy, the cradle of democracy. I suspect that he spoke for two hours rather than two minutes. His speech would form a book in itself, but Luke has no space for such a thing within his own work. He has boiled it down to the bones.
So what might have caused them to take Paul before the highest court in the land? People often say that the ancient pagan world was tolerant of religious diversity, and there is a sense in which that is true. Many “gods,” many “lords,” and many miscellaneous cults thrived in the countries that bordered the Mediterranean. It was easy for new divinities to make their way into a city, with a temple here and a small shrine there. A cult like that of Mithras was soon to become popular with the Roman army. The new cults of Rome and of Caesar himself were able to find a place alongside, sometimes upstaging but not normally displacing, the existing shrines of the pantheon.
However, tolerance was limited and controlled. There is evidence that philosophers were banished from cities because of their teaching. In particular, Athens itself had staged the trial of Socrates (399 BC), seen from that day to this as one of the most important events in the history of philosophy. What was Socrates’s crime? Corrupting the young and introducing foreign divinities. Since there were political motives as well behind Socrates’s trial, we cannot be entirely sure what this meant, but the memory lived on. In Athens of all places, conscious of its long and distinguished history and of the association of that history with the goddess Athene and the victory over the Persians by which her preeminent status had been assured, to have an outsider like Paul bringing strange new teachings would have been much more than a mere philosophical curiosity. He would have been a potential threat to society, to stability, to the worship of the divinities by whose beneficence the city lived, moved, and had its being. He had to be investigated.
Luke mocks the Athenian mixture of civic pride, on the one hand, and mere love of novelty, on the other. “All the Athenians, and the foreigners who live there,” he says with a sniff of disdain, “spend their time simply and solely in telling and hearing the latest novelty.”2 He is doing his best to play down the seriousness of the charge against Paul; the mention of “the foreigners who live there” implies “so Paul isn’t the only outsider, and they can hardly object to yet one more new idea.” Even before Paul gets to the Areopagus to face a charge of introducing novel theological ideas, Luke is insinuating that the whole city was eager for that kind of thing anyway. But you do not take someone to the highest court in the land unless there are serious questions to be addressed, with the undertones of a potential capital charge. The Areopagus, to repeat, was not a philosophers’ debating society.
The philosophers were more likely to debate in the marketplace, and that, as well as the synagogue, is where Paul had begun. We hear nothing of the local Jewish reaction; our attention is drawn to the debates with the Epicureans and the Stoics. Here Paul must have been in his element—or rather, one of his elements, since he was obviously at home in the synagogue as well, handling the scriptures with a lifetime’s easy fluency. But he was from Tarsus, one of the main centers of philosophy in the ancient world, and now here he was in Athens, the ultimate home of learned discourse, the city of Socrates, of Plato, of Aristotle . . .
The Epicureans and the Stoics were two of the main philosophical schools of the time. There was also the “Academy,” the ancient school of Plato, which was making a comeback after years of cautious agnosticism. But the Epicureans, the most famous of whom at the time was the Roman poet Lucretius, and the Stoics, among whom were Paul’s near contemporaries Seneca and Epictetus, were the main contenders. Of the two, Stoicism was the more popular. The overlaps and differences between these two great systems can be seen on many fronts, but for Paul’s purposes what mattered was their view about “God” or “the gods.” What he was saying about the One God fitted with neither. Yet he could see that both schools were hinting at things that pointed beyond their own proposals.
The key question concerned the relationship between “God” or “the gods” and the world, particularly the lives of humans. The Epicureans held that, though the gods might well exist, they live in a world of their own entirely separate from the human world. The world inhabited by humans carries on under its own impetus. Its atoms (this view goes back to the fifth-century BC Democritus) move to and fro, “swerving” this way and that and thereby colliding with one another and producing different effects, different evolving life-forms. Everything in the world and human life thus has “natural” causes, and at death the constituent atoms are dispersed beyond recall and the entire human person ceases to exist. This worldview remained the opinion of a small minority right up until the eighteenth century. Since then, it has become the dominant one in modern Western culture. Many imagine it to be a modern “discovery.”
The Stoics, by contrast, were basically pantheists. “God” and the world are more or less the same thing, and the divine spark of life, the logos, exists within everything. This life consists of a fire or spirit that animates the whole universe and that will eventually blaze out in a great moment of conflagration. After that, like the phoenix, the whole world will begin all over again, and events will take exactly the same course as before. Wise and virtuous human life then consists in thinking and acting in accordance with the inner logos of the world. Many Stoics, however, of whom Epictetus was a good example, enjoyed a flexible sort of pantheism in wh
ich, though they were themselves technically as much a part of “the divinity” as anything else, they could address the divine being in respectful and grateful worship.
The philosophers were not, of course, the only people who thought about such questions. Many of the ancient poets wrote movingly about the strange commerce between the gods and the world, and some pointed to the possibility of a beneficent force behind the messy world of the pagan pantheon. Some of these poets were playwrights. One famous play by the fifth-century BC tragedian Aeschylus describes the foundation of the court of the Areopagus itself, at which the god Apollo presided—and declared, among other things and as part of the logic of trials for murder, that when people die and their blood is spilled on the ground, there is no resurrection.3 That denial formed part of the foundation charter of the court before which Paul found himself.
To the philosophers in the marketplace, Paul seemed a mere oddity. His essentially Jewish view of the One God and a created universe and his specifically Christian variation on this simply didn’t fit. They were scornful: What can this man be on about, they wondered, scattering words around like someone sowing seeds in every direction? The one thing they picked up on was that he was talking about someone called Jesus and someone or something called “Anastasis”—the Greek word for “resurrection.” They assumed “Jesus and Anastasis” were a new pair of divinities, and “Anastasis,” a feminine noun in Greek, was Jesus’s consort; the two were a divine couple, rather like Isis and Osiris (though there the female is always mentioned first). The result, though, was clear. To the philosophers, Paul seemed to be proclaiming foreign divinities. The echoes of Socrates’s trial were obvious. That is why they took him to the Areopagus.
That too is why the opening question was hardly an innocent invitation to deliver a seminar paper. We have to imagine the opening remarks said in a voice of icy calm, with just the hint of a sneer, by a presiding magistrate who knows he has the power to have the person before him beaten, banished, or possibly even killed. “Are we able to know”—in other words, is this some top-secret mystery, or are we mere mortals capable of getting the point—“what this new teaching really is that you are talking about? You are putting very strange ideas into our minds. We’d like to find out what it all means.”4
Paul is thus on the spot. Few people who have studied the apostle would start with Acts 17 to explain who this remarkable man really was or what made him tick. But a strong case can be made for doing just that. Once we set aside the notion that he was trying out some arguments in “natural theology” and realize that he was speaking in self-defense, but also using the opportunity to score several points of his own within a framework cleverly designed to offset the wrong sort of reaction, we see the whole man at work. He comes across, of course, as a Jewish thinker, not just in his denunciation of idolatry and pagan temples, not just in his final punch line about the world’s Creator having a time line at the end of which he will call the whole world to account, and not even in the utterly Jewish (and, to Greeks, utterly ridiculous) notion of resurrection. The entire speech is Jewish in the way that the book of Proverbs is Jewish or the Wisdom of Solomon is Jewish, taking (as Paul says elsewhere) “every thought prisoner” to “make it obey the Messiah.”5 It is Jewish thought, with its strong view of the One God as the creator of all, claiming the intellectual high ground, able to see why this or that philosophy has a point to make but hasn’t yet grasped the whole picture.
It is, above all, Jewish thought that speaks of the utter transcendence and yet the intimate personal presence of the One God. Paul does not quote the Psalms or Isaiah, but we can see the influence of their double vision of the One God all the way through: the sovereign God, high above and beyond the earth so that its inhabitants are like grasshoppers, yet gently at hand, gathering the lambs in his arms and leading the mother sheep. Paul has absorbed the ancient wisdom of Israel deep into his heart. Thus equipped, he can look out on local inscriptions, monumental temples, philosophical debates, and poetic fancies with equanimity. This is Paul the Jew at the top of his game.
Equally, this is Paul the Roman citizen. His experience in Philippi must have helped him to realize that, however paradoxical it might be for a Jesus-follower to be an official citizen of Caesar’s empire, that is who he is and it can be turned to his advantage. Athens had no great love for Rome—the Romans had sacked the city a little over a century earlier—but Paul knew that if things turned rough, it would do him no harm to point out that he came with the judicial backing of the current great empire. Nor was this merely pragmatic. Once again his Jewish roots helped. Paul believed (as even Jesus had acknowledged at the most unlikely moment6) that the ruling powers of the world exercised their rule at the good pleasure of the One God, who would hold them to account. Paul must already have realized that the remarkable network of communications, particularly the roads and the local judicial systems, had created conditions never before imagined in which a wandering preacher like himself could make his way from country to country. He knew, of course, that things could still go horribly wrong. His experiences in Galatia and northern Greece would be fresh in his mind. But part of his belief in divine providence included the belief that the One God had strangely but surely established the Roman world, with all its pagan wickedness, for which it would be called to account, as a means by which, however paradoxically, he and others could proclaim Jesus as Lord. We would be right to suppose that he took courage in this knowledge.
Jew and Roman meet in Paul the Greek thinker and traveler. Again we must stress that this has nothing to do (as many generations have supposed, particularly when modern European thinkers have wanted to reject something called “Jewish thought”) with Paul leaving behind his Jewishness and taking on a different kind of thought altogether. No: for reasons already stated, Paul the loyal Jew can see all truth as God’s truth and therefore all observation and debate as observation of God’s world and debate about what it all means. He is thoroughly familiar with the language and ideas of Greek thought. (I suspect he relished the fact that when he said pneuma, he knew that what he meant by “spirit” both was and wasn’t the same as what a Stoic would have meant by it, or that when he spoke of Jesus as the eikōn theou, this idea of “the image of God” would mean different things to different people. Yes, misunderstandings would occur, and he would endlessly correct them.) He would speak not from the defensive position that unless one retreats into “pure” Jewish culture, everything will fall apart, but from the positive high ground that idolatry and the false thinking it engenders are perversions, distortions of the truth, and that when one pulls hard on the truth, the knots and tangles farther down the rope will eventually come loose.
This complex man, then, carries in his own person the deeply biblical and Jewish worldview, which has been brought into startling new focus by Jesus and the spirit, but not abandoned or marginalized. From that point of view he can travel the world of Rome and think the thoughts of Greece without fear or shame. In particular, his message of Jesus’s resurrection, without which his whole life and work would mean nothing, contains within itself the news that Jesus’s crucifixion was a victory, not a defeat. His denunciation of idols and temples in his Areopagus speech is not simply Jewish-style polemic, though it is that as well. It is the position of someone who believes that all the would-be divine powers in the world have been dethroned, shamed, led in someone else’s triumphal procession as a defeated rabble. The victory of Jesus on the cross, as we have seen, has a deeply intimate meaning for Paul: “The son of God loved me and gave himself for me.” But this is bound up tightly with its cosmic meaning: “He stripped the rulers and authorities of their armor,” he writes to the Colossians, “and displayed them contemptuously to public view, celebrating his triumph over them in him.”7 He is the Messiah’s man, and that includes all the other elements we have just listed.
All this is on display, then, as he addresses the graybeards in the senior court of Athens. His main point ought now to be cl
ear: “What I am saying to you may sound ‘new,’ but it is in fact hidden within your own culture. It is well hidden; in fact, you have covered it up with foolish and unnecessary superstructures. But though the specific news about Jesus and the resurrection may be a shock to your system”—it was, and they laughed at him for it—“the underlying truth that it unveils is a truth about the world and its One Creator God to which, at its best, your culture dimly and distantly bears witness.” Paul is not trying to begin with Athenian cultural symbols and build up a philosophical argument that will arrive at Christian truth. He is managing at one and the same time to rebut the charge of “proclaiming foreign divinities” and to sketch a worldview, a metaphysic, in which it might just make sense to say that the One God has unveiled his purpose for the world by raising Jesus from the dead. He is a Sherlock Holmes figure, explaining to the puzzled police chiefs that their different theories about the crime all have some sense to them, but that there is a different overall framework, under their noses all the time but never observed, that will solve the whole thing.
So he begins with the famous altar inscription “To an Unknown God.” Much ink has been spilled by scholars on what exactly such an inscription might originally have meant, but Paul is not concerned so much with its past history as with the excellent opportunity it presents him. It isn’t just that he is grasping at a kind of theological straw (“Here you are yourselves, admitting that there might be one god you don’t know yet, so let’s see if we can build on that”). He is picking up the idea of “ignorance” itself and using it as a lever to critique the entire world of normal pagan religion.
