The Scriptures Are Searched, and the Unknown God Is Named

The route follows the Via Egnatia, the Roman highway across Macedonia. Amphipolis lay about thirty-three miles from Philippi, Apollonia some twenty-seven beyond it, and Thessalonica about thirty-five more, each a long day’s stage. Thessalonica was the capital of the province, and the verse notes a synagogue there, as if the two towns before had none.

“As his manner was” uses the word for Jesus at Nazareth, who went into the synagogue “as his custom was” (Luke 4:16). “Reasoned” is dialegomai, the root of dialogue. Three sabbaths may cover only the synagogue phase: Paul says he worked “night and day” there (1 Thessalonians 2:9), and Philippi sent him help “once and again” (Philippians 4:16).

“Opening” is dianoigo, the verb of the Emmaus road, where the risen Jesus “opened to us the scriptures” (Luke 24:32). “Alleging” in 1611 meant citing as proof; the Greek paratithemi means to set beside, laying passages next to events. The sentence slides from report into Paul’s own voice: “this Jesus, whom I preach unto you”.

“Consorted” is proskleroo, literally to be allotted to, to cast in one’s lot with, found only here. Paul’s first letter to this church describes them as people who “turned to God from idols” (1 Thessalonians 1:9), which fits a church drawn largely from Gentiles. Inscriptions show Macedonian women holding real public standing.

“Lewd” in 1611 meant low or worthless, not indecent, and “of the baser sort” translates agoraioi, idlers who hung about the marketplace. Jason was a Greek name often taken by Jews called Joshua; a high priest of the Maccabean era bore it (2 Maccabees 4:7). A Jason sends greetings in Romans 16:21, possibly this man.

“Rulers of the city” is politarchai, a title found in no surviving classical author and once treated as a slip by the Book of Acts. It has since turned up on dozens of inscriptions, several from Thessalonica itself, including one from an arch now in the British Museum. “Turned the world upside down” is anastatoo, to incite revolt.

“Decrees of Caesar” may refer to imperial edicts against predicting a change of ruler, or to the oaths of loyalty provincials swore; both are scholars’ proposals. Paul’s letters to this city speak often of the Lord’s “coming”, parousia, a word used for the ceremonial arrival of a king, which could sound like another king indeed.

Thessalonica was a free city with its own popular assembly, the demos, which is the “people” the mob tried to bring Paul before in verse 5. Both the assembly and the magistrates are unsettled. “Troubled” is tarasso, a word for water stirred up and churned.

“Taken security” is a legal idiom, like the Latin satis accipere: Jason posted a bond guaranteeing there would be no more trouble. Some have suggested this bond is why Paul could not return, “but Satan hindered us” (1 Thessalonians 2:18); that is a guess, but it fits the timing.

Another escape by night, as from Damascus (9:25). Berea lay about fifty miles west-south-west, off the Via Egnatia; Cicero called it an out-of-the-way town when he mocked a governor for slipping away there. Having just been driven from one synagogue, Paul goes straight to the next.

“More noble” is eugenesteros, literally better born, used here of character: open and generous-minded. “Searched” is anakrino, the verb for judicial examination, as when Herod “examined” the guards (12:19). The Bereans question the Scriptures as a magistrate questions witnesses, daily.

“Honourable” is euschemon, of good standing, the word used for Joseph of Arimathea, “an honourable counsellor” (Mark 15:43). Among the Bereans who believed was probably Sopater of Berea, who later travels with Paul (20:4). “Not a few” is another litotes.

“Stirred up” is saleuo, to shake, the verb used for the foundations of the Philippian prison being “shaken” in 16:26. The opponents make a fifty-mile trip to shake another town. They wait until they hear the word of God is being preached in Berea, not merely that Paul is present.

“As it were to the sea” can be read as a feint, setting out for the coast as though to sail, to throw off pursuers; the Greek hos can also simply mean “as far as the sea”, and some manuscripts read so. Silas and Timothy, less conspicuous, stay behind to keep the work going.

“Conducted” means escorted; Paul does not travel alone. Athens lay about two hundred miles south by sea. 1 Thessalonians 3:1–2 reveals that Timothy did reach Athens and was sent back to Thessalonica from there, so the Book of Acts compresses the comings and goings.

“Stirred” is paroxuno, provoked, the verb behind “paroxysm”; the Septuagint uses it of God provoked by Israel’s idols (Deuteronomy 9:18). “Wholly given to idolatry” is kateidolos, “thick with idols”, a word not found before Acts. Pausanias, touring Athens a century later, filled pages listing statues, altars and shrines.

The Athenian agora lay below the Acropolis, among the colonnades where Socrates had questioned passers-by four and a half centuries earlier. Paul does the same: daily, with whoever happens by. The synagogue and the market are two different audiences, and he works both at once.

“Babbler” is spermologos, a seed-picker, a bird that pecks up stray grain, then slang for someone who gathers scraps of ideas and peddles them. “A setter forth of strange gods” echoes the charge against Socrates, introducing new divinities. John Chrysostom thought they heard “Jesus and Anastasis” as a pair of gods, since anastasis, resurrection, is also a feminine noun.

The Areopagus, the hill of Ares, was also the name of the ancient council that took its name from the hill and by this period oversaw matters of religion and education in Athens. “Took him” is epilambanomai, which can mean to seize or to take someone by the hand, as Barnabas took Saul in 9:27.

“Strange things” is xenizonta, things that sound foreign or startling; the same root gives xenizo, to host a stranger, used when Peter lodged Cornelius’s men (10:23). The Athenians are willing to entertain the ideas as guests. “What these things mean” asks for definitions.

A parenthesis in which the Book of Acts permits itself a dry aside. “Some new thing” is literally “something newer”, the latest. Four centuries earlier Demosthenes had scolded the Athenians for wandering the market asking one another, “Is there any news?”

“Ye men of Athens” is the formal opening of the city’s orators, the phrase Demosthenes used to begin his speeches. Mars is the Latin name for Ares. Paul “stood in the midst”, the posture of a speaker addressing an assembly, which is how Peter stood among the brethren in 1:15.

“Devotions” is sebasmata, objects of worship: altars, statues, shrines. Pausanias mentions altars at Athens “to gods called unknown”, and Diogenes Laertius tells how Epimenides ended a plague by sacrificing wherever released sheep lay down, leaving nameless altars. “Ignorantly” is agnoountes, a play on agnostos, “unknown”.

Stephen had said the same before the council: “the most High dwelleth not in temples made with hands” (7:48). The Parthenon stood on the Acropolis in plain view of the Areopagus. “Lord of heaven and earth” is the title Jesus used in prayer (Luke 10:21), and the whole line echoes Isaiah 42:5.

“Worshipped” here is therapeuo, to serve or tend, the word for the daily care of cult statues, which were washed, dressed and fed. Epicureans held that the gods need nothing from humans, so Paul begins on ground they shared. “Life, and breath” is zoen kai pnoen, a pair that chimes in Greek.

The oldest manuscripts read “made of one”, meaning one man; “blood” comes from a later text. Athenians prided themselves on being autochthonous, born from the soil of Attica, a people apart. “The bounds of their habitation” recalls Deuteronomy 32:8, where the Most High “set the bounds of the people”.

“Feel after” is pselaphao, to grope as in the dark, the word Homer uses when the blinded Cyclops feels for the doorway. Isaiah 59:10 has Israel groping for the wall like the blind. The mood in Greek is a hesitant optative, “if perhaps they might”, and then Paul adds that God is not far from anyone.

“In him we live, and move, and have our being” is traced by a ninth-century Syriac commentator to Epimenides of Crete. “For we are also his offspring” is a half-line from Aratus’s Phaenomena, and Cleanthes’ Hymn to Zeus has something close to it. Aratus came from Soli in Cilicia, Paul’s home province.

“Godhead” is to theion, “the divine”, a neuter term of the philosophers rather than Paul’s usual word for God; he speaks their language. “Graven by art and man’s device” names craft and design, the two things Isaiah 44:9–20 mocks when the carpenter makes a god from half a log and cooks his dinner on the other half.

“But now” is the hinge of the speech, a turn from one age to another. “All men every where” is pantas pantachou in Greek, the two words chiming. After a long appeal to shared ground, the speech arrives at a command, the first thing in it that God is said to command.

“Judge the world in righteousness” is a phrase the Greek Psalms use three times (Psalms 9:8, 96:13, 98:9). “Assurance” is pistis, usually faith, here meaning a pledge or proof offered to everyone. Jesus is never named in the speech; he is “that man”, and the resurrection is the last word before the interruption.

In Aeschylus’s Eumenides, the play about the founding of this very court, Apollo says that once a man is dead and the dust has drunk his blood there is no anastasis, no resurrection. Paul has used the word the Areopagus itself was founded on denying. “Mocked” is chleuazo, to jeer.

The verse is short and flat. No verdict is given and no charge is brought; the hearing simply ends. The phrasing resembles Jesus leaving the angry crowd at Nazareth, “passing through the midst of them went his way” (Luke 4:30), though here the crowd laughs instead of threatening.

“Clave” is kollao, to join oneself, the verb of 9:26. An Areopagite was a member of the council, a man of high rank. Dionysius of Corinth, quoted by Eusebius, says this Dionysius became the first bishop of Athens, and a sixth-century mystical writer took his name. Damaris is otherwise unknown, and Codex Bezae leaves her out.