Tool Beta
The Ancient World Behind the Text
Pick a passage anywhere in the New Testament. See the customs and ideas a first reader knew without being told.
Acts 17:16-21, Athens: idols, the marketplace and the philosophers
Waiting in Athens, Paul is distressed at a city full of idols. He argues in the synagogue and the marketplace, and Epicurean and Stoic philosophers take him for a preacher of foreign gods and bring him to the Areopagus.
Acts 17:16-21, in every translation this tool compares.
Waiting in Athens for his coworkers, Paul is deeply troubled by the idols filling the city. He debates in the synagogue and daily in the public square with anyone he meets, including Epicurean and Stoic thinkers. Some dismiss him as a scrap-collector of ideas, while others think he is introducing new deities, since he speaks of Jesus and resurrection. Curious, as Athenians proverbially were about anything novel, they bring him before the Areopagus to explain himself.
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- {"u":"https:\/\/jayms.com\/bible-study-tools-2\/ancient-world-ideas\/sages-and-philosophers\/","n":"Philosophers and their schools","s":"Stoics, Epicureans and other schools taught a whole way of life in lecture halls and marketplaces. A traveling teacher with a message about God would be heard, and judged, as one more philosopher.","r":""}
- {"u":"https:\/\/jayms.com\/bible-study-tools-2\/ancient-world-ideas\/resurrection-of-the-dead\/","n":"The resurrection of the dead","s":"Most Jews, with the Pharisees, expected God to raise the dead to bodily life at the end of the age. The Sadducees denied it. Nobody expected one man to rise ahead of everyone else.","r":""}
City streets were often lined with statues, and Athens was famous for the Hermae, pillars topped with heads of Hermes (Keener and his notes). Sages without schools of their own worked the marketplace (the cultural backgrounds notes; Keener). Stoics, the dominant school, held that reason structured the universe and fate ruled it, so one should master one's own attitude; Epicureans, followed only by the upper classes, held the gods far off and uninvolved and made the goal of life freedom from pain and disturbance (the cultural backgrounds article Ancient Philosophies; Wright). The word for babbler meant a seed-picker, a bird pecking at grain (the ESV and CSB Study Bibles; Keener and his notes). Because Anastasis, resurrection, was also a woman's name, the critics seem to have heard Jesus and Anastasis as a new pair of gods (Keener and his notes; Wright). The charge of proclaiming foreign gods recalled the trial of Socrates (Keener and his notes; Wright), and Wright hears a veiled threat in their asking to know the new teaching. Athens was proverbial for its curiosity (Keener and his notes), though Wright notes that new was a sneer in a world where old was best.
- Craig S. Keener, The IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament, on Acts 17:16, 17:17, 17:18, 17:19-20 and 17:21
- NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible, notes on Acts 17:17, 17:18 and 17:21, and article Ancient Philosophies
- ESV Study Bible, study notes on Acts 17:16 and 17:18
- CSB Study Bible, note on Acts 17:18
- N. T. Wright, Paul: A Biography, ch. 8, Athens
- N. T. Wright, Acts for Everyone, Part Two, comment on Acts 17:10-21
