Acts Chapter 17

What Happens:

Paul and his group travel through Amphipolis and Apollonia in Macedonia, arriving at the city of Thessalonica. Thessalonica is large enough to have a Jewish population, so, following his usual routine, Paul goes to the synagogue on the Sabbath and begins telling the Jews about Jesus. Over the course of three Sabbaths he explains to them Jesus’ life, resurrection, and fulfillment of various prophecies, and at the end he declares that Jesus is the Messiah. Some of the Jews are convinced and become believers, including a large number of non-Jews who worship God, and a number of prominent women.

So many Jews join Paul that the remaining Jews start to get jealous, and they round up some local hooligans from the market and use them to start a riot in the city. Paul has been staying with a Greek named Jason, and the ringleader Jews rush to Jason’s house hoping that Paul and Silas are there. However, no one is home except Jason and a few other believers, so the Jews grab them and drag them down to the city officials. The leaders of the engineered riot exclaim, “These men who have caused trouble all over the world have now come here, and Jason has welcomed them into his house. They are all defying Caesar’s decrees, saying that there is another king, one called Jesus.” The crowd roils at hearing this, and the city officials aren’t sure what to believe. They make Jason and the others post bond, and then let them go.

Paul and Silas leave for Berea, a city 30 miles west. Following his usual preaching routine, he heads to the synagogue and begins teaching about Jesus. The Bereans are “of more noble character” than the Thessalonians, and they receive Paul’s message enthusiastically. Many of the Jews convert, along with some prominent Greek women and men. They study the scriptures every day to learn more about what Paul has been saying. However, when the Jews back in Thessalonica hear about this, they send some people to Berea to agitate the city and stir things up. The new believers in Berea send Paul to Athens, but Silas and Timothy stay in Berea for now, and plan to join Paul later.

While Paul is waiting for Timothy and Silas in Athens, he becomes distressed at the innumerable idols throughout the city. He goes to the synagogue and the marketplace and reasons with the Jews and the greek worshipers of God, about Jesus. At the marketplace a group of Epicurean and Stoic philosophers begin to dispute his claims, calling him a “babbler”. They take him to a meeting of the Areopagus and ask him to explain all these new ideas he’s bringing in, philosophy and endless debate over the newest ideas being the favorite pastime of most everyone in Athens.

Paul gives a speech: “People of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. So you are ignorant of the very thing you worship—and this is what I am going to proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands. … [H]e himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else. From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us.”

Paul quotes two Cretan and Cilician poets, one of whom said that people are God’s offspring. “Therefore since we are God’s offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone—an image made by human design and skill. In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent. For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to everyone by raising him from the dead.”

Some of the listeners sneer at this speech, but many say they want Paul to come back and speak again on this subject, and a few become believers on the spot.

Commentary

Here we go again. (I think my first thought on reading the first paragraph of this chapter was a slightly incredulous, “This again? Really?”) We have basically a repeat of what seems to happen in almost every city Paul preaches in: Paul teaches about Jesus, some of the Jews like it and some don’t, the ones who don’t immediately get smitten with hate for Paul for stealing their influence, and then they either A) riot, B) stone them, or C) arrest them. (cf Acts 14, 15, and 16) This is also not the first time that resentful Jews have followed Paul & co to another town to continue their harassment. (see Acts 14.) I’m hoping we can break the cycle eventually (Paul’s got speech skills, maybe he can find a way to make the Jews who don’t want to join him less envious), but I’ve got a feeling it’s gonna be like this from here on out. At least they didn’t get stoned to death this time.

This chapter mentions Paul, Silas, and Timothy, but not Luke. Luke also refers to “them” as traveling, rather than “we”. It looks like Luke stayed behind in Philippi when the others left, at the end of the last chapter.

Also, here’s the map. Amphipolis, Appollonia, Thessalonica, and Berea are clustered at the top, and Athens is at the southeastern corner of Greece.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Areopagus refers to both a group of people and to the place where they met. “Areopagus” is Greek for Rock of Ares (Ares being the greek equivalent of the god Mars. The Romans called the place Mars Hill.) The place itself is near the Acropolis (home of the Parthenon, which was already 500 years old at that time) and consists of a giant lumpy boulder (the Rock of Ares), with a flat plaza-like space in front. The Areopagus council was an aristocratic council of Athens dating back to ancient times. It was powerful when Athens was its own city-state, but history is vague on what powers it retained after the Romans took over. The Romans divided their Empire into Senatorial Provinces, where the Senate picked the proconsuls who governed them, and Imperial Provinces, where only the Emperor could select the proconsuls. Most Imperial provinces were strategically located in border regions, or newly-conquered, unstable, or rebellious regions. Because the Senatorial provinces were by definition peaceful and stable, they had few or no legions stationed in them, so this arrangement also had the effect of keeping the legion-heavy provinces firmly under the control of the Emperor.

Anyway, Athens, part of the province of Achaea, was originally a Senatorial province. In AD15, the Emperor Tiberius made Athens (and Macedonia) Imperial Provinces, in response to complaints of Senatorial mismanagement. In AD44 Emperor Claudius returned them to Senatorial Province status again.

Fun Fact: One of the proconsuls of Athens was Gaius Calpurnius Piso, who was a Senator from c. 54AD to 65AD and led a conspiracy to murder the increasingly-crazy Emperor Nero. Paul’s journey here in Acts runs from about 49AD to 52AD, and Paul and Peter were both killed by Nero in 64AD.

Also, can Paul give a speech or what? I’m sure in real life he probably said a lot more stuff than just the sample that Luke wrote down in his book, but it’s not bad for basically an off-the-cuff speech given to some pushy philosophers. As a person who can barely speak in front of a group at all without messing it up horribly, I am suitably impressed.

Stoic philosophers believed in a deterministic universe, and that the definition of virtue was to keep one’s own will in line with the will of nature, i.e. fate. In practice this involved large amounts of fortitude and “accepting fate”. The Epicureans believed that pleasure is the highest good, and that freedom from fear and freedom from physical pain is the highest form of pleasure. They were more concerned with avoiding pain than with being hedonistic. It’s interesting that Paul was highly educated enough to be familiar with and able to quote the Cilician and Cretan poets.