A. Recently Planted Churches Revisited (15:36–16:5)

36 After some time⁸⁴ Paul said to Barnabas, “Let us go back and visit the brothers in all the cities where we preached the word of the Lord, and see how they are getting on.”

37 Barnabas wished to take John, surnamed Mark, along with them.

38 But Paul refused to take him along’⁸⁵ because he had parted from them in Pamphylia and not gone on with them to the work.

39 The disagreement between them became so sharp that they separated. Barnabas took Mark and set sail for Cyprus,

40 but Paul chose Silas and set out, having been commended by the brothers to the grace of the Lord.

41 He made his way through Syria and Cilicia, strengthening the churches.⁸⁶

36–39 The story of the disagreement between Paul and Barnabas does not make pleasant reading, but Luke’s realism in recording it helps us to remember that the two men, as they themselves said to the people of Lystra, were “human beings with feelings like” any other. Luke does not relate the dispute in such a way as to put Paul in the right and Barnabas in the wrong. In view of Luke’s restraint, it is idle for the reader to try to apportion the blame.

When Paul proposed to Barnabas that they should revisit the churches planted during their recent tour of Cyprus and central Anatolia, Barnabas agreed, and suggested that they should take Mark along with them as they had done on the former occasion. But Paul, believing that Mark’s departure from Perga during their former journey was unjustified,⁸⁷ and probably reckoning that it revealed some defect of character which made him unsuitable for such work, refused point-blank to take him again. We can believe that it would indeed have been unwise for Mark at this stage to join another missionary expedition of which Paul was one of the leaders. On the other hand, Barnabas probably discerned promising qualities in his young cousin which could be developed under his care rather than under Paul’s. It did Mark good to spend more time in the company of such a “son of encouragement”; in the event his latent qualities reached full maturity and were appreciated in due course by Paul himself (Col. 4:10; Philem. 23; 2 Tim. 4:11).

It is a pity that the dispute was allowed to generate such bitterness; it might not have done so but for the memory of the incident at Antioch when “even Barnabas,” a« Paul says, followed Peter’s example in withdrawing from the society of Gentile Christians.⁸⁸ After that, it is doubtful if Paul and Barnabas could ever be so happy in their association as they had once been. The old mutual confidence had been damaged and could not be restored: “never glad confident morning again.” It is not Luke’s policy to record such disagreements on points of principle, but the disagreement on a personal matter which he does record here can be read with greater understanding in the light of Paul’s account in his letter to the Galatians. Even so, the present disagreement was overruled for good: instead of one missionary and pastoral expedition there were two. Barnabas took Mark and went back to Cyprus to continue the evangelization of his native island; Paul visited the young churches of Anatolia.

40–41 Paul now had to find a new travel companion. He had had opportunity, during the recent visit to Antioch of Judas and Silas, to make an assessment of Silas, and in many ways found him to be a kindred spirit.⁸⁹ Luke certainly intends his readers to identify the Silas whom Paul chose as his companion with the Silas who, with Judas Barsabbas, had carried the apostolic letter from Jerusalem to Antioch, and there is no good reason to question the identification. Not only did he commend himself to Paul as a congenial colleague; it would be advantageous to have a leading member of the Jerusalem church as his companion. It appears, moreover, from the story of their adventures in Philippi that Silas, like Paul himself, was a Roman citizen (16:37–38); Paul would thus be spared the embarrassment of claiming for himself civic privileges or exemptions which his colleague could not share. Commended afresh to the divine grace by the Antiochene church, as on the earlier occasion when he set out with Barnabas (13:3),⁹⁰ Paul went with Silas through the cities of Syria and Cilicia, encouraging the believers and strengthening the churches.

84. A quite indefinite time note (Gk. ), here probably marking the transition from one source to another.

85. In v. 37 “to take along with them” renders the Greek aorist infinitive(), in v. 38 “to take along” renders the present infinitive (). On this “delicate nuance” J. H. Moulton remarks, “Barnabas, with easy forgetfulness of risk, wishes Mark—Paul refuses , to have with them day by day one who had shown himself unreliable” (MHT I, p. 130). For the verb cf. 12:25.

86. The Western text adds “handing over the commands of the elders” (cf. 16:4).

87. Cf. 13:13b (pp. 250–51).

88. Gal. 2:13.

89. F. C. Burkitt, hazarding a guess, says, “I should say that Silas had heard St. Stephen gladly” (Christian Beginnings [London, 1924], p. 133).

90. But Antioch no longer served Paul as a missionary base; his center of operations was for the next few years moved west to the Aegean world.

ACTS 16

2. Paul and Silas in South Galatia; Timothy Joins Them (16:1–4)

1 Then he arrived ¹ at Derbe and Lystra. Now at the latter place there was a disciple named² Timothy, the son of a Jewish woman who was a believer, although his father was a Greek.

2 Timothy received a good report from the brothers at Lystra and Iconium.

3 Paul wished him to set out as his companion, so he took him and circumcised him because of the Jews in those places. (Everyone knew that his father was a Greek.)

4 As they went through the cities, then, they handed over the decrees which had been decided upon by the apostles and elders at Jerusalem.³

1–2 Having passed through Cilicia, Paul and Silas crossed the Taurus range by the pass called the Cilician Gates,⁴ and after traversing part of the territory of Antiochus IV, king of Commagene,⁵ they entered the south-eastern region of the province of Galatia. There they visited the cities which had been evangelized by Paul and Barnabas two or three years previously—Derbe, Lystra, Iconium, and (probably) Pisidian Antioch.

At Lystra⁶ (the common term in “Derbe and Lystra” of v. 1 and “Lystra and Iconium” of v. 2) Paul decided to take along as his personal companion a young man named Timothy who with his mother had come to faith in Christ during the previous missionary visit and who had since then made promising progress in the Christian life. That the brothers in Lystra and Iconium should have known him better than those in Lystra and Derbe is quite natural: Lystra was much nearer to Iconium than to Derbe, although Lystra and Derbe were Lycaonian cities and Iconium was in Phrygia.

The statement that Timothy’s mother (Eunice by name, according to 2 Tim. 1:5) had married a Gentile suggests that there was less rigid social segregation among the Jews of central Asia Minor than among those of Palestine. In Phrygia, says Ramsay, “there can be little doubt that the Jews married into the dominant families”;⁷ and the same may well have been true in Lycaonia.

3 It was Timothy’s mixed parentage that made Paul decide to circumcise him before taking him along as his junior colleague. By Jewish law Timothy was a Jew, because he was the son of a Jewish mother, but because he was uncircumcised he was technically an apostate Jew. If Paul wished to maintain his links with the synagogue, he could not be seen to countenance apostasy.⁸ He set his face implacably against any move to circumcise Gentile believers like Titus (Gal. 2:3–5), but Timothy was in a different situation. For Paul, circumcision in itself was a matter of indifference (Gal. 5:6; 6:15); only when it was regarded as a condition of acceptance with God did it involve a lapse from grace and the obligation to keep the whole law of Moses (Gal. 5:3–4). Timothy’s circumcision was a minor surgical operation carried out for a practical purpose—his greater usefulness in the ministry of the gospel. No doubt Paul was charged with inconsistency for his action (as he has been charged in more recent times); but the consistency which some would like to impose on Paul is that “foolish consistency” which R. W. Emerson describes as “the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.”⁹ Those who deplore the absence of this consistency from Paul miss the higher consistency which aimed at bringing all the activities of his life and thought “into captivity to the obedience of Christ” (2 Cor. 10:5) and at subordinating every other interest to the paramount interests of the gospel (1 Cor. 9:23).

There are indications in the Pastoral Epistles that the leaders of Timothy’s home church associated themselves with Paul in commissioning him for the gospel ministry.¹⁰

4 Since 15:40 the successive verbs have been in the singular number, with Paul as subject. Now the plural is used: “they handed over the decrees.” This was Silas’s duty, not Paul’s.¹¹ The decrees indeed had been addressed expressly to the Gentile believers of Antioch and of Syria and Cilicia, not of South Galatia; since, however, the cities now being visited had been evangelized from Antioch, it might have been argued that they were included by implication. But, if the churches in these cities were those to which Paul’s letter to the Galatians had only recently been sent, how would they have reacted to the delivery of directives from Jerusalem by Paul’s fellow-traveler? Paul himself, as we have seen, never invokes the Jerusalem “decrees” when he deals with the practices which they forbid.¹²There are reasons for doubting if this verse is part of the original text of Acts.¹³

4. The Churches Grow in Faith and Numbers (16:5)

5 So the churches were established in their faith and increased in number day by day.

5 A crucial phase of Luke’s narrative is now concluded with the third of six brief reports of progress. The scene of action shifts to the Aegean world.

B. PHILIPPI (16:6–40)

1. The Call from Macedonia (16:6–10)

6 So they passed through¹⁴ the Phrygian and Galatian region: they had been forbidden by the Holy Spirit to speak the word in Asia.

7 When they came opposite Mysia, they tried to make their way into Bithynia, but the Spirit of Jesus¹⁵ did not allow them;

8 so they passed by Mysia and came down to the sea at Troas.¹⁶

9 Here a vision appeared to Paul by night: a man of Macedonia was standing and appealing to him, “Come over into Macedonia and help us.”

10 When he had seen the vision, we immediately sought means to set out for Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to preach the gospel to them.¹⁷

6 Paul’s missionary journeys display an extraordinary combination of strategic planning and keen sensitiveness to the guidance of the Spirit of God, however that guidance was conveyed—by prophetic utterance, inward prompting, or the overruling of external circumstances. On this occasion his intention had probably been, after visiting the churches planted in South Galatia by Barnabas and himself, to continue along the westward road to Ephesus. But the Spirit forbade him and his associates to take this road. The prohibition was evidently given before they passed through the “Phrygian and Galatian region”¹⁸ (probably the Phrygian territory incorporated in the province of Galatia, in which Iconium and Pisidian Antioch lay);¹⁹ it perhaps took the form of a prophetic utterance in the church at Lystra. The Spirit, we may observe, gave them ample warning to change their plans.

7–8 If the province of Asia was not to be the field of their immediate evangelistic activity, then it was natural for them to cast their eyes farther north, and think of the highly civilized province of Bithynia in northwest Asia Minor, with its Greek cities (of which Nicomedia and Nicaea were the most important) and Jewish settlements.²⁰ So, instead of continuing west to Ephesus, they turned north (probably from Pisidian Antioch), crossed the Sultan Daǧ range, and arrived at Philomelium (modern Akşehir). From there they struck northwest, taking one of two possible routes leading through Asian Phrygia. We could plot the remainder of their journey more certainly if we knew where they received the second divine monition, warning them away from Bithynia. If “over against Mysia” or “opposite Mysia” means, as Ramsay put it, “when they had reached such a point that a line drawn across the country at right angles to the general line of their route would touch Mysia,”²¹ then they would have arrived at one or the other of the road-junctions Dorylaeum (modern Eskişehir) or (more probably) Cotiaeum (modern Kütahya), and instead of continuing north into Bithynia turned west until they reached the sea at Troas.²²

In saying that this second prohibition was imposed by “the Spirit of Jesus,” does Luke suggest some significance in the change of terminology? It was the same Spirit who forbade them to “speak the word in Asia,” but the fact that on this occasion he is called “the Spirit of Jesus” may indicate that his guidance was now given through a prophecy uttered expressly in the name of Jesus. Paul and Silas were both prophets,²³ and available for use by the Spirit or by the exalted Lord for the declaration of his will.

9 Troas—Alexandria Troas (to give it its full name)—was founded at the end of the fourth century B.C. and remained a free city until Augustus gave it the status of a Roman colony. It was a regular port of call for vessels journeying between proconsular Asia and Macedonia (cf. 20:5) and was an important center in the Roman system of communications. Traces of its harbor and other buildings may still be seen at Dalyan.²⁴

At Troas, then, the series of divine prohibitions gave way to a positive direction. The direction this time took the form of a night vision seen by Paul. In this vision a man of Macedonia stood appealing to Paul to cross over to Macedonia and help the people there. Macedonia, which became the dominant power in the Greek world and Western Asia under Philip II and Alexander the Great in the fourth century B.C., had been a Roman province since 146 B.C. It is needless to ask how Paul recognized the man to be a Macedonian: his request, “Come over into Macedonia and help us,” indicated his nationality clearly enough.

10 At this point the narrator shows unobtrusively that he himself now joined the missionary party as a fourth member, by continuing the story in the first person plural instead of the third. In the prologue to the Third Gospel (which was designed as the prologue to the whole of Luke-Acts), he claims to have kept in touch with the events related “for some time back”; the “some time back” goes back at least to this point.²⁵ Here, then, the first of the “we” sections of Acts begins. No other explanation of them is so probable as that the “we” which characterizes them includes the “I” of the prologues to Luke and Acts. A writer incorporating into his narrative the diary of some personal eyewitness other than himself would scarcely have done so in such an artless way.²⁶ If the narrator was Luke the physician of Col. 4:14, we may wonder if he was practising his profession in Troas at the time, or waiting to be signed on as a ship’s doctor; but we have no means of knowing. At any rate, he accompanied Paul, Silas, and Timothy to Macedonia, having taken part in the joint decision to go there in response to Paul’s vision.

If Paul’s original plan had been to evangelize the eastern shore of the Aegean by planting Christianity in Ephesus, “that great metropolis in which the East looked out upon the West,”²⁷ then the plan was only postponed, not jettisoned altogether. But first he was directed to the western shore of the Aegean, to plant the faith in Philippi, Thessalonica, Beroea, and Corinth before he settled in Ephesus. Strategic points on the circumference of the circle of which Ephesus was the center were to be evangelized first—in Macedonia and Achaia as well as in South Galatia—and then he was to complete his work in that whole area by nearly three years’ ministry at the center. The Spirit’s interventions did not frustrate Paul’s strategy, but enhanced its effectiveness.

2. Troas to Philippi (16:11–12a)

11 Setting sail²⁸from Troas, then, we had a straight run to Samothrace, and the next day (we came) to Neapolis.

12a From there we went to Philippi, a city of the first district of Macedonia,²⁹ a Roman colony.

11 The wind was favorable for the voyage across the North Aegean, and they finished it in two days. (The reverse journey from Philippi to Troas, recorded in 20:6, took five days.) On the evening of the first day they reached Samothrace, a mountainous island rising to 5,000 feet, which forms a conspicuous landmark. In religious history the chief importance of Samothrace lies in its being the seat of a widely patronized mystery cult, the worship of the Cabiri, which had been practised there from time immemorial. Paul and his friends did not linger there, however; the next day their ship took them to Neapolis, on the mainland. Neapolis, the modern Kavalla, was the port of Philippi, which lay some ten miles inland. At Neapolis the great Egnatian Way, a Roman road linking the Adriatic with the Aegean, reached its eastern terminus.³⁰ Luke likes to note the ports of arrival and departure, and in the “we” sections he is specially careful to note the daily progress made during voyages.

12a Disembarking at Neapolis, the missionaries went on to Philip-pi along the Egnatian Way. This city received its name from Philip II, father of Alexander the Great, who seized the gold mines in the vicinity and fortified what had formerly been the Thasian settlement of Crenides. With the rest of Macedonia, Philippi passed under Roman control at the end of the Third Macedonian War in 168 B.C. At that time Macedonia was divided into four administrative districts or republics. Later, in 146 B.C., it was reduced to provincial status. Near Philippi was fought the battle in 42 B.C. which resulted in the victory of Mark Antony and Octavian (the future Emperor Augustus) over Brutus and Cassius, assassins of Julius Caesar.³¹ After the battle, the victors settled a number of their veterans at Philippi and made the city a Roman colony; Octavian settled further colonists there after his victory over Antony and Cleopatra at Actium in 31 B.C.

Luke describes Philippi as a city of the first district of Macedonia³²—that is, the first of the four districts into which the former kingdom was divided by the Romans. While he refers to several other cities which are known to have been Roman colonies at the time, Philippi is the only one which he expressly calls a Roman colony.³³ The details of its administration given in the ensuing narrative are those which were specially characteristic of such a colony. A Roman colony used Roman law, and its constitution was modeled on the municipal constitution of Rome.

3. The Faith of Lydia (16:12b–15)

12b In this city we spent several days.

13 On the sabbath day we went outside the gate by the riverside to a place habitually used for prayer,³⁴ and we sat down and talked to the women who had come together.

14 One of the women, Lydia by name, a purple merchant from the city of Thyatira, listened carefully.³⁵ The Lord opened her heart to pay heed to what Paul was saying.

15 When she was baptized, with her household, she begged us, “If you have judged me to be a believer in the Lord, come into my house and stay there.” She would take no refusal.³⁶

12b–13 At Philippi, then, they spent several days. When Paul visited a new city, it was his practice, as we have seen, to attend the local Jewish synagogue on the first sabbath after his arrival and seek an opportunity to make his message known there. At Philippi, however, there does not appear to have been a regular synagogue. That can only mean that there were very few resident Jews; had there been ten Jewish men, they would have sufficed to constitute a synagogue.³⁷ No number of women could compensate for the absence of even one man necessary to make up the quorum of ten. There was, however, a place outside the city where a number of women—either of Jewish birth or Gentiles who worshiped the God of Israel—met to go through the appointed Jewish service of prayer for the sabbath day, even if they could not constitute a valid synagogue congregation. Paul and his companions found this place, by the bank of the river Gangites, and sat down with the women and told them the story of Jesus.

14–15 One of these women, a God-fearing Gentile, came from Thyatira in the province of Asia. Her name Lydia, “the Lydian woman,” reminds us that Thyatira lay in the territory of the ancient kingdom of Lydia. The people of that area were famed for their skill in the manufacture of purple dye, extracted from the juice of the madder root.³⁸ This was still in use there for the dyeing of carpets at the end of the nineteenth century, before it was superseded by chemical dyes.³⁹ Lydia had evidently come to Philippi as a trader in that dye. There is inscriptional evidence for the existence of a guild of purple merchants in Philippi.⁴⁰ But she had possibly learned to worship the true God in her native Thyatira; there was probably a Jewish community there.⁴¹

As Paul and his friends spoke, Lydia believed what they said and acknowledged Jesus as Lord. She thus became Paul’s first convert in Europe. When she was baptized, together with her household (which would include her servants and other dependents as well as her family), she gave practical proof of her faith by pressing the four missionaries to become her guests. Women in Macedonia were noted for their independence; moreover, under Roman law (which governed life in the colony) freeborn women with three children and freedwomen with four children were at this time granted a number of privileges, including the right to undertake legal transactions on their own initiative.⁴²

4. The Pythoness (16:16–18)

16 Now, as we made our way to the place of prayer,⁴³ we were encountered by a slave girl who was possessed by a pythonic spirit. She brought her owners much profit⁴⁴ by her fortune-telling.

17 She kept on following Paul and us, calling out as she did so, “These men are servants⁴⁵ of God Most High: they are proclaiming the way of salvation to you!”⁴⁶

18 She did this for many days on end. Paul was annoyed, and turned and said to the spirit, “I command you in the name of Jesus Christ, Come out of her!” It came out there and then.

16 Three individuals are singled out by Luke among those whose lives were influenced for good by the gospel at Philippi; they differ so much one from another that he might be thought to have selected them deliberately in order to show how the saving power of the name of Jesus was shown in the most diverse types of men and women. The first is Lydia, the independent businesswoman of reputable character and God-fearing mind; as she heard the gospel, “the Lord opened her heart” and she believed it. The second is a person of a very different stamp: an unfortunate demon-possessed slave girl, whose owners exploited her condition for their material gain. She is described by Luke as “having a pythonic spirit” or being a “pythoness”—that is, a person inspired⁴⁷ by. Apollo, the Greek deity specially associated with the giving of oracles, who was worshiped as the “Pythian” god at the oracular shrine of Delphi in central Greece. His priestess there was the Pythian prophet par excellence; the girl of whom Luke speaks was a very pale reflection of her. This girl’s involuntary utterances were regarded as the voice of the god, and she was thus much in demand by people who wished to have their fortunes told or to receive information or advice which they believed could be supplied from such a source.

17 The slave girl’s deliverance demanded much more spectacular measures than Lydia’s quiet turning in heart to the Lord. Day by day, as the missionaries went to the place of prayer, she followed them through the streets of Philippi, advertising them aloud as servants of God Most High, who were bringing the way of salvation to the city. The title “God Most High” provided Jews and Gentiles with a convenient common denominator for the supreme being,⁴⁸ and “salvation” in a religious sense was as eagerly sought by Gentiles as by Jews.⁴⁹

18 The missionaries, however, did not appreciate her unsolicited testimonials, and at last Paul, vexed by her continual clamor, exorcized the spirit that possessed her, commanding it in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her. The words had scarcely left his lips when she was released from its power. The superior authority which such spirits had recognized when Jesus himself commanded them to leave their victims was equally recognized when his name was invoked by one of his disciples, and proved as potent in exorcism as in other forms of healing (cf. 3:6).

5. Paul and Silas Imprisoned (16:19–24)

19 When her owners saw that their hope of profit⁵⁰ had “come out” of her, they seized Paul and Silas and dragged them into the forum⁵¹before the magistrates.

20 Bringing them before the praetors,⁵² they said, “These men are causing disturbance in our city. Jews as they are,

21 they are proclaiming customs which we may neither accept nor practise, Roman citizens as we are.

22 The crowd joined in attacking them, and the praetors tore off their cloaks and ordered them to be beaten with rods.

23 When they had inflicted many strokes on them, they threw them into prison and charged the jailer to guard them securely.

24 Receiving such a charge, he threw them into the inner prison and secured their feet in the stocks.

19 The good deed done to the slave girl was not at all to the liking of her owners; when Paul exorcized the spirit that possessed her, he exorcized their means of income: she could no longer tell fortunes. There is a literary parallel in one of the comedies of Menander in which a girl possessed not by Apollo but by Cybele laments the loss of her cymbals and tambourine and of her gift of prophecy, which depends on them.⁵³ The righteous indignation of the Philippian slave girl’s owners was aroused at the missionaries’ wanton attack on the sacred rights of property (as they saw it).⁵⁴ Moreover, the men who had infringed these rights were not Roman citizens like themselves (or so they thought); they were not even Greeks, like the population around them, but wandering Jews, engaged in propagating some variety of their own perverse superstition. They therefore dragged Paul and Silas before the magistrates and lodged a complaint against them. Luke and Timothy were apparently unmolested: Paul and Silas were not only the leaders of the party but also most obviously Jews (Luke was a Gentile and Timothy a half-Gentile). Anti-Jewish sentiment lay very near the surface in pagan antiquity.

20–21 As Philippi was a Roman colony, its municipal administration, like that of Rome itself, was in the hands of two collegiate magistrates. The collegiate magistrates of a Roman colony were commonly called duumvirs, but in some places they preferred the more dignified title of praetors, and this is what the chief magistrates of Philippi were apparently called.⁵⁵ Before the two praetors, then, Paul and Silas were dragged, and their accusers represented them as vagabond Jews who were causing disturbances in the city and inculcating customs which Roman citizens of all people could neither admit nor practise. Proselytization of Roman citizens by Jews was not positively illegal, so far as the evidence indicates,⁵⁶ but it certainly incurred strong disapproval. The magistrates were bound in any case to take cognizance of such religious activity as threatened to provoke a breach of the peace or to encourage unlawful practices or organizations; and Paul and Silas were charged with precisely this kind of activity.

22 There was great indignation that Roman citizens should be molested by strolling peddlers of an outlandish religion. Such people had to be taught to know their proper place and not trouble their betters. There was no serious investigation of the charge: Paul and Silas were summarily stripped⁵⁷ and handed over to the lictors—the magistrates’ police attendants—to be soundly beaten; the city jailer was then ordered to lock them up.

The lictors⁵⁸ were the official attendants on the chief magistrates in Rome and other Roman cities. They carried as symbols of office bundles of rods, with an axe inserted among them in certain circumstances—the fasces et secures⁵⁹—denoting the magistrates’ right to inflict corporal and, where necessary, capital punishment. It was with the lictors’ rods that the two missionaries were beaten on this occasion. It was not the only time that Paul had this treatment meted out to him: five or six years later he claims to have been beaten with rods three times (2 Cor. 11:25), although we have no information about the two other occasions.

23–24 When, after this severe beating, they were handed over to the jailer’s custody, he interpreted his instructions strictly and fastened their legs in the stocks, in the inmost part of the prison. These stocks had more than two holes for the legs, which could thus be forced apart in such a way as to cause the utmost discomfort and cramping pain.⁶⁰ It was not the jailer’s business to take any thought for his prisoners’ comfort, but to make sure that they did not escape. He was possibly a retired soldier, and while service in the Roman army developed many fine qualities, these did not include the milk of human kindness. Yet this man is the third person in Philippi whom Luke describes as influenced by the saving power of Christ. He was a totally different character from both Lydia and the fortune-teller, and it took an earthquake and confrontation with death to make him take thought for his salvation; yet the same gospel as had blessed those two women now brought blessing to him.

6. Earthquake at Midnight: the Jailer’s Conversion (16:25–34)

25 At midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the prisoners were listening to them.

26 Suddenly there was a great earthquake; the foundations of the prison were shaken, all the doors were opened at once,⁶¹ and all the fetters were unfastened.

27 The jailer woke up; when he saw the prison doors open, he drew his sword and was on the point of killing himself for he thought the prisoners had escaped.

28 But Paul called in a loud voice, “Don’t harm yourself; we are all here!”

29 The jailer then called for lights, rushed in, and fell down trembling before Paul and Silas;

30 he brought them out⁶² and said, “Gentlemen, what must I do to be saved?”

31 “Believe on the Lord Jesus,”⁶³ they replied, “and you will be saved—you and your household.”

32 Then they spoke the word of the Lord⁶⁴ to him, and to all those who were in his house.

33 At that very hour of the night he took them and bathed their wounds;⁶⁵ then he was baptized immediately, together with all who belonged to him.

34 Then he brought them up into his house and set food before them.⁶⁶ Having believed in God, he rejoiced with all his household.

25 This paragraph bears the marks of being an independent narrative, inserted by Luke into the record of events at Philippi. He probably derived it from another source than its context: if verse 35 had followed immediately after verse 24, the reader would have been conscious of no hiatus.⁶⁷ But we may be glad that Luke did add it at this point: it enriches his account of Paul’s Philippian ministry.

The double discomfort of the lictors’ rods and the stocks was not calculated to fill Paul and Silas with joy, but around midnight the other prisoners, as they listened, heard sounds coming from the inmost cell—sounds, not of groaning and cursing, but of prayer and hymn-singing. “The legs feel nothing in the stocks when the heart is in heaven,” says Ter-tullian.⁶⁸ What sort of men were these?

26 Perhaps it was the awed impression which the two missionaries’ behavior produced on the other prisoners that enabled them to dissuade those others from making their escape while the going was good when a sudden earthquake shook the prison foundations, threw open the doors, and loosened the staples that attached the prisoners’ fetters to the walls.

27 The earthquake that rocked the prison foundations wakened the jailer out of his midnight sleep. Immediately he went to investigate his charge. The worst had happened: the prison doors were open; the prisoners, of course, had seized their opportunity and escaped. For a man brought up to a Roman soldier’s ideals of duty and discipline, only one honorable course was open—suicide.

28 But as he stood there, by the outer door of the prison, about to drive the point of his short sword into his throat or heart, his hand was arrested by a voice from the darkness within: “Don’t harm yourself; we are all here!” While he could see nothing as he looked into the darkness, those inside could see his figure silhouetted in the doorway and could see what he was about to do. Not only were Paul and Silas still there, but they had apparently restrained the other prisoners also. There was something uncanny about these two men!

29–30 So, calling for light, he rushed into the prison and brought Paul and Silas out. First, according to the Western reviser (who probably imagined what he himself would have done had he been in the jailer’s shoes), he prudently secured the other prisoners again.⁶⁹ Then he earnestly asked Paul and Silas, “What must I do to be saved?”

How much he meant by this question it would be difficult to determine. He might have heard (or heard about) the fortune-teller’s announcement that these men had come to proclaim a “way of salvation";⁷⁰ if so, he might have seen in the earthquake a supernatural vindication of them and their message. What was involved in this salvation would not have been clear to him, but he was thoroughly shaken, in soul as well as in body, and if anyone could show him the way to peace of mind, release from fear, and a sense of security, Paul and Silas (he was convinced) could do so.

31–32 There and then the two missionaries assured him that faith in Jesus, the Lord whom they proclaimed, was the way of salvation for himself and his family. What was meant by faith in Jesus as Lord they proceeded to make plain to the whole household, presenting the gospel to them in terms which they could readily grasp.

33–34 This was the message they had lived for! With joy they embraced it at once. The jailer bathed the wounded backs of the two men, probably at a well in the prison courtyard, and there too he and his household were baptized. “He washed and was washed,” says Chrysostom: “he washed them from their stripes, and was himself washed from his sins.”⁷¹ If nothing is said explicitly of their receiving the Holy Spirit, this is implied in the emphasis on the rejoicing which filled the house.⁷²

There, in the jailer’s house, into which Paul and Silas were brought up,⁷³ they received hospitable treatment: food was set before them, and hosts and guests exulted together, united in Christian faith and love. The jailer was guilty of no dereliction of duty in thus taking two prisoners into his house; his responsibility was to produce them when called upon to do so. He had no reason to fear that they would run away and leave him in the lurch. Luke’s third example of the power of the gospel at Philippi is the most wonderful of all. And perhaps Paul and Silas reckoned the rods and the stocks well worth enduring for the joy that they shared in the jailer’s house.

7. Paul and Silas Leave Philippi (16:35–40)

35 At daybreak⁷⁴ the praetors sent the lictors with a message: “Release those men.”

36 The jailer reported their words to Paul: “The praetors have sent word that you two are to be released: now then, depart and be on your way in peace.”⁷⁵

37 But Paul said to the lictors, “They have beaten us publicly, without a proper trial,⁷⁶ Roman citizens as we are, and threw us into prison. Do they now think they can turn us out secretly? No indeed; let them come in person and escort us out.”

38 The lictors reported these words to the praetors. The praetors were afraid when they learned that the men were Roman citizens,

39 and they came⁷⁷ and appealed to them; they brought them out and begged them to leave the city.

40 So, leaving the prison, they went to Lydia’s house, where they saw the brothers⁷⁸ and encouraged them; then they took their departure.

35 By the next morning the excitement of the previous day had died down. The praetors decided that the two vagabond Jews had been taught the necessary lesson by the lictors’ rods and the night in the lock-up. All that was required now was to release them and send them out of town; they would be in no hurry to come back. Imprisonment in itself was not a common penalty for breaches of civil law; by having Paul and Silas locked up overnight after their beating, the praetors had simply exercised their police right of coercitio—summary correction or chastisement. They now sent the lictors to the jail with orders to the jailer to set the two prisoners free.

36–37 But when the jailer reported this message to Paul and Silas and told them that they were at liberty to depart, Paul demurred. An injustice had been committed, and it must not be covered up in this way. He and his companion were Roman citizens—as good Roman citizens as the colonists and magistrates of Philippi—and their rights as Roman citizens had been grossly violated. The charges against them ought to have been properly investigated, but they had been beaten and imprisoned without any inquiry. By a series of Valerian and Porcian laws enacted between the beginning of the Roman Republic and the early second century B.C. Roman citizens were exempted from degrading forms of punishment and had certain valued rights established for them in relation to the law.⁷⁹ These privileges had been more recently reaffirmed under the empire by a Julian law dealing with public disorder.⁸⁰

Why then did not Paul appeal to his Roman citizenship the day before?⁸¹ The answer sometimes given, that it would have been embarrassing for him to have to claim privileges which Silas could not share, seems to be excluded by the plain implication of the present passage, that both Silas and he were Roman citizens. It may be that they did protest at the time, but that no one paid any attention to them in the excitement of the moment. A Roman citizen claimed his legal rights by the affirmation ciuis Romanus sum, “I am a Roman citizen.”⁸² It is uncertain if there was any documentary evidence which could be produced on the spot in confirmation of the claim. Paul was probably registered as a Roman citizen in the public record office at Tarsus, and a certified copy of the registration might be obtained, but did he carry this around with him wherever he went?⁸³ At any rate, on this occasion Paul’s claim neatly turned the tables on the self-important complaint of his accusers, that respectable Roman citizens should not be disturbed by wandering Jews. If the praetors wanted them to leave Philippi, he said, let them come and show the courtesy due to Roman citizens, and not expel them in this hole-and-corner manner.

38–39 The lictors brought Paul’s message back to the praetors, who were dismayed to learn what, in yesterday’s excitement, they had failed to ascertain—that these two Jews were as good Roman citizens as themselves. If a complaint about their illegal treatment of these Roman citizens reached the ears of the authorities in Rome, they would be in an awkward position. Their self-importance was healthily deflated, as they went to the jail and requested Paul and Silas to leave Philippi. Roman citizens who had been convicted of no crime could not be expelled from a Roman city, but the responsibility of protecting two unpopular Roman citizens was more than the praetors felt able to undertake. They therefore apologized to Paul and Silas and escorted them out of the prison precincts, asking them to be good enough not to remain in Philippi any longer.

40 Being released from prison, they went to Lydia’s house and spoke words of encouragement to the Christians gathered there. Paul’s insistence on an official apology may have served in some degree as a protection to them for the time being. (That the Christians of Philippi had to endure persecution for their faith some years later is evident from Phil. 1:27–30.) Then Paul and Silas, with Timothy, departed from Philippi in the westward direction along the Egnatian Way. Luke perhaps stayed behind; at any rate he reappears in Philippi in 20:5–6, at the beginning of the second “we” section of Acts. He is possibly the “true yokefellow” to whom Paul addresses a special request in Phil. 4:3.⁸⁴

The later history of the Philippian church makes pleasant reading. The same kindness as provided Paul and his friends with hospitality during their first visit to the city was shown in repeated gifts to Paul during his subsequent travels and Roman imprisonment (Phil. 4:10–16).⁸⁵

1. The Western text (D lat^g syr^{hcl. mg} ) reads “And passing through these nations he arrived …”

2. P⁴⁵ omits “named.”

3. The Western text reads “and going through the cities they proclaimed the Lord Jesus Christ with all boldness, at the same time also handing over the commandments of the apostles and elders at Jerusalem.”

4. See W. M. Ramsay, “St. Paul’s Road from Cilicia to Iconium,” Pauline and Other Studies (London, 1906), pp. 273–98; also J. Murphy-O’Connor, “On the Road and on the Sea with St. Paul,” Bible Review 1.2 (1985), pp. 38–47 (where it is pointed out that on journeys from east to west Paul preferred to go by land, because of delays caused by contrary winds at sea).

5. See p. 272.

6. The Latin translation of Origen’s commentary on Romans (at 16:21) calls Timothy “a citizen of Derbe” (cf. Valckenaer and Blass’s emendation at 20:4, mentioned on p. 380, n. 4).

7.BRD, p. 357.

8. Cf. M. Hengel, Acts and the History of Earliest Christianity, E.T. (London, 1979), p. 64; also A. E. Harvey, The New English Bible: Companion to the New Testament (Oxford/Cambridge, 1970), p. 459. Since everyone, not least “the Jews in those places,” knew that his father was a Greek, it would be taken for granted that he was uncircumcised. The imperfect tense of the last verb of v. 3 () may imply that his father was no longer alive; this is made explicit by a handful of witnesses in v. 1 (104 pc lat^g p ^vg.codd ) which say that his mother was a widow.

9. “Essay on Self-Reliance,” Essays, Lectures and Orations (London, 1848), p. 30; cf. F. J. Foakes-Jackson, Life of St. Paul (London, 1927), p. 15.

10. In 1 Tim. 4:14 Timothy is said to have received his spiritual gift “by prophetic utterance” when the elders of his church laid their hands on him (cf. 1 Tim. 1:18); in 2 Tim. 1:6 he is said to have received it when Paul laid his hands on him.

11. Cf. 15:22, 27.

12. See p. 285.

13. It is a doublet of the Western reading of 15:41 (except that there it is the churches of Syria and Cilicia that receive the “commandments,” whereas here it is the churches of Derbe, Lystra, etc.). See A. S. Geyser, “Paul, the Apostolic Decree and the Liberals in Corinth,” in Studia Paulina in honorem J. de Zwaan (Haarlem, 1953), p. 137.

14. Gk. . The Byzantine text reads “having passed through”(), which suggests that the prohibition to preach in Asia came after they had traversed the “Phrygian and Galatian region,” whereas it actually came before, or at an early point in, their passage through it.

15. The Byzantine text omits “of Jesus.”

16. The Western text reads “and passing through Mysia, they arrived at Troas.”

17. The Western text recasts this verse: “Having awaked, then, he related the vision to us, and we recognized that the Lord had called us to evangelize those in Macedonia.”

18. It may have been known as Phrygia Galatica (on the analogy of Pontus Galaticus, attested in CIL III.6818). The frequently repeated objection that (feminine singular) is not used adjectivally is sufficiently refuted by C. J. Hemer, who adduces thirty-one instances of its being so used (“The Adjective ‘Phrygia,’ ” JTS n.s. 27 [1976], pp. 122–26; “Phrygia: A Further Note,” JTS n.s. 28 [1977], pp. 99–101).

19. See W. M. Calder, “The Boundary of Galatic Phrygia,” MAMA 7 (Manchester, 1956), pp. ix–xvi.

20. It was united under one governor with the western part of the former kingdom of Pontus. For Jewish settlements in Bithynia cf. Philo, Embassy to Gaius 281. Bithynia was evangelized before long; cf. 1 Pet. 1:1 and Pliny, Epistle 10.96 (his letter to the Emperor Trajan on the growth of Christianity in the province).

21. The Church in the Roman Empire (London, ⁴1895), p. 75n. If so, might be rendered in modern idiom by “in the latitude of Mysia.”

22. See T. R. S. Broughton, “Three Notes on St. Paul’s Journeys in Asia Minor,” in Quantulacumque: Studies presented to K. Lake (London, 1937), pp. 135–38. Paul and his companions had to pass through part of Mysia to get to Troas; they “passed by Mysia” in the sense that they did not stop to preach there.

23. Cf. 13:1; 15:32.

24. See J. M. Cook, The Troad (Oxford, 1973), pp. 16–21; C. J. Hemer, “Alexandria Troas,” TynB 26 (1975), pp. 79–112.

25. See H. J. Cadbury, “Commentary on the Preface of Luke,” Beginnings I.2 (London, 1922), pp. 501–3; J. H. Ropes, “St. Luke’s Preface: and ,” JTS 25 (1923–24), pp. 70–71.

26. On the uniformity of the style and language of the “we” sections with those of the rest of Acts see A. Harnack, Luke the Physician, E.T. (London, 1907), pp. 26–120; J. C. Hawkins, Horae Synopticae (Oxford, ²1909), pp. 182–89. If the narrator incorporated the diary of someone else, he must have worked over it very thoroughly; why then did he leave this abrupt transition from the third person to the first, with no hint of the identity of the diarist? If, on the other hand, the first-person narrative style were a fictitious device to suggest the presence of an eyewitness and thus give an impression of greater authority or immediacy to the record, would it not have been used less sparingly? See p. 7.

27. F. J. A. Hort, Prolegomena to Romans and Ephesians (London, 1895), p. 83.

28. The Western text adds “next day.”

29. This rendering, which presupposes Gk., is found in no Greek manuscript, but is supported by some codices of the Latin Vulgate and by mediaeval versions in Provençal and German. It was conjectured by F. Field, F. Blass, and C. H. Turner, and has been defended more recently by E. Haenchen and H. Conzelmann (cf. NA²⁶). The majority Greek reading is , not , but it is difficult to make sense of “which is first city of the district of Macedonia.” The Western text interprets this to mean that Philippi was “capital of Macedonia” (), but that distinction belonged to Thessalonica, not to Philip-pi. The historical situation is reflected accurately by the reading “which is a city of the first district of Macedonia.”

30. Its western termini were at Apollonia and Dyrrhachium (modem Poyani and Durrës in Albania). See N. G. L. Hammond, “The Western Part of the Via Egnatia,” JRS 64 (1974), pp. 185–94. The Romans built the road across Macedonia after the country became a province in 146 B.C.

31. The battle immortalized in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, especially in the ominous au revoir, “thou shalt see me at Philippi” (Act 4, Scene 3).

32. See n. 29 above. For the division into four districts see Livy, History 45.29.

33. He transliterates Lat. colonia () instead of using Gk. . The original purpose of Roman colonies was military; it was reckoned a good thing to have settlements of Roman citizens planted at strategic points throughout the Roman sphere of influence. Other Roman colonies which figure in Acts are Pisidian Antioch, Lystra, Troas, Corinth, and Ptolemais.

34. The chief authorities for the Alexandrian text are corrupt here ( A B require emendation); the true reading may be preserved in the Byzantine text, , correctly rendered in KJV: “where prayer was wont to be made” (the Western reading is probably due to the misinterpretation of as “it was thought”). Here and in v. 16 may mean either “prayer” or “a place of prayer” (almost, if not altogether, synonymous with ).

35. Gk. (imperfect), “kept on listening.”

36. Gk. , “she compelled us.”

37. For ten as the quorum (minyān) for a synagogue congregation cf. Pirqê’ Abôt 3.7: “Rabbi Halafta ben Dosa, of the village of Hananya, said, ‘When ten people sit together and occupy themselves with the Torah, the shekhinah abides among them, as it is said, God stands in the congregation of God’ (Ps. 82:1).”

38. See C. J. Hemer, “Lydia and the Purple Trade,” New Docs. 3 (1978), pp. 53–55.

39. See W. M. Ramsay, Historical Geography of Asia Minor (London, 1890), p. 123. Lydian women are associated with purple dyeing as early as Homer (Iliad 4.141–42).

40. CIL III.664 (purpurarii).

41. Since Thyatira was founded by Seleucus I, it may be included among “the cities which he founded in Asia” in which, according to Josephus (Ant. 12.119), he granted citizenship to Jews. Cf. Schürer II, p. 440, n. 63 (CIG 3509, cited there, speaks of a in front of the city of Thyatira). Thyatira was later the seat of a church, one of the seven addressed in the Apocalypse (Rev. 2:18–29).

42. Since she had already confessed her faith in baptism, “if you have judged me to be a believer in the Lord” must be equivalent to “since you have judged me to be a believer …” See W. D. Thomas, “The Place of Women in the Church at Philippi,” ExT 83 (1971–72), pp. 117–20; cf. p. 323, n. 5 below.

43. Or “to prayer” (); cf. n. 34 above.

44. Gk. , “work,” “business.”

45. P 45 omits , probably by accident.

46. The textual evidence is fairly evenly balanced between “you” () and “us” (), with a slight preponderance in favor of “you.”

47. Plutarch (The Failure of the Oracles 9.414e) calls such people “ventriloquists” (Gk. )—ventriloquists, that is to say, whose utterances were really and not only apparently beyond their conscious control. In LXX the same Greek word is used of those who have a familiar spirit (Heb. ), like the witch of Endor (1 Sam. [LXX 1 Kms.] 28:7).

48. In LXX is the rendering of , the divine designation found in Gen. 14:18, etc. For its use by Gentiles cf. Num. 24:16; Isa. 14:14; Dan. 3:26 (LXX/Theod. 3:93); 1 Esdr. 2:3. In Mark 5:7 “Legion” address Jesus as . Josephus (Ant. 16.163) quotes an edict of Augustus in which Hyrcanus II is called . With the slave girl’s use of here compare (and contrast) Stephen’s use of in 7:48. See A. B. Cook, Zeus II.2 (Cambridge, 1925), p. 889; A. Deissmann, Light from the Ancient East, E.T. (London, 21927), pp. 413–24; A. D. Nock, C. H. Roberts, and T. C. Skeat, “The Gild of Zeus Hypsistos” (1936), in Nock, Essays, pp. 414–43; also CIJ 2.1433, where a synagogue in Alexandria (second century B.C.) is dedicated , and other dedications cited in New Docs. 1 (1976), § 5.

49. See on 14:9 (p. 274 with n. 22).

50. Gk. , as in v. 16 above.

51. Gk. , which, in reference to a Roman city, is a translation of Lat. forum. The forum of Philippi, which lies on the south side of the Egnatian Way, is one of the chief features of the site, although the buildings seen today date mostly from the time of Marcus Aurelius (161–80).

52. This clause practically repeats the preceding one, with a less violent verb. The “praetors” () here are the “magistrates” () of v. 19.

53. Menander, Theophoroumenē (“The Divinely Inspired Girl”), Act 2, Scene 1; see T. B. L. Webster, An Introduction to Menander (Manchester, 1974), p. 191.

54. The only occasions on which Luke reports an attack by Gentiles on Christian missionaries arise from a threat (real or imagined) presented by the gospel to property interests; cf. 19:23–27 (pp. 374–75).

55. Compare the chief magistrates of Capua (a Roman colony in Italy itself), of whom Cicero said, “While they are called duumvirs (duo uiri, ‘two men’) in our other colonies, these men wished to be called praetors” (On the Agrarian Law 2.93).

56. See A. N. Sherwin-White, Roman Society and Roman Law in the New Testament (Oxford, 1963), p. 81.

57. The idea that it was their own clothes that the praetors tore off (cf. 14:14) is ludicrously misconceived.

58. Gk. , “rod-carriers.”

59. It is in part from the adoption of such a bundle of rods as the symbol of an Italian political party after World War I that the political term “fascist” is derived.

60. Eusebius tells how this form of torture was endured by the confessors of Vienne and Lyon in A.D. 177 (HE 5.1.27) and by Origen at a later date (HE 6.39).

61. B and lat^g omit “at once.”

62. The Western text inserts “having secured the other prisoners.”

63. The Western and Byzantine texts add “Christ.”

64. Cod. B with the first hand in and a few other witnesses read “the word of God.”

65. Gk. , “blows” (translated "strokes" in v. 23 above).

66. Gk. , “placed a table alongside (each).” The expression is ancient and idiomatic: it occurs in Herodotus (Hist. 6.139) and similar phrases are found in Homer (e.g., Iliad 24.476; Odyssey 5.196; 7.174–75; 17.333–35). Individual tables were brought up beside each guest, and food was placed on them.

67.M. Dibelius, in an essay on the style criticism of Acts, concludes that the account of the earthquake is an independent legend inserted in the itinerary, having no connection with it, although Luke (he considers) has complicated the picture by adding the preaching and the baptism of vv. 32–33 (Studies in the Acts of the Apostles, E.T. [London, 1956], pp. 23–24). R. Reitzenstein points out a recurring pattern of escape stories in Greek literature; cf. 5:19; 12:6–10 above (Die hellenistischen Wundererzählungen [Leipzig, 1906], pp. 120–22). Origen (Against Celsus 2.34) compares this narrative and that of Peter’s release in 12:6–10 with Euripides’ account of the escape of the Bacchanals and of Dionysus in Bacchae 443–50, 586–602 (Celsus had asked why Jesus did not escape from his bonds as Dionysus did from his). As for the singing at midnight, a literary affinity to this had been found in Testament of Joseph 8:4–5, 9:4, where, after Joseph is beaten and thrown into prison, he is overheard “giving thanks to the Lord and singing praises in the house of darkness” (W. K. Lowther Clarke, “St. Luke and the Pseudepigrapha: Two Parallels,” JTS 15 [1913–14], pp. 597–99; also Beginnings 1.2, pp. 77–78).

68. To the Martyrs 2. Cf. Epictetus: “Then we shall be emulators of Socrates, when we are able to compose paeans in prison” (Dissertations 2.6.26).

69. W. M. Ramsay is inclined to accept the Western addition as authentic, as “suggestive of the orderly well-disciplined character of the jailor” (St. Paul the Traveller [London. ¹⁴1920], p. 222); W. L. Knox dismisses it as “an amusing insertion” (St. Paul and the Church of Jerusalem [Cambridge, 1925], p. xxiv). So differently do students of Acts react to the peculiar Western readings!

70. See also on 14:9 (pp. 273–74).

71. Homilies on Acts 36.2. For the baptism of the jailer’s household cf. v. 15; also 10:44–48 with 11:14: 1 Cor. 1:16.

72. Cf. the Ethiopian, who “went his way rejoicing” (8:39).

73. It was on an upper floor, if one may judge from .

74. After “at daybreak” the Western text continues: “the praetors came together into the forum and, calling to mind the earthquake that had taken place, they were struck with fear and sent the lictors …” An answer was thus supplied to the natural question: What effect did the earthquake have on people outside the prison precincts?

75. Some Western witnesses omit “in peace.”

76. Gk. , “uncondemned” (the Western text has , “not guilty”). Here, as in 22:25, the Greek word may represent Lat. re incognita, “without investigating our case” (cf. W. M. Ramsay, St. Paul the Traveller, pp. 224–25).

77. The Western text reads: “And having arrived with many friends at the prison, they begged them to depart, saying, ‘We did not know the truth about you, that you were righteous men.’ And having led them out, they begged them, saying, ‘Depart from this city, lest perchance they come to us in a body again, crying out against you.’ ”

78. The Western text adds “they related all that the Lord had done to them” (cf. 14:27; 15:4).

79. Referring to an enactment of 195 B.C., Cicero says, “The Porcian Law removed the rods from the bodies of all Roman citizens” (On behalf of Rabirius, charged with treason 12).

80. The lex Iulia de ui publica (see A. H. M. Jones, Studies in Roman Government and Law [Oxford, 1960], pp. 97–98).

81. In 22:25 Paul is careful to claim his citizen rights before being beaten, but there he was about to be scourged, with a more murderous instrument than the lictors’ rods (see pp. 420–21).

82. Cicero (Verrine Orations 2.5.161–62) relates, as an outrageously illegal proceeding, how a Roman citizen was publicly beaten in the forum of Messina, Sicily, despite his protest ciuis Romanus sum.

83. See F. Schulz, “Roman Registers of Births and Birth Certificates.” JRS 32 (1942), pp. 78–91; 33 (1943), pp. 55–64; A. N. Sherwin-White. Roman Society and Roman Law in the New Testament, pp. 144–50.

84. This presupposes that the section of Philippians in which the “true yokefellow” is addressed belongs to an earlier date than Paul’s Roman imprisonment, to which the bulk of that letter probably belongs. The identification with Luke is at least less improbable than the view that Lydia is so addressed, especially when “yokefellow” () is taken to mean “wife” (so E. Renan, St. Paul, E.T. [London, 1889], p. 76; S. Baring-Gould, A Study of St. Paul [London, 1897], pp. 213–16).

85. Cf. F. F. Bruce, Philippians, GNC (San Francisco, 1983), pp. 123–29.

ACTS 17

C. THESSALONICA TO ATHENS (17:1–34)

1. Arrival at Thessalonica (17:1–4)

1 Taking the road through Amphipolis¹ and Apollonia, they came to Thessalonica. There was a Jewish synagogue there,

2 and according to Paul’s custom he went in among them, and for three sabbath days in succession he discoursed to them from the scriptures.

3 He opened them up and, setting them alongside (the events which fulfilled them), showed that it was necessary for the Messiah to suffer and to rise from the dead, adding, “This is the Messiah—this Jesus, whom I proclaim to you.”

4 Some of them believed² and attached themselves to Paul and Silas, including a large company of God-fearing Greeks, and not a few of the leading women.

1 From Philippi Paul and Silas, with Timothy, took the Egnatian Way westward through Amphipolis on the Strymon (formerly an important strategic point on the Thraco-Macedonian frontier) and then, a second day’s journey on, through Apollonia, and arrived at Thessalonica, then as now the principal city of Macedonia. Thessalonica was founded in 315 B.C., on the site of the earlier settlement of Therme, by Cassander, who named it after his wife, a half-sister of Alexander the Great. The three travelers apparently halted only for a night at Amphipolis and again at Apollonia, but at Thessalonica (about 62 miles west of Philippi) they made a longer stay: the importance of this city commended it as a suitable place for intensive evangelization.

2–3 In accordance with his regular practice, Paul visited the local synagogue, and (having probably been invited to address the congregation, as previously at Pisidian Antioch) he expounded the Old Testament scriptures on the next three sabbath days. He brought forward as evidence of their fulfilment the historical facts recently accomplished in the ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus, setting these events alongside³ the predictions in order that the force of his argument might be readily grasped. According to those predictions, the Messiah was appointed to suffer and then rise again from the dead.⁴ Both these experiences had been fulfilled in Jesus, and in nobody else; therefore, said Paul, this Jesus of whom I tell you is the promised Messiah.

4 As had happened in the synagogues of South Galatia, so also in Thessalonica some of Paul’s Jewish hearers were convinced by what he said, but the majority of his converts during these three weeks were God-fearing Gentiles. Among these were a considerable number of women of high station. Macedonian women had a well-earned reputation for their independence and enterprising spirit.⁵ If some of the women who believed the gospel at this time were the wives of leading citizens, the initiative was theirs, not their husbands’. Jason, who is mentioned as the missionaries’ host in verse 5, was presumably one of the Jews who believed (the Greek name Jason was assumed by many Jews who were originally named Joshua); Aristarchus and Secundus, described as Thessalonians in 20:4, were probably also converted to the Christian faith at this time.

2. Trouble in Thessalonica (17:5–9)

5 The Jews, however, were stirred to envy and, enlisting the aid of some characters who loafed around the agora, ready for mischief,⁶they assembled a mob and set the city in an uproar. They attacked Jason’s house and searched for the men in order to bring them out before the public assembly.

6 When they did not find them, they dragged Jason and some of the brothers before the politarchs. “These men,” they shouted, “who have subverted the whole world have arrived here too;

7 Jason has harbored them. They all practise things in opposition to Caesar’s decrees; they say there is another emperor, Jesus.”

8 The crowd and the politarchs were agitated when they heard this.

9 The politarchs took security from Jason and the others, and dismissed them.

5 It was not only in the synagogue preaching and the making of many converts that the pattern of events in the South Galatian cities was reproduced at Thessalonica. Here too the Jews who did not believe the gospel, incensed at the readiness of so many potential proselytes to embrace the missionaries’ message and adhere to them, incited the city rabble against Paul and his companions. By the time that the rabble assaulted the house where the missionaries had been staying, they had succeeded in making their escape; no doubt some of their converts, getting wind of what was afoot, hid them where they were not likely to be found. The mob was thus unable to drag them before the civic assembly,⁷ as it had hoped to do.

6–7 But if Paul and his colleagues were not there, Jason himself, the owner of the house, was at home, and he, together with some other new Christians, was dragged before the magistrates. The magistrates of Thessalonica are called “politarchs,” a title which is known from many inscriptions to have been given to the chief magistrates of Macedonian cities.⁸ A most serious complaint was lodged against the missionaries and their hosts. Jason and his friends were charged with harboring Jewish agitators, political messianists such as had stirred up unrest⁹ in other cities of the Roman Empire. Rome¹⁰ and Alexandria¹¹ had recently experienced such trouble; now, said the accusers, the troublemakers had come to Thessalonica. Their seditious and revolutionary activity was not only illegal in itself; they were actually proclaiming one Jesus as a rival emperor to him who ruled in Rome. This was a subtle charge: even an unfounded suspicion of this kind was enough to ruin anyone against whom it was brought. In the present instance there was just enough color of truth in the charge to make it plausible and deadly. The missionaries proclaimed the kingdom of God—a very different kingdom, to be sure, from any secular empire—and they may even have given Jesus the Greek designation basileus (“king”), which was accorded to the Roman emperor by many of his Greek-speaking subjects.¹² This Jesus, moreover, had been executed for sedition by the sentence of a Roman judge.

It may be that more than straightforward sedition was implied in the charge that Paul and his colleagues contravened “Caesar’s decrees.”¹³ Sedition (maiestas) was an offense against public law¹⁴ and required no special decree of Caesar to make it illegal. But it is plain from the summary of the apostolic message which the Thessalonians accepted (1 Thess. 1:9–10), and from other references in the Thessalonian correspondence, that there was a strong eschatological emphasis in the preaching. Such teaching as that reflected in 2 Thess. 2:5–7, with its veiled allusion to the removal of the imperial power, might well have been construed as infringing one or more of Caesar’s decrees.¹⁵ Augustus and Tiberius had been very sensitive about the activities of astrologers and other prognosticators and had issued decrees forbidding predictions or inquiries affecting affairs of state or the emperor’s personal well-being.¹⁶

8–9 On hearing these charges, the politarchs shared the crowd’s perturbation. It was their responsibility to make sure that the imperial decrees were respected in the city.¹⁷ The provincial administration, not to speak of the imperial authorities in Rome, would not be pleased if they treated such grave accusations lightly. But, unlike the magistrates at Philippi (who reacted so violently to a much less serious charge), they behaved very sanely. The evidence for the charge was scanty, and the men against whom it was really brought could not be found. Jason and his associates were made responsible for seeing that there was no more trouble; they had to give security for the missionaries’ good conduct, and this meant in practice that the missionaries had to leave the city quietly and not return.

Paul and his friends had no choice in the matter. Paul would have liked to stay and strengthen his converts with further teaching. By this time his converts from outright paganism outnumbered those who had believed the gospel when they heard it in the synagogue: the clear testimony of the Thessalonian correspondence is that those who received it had “turned to God from idols” (1 Thess. 1:9). Would such people’s faith survive Paul’s sudden departure (leaving them, as it might appear, in the lurch) and the pressure which was bound to be exerted on them to return to their former way of life? It is probably with regard to this situation that Paul told them, some weeks later, that he was eager to go back and see them, “but Satan hindered us” (1 Thess. 2:18).¹⁸ He might well discern satanic machinations behind the politarchs’ decision, while they themselves would regard their decision as mild but effective. In the event, the newly planted church of Thessalonica was subjected to open persecution and more subtle forms of discouragement, yet it maintained its faith and witness in a manner that filled the hearts of Paul and his companions with unbounded joy when they learned of it.

3. Beroea (17:10–15)

10 Then the brothers sent off Paul and Silas secretly by night to Beroea. When they arrived there, they made their way to the Jewish synagogue.

11 The Beroean Jews were more open-minded than those of Thessalonica: they accepted the message with all eagerness and examined the scriptures daily to see if these things were so.¹⁹

12 Many of them believed, then, as well as a considerable number of the. Greek women of better class, and men also.²⁰

13 But when the Jews of Thessalonica learned that the word of God had been proclaimed in Beroea also, they came there too, disturbing the²¹ crowds and throwing them into agitation.²²

14 Then the brothers immediately sent off Paul to make his way as far as the sea ²³ while Silas and Timothy stayed behind in Beroea.

15 The men who were conducting Paul took him to Athens ²⁴ Then they took their departure, after receiving orders for Silas and Timothy to come to him there as quickly as possible.

10 Paul and Silas were spirited away from Thessalonica by their friends who had guaranteed their departure, and made their way to Beroea. They had to leave the Egnatian Way and take the road which led south, to Thessaly and the province of Achaia. Paul, it is thought by some, had conceived the plan of traveling along the Egnatian Way to its Adriatic terminus, where it would have been a simple matter to cross the Straits of Otranto and take the road to Rome. He makes it clear that he had planned to visit Rome several times before he actually did so (Rom. 1:13; 15:22).²⁵ But if he had tried to do so at this time, he might have found his plan frustrated: he would probably have met Jews from Rome traveling eastward along the Egnatian Way, telling how the Emperor Claudius had expelled them from the capital. His turning south may have been contrary to his plan but, as events proved, it was in the plan of God.

Beroea is described by Cicero as an “out-of-the-way town,”²⁶ but all that he means is that it lay off the Egnatian Way. It is about forty miles west-southwest of Thessalonica, on a tributary of the Haliacmon at the foot of Mount Bermios. It was the first city of Macedonia to surrender to the Romans at the end of the Third Macedonian War (168 B.C.); it was then included in the third of the four districts into which Macedonia was divided. At Beroea Paul and Silas were rejoined by Timothy.

11–12 Here too there was a Jewish synagogue, but when it was visited by Paul and Silas the congregation gave their message a reception far different from that given by the Jews of Thessalonica. With admirable freedom from prejudice,²⁷ they brought the missionaries’ claims to the touchstone of Holy Writ. Their procedure is worthy of imitation by all who have some new form of religious teaching pressed on their acceptance. These Beroean Jews would have been surprised could they have foreseen how many Christian groups of later days would call themselves “Beroeans” after their noble example of Bible study. As might be expected from people who welcomed the gospel so eagerly, many of them believed. As at Thessalonica, the believers included many God-fearing Greeks, both men and women, and some of these, particularly the women, belonged to leading families in the city. Among the Beroean converts one at least is known to us by name—Sopater son of Pyrrhus, mentioned below in 20:4.²⁸

13 But as, on an earlier missionary journey, the Jews of Pisidian Antioch and Iconium followed the missionaries to Lystra and stirred up trouble for them there, so now the Jews of Thessalonica, hearing that Paul and Silas had arrived in Beroea, sent a deputation there to repeat the course of action that had been so effective in Thessalonica.

14–15 Once again Paul, the main target for the opposition, had to be gotten out of the city quickly and quietly. Some of his Beroean friends took him to the coast—to Methone or Dium—and put him on board a ship bound for Piraeus (the port of Athens). There is, however, another reading of the text (represented in KJV)²⁹ which implies that they made as though they were taking him to the coast, but actually, having thus thrown possible pursuers off their track, escorted him southward by road as far as Athens. One way or the other, he arrived at Athens, and sent his Beroean friends back with instructions to Silas and Timothy to come and rejoin him there as soon as possible, while he waited for them.³⁰

4. Athens (17:16–21)

16 While Paul waited for them in Athens, it irked his spirit within him to see the city so full of idols.

17 So he conversed in the synagogue with the Jews and God-fearers and in the agora day by day with those who chanced to be around.

18 Some of the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers also met with him. Some asked, “What would this charlatan be at?” Others said, “He seems to be advertising foreign divinities”—because he was preaching the gospel of Jesus and the Resurrection.

19 So they laid hold on him and brought him to the Areopagus. There they said, “May we know what this new teaching is, of which you speak?

20 You are bringing some strange things to our notice; we should like to know what they mean.–

21 Now all the Athenians and the resident foreigners found time for nothing else than telling or hearing the latest novelty.

16 Although Athens had long since lost the political eminence which was hers in an earlier day, she continued to represent the highest level of culture attained in classical antiquity. The sculpture, literature, and oratory of Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. have, indeed, never been surpassed. In philosophy, too, she occupied the leading place, being the native city of Socrates and Plato, and the adopted home of Aristotle, Epicurus, and Zeno. In all these fields Athens retained unchallenged prestige, and her political glory as the cradle of democracy was not completely dimmed. In consideration of her splendid past, the Romans gave Athens the right to maintain her own institutions as a free and allied city within the Roman Empire.³¹

Visitors to Athens today who view the masterpieces of the great architects and sculptors of the age of Pericles are free to admire them as works of art: to no one nowadays are they anything more. But in the first Christian century they were not only admired as works of art: they were temples and images of pagan divinities. Temples and images of pagan divinities were no new thing to a native of Tarsus, but this native of Tarsus had been brought up in the spirit of the first and second commandments of the decalogue. Whatever Paul may have felt in the way of artistic appreciation—and his education had not fostered any capacity for this—the feeling that was uppermost in his mind as he walked here and there through the violet-crowned city was one of indignation: the city was full of idols, dedicated to the worship of gods that were no gods—for “what pagans sacrifice they offer to demons and not to God” (1 Cor. 10:20).

17 Paul was not the man to take a holiday from the main business of his life, so he did not while away the time while he waited for his friends to rejoin him from the north. In any case, the spectacle of a city so entirely dedicated to false worship stirred him to the conviction that here, if anywhere, were men and women who sorely needed the gospel with which he had been entrusted. Athens afforded him ample confirmation of what he had already learned, that, “in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom” (1 Cor. 1:21). He visited the synagogue in Athens, there-fore, and held discourse there with Jews and God-fearing Gentiles, while in the Agora, the center of Athenian life and activity, he debated day by day with those who happened to be around. It has often been observed how subtly and accurately Luke suggests the local color and atmosphere of each city with which he deals. “In Ephesus Paul taught ‘in the school of Tyrannus’; in the city of Socrates he discussed moral questions in the market-place. How incongruous it would seem if the methods were transposed!”³²The Agora lay north of the Acropolis. If it was the first place for which Paul made on coming to Athens, he would have seen herms (square pillars surmounted by a head of Hermes) wherever he looked, “a veritable forest of idols.”³³

18 Among those with whom Paul met and conversed in the Agora were philosophers of the rival Stoic and Epicurean schools.

The Stoics, who claimed the Cypriot Zeno (c. 340–365 B.C.) as their founder, were so called because they met in the stoa poikilē, the “painted colonnade” in the Agora, where he habitually taught in Athens. Their system aimed at living consistently with nature, and in practice they laid great emphasis on the primacy of the rational faculty in humanity, and on individual self-sufficiency. In theology they were essentially pantheistic, God being regarded as the world-soul. Their belief in a cosmopolis or world-state, in which all truly free souls had equal citizen rights, helped to break down national and class distinctions. Stoicism at its best was marked by great moral earnestness and a high sense of duty. It commended suicide as an honorable means of escape from a life that could no longer be sustained with dignity. Something of the proud spirit of personal independence which it fostered comes to expression in W. E. Henley’s Invictus:

“I thank whatever gods may be

For my unconquerable soul.”

As it happens, another English poet uses the same phrase, “whatever gods may be,” in a setting as distinctively Epicurean as Henley’s is essentially Stoic. That is A. C. Swinburne in The Garden of Proserpine:

“From too much love of living,

From hope and fear set free,

We thank with brief thanksgiving

Whatever gods may be

That no life lives for ever;

That dead men rise up never;

That even the weariest river

Winds somewhere safe to sea.”

The Epicurean school, founded by Epicurus (340–370 B.C.), member of a family of Athenian settlers on Samos, based its ethical theory on the atomic physics of Democritus and presented pleasure as being the chief end in life, the pleasure most worth enjoying being a life of tranquillity (ataraxia), free from pain, disturbing passions, and superstitious fears (including in particular the fear of death). It did not deny the existence of gods, but maintained that they took no interest in the life of men and women.

Stoicism and Epicureanism represented alternative attempts in pre-Christian paganism to come to terms with life, especially in times of uncertainty and hardship; post-Christian paganism has never been able to devise anything appreciably better. But Stoics and Epicureans alike, much as they might differ from each other, agreed at least on this: that the new-fangled message brought by this Jew of Tarsus was not one that could appeal to reasonable people. They looked on him as a retailer of secondhand scraps of philosophy, “a picker-up of learning’s crumbs” (like Browning’s Karshish), a type of itinerant peddler of religion not unknown in the Agora, and they used a term of disparaging Athenian slang to describe him.³⁴ Others preferred to class him as a propagandist for foreign divinities—he spoke of Jesus and Anastasis (the Greek word for “resurrection”), and to some of his hearers these two words sounded as if they denoted the personified and divinized powers of “healing” and “restoration.”³⁵

19–20 But there was in Athens a venerable institution, the Court of the Areopagus, which exercised jurisdiction in matters of religion and morals. This aristocratic body, of venerable antiquity, received its name from the Areopagus, the “hill of Ares” (the Greek god of war), southwest of the Acropolis, on which it traditionally met. At the time with which we are dealing it held its ordinary meetings in the Royal Colonnade (stoa basileios), in the northwest corner of the Agora.³⁶ (It continued to meet on the Areopagus to judge cases of homicide.) Its traditional power was curtailed with the growth of Athenian democracy in the fifth century B.C., but in Roman times its authority was enhanced and it commanded great respect.³⁷ Before this body, then, Paul was brought, not to stand trial in a forensic sense, nor yet to be examined with a view to being licensed as a public lecturer,³⁸ but simply to have an opportunity of expounding his teaching before experts.

21 Then, commenting on the Athenians’ interest in the novelty of Paul’s teaching, Luke sums up their general attitude in a sentence which Eduard Norden described as “the most cultured thing to be found anywhere in the New Testament.”³⁹ The Athenians themselves admitted that their passion for anything new could be carried to excess; the orator Demosthenes, for example, four centuries earlier, had reproached them for going about asking what was the latest news in a day when Philip of Macedon’s aggressive policy called for deeds, not words.⁴⁰

5. Paul’s Areopagitica (17:22–31)

22 So, standing in the midst of the Areopagus (court),⁴¹ Paul said, “Gentlemen of Athens! I see that you are uncommonly religious in everything.

23 As I was passing through (your city) and looking at your objects of worship, I found an altar bearing the inscription: ‘To the Unknown God.’ This God, whom you worship as one unknown, is the God of whom I tell you.

24 The God who made the world and everything in it, Lord of heaven and earth as he is, does not reside in temples made with hands.

25 It is not because he is in need of anything that he accepts service from the hands of human beings; it is from him that all receive life, breath, and everything.

26 From one man⁴² he has made every nation of mankind to inhabit the whole of earth’s surface. He appointed the allotted seasons and the frontiers of their residence,

27 in order that they might seek God,⁴³ if indeed they might grope for him and find him. Indeed, he is not far from each one of us,

28 ‘for in him we live and move and have our being’—as indeed some of your⁴⁴ poets⁴⁵ have said: ‘for we are truly his offspring.’

29 Since, then, we are God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the divine nature is like gold or silver or stone, the engraving of human art and design.

30 God has overlooked the times of ignorance, but now his command to all people everywhere is to repent,

31 because he has set a day on which he is going to judge⁴⁶ the world in righteousness, by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has provided a pledge to all, by raising him from the dead.”

22 Probably no ten verses in Acts have formed the text for such an abundance of commentary as has gathered around Paul’s Areopagus speech.⁴⁷ Diametrically opposing views have been expressed on the question whether Paul did deliver, or indeed could have delivered, such a speech. In the earlier years of the twentieth century B. W. Bacon, a critic not marked by conservatism, concluded that this speech, “in distinction from that attributed to Paul in Acts 13:16–41, is really of Pauline type,”⁴⁸ whereas Percy Gardner found the viewpoint expressed in it so different from that of the first chapter of Romans, and indeed so contradictory to it, that he called it “the least authentic of the Pauline discourses in Acts.”⁴⁹ Eduard Norden regarded it as out of the question that Paul could have delivered this speech; the historian Eduard Meyer, however, who confessed himself unable to understand “how this scene could be explained as an invention,”⁵⁰ claimed to have persuaded Norden to admit the possibility that Luke correctly reproduced the contents of a genuine speech of Paul.⁵¹ But since then the careful stylistic studies of Martin Dibelius, leading to the conclusion that “Paul would never have written in this way,”⁵² have weighed heavily with students of the speech: “what we have before us,” he says, “is a hellenistic speech about the true knowledge of God.”⁵³

When the gospel was presented to pagans, even cultured pagans like the members of the Court of the Areopagus, it was necessary to begin with a statement about the living and true God. The knowledge of God, according to Paul in Rom. 1:19–22, was accessible to all in his works of creation, but the capacity or desire to acquire it had been impaired by idolatry. If the author of Romans 1–3 had been invited to address an Athenian audience on the knowledge of God, it is difficult to see how the general purport of his words could have been much different from what Luke here reports Paul as saying. The tone of the Areopagitica is different from that of Romans 1–3, but Paul knew the wisdom of adapting his tone and general approach to the particular audience or readership being addressed at the time.

If the address at Pisidian Antioch in 13:16–41 is intended to serve as a sample of Paul’s preaching to a synagogue congregation, the present speech is equally well designed to serve as a sample of his preaching to pagans (cf. the much briefer summary in 14:15–17). Here he does not quote Hebrew scriptures which would have been quite unknown to his hearers; the direct quotations in this speech are quotations from Greek poets. But he does not condescend to his hearers’ level by arguing from first principles as one of their own philosophers might do. His argument is firmly based on biblical revelation; it echoes throughout the thought, and at times the very language, of the Old Testament. Like the biblical revelation itself, his argument begins with God the creator of all and ends with God the judge of all.

He starts by mentioning that what he has seen in their city has impressed him with the Athenians’ extraordinary religiosity (an impression made on many other people in antiquity, some of whom considered the Athenians to be the most religious of all human beings).⁵⁴ This characterization of the Athenians by Paul was not necessarily meant to be complimentary: we are told that it was forbidden to use complimentary exordia in addressing the Areopagus court, with the hope of securing its goodwill.⁵⁵ The expression Paul used could also mean “rather superstitious”; it was as vague a term in Greek as “religion” is in English, and what was piety to Greeks was superstition to Jews (and vice versa).⁵⁶

23 Paul goes on to tell them that, among their religious installations there was one which particularly attracted his attention: an altar inscribed “to the Unknown God” (or possibly “To an unknown god”).⁵⁷ Other writers say that altars to “unknown gods” were to be seen at Athens;⁵⁸ Didymus of Alexandria⁵⁹ and Jerome probably had such statements in mind when they said that Paul changed the plural “gods” into the singular. Jerome⁶⁰ indeed says that the altar seen by Paul bore the inscription “To the gods of Asia, Europe and Africa, to unknown and foreign gods” (presumably he knew of such an altar-inscription in Athens, which he translates into Latin). But Paul may have seen an altar dedicated exactly as he says. When a derelict altar was repaired and the original dedication could not be ascertained, the inscription “To the (an) unknown god” would have been quite appropriate. An altar on the Palatine hill in Rome was rebuilt about 100 B.C. and dedicated “whether to a god or to a goddess”;⁶¹ the vagueness of the wording reflects ignorance of the divinity in whose honor it had first been erected.⁶²

This God whom they venerated, said Paul, while they confessed their ignorance of his identity, was the God whom he now proposed to make known to them. But he did not express himself quite so personally, as if unreservedly identifying the “unknown god” of the inscription with the God whom he proclaimed. He used neuter, not masculine, forms: “what there-fore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you” (RSV).⁶³ Since they acknowledged their ignorance of the divine nature, he would tell them the truth about it.

24 He then begins to tell them about the true God. He it is who created the universe and everything in it; he is Lord of heaven and earth. Here is the God of biblical revelation; no distinction is pressed between a supreme being and a demiurge who fashioned the material world. The God who is creator of all and universal Lord is introduced in language strongly reminiscent of the Old Testament scriptures. Equally reminiscent of those scriptures is the language in which Paul describes the true God as not inhabiting sanctuaries built by human hands.⁶⁴ If even the shrine at Jerusalem, erected for the worship of the true God, could not contain him, how much less the splendid shrines on the Athenian Acropolis, dedicated as they were to divinities that had no real existence! True, even the higher paganism had acknowledged that no material house could accommodate the divine nature,⁶⁵ but the affinities of the terms here used by Paul are biblical rather than classical.

25 The God who created all could not be envisaged as requiring anything from his creatures. If he is pleased to accept their service, it is not because he lacks something which they can supply. Here again parallels to Paul’s argument can be adduced from Greek literature and philosophy.⁶⁶ But the great prophets of Israel also had to refute the false notion that God is somehow dependent on his people’s worship and service, when they saw how many of their fellow Israelites were devoted to it. How can the Lord of heaven and earth need anything that his creatures can give him?

“I will accept no bull from your house,

nor he-goat from your fold.

For every beast of the forest is mine,

the cattle on a thousand hills.

I know all the birds of the air,

and all that moves in the field is mine.

If I were hungry, I would not tell you;

for the world and all that is in it is mine.”⁶⁷

Far from their being able to supply any need of his, it is he who supplies every need of theirs: to them all he gives “life, breath, and everything.”

26 The creator of all things in general is creator of the human race in particular. The Athenians might pride themselves on being autochthonous—sprung from the soil of their native Attica⁶⁸—but this pride was ill-founded. All mankind was one in origin—all created by God and all descended from a common ancestor. This removed all imagined justification for the belief that Greeks were innately superior to barbarians, as it removes all justification for comparable beliefs today. Neither in nature nor in grace, neither in the old creation nor in the new, is there any room for ideas of racial superiority.

And God, having created the whole race of human beings, has given them the whole earth for their dwelling place, allotting appropriate living space to each nation. Another interpretation, favored by Dibelius, is that God has appointed the habitable zones of the earth for the human family to live in.⁶⁹ But the divine allocation of national territories has biblical authority, the locus classicus being Deut. 32:8:

“When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance,

when he separated the sons of men,

he fixed the bounds of the peoples

according to the number of the sons of God.”⁷⁰

According to the Genesis account, the earth was formed and furnished to be a home for humanity before humanity itself was brought into being to occupy it; the tenses of the Greek verbs here similarly suggest that “the determination of man’s home preceded his creation, in the Divine plan.”⁷¹And part of the forming and furnishing of this home consisted in the regulation of the “allotted seasons,” by which, after the analogy of the Lystran speech (14:17), we are probably to understand the seasons of the year by whose sequence annual provision is made for the supply of food. (Another, but less likely, interpretation sees in the “allotted seasons”⁷² the divinely determined periods for the rise and fall of empires, as in the visions of the book of Daniel.)

27 What was God’s purpose in thus arranging time and place so providentially for men and women’s well-being? It was, says Paul, in order that they might seek God and find him.⁷³ Ever since the creation, he says in Rom. 1:20, the things that God has made have pointed clearly to “his everlasting power and divinity.” If human beings, beguiled and confused by false worship, have failed to perceive the nature of God in the works of creation, they are without excuse. The attitude expressed in the letter to the Romans is not so widely different from that of the Areopagitica. There is, indeed, a difference of emphasis: in that letter Paul writes to established Christians, while here he is trying to gain a hearing from pagans; but there is no hint in the speech that the Athenians’ confessed ignorance of the divine nature was blameless. Even some of their own teachers had realized the folly of trying to represent the divine nature by material images, worship it at material altars, or house it in material temples, and had perceived, however dimly, how near God was to those who truly sought him.⁷⁴

28 At this point Paul illustrated his argument by two quotations from Greek poets in which the relation of humanity to the supreme God was set forth. One of these appears to have been the fourth line of a quatrain preserved from a poem attributed to Epimenides the Cretan (c. 600 B.C.), but actually of later date:

“They fashioned a tomb for thee, O holy and high one—The Cretans, always liars, evil beasts, idle bellies!—But thou art not dead; thou livest and abidest for ever, For in thee we live and move and have our being.”⁷⁵

The other is part of the fifth line of the Phainomena of Paul’s fellow-Cilician Aratus (born 310 B.C.), which opens with the words:

“Let us begin with Zeus. Never, O men, let us leave him unmentioned. All the ways are full of Zeus, and all the market-places of human beings. The sea is full of him; so are the harbors. In every way we have all to do with Zeus, for we are truly his offspring.”⁷⁶

In both these poems Zeus is considered not as the ruler of the traditional pantheon of Greek mythology but as the supreme being of Greek, and especially Stoic, philosophy. But did Paul intend to identify the Zeus of Greek philosophy simpliciter with the God of biblical revelation, whom in his letters he repeatedly calls “the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ”? Quite certainly not. Is he then simply detaching from their original contexts sentiments which, so far as their actual phraseology goes, lend themselves to incorporation into his Judaeo-Christian context? Again, no. Even in their contexts, the words quoted (especially those of Aratus) could be taken as pointing to some recognition of the true nature of God—that recognition which, according to the writer to the Hebrews, is his reward to “those who seek him” (Heb. 11:6); they “could be acknowledged,” says N. B. Stone-house, “as up to a point involving an actual apprehension of revealed truth.”⁷⁷

29 We are, then, the offspring of God, says Paul, not in any pantheistic sense but in the sense of the biblical doctrine of man, as beings created by God in his own image. There is, indeed, a mighty difference between this relation of men and women to God in the old creation and that redemptive relation which members of the new creation enjoy through faith as sons and daughters of God “in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:26). But Paul is dealing here with the responsibility of all human beings as creatures of God to give him the honor which is his due. And this honor is certainly not given if they envisage the divine nature in the form of plastic images.⁷⁸ Even if pagan philosophers rationalize the images as material symbols of the invisible divinity, the great bulk of the worshipers will pay divine homage to the images themselves.

30 The Athenians had good reason, then, to acknowledge their ignorance of God. But, even if such ignorance was not free from blame, God in mercy had passed it over. There is a parallel here not only to the statement in the Lystran speech that in past generations God “allowed all the nations to go their own ways” (14:16),⁷⁹ but also to Paul’s teaching in Rom. 3:25 about God’s forbearance in passing over sins committed before the coming of Christ. It is implied in all these places that the coming of Christ marks a fresh start in God’s dealings with the human race. In the present place God’s overlooking people’s earlier ignorance of himself is seen to have had in view the full revelation now given in the advent and work of Christ. “But now” in the present context is parallel to “but now” in Rom. 3:21.⁸⁰° If ignorance of the divine nature was culpable before, it is inexcusable now. Let all people everywhere (the Athenian hearers included) repent therefore of their false conception of God (and consequent flouting of his will)⁸¹ and embrace the true knowledge of his being now made available in the gospel.

31 For God the creator of all is also God the judge of all. Already in his sovereign counsel he has fixed a day in which he will “judge the world in righteousness”⁸²—another biblical expression. Greek thought had no room for such an eschatological judgment as the biblical revelation announces.⁸³But not only is the judgment day fixed; the agent of the judgment has also been appointed.⁸⁴ Paul does not refer directly to the human figure—the “one like a son of man”—of Dan. 7:13; but this is “the man” whom he has in mind, the one in whom God’s eternal purpose finds its fulfilment, the one to whom the Father has given “authority to execute judgment, because he is Son of Man” (John 5:27).⁸⁵ Moreover, he assures his audience, God has furnished firm proof that this is the man through whom he is going to judge the world, because this is the man whom he has raised from the dead.

Thus, then, Paul concludes his Areopagitica. There is no need to suppose that the speech was seriously curtailed by the ridicule with which some members of the audience received his reference to Jesus’ rising from the dead. The speech as it stands admirably summarizes an introductory lesson in Christianity for cultured pagans. The first thing the Athenians, like the Thessalonians, had to learn was to “turn to God from idols, to serve a living and true God” (1 Thess. 1:9). Therefore the greater part of the speech is, as Dibelius observed, concerned with the true knowledge of God. He qualified it as “a hellenistic speech about the true knowledge of God”;⁸⁶ with this too one can only agree. But would the historical Paul, with his policy of being “all things to all” (1 Cor. 9:22), have tried to win the Athenians from paganism with a Hebraic speech about the knowledge of God? The man who calls himself “a Hebrew of Hebrews” (Phil. 3:5) was at the same time, from another point of view, a Hellenist of Hellenists. The essential content of the speech is biblical, but the presentation is Hellenistic.

The knowledge of God set forth here is no merely philosophical discipline: it involves moral and religious responsibilities, and for lack of this knowledge, in the measure in which it was accessible to them, the hearers are summoned to repentance. The knowledge of God is viewed in the Old Testament scriptures as belonging to the same moral order as truth, goodness, and steadfast love (cf. Hos. 4:1; 6:6); the lack of this knowledge brings destruction in its train (Hos. 4:6), while the earth will be filled with this knowledge when God’s will is perfectly done and his covenant finally established with his people (Hab. 2:14; Jer. 31:34). It is in these categories that this speech moves, together with the thought behind it, even if the prophets are not formally quoted; the “delicately suited allusions” to Stoic and Epicurean tenets which have been discerned in the speech,⁸⁷ and the direct quotations from pagan poets, have their place as points of contact with the hearers, and illustrate the argument in terms familiar to them, but they in no way commit the speaker to acquiescence in their philosophical presuppositions. One may agree with Dibelius in looking at the speaker before the Areopagus as “the precursor of the Apologists,”⁸⁸ without denying that Paul could have filled this role and without assuming that such an apology to the Gentiles involves a compromise of biblical principles.

Dibelius characterizes the concluding words as “the only Christian sentences in the Areopagus speech."⁸⁹ Agreed: they announce the subject of the second lesson. After turning to the living and true God, the Thessalonians had to learn “to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead, Jesus, our deliverer from the coming wrath” (1 Thess. 1:10). The terms in which Jesus is introduced here at Athens are as thoroughly eschatological as those in which he was introduced at Thessalonica. Paul would have told them more, says J. A. Bengel, had they wished to listen.⁹⁰ The second lesson would have unpacked the compressed contents of verse 31. Who was this man of God’s appointment? And what were the circumstances of his being raised from the dead? It might have been said that, in the report of Paul’s synagogue address in 13:16–41, no Christian word is spoken before verse 23. The difference between that address and the present one (apart from the contrast between the “Hebraism” of the former and the “Hellenism” of the latter) is that, in the former, fulfilment is treated as fully as preparation, whereas the latter is devoted almost entirely to preparation, a detailed statement of the fulfilment being presumably left until later.

6. The Athenians’ Reaction (17:32–34)

32 When they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some of them ridiculed (the idea); the others said, “We will listen to you about this once again.”⁹¹

33 So Paul went out from their midst.

34 But some men adhered to him and believed; among them was Dionysius the Areopagite.⁹² There was also a woman named Damaris, and others with them.

32 The idea of resurrection of dead people was uncongenial to the minds of most of Paul’s Athenian hearers. All of them except the Epicureans would no doubt have agreed with him had he spoken of the immortality of the individual soul; but as for resurrection, they would have endorsed the sentiments of the god Apollo, expressed on the occasion when that very court of the Areopagus was founded by the city’s patron goddess Athene: “Once a man dies and the earth drinks up his blood, there is no resurrection.”⁹³ Some of them, therefore, ridiculed a statement which seemed so absurd. Others, more polite if equally skeptical, suggested that there might be an opportunity later for a further exposition of his teaching.⁹⁴

33–34 Paul then left the meeting of the court, and not long afterward he left Athens. Before he left, he had secured a few adherents, of whom two are mentioned by name. One of them was a member of the Areopagus court, Dionysius by name. Eusebius reports, on the authority of a later Dionysius (bishop of Corinth c. A.D. 170), that Dionysius the Areopagite became the first bishop of Athens;⁹⁵ this is the kind of tradition which was bound to arise. He was later credited with the authorship of a body of Neoplatonic literature, actually dating from the fifth and sixth centuries.

As for Damaris, Ramsay suggested that she must have been “a foreign woman, perhaps one of the class of educated Hetairai,”⁹⁶ in view of the unlikelihood of an ordinary Athenian woman being present on such an occasion. A meeting held in one of the colonnades of the Agora could not be a private meeting; there was bound to be a crowd of bystanders listening to whatever they found interesting,⁹⁷ and Damaris was probably one of them. It is less likely that she was a God-fearing Gentile who heard Paul in the synagogue; the impression given is that she heard his Areopagitica. Chrysostom makes her the wife of Dionysius.⁹⁸

There is no mention of any baptisms at Athens, nor is Paul said to have planted a church there. Although Athens was in the Roman province of Achaia, it is a family resident in Corinth that Paul describes as “the firstfruits of Achaia” (1 Cor. 16:15).⁹⁹ If the response to his preaching in Athens was scanty, the reason may lie with the Athenians’ refusal to take him seriously rather than with the terms of his message. The idea, popular with many preachers, that his determination, when he arrived in Corinth, to “know nothing” there “except Jesus Christ and him crucified” (1 Cor. 2:2), was the result of disillusionment with the line of approach he had attempted in Athens, has little to commend it.¹⁰⁰ The Athenians of today have made up for their ancestors’ indifference by engraving the text of Paul’s Areopagitica on a bronze tablet at the foot of the ascent to the Areopagus, and by naming a neighboring thoroughfare in honor of the apostle.¹⁰¹

1. After “Amphipolis” the Western text continues: “they came down to Apollonia and from there to Thessalonica.”

2. After “believed” (, “were persuaded”) the Western text continues: “and many of the God-fearers adhered to the teaching, and a large number of the Greeks, and not a few of the wives of the leading men.” (The Western reviser plays down feminine initiative.)

3. Gk. , “setting side by side” and hence “bringing forward as evidence.”

4. “It was necessary” for the Messiah to suffer and to rise from the dead in order that the scriptures might be fulfilled. Cf. Luke 9:22; 24:26,44. Cf. also 3:18 above; 26:23. Paul (1 Cor. 15:3–4) and Peter (1 Pet. 1:11) emphasize that the death and resurrection of Christ took place in accordance with the scriptures.

5. See W. W. Tarn and G. T. Griffith, Hellenistic Civilisation (London, ³1952), pp. 98–99.

6. Gk. , “certain lewd fellows of the baser sort” (it is difficult to improve on this KJV rendering, even if it is not twentieth-century English).

7. Gk. . As Thessalonica was a free city, its civic assembly (comprising the citizen body) discharged legislative and juridical functions. The law in many Greek cities, like Roman law, depended largely on private informers to set it in motion.

8. The title is found in some 32 inscriptions from the second century B.C. to the third century A.D., being used in the majority of these for the magistrates of Macedonian cities. The form is otherwise attested in inscriptions only; occurs in Aeneas Tacticus, Siege Warfare 26.12. The similar term was used for the magistrates of Thessalian cities. See E D. Burton, “The Politarchs,” AJT 2 (1898), pp. 598–632; C. Schuler, “The Macedonian Politarchs,” Classical Philology 55 (1960), pp. 90–100; J. ?. Oliver, “Civic Constitutions for Macedonian Communities,” Classical Philology 58 (1963), pp. 164–65; F. Gschnitzer, “Politarchēs,” PW Supplement 13 (1973), cols. 483–500; J. M. R. Cormack, “The Gymnasiarchal Law of Beroea,” in Ancient Macedonia, ed. B. Laourdas and Ch. Makaronas, II (Thessaloniki, 1977), pp. 140–41; B. Helly, “Politarques, Poliarques et Politophylaques,” in Ancient Macedonia, II, pp. 531–44; cf. New Docs. 2 (1977), § 5.

9. This is the sense of the verb , which is regularly used pejoratively, as in 21:38 below (cf. Gal. 5:12, , “those who unsettle you”). It appears in Dan. 7:23 LXX in the sense of “trample down”; it is found also in vernacular papyri, notably in the letter from the bad boy Theon to his father (P. Oxy. 119.10, second/third century A.D.), where he quotes his harassed mother as saying , (“he upsets me; away with him!”).

10. Suetonius, Claudius 25.4 (see on 18:2 below).

11. See Claudius’s letter to the Alexandrines (P. Lond. 1912).

12. The emperor is called in John 19:15; 1 Pet. 2:13, 17.

13. See E. A. Judge, “The Decrees of Caesar at Thessalonica,” RTR 30 (1971), pp. 1–7.

14. See R. A. Bauman, The Crimen Maiestatis in the Roman Republic and Augustan Principate (Johannesburg, 1967); Impietas in Principem (Munich, 1974); C. W. Chilton, “The Roman Law of Treason under the Early Principate,” JRS 45 (1955), pp. 73–81.

15. “It would not have been hard to interpret such announcements as predictions of a change of ruler” (E. A. Judge, “The Decrees of Caesar …,” p. 3).

16. Dio Cassius, Hist. 56.15.5–6; 57.15.8; cf. also Tacitus, Annals 2.27–32; Paulus, Sententiae 5.21.

17. Cf. E. A. Judge, The Social Pattern of the Christian Groups in the First Century (London. 1960), pp. 34–35.

18. Cf. W. M. Ramsay, St. Paul the Traveller ( London, ¹⁴1920), p. 231.

19. The Western text adds “as Paul declared.”

20. The Western text reads: “some of them therefore believed, but some did not believe [cf. 28:24], and many of the Greeks, both men and women of the better class, believed” (the Western reviser reverses the priority given to women).

21. The Western text expands: “and did not cease disturbing.”

22. P⁴⁵ omits “and throwing … into agitation.”

23. . The Byzantine text reads (“as if to the sea”), the Western text reads (“to the sea”).

24. After “Athens” the Western text continues: “but he passed by Thessaly, for he was prevented from preaching the word to them [an imitation of 16:6–8?]; and they departed, having received an order from Paul to Silas and Timothy to come to him quickly.”

25. Cf. A. Harnack, The Mission and Expansion of Christianity, E.T., I (Edinburgh, 1908), pp. 74–77; H. J. Cadbury, The Book of Acts in History (New York, 1955), pp. 60–61; E. A. Judge and G. S. R. Thomas, “The Origin of the Church at Rome,” RTR 25 (1966), p. 90; G. Bornkamm, Paul, E.T. (London, 1971), pp. 51–55; A. Suhl, Paulus und seine Briefe (Gütersloh, 1975), pp. 94–96.

26. Against Piso 36.89.

27. This seems to be meant here by , “more open-minded,” lit. “more noble.”

28. Perhaps identical with the Sosipater of Rom. 16:21.

29. The Byzantine reading (cf. p. 326, n. 23).

30. Silas and Timothy’s movements between Paul’s departure from Beroea and their rejoining him at Corinth (18:5) must be reconstructed with the aid of 1 Thess. 3:1–6. It appears that, as instructed, they rejoined Paul in Athens (1 Thess. 3:1), from which Timothy was sent back to Thessalonica (1 Thess. 3:2). (T. W. Manson suggested that on this occasion Timothy was the bearer of 2 Thessalonians, which he believed to have been written before 1 Thessalonians.) Silas also went back to Macedonia—where exactly is not indicated (18:5). Paul then went on from Athens to Corinth (18:1), where he was rejoined by Silas and Timothy on their return from Macedonia (18:5; 1 Thess. 3:6). See K. Lake, The Earlier Epistles of St. Paul (London, 1911), p. 74; T. W. Manson, Studies in the Gospels and Epistles (Manchester, 1962), pp. 266–67.

31. See D.J.Geagan, “Roman Athens: Some Aspects of Life and Culture, I. 86 B.C. -A.D.,” ANRW 2.7 (Berlin, 1975), 371–437.

32. W. M. Ramsay, St. Paul the Traveller, p. 238.

33. R. E. Wycherley, “St. Paul at Athens,” JTS n.s. 19 (1968), pp. 619–20; cf. S. Halstead, “Paul in the Agora,” in Quantulacumque: Studies presented to K. Lake (London, 1937), pp. 139–43.

34. Gk. , lit. “seed-picker,” “gutter-sparrow”; then someone who picked up scraps in the market, a worthless character (cf. Demosthenes’s description of Aeschines as , , “a prater, a market hack,” On the Crown 127); then of someone who picked up scraps of learning wherever he could, which is the meaning here.

35. F. H. Chase, The Credibility of Acts (London, 1902), pp. 205–6) suggests that they may have associated with (“healing”) or with (Ionic ), the goddess of health, a daughter of Asklepios. “This interpretation of the words and would be confirmed in the minds of the Athenians if they caught the words and in St. Paul’s teaching.” The view that he was a preacher of foreign divinities recalls the charges brought at an earlier date in Athens against Protagoras, Anaxagoras, and Socrates (cf. Plato, Euthyphro 3B, Apology 24B–C; Xenophon, Memorabilia 1.1.1).

36. See C. J. Hemer, “Paul at Athens: A Topographical Note,” NTS 20 (1973–74), pp. 341–50.

37. See D. J. Geagan, The Athenian Constitution after Sulla (Princeton, 1950), p. 50: “Ordo Areopagitarum Atheniensium,” in Phoros: Tribute to E. D. Meritt, ed. D. W. Bradeen and M. F. McGregor (New York, 1974), pp. 51–56.

38. This was Ramsay’s view (St. Paul the Traveller, p. 247); he recalls. how “Cicero induced the Areopagus to pass a decree inviting Cratippus, the Peripatetic philosopher, to become a lecturer in Athens,” and infers “that some advantage was thereby secured to him” (cf. Plutarch, Cicero 24.5).

39. Agnostos Theos (Leipzig, 1913), p. 333.

40. Demosthenes, Philippic 1.10; cf. Cleon’s reproach: “you are the best people at being deceived by something new that is said” (Thucydides, Hist. 2.38.5).

41. Gk. . The phrase “in the midst” shows that it is the court, not the hill, that is meant here by “the Areopagus” (cf. , v. 33; , 4:7). That the full expression “the court (council) of the Areopagus” was shortened in common parlance to “the Areopagus” is attested by Cicero (Letters to Atticus 1.14.5), Seneca (On Tranquillity 5), Valerius Maximus (Memorable Deeds and Words 2.64), and by an inscription at Epidaurus (IG 4.937.2).

42. Gk. . The Western and Byzantine texts add (cf. KJV “of one blood”).

43. The Western text reads “especially that they might seek the divine nature” (, as in v. 29).

44. P74 B and a few other witnesses read “our” () for “your” (); “our” may have been judged appropriate because Aratus. about to be quoted, was a Cilician like Paul.

45. The Western text omits “poets” (the meaning then is “your own men”); the Peshitta Syriac has “wise men” instead of “poets.”

46. The Western text reads “a day for judging” ().

47. See, in addition to discussions in commentaries, E. Curtius, “St. Paul in Athens” (1893), E.T. in Exp. 7, 4 (1907), pp. 436–55; E. Norden, Agnostos Theos: Untersuchungen zur Formengeschichte religiöser Rede (Leipzig/Berlin, 1913, ²1929), pp. 1–140; A. von Harnack, 1st die Rede des Paulus in Athen ein ursprünglicher Bestandteil der Apostelgeschichte? = TU 39.1 (Leipzig, 1913); R. Reitzenstein, “Die Areopagrede des Paulus,” Neue Jahrbücher für das klassische Altertum 31 (1913), pp. 393–422; E. Meyer, Ursprung und Anfänge des Christentums, III (Stuttgart/Berlin, 1923), pp. 89–108; A. Schweitzer, The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle, E.T. (London, 1931), pp. 6–9; W. L. Knox, St. Paul and the Church of the Gentiles (Cambridge, 1939), pp. 1–26; W. Schmid, “Die Rede des Apostels Paulus vor den Philosophen und Areopagiten in Athen,” Philologus 95 (1942), pp. 79–120; M. Pohlenz, Paulus und die Stoa (1949; Darmstadt, 1964); M. Dibelius, “Paul on the Areopagus” (1939) and “Paul in Athens” (1939), E.T. in Studies in the Acts of the Apostles (London, 1956), pp. 26–92; A. D. Nock, “The Book of Acts” (1953), Essays on Religion and the Ancient World, II (Oxford, 1972), pp. 829–32; W. Eltester, “Gott und Natur in der Areopagrede,” in Neutestamentliche Studien für Rüdolf Bultmann, ed. W. Eltester, BZNW 21 (1954), pp. 202–27; G. Schrenk, Studien zu Paulus (Zurich, 1954), pp. 131–48; B. Gärtner, The Areopagus Speech and Natural Revelation (Lund, 1955); H. Hommel, “Neue Forschungen zur Areopagrede Acta 17,” ZNW 46 (1955), pp. 145–78; W. Nauck, “Die Tradition und Komposition der Areopagrede,” ZTK 53 (1956), pp. 11–52; N. B. Stonehouse, Paul Before the Areopagus and Other New Testament Studies (Grand Rapids, 1957), pp. 1–40; H. Conzelmann, “The Address of Paul on the Areopagus” (1958), E.T. in Studies in Luke-Acts, ed. L. E. Keck and J. L. Martyn (Nashville/New York, 1966), pp. 217–30; H. P. Owen, “The Scope of Natural Revelation in Romans 1 and Acts 17,” NTS 5 (1958–59), pp. 133–43; R. E. Wycherley, “St. Paul at Athens,” JTS n.s. 19 (1968), pp. 619–21; T. D. Barnes, “An Apostle on Trial,” JTS n.s. 20 (1969), pp. 407–19; A.-M. Dubarle, “Le discours à l'Aréopage (Actes 17, 22–3l)et son arrièreplan biblique,” RSPT 57 (1973), pp. 576–610; S. G. Wilson, The Gentiles and the Gentile Mission in Luke-Acts, SNTSM 23 (Cambridge, 1973), pp. 196–218; C. J. Hemer, “Paul at Athens: A Topographical Note,” NTS 20 (1973–74), pp. 341–50; C. K. Barrett, “Paul’s Speech on the Arepagus,” in New Testament Christianity for African and the World: Essays in honour of Harry Sawyerr, ed. M. E. Glasswell and E. W. Fasholé-Luke (London, 1974), pp. 69–77.

48. The Story of St. Paul (London, 1905), p. 164.

49. “The Speeches of St. Paul in Acts,” in Cambridge Biblical Essays, ed. H. B. Swete (Cambridge, 1909), p. 401.

50. Ursprung und Anfänge des Christentums, III, p. 105.

51. Ursprung und Anfänge, III, p. 92, n. 4. H. J. Cadbury remarks that “the classicists are among the most inclined to plead for the historicity of the scene at Athens” (Beginnings I.5, p. 406, n. 1). One outstanding exception to this rule was U. von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff: while second to none in his appreciation of Paul as “a classic of Hellenism,” he felt he had no common ground with those who could attribute the Areopagitica to the Paul of the genuine epistles (Die griechische Literatur des Altertums = Die Kultur der Gegenwart, ed. P. Hinneberg, I.8 [Berlin/Leipzig, ³1912], p. 232).

52. M. Dibelius, Studies, p. 61.

53. Studies, p. 57.

54. Cf. Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus 260 (“they say that Athens is most pious towards the gods”); Josephus, Ap. 2.130 (“the most pious of the Greeks”); Pausanias, Description of Greece 1.17.1 (“the Athenians venerate the gods more than others”); also Strabo, Geog. 9.1.16; Livy, Hist. 45.27.

55. Cf. Lucian, Anacharsis 19.

56. Gk. . Cf. 25:19 for the noun .

57. Gk. . Paul takes the reference to be to the one true God; the dedicators may have meant something different. The lapidary style would in any case dispense with the definite article.

58. Cf. Pausanias, Description of Greece 1.1.4; Philostratus, Life of Apollonius 6.3.5.

59. Commentary on 2 Corinthians (10:5).

60. Commentary on Titus (1:12). E. Norden (Agnostos Theos, pp. 118–20) thought this statement might be dependent on Minucius Felix (Octavius 6.2), according to whom the Romans venerated the gods of cor quered nations, erecting altars to divinities unknown to themselves.

61. CIL 1.632. Another parallel has been discerned in a Pergamene inscription of the imperial period, , “To un[known] gods: Capit[o], torchbearer” (H. Hepding, Athenische Mitteilungen 35 [1910], pp. 454–57; cf. A. Deissmann, Paul, E.T. [London, 1926], pp. 287–91, with Plates V and VI); but it is not certain if the second word is really .

62. Mention should also be made of Diogenes Laertius, who tells (Lives of Philosophers 1.110) how the Athenians once, during a pestilence, sent for Epimenides, the wise man of Crete (C. 600 B.C.), who advised them to release black and white sheep from the Areopagus and then, on the spot where each lay down, to sacrifice it to “the appropriate god” (the god of the locality). Accordingly, says Diogenes, “anonymous altars” (altars to unnamed gods) might be seen throughout Attica. The presence of such altars is attested by other writers.

63. Cf. , “the divine nature,” in v. 29, instead of , “God.” See N. B. Stonehouse, Paul Before the Areopagus, p. 19.

64. Cf. 1 Kings 8:27; Isa. 66:1–2; and see the discussion on the similar statement in Stephen’s speech (pp. 149–51 above, on 7:47–50).

65. Cf. Euripides, fragment 968: “What house built by craftsmen could enclose the form divine within enfolding walls?”

66. Cf. Euripides, Heracles 1345–36 (“God, if he be truly God, has need of nothing”); Plato, Euthyphro 14C (“What advantage accrues to the gods from what they get from us?”).

67. Ps. 50:9–12. The psalmist’s argument is precisely Paul’s: God has no need of anything because he is owner of everything. It is strange, then, that M. Dibelius should say that “only twice is it emphasized in the LXX that God needs nothing, but even these two passages are sufficient to prove the Greek origin of the idea” (Studies, p. 44); he refers to 2 Macc. 14:35 and 3 Macc. 2:9. Cf. Mic. 6:6–8.

68. This belief reflects the historic fact that the Athenians were the only Greeks on the European mainland who had no tradition of their ancestors’ coming into Greece: they belonged to the earliest (Ionic) movement of Greek immigration.

69. Cf. Dibelius, Studies, pp. 35–37.

70. MT reads “… sons of Israel”; but the LXX reading is attested in Hebrew in one Qumran manuscript (4QDt^q).

71. J. H. Moulton, MHT I (Edinburgh, 1906), p. 133.

72. Gk. . Cf. Luke 21:24, , the period appointed for Gentile domination of Jerusalem (the resemblance is mainly verbal).

73. The verb conveys the idea of “groping” after God in the darkness or semi-darkness, when the light of his full revelation is not available.

74. A verbal link has been found in Dio Chrysostom, Oration 12.28, where those of primaeval days are described as “not settled separately by themselves far away (, as here) from the divine being or outside of him, but … sharing his nature.”

75. The quatrain is quoted in a Syriac version by the ninth-century commentator Isho‘dad (ed. M. D. Gibson. Horae Semiticae, X [Cambridge, 1913], p. 40). Isho‘dad was probably dependent here on Theodore of Mopsuestia (350–428); he reproduces Theodore’s use of Diogenes Laertius’s story (see p. 336, n. 62) to illustrate the inscription “To the unknown God.” The Cretans’ claim to be able to point out the tomb of Zeus was felt to be an impious falsehood. The second line of the quatrain is quoted in Tit. 1:12; according to Clement of Alexandria (Miscellanies 1.14.59.1–2) it comes from a work by Epimenides. A similar sentiment appears in Callimachus’s Hymn to Zeus (lines 7–8): “Cretans are always liars: for the Cretans, O King, actually fashioned a tomb for thee. But thou hast not died; thou art for ever.” The line here quoted by Paul can with little difficulty be given hexameter form; Cod. D spoils the rhythm by adding “day by day” at the end of it.

76. These last words () may have been imitated by Aratus from the opening words of line 4 of Cleanthes’ Hymn to Zeus (). K. Lake (Beginnings I.5, p. 247) points out that the immediately following lines of the poem by Aratus have “a strong general resemblance” to v. 26 of Paul’s Areopagitica.

77. Paul Before the Areopagus, p. 30; cf. R. Stob, Christianity and Classical Civilization (Grand Rapids, 1950), pp. 58–60.

78. This is an echo of the OT polemic against image-worship found in such passages as Isa. 44:9–20; Ps. 115 (LXX 114):4–8 par. 135 (LXX 134): 15–18; the argument is developed in Wisd. 13:5, 10; 15:4, 15–17; in the Letter of Aristeas 134–37; and by the early Christian apologists.

79. This, says W. L. Knox, “is simply another way of saying that God ‘handed them over to a reprobate mind’ ” (The Acts of the Apostles [Cambridge, 1948], p. 70, referring to Rom. 1:28).

80. “But now” in Rom. 3:21 is related to the revelation of God’s way of righteousness in Christ and his atoning death.

81. For the association of repentance with the passing over of sins cf. Wisd. 11:23, “thou dost overlook men’s sins, that they may repent.”

82. Cf. Ps. 9:8; 96 (LXX 95): 13; 98 (LXX 97):9. For other Pauline references to the appointed day of judgment cf. Rom. 2:5, 16; 1 Cor. 1:8; Phil. 1:6, 10; 1 Thess. 5:2,4; 2 Thess. 1:10; 2:2.

83. There is no implication about the end of time in the judgment exercised in the realm of the dead by Minos, Rhadamanthys, and Aeacus, three mortals who for piety in this life were appointed as judges over the shades, according to Greek mythology, nor is there any such implication in Plato’s reinterpretation of the myth (Gorgias 523A–527A).

84. Cf. 10:42.

85. In John 5:25–27 the Son’s authority to execute judgment “because he is Son of Man” () seems to be the corollary of his authority, also received from the Father, to have “life in himself’ and to impart life to others. W. L. Knox (Some Hellenistic Elements in Primitive Christianity [London, 1944], p. 28) considers the christology of the Areopagitica to be simply that of Rom. 1:4, where the resurrection of Christ marks him out as Son of God—this in answer to the doubts expressed about the christology of this passage by J. de Zwaan in “Was the Book of Acts a Posthumous Edition?” HTR 17 (1924), pp. 95–153, especially pp. 132–41 (an article with which Knox is otherwise in general agreement).

86. See p. 334, n. 53 above.

87. MHT II (Edinburgh. 1929), p. 8, n. 3. Such allusions have been traced in v. 25, where there are parallels both to the Epicurean doctrine that the divine being needs nothing from mortals (not even worship) and to the Stoic doctrine that he is the source of all life.

88. Studies, p. 63.

89. Studies, p. 56.

90. “Plura erat dicturus audire cupientibus” (Gnomon Novi Testamenti, p. 460).

91. Gk. .

92. Cod. D reads “one Dionysius, an Areopagite of honorable station,” and omits all reference to Damaris; this, however, may not represent the original Western text. The Graeco-Latin codex E/e attaches the description “of honorable station” to Damaris, not to Dionysius.

93. Aeschylus, Eumenides 647–48 (“there is no anastasis,” the same word as is used in v. 32).

94. J. S. Stewart sees something more than a polite dismissal here: “these men at Athens resolved to hear the apostle again; for wistfully they hoped his message might be true” (A Faith to Proclaim [London, 1953], p. 117).

95. Eusebius, HE 3.4.11; 4.23.3.

96. St. Paul the Traveller, p. 252; cf. The Church in the Roman Empire (London, 1893), p. 161.

97. Formal meetings of the Areopagus court were roped off, but this was scarcely a formal meeting.

98. On the Priesthood 4.7. The name Damans is a variant of , “heifer” (lat^h actually has the spelling Damalis). The original form of the Western text perhaps described her as (“of honorable estate”), like the God-fearing Greek women of Beroea (v. 12).

99. It is idle to maintain, with Zahn (INT. E.T. [Edinburgh, 1909], I, p. 266) and some others, that Stephanas must have been converted in Athens. See W. M. Ramsay, “The Firstfruits of Achaia.” BRD. pp. 385–411.

100. See the critique of this popular idea in N. B. Stonehouse, Paul Before the Areopagus, pp. 31–40.

101. Another street in the vicinity bears the name of Dionysius the Areopagite.

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A. Recently Planted Churches Revisited (15:36–16:5)