1 Thus is the secondary literature on this passage almost endless. Of modern commentators on Acts, Schneider, Gerhard, Die Apostelgeschichte (2 vols.; Freiburg: Herder, 1980/1982)Google Scholar 2.234, offers the most helpful delineation of the main lines of scholarship. Though of course more has been written since the publication of Schneider's second volume, his brief outline remains a trustworthy guide to the intellectual map of past interpretation. Beurlier, Émile, ‘Saint Paul et L'Aréopage’, Rev. d'hist. et de litt. rel. 1 (1896) 344–66Google Scholar, is concise for the patristic period.

2 That a scholar as observant as Jervell, Jacob, Die Apostelgeschichte (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1998) 453CrossRefGoogle Scholar, can call the Areopagus speech an ‘Intermezzo’ should immediately caution against any overstatement of the scene's narrative importance. See Vielhauer, Philipp, ‘On the “Paulinism” of Acts’, Studies in Luke–Acts (ed. Keck, L. E. and Martyn, J. L.; Mifflintown, PA: Sigler, 1999) 33–50Google Scholar, esp. 34; and Schubert, Paul, ‘The Place of the Areopagus Speech in the Composition of Acts’, Transitions in Biblical Scholarship (ed. Rylaarsdam, J. Coert; Chicago: University of Chicago, 1968) 235–61Google Scholar, esp. 261.

3 Examples of pagan tradition that were evident to early Christians are too numerous to name. We shall mention only one particularly striking example known to Acts commentators for a long time: for Origen the echoes of Socrates's trial reverberated so loud through the scene in Athens that he believed Socrates himself to have been tried before the Areopagus. Of course, Socrates was not tried before the Areopagus but before the People's Court in the agora. The fact that Origen thought the council was the Areopagus simply shows the power of Luke's story to evoke analogically shaped ‘historical’ connections.

4 II. Apol. 10.6 (πρὸς θɛοῦ δὲ τοῦ ἀγνώστου αὐτοῖς διὰ λογοῦ ζητήσɛως ἐπίγνωσιν προϋτρέπɛτο ϵἰπών…). I use here the critical edition of Marcovich, Miroslav, Iustini Martyris Apologiae Pro Christianis (Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1994)Google Scholar. Marcovich also notes the possible allusion to Acts 17.23 (p. 28). There remains serious debate on the issue of Justin's knowledge of Acts (or lack thereof). For a judicious discussion, see Gregory, Andrew, The Reception of Luke and Acts in the Period before Irenaeus (WUNT 2/169; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003) 317–21Google Scholar.

5 Stromata I.19. The Phaenomena of Aratus was a wildly popular book by ancient standards. It was translated into Latin by no less a man than Cicero himself and also—in a very unusual move at that time—translated into Arabic.

6 Letters to Priests, 49 (to Horotantius). For the Greek east, see Pelikan's, Jaroslav excellent treatment of the Cappadocians in Christianity and Classical Culture: The Metamorphosis of Natural Theology in the Christian Encounter with Hellenism (New Haven, CT: Yale University, 1993)Google Scholar. Though it is sometimes implicit, throughout the book Pelikan relates the Cappadocians' theological self-understanding and methods to Paul's speech (see esp., for example, p. 167, where Acts 17.22–28 is cited as the overall framework for Part II of Pelikan's book).

7 Summa Theologiae Ia.1.8.2. I am aware of the debate over how best to construe Aquinas's understanding of ‘natural knowledge’ (i.e., it is not an alternative to theological knowledge). But such matters cannot occupy us here.

8 See Calvin's Commentary on Acts, esp. his remarks on 17.22–34. That the Areopagus text was important to Calvin's thinking about the knowledge of God may be seen easily enough in the first chapter of Book I of the Institutes (I.1.1, I.5.3, etc.). Reflection on the ‘apologetic’ dimension of Paul's speech occurred in the earlier period, too, of course. Indeed, for the view that Athenagoras's distinction between arguments ‘on behalf of the truth’ and ‘concerning the truth’ owes its intellectual foundations to Paul's Areopagus discourse, see Torrance, T. F., ‘Phusikos kai Theologikos Logos, St Paul and Athenagoras at Athens’, SJT 41 (1988) 11–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar. As far as I can discern, Athenagoras does not actually cite Acts 17, but Torrance may well be correct that the structure of his thought—at least as Torrance himself presents it—reflects a careful consideration of Paul's speech. For the connection between Paul's speech and the early Apologists, see the concise article of Gebhardt, H., ‘Die an die Heiden gerichtete Missionsrede der Apostel und das Johannesevangelium’, ZNW 6 (1905) 236–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 See, e.g., Barrett, C. K., The Acts of the Apostles (2 vols.; ICC; Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1994/1998)Google Scholar, 2.850–1.

10 Analyzing the speeches in Acts has long been a kind of cottage industry in NT studies. Of course there has also been some debate over the question of cultural influence on Paul's speech, with Dibelius far on one side (pagan) and Gärtner on the other (Jewish). But most NT scholars would now view such Hellenistic/Jewish dichotomies as unnecessary, particularly when dealing with a culturally complex figure such as Luke. Furthermore, attention to the animating narrative moves of Acts as a whole precludes the ability to abstract ‘pagan’ from ‘Jewish’ elements when thinking about the Areopagus discourse: Acts is plainly concerned with both aspects of Mediterranean life and weaves them inseparably into the fabric of the text.

11 Vielhauer's article cited in n. 2 above is of course the classic statement of this position.

12 E.g., Bruce, F. F., The Book of the Acts (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1954) 345–68Google Scholar; or Pesch, Rudolf, Die Apostelgeschichte (2 vols.; Neukirchener–Vluyn: Neukirchener, 1986) 2.141–2Google Scholar.

13 E.g., Walaskay, Paul, Acts (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1998) 166Google Scholar: Paul is ‘far removed from the world of the Bible’; his ‘address was a reflection on Stoic theology’; Wilson, Stephen G., The Gentiles and the Gentile Mission in Luke–Acts (SNTSMS 23; Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1973) 214CrossRefGoogle Scholar: Luke thinks the Gentiles' ‘basic response [is] correct but misguided’.

14 See, e.g., the brief remarks of Marguerat, Daniel, ‘Paul après Paul: une histoire de réception’, NTS 54 (2008) 317–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar (319). There were exceptions in the ancient world, too, of course. John Chrysostom, for example, took the logic of Paul's speech to be entirely critical rather than an attempt to establish common ground or engage in Christian apologetics (Homilies on Acts, Homily 38).

15 In more traditional language, this is the difference between the order of being and the order of knowledge.

16 See Barr's, James chapter on the speech in Biblical Faith and Natural Theology (Oxford: Oxford University, 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In a sense Barr is right, of course, that the ‘importance of the Areopagus speech for traditional natural theology is too obvious to require exemplification’ (21 n. 1). Yet it is helpful nevertheless to see something of the cumulative hermeneutical weight of a particular way of reading the speech. Paul's speech is not without its importance in other spheres of argumentation: we might remember, for example, Milton's Areopagitica (pub. 1644), whose allusive title recalled not only Isocrates's discourse but also Paul's. It was, says Milton, ‘especially Paul’ who saw no contradiction in the attempt to insert the wisdom of the Greek poets into holy scripture. Milton's larger point was about censorship, and his actual political position was more dissimilar than similar to that of Isocrates (Milton obviously favored less censorship). This is simply to note that Paul's speech actually works somewhat better for Milton's purposes than Isocrates's: in Milton's way of seeing things, Paul had at least been able to read the Greeks.

17 Subtle exegetes have attempted to distinguish between various degrees of ‘supplementation’ or ‘correction’—the philosophers need less correction than the wider populus. See, e.g., the article of Schneider, Gerhard, ‘Anknüpfung, Kontinuität und Widerspruch in der Areopagrede Apg 17,22–31’, Kontinuität und Einheit (ed. Müller, Paul-Gerhard and Stenger, Werner; Freiburg: Herder, 1981) 173–8Google Scholar, wherein the ‘Widerspruch’ is explicated entirely in terms of the Christians and Stoics together over against the everyday pagan. Bultmann, Rudolf, ‘Anknüpfung und Widerspruch: Zur Frage nach der Anknüpfung der neutestamentlichen Verkündigung an die natürliche Theologie der Stoa, die hellenistischen Mysterienreligionen und die Gnosis’, TZ 2 (1946) 401–18Google Scholar, is typically thought-provoking: for Bultmann, the Anknüpfung just is the Widerspruch.

18 The critical text is that of Otto Stählin (updated by Ludwig Früchtel), Clemens Alexandrinus II (GCS 15; Berlin: Academie, 1960), here 58–9. Perhaps the most interesting contemporary reading on this question is—unsurprisingly—the Gifford lectures (e.g., Gilson, Barth, Pelikan, Barr, Hauerwas et al.).

19 As is well known, NT scholars have frequently looked for Luke's sources for his speeches. My formulation above is not intended to deny that Luke may well have had access to traditions/sources that helped him shape the speeches (or even exercised both formal and material restraints upon his literary creativity); its intent, rather, is simply to point to the significance of something recent scholarship has made unavoidable: any argument for a source/tradition behind the speeches must past through the elegant and consistent manner by which Luke—throughout the speeches in Acts—has rendered literarily that which he has received. See also n. 40 below.

20 See Rowe, C. Kavin, ‘Acts 2:36 and the Continuity of Lukan Christology’, NTS 53 (2007) 37–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 See, e.g., Green, Joel B., ‘The Problem of a Beginning: Israel's Scriptures in Luke 1–2’, BBR 4 (1994) 61–86Google Scholar.

22 E.g., Demosthenes De Corona 18.127 [269]; Dio Chrysostom Discourse 32.9.

23 Barnes, T. D., ‘An Apostle on Trial’, JTS 20 (1969) 407–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 Cf. esp. Acts 16.19 where Luke, as he does here in 17.19, employs ἐπιλαμβάνομαι with the preposition ἐπί in order to speak about Paul and Silas's appearance before certain authorities: ‘[H]aving seized [ἐπιλαβόμɛνοι] Paul and Silas, they dragged them into the agora [ἐπὶ τοὺς ἄρχοντας]’ (cf. ἐπὶ τοὺς πολιτάρχας in 17.6). See also Luke 23.26; Acts 16.19; 17.6; 18.17; 21.30, 33. Cf. Jerome's translation of ἐπιλαμβάνομαι in 17.19 as apprehendere (et apprehensum eum ad Areopagum duxerunt).

25 Cf. esp. Acts 27.21: σταθɛὶς ὁ Παῦλος ἐν μέσῳ αὐτῶν ϵἶπϵν ἔδει μέν ὦ ἄνδρɛς; see also Luke 2.46; 8.7; 10.3; 22.27; 24.36; Acts 1.15; 2.22.

26 LSJ, 452.

27 Barnes, ‘An Apostle on Trial’, 410.

28 It is important to note that the interpretive move runs the other way as well: the Socratic echoes also rightfully reinforce the reading of the scene as a trial. That Socrates was tried in the People's Court does not substantively alter the impact of the resonance: it merely helps to describe more precisely the actual shape of the analogy.

29 The other charge frequently reported was that of ‘corrupting the youth’—which was in essence yet another political charge. On this point, see Garnsey, Peter, ‘Religious Toleration in Classical Antiquity’, Persecution and Toleration (ed. Sheils, W. J.; London: Blackwell, 1984) 1–27Google Scholar.

30 Cf., e.g., Xenophon Memorabilia I.1.1, 3, et passim; Plato Apol. 24BC, 28E–30E, et passim; Josephus C. Ap. 2.262–64; Justin Martyr I Apol. 5.4.

31 Cf. Euripides Bacchae lns. 255–9.

32 E.g., Haenchen, Ernst, The Acts of the Apostles: A Commentary (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1971) 520Google Scholar. See, however, Apuleius Met. 10.7, and Lucian Anacharsis, or Athletics 19, both of whom speak of the dangers of trying to influence the Areopagus through rhetorical maneuvering.

33 Haenchen, The Acts of the Apostles, 520, thinks that ‘superstition’ is an entirely modern concept. If by this Haenchen means to say that we as moderns know that the tricks involved in palm-reading, crystals, etc. are nothing but tricks—and therefore unreal and untrue in some sort of metaphysical sense—then of course he is right. The conception of the cosmos that buttressed the seriousness with which the ancients took their soothsayers is no longer ours. However, if we simply understand ‘superstitious’ to mean a kind of gross exaggeration and distortion of otherwise common features of religious life in the ancient world (as does Plutarch in his De Superstitione, for example), then our translation is on solid ground. On this matter and the word itself, see P. J. Koets, Δɛισιδαιμονία: A Contribution to the Knowledge of the Religious Terminology in Greek (Purmerend: J. Muusses, 1929); and, more recently, Martin, Dale B., Inventing Superstition: From the Hippocratics to the Christians (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 2004)Google Scholar.

34 See the concise discussion in Barrett, Acts, 2.836.

35 E.g., Klauck, Hans-Josef, Magic and Paganism in Early Christianity: The World of the Acts of the Apostles (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1999) 81–2Google Scholar. See also Marguerat, Daniel, ‘Luc–Actes entre Jérusalem et Rome: Un Procédé Lucanien de Double Signification’, NTS 45 (1999) 70–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar (esp. 75). Marguerat's article provides multiple instances of Luke's semantic skill in constructing purposefully ambiguous statements.

36 On dramatic irony as a major Lukan literary technique, see C. Kavin Rowe, Early Narrative Christology: The Lord in the Gospel of Luke (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, repr. 2009).

37 See, e.g., van der Horst, P. W., ‘The Unknown God’, Knowledge of God in the Graeco-Roman World (ed. van den Broek, R. et al. ; Leiden: Brill, 1998) 19–42Google Scholar.

38 It is possible to read the participle ἀγνοοῦντɛς as yet another instance of dramatic irony: if one translates ‘unknowingly’ for the ears of the Areopagus, Paul's statement is much less offensive—because theologically critical—than if one translates ‘ignorantly’. Again: the connotative difference exists in Greek in the same word; it is only in English that the choice must be made.

39 De Superst. (apud Augustine De Civitate Dei 6.10); cf., among many possible examples, Plutarch's Numa 8.7–8, or his De Superstitione, esp. 167.

40 This is yet another place where a better sense of Luke's literary style would serve us well. Just to the degree that we comprehend that Luke is not a rigid copyist or a wooden interpreter of the texts and traditions he knows, we will find unnecessary the need to search for a ‘source’ from which Luke derived his philosophical-sounding sentences. Indeed, the whole search for a source can be interpreted as the effect of the power of allusion—as Luke here puts it to work—upon modern scholars of his text. That is, we do not search for a source to understand Luke's text but, to the contrary, precisely because we already move within the sphere created by the allusion. In Gadamer's terms, the search for a source is not to go behind the text as we have it but rather is itself a part of the text's effective history and, in a sense, counts as a certain kind of evidence that we have already understood at least part of what Luke means to say.

41 SVF 1.537 (pp. 121–2).

42 See, e.g., the classic statement by Dibelius, , ‘Paul in Athens’, Studies in the Acts of the Apostles (London: SCM, 1956) 78–83Google Scholar: the Areopagus speech is a ‘manner of constructing a Christian theology not on biblical, but on philosophical, especially Stoic, ideas’ (82). The fundamental translational assumption here of course is that a Christian theology actually could be erected on a Stoic basis. For a more recent example, see among many possible options, Witherington, Ben, The Acts of the Apostles: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998)Google Scholar, who asserts that Paul ‘is making a proclamation of monotheism in its Christian form’ (518). Unwittingly perhaps, such a formulation treats Christianity as a subset of a more general theological reality (‘monotheism’). In this way of thinking, monotheism is the ultimate truth toward which both pagan philosophy and Christianity point, and is therefore the theological ground that makes possible a genuine translation: pagan philosophy and Christianity are ultimately about the same thing, as it were, even though they use different languages to speak of it. Whether Witherington intends this or not is unclear, for later in the commentary he seems both to retreat from this statement and to reaffirm it (534–5). That many scholars take ‘monotheism’ to be the theological essence of Christianity, the ‘highest’ form of religion in general, and so forth needs no elaboration. See, e.g., the ‘Introduction’ by Athanassiadi, Polymnia and Frede, Michael, eds., Pagan Monotheism in Late Antiquity (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999) 1–20Google Scholar.

43 Think, for example, of the multifaceted questions that one must engage to explain Luther's translation of ἐκκλησία not by Kirche but by Gemeinde.

44 See below on ancient philosophy as a way of life.

45 Eusebius Praep. Evang. 13.12. For the text and translation of Aristobulus, see Holladay, Carl R., Fragments from Hellenistic Jewish Authors. Vol. III. Aristobulus (Atlanta: Scholars, 1995) 171–3Google Scholar.

46 So, rightly, Barrett, Acts, 2.852, among others.

47 This is yet another instance of Luke's use of dramatic irony: the members of the Areopagus can well hear a connection to Stoic ‘oneness’ doctrine, but the readers of Acts know of course that the ‘one’ is Adam. Cf. Marguerat, ‘Luc–Actes entre Jérusalem et Rome’, 75.

48 Many English translations of Acts 17.27 suggest that the gentiles have found God. This is a mistake. The optative mood of ψηλαϕήσɛιαν and ɛὕροιɛν expresses the wish or hope of God's creative purpose but not the fact that the Gentiles have ‘touched and found’. Indeed, Luke's point is just the opposite: despite such a hope the Gentiles have remained ignorant of God, that is, they have not touched or found God. The καί γɛ that begins the next sentence makes this point explicit.

49 With characteristic clarity, Barrett, Acts, 2.850–1, remarks, ‘From nature the Greeks have evolved not natural theology but natural idolatry’.

50 Cf. Weiser, Alfons, Die Apostelgeschichte (2 vols.; Gütersloh: Gerd Mohn, 1981/1985) 2.479–80Google Scholar. Weiser's concise and well-formulated excursus constitutes another exception to the dominant interpretive trend.

51 See especially Chapter 2 of C. Rowe, Kavin, World Upside Down: Reading Acts in the Graeco-Roman Age (New York: Oxford University, 2009)Google Scholar.

52 This determination of the entire cosmos by a specific human being reveals the deep unity between the vastness and the particularity of Luke's theological vision: the totality of what is, is immediately and irrevocably related to the one whom God raised from the dead. And this relation, moreover, is one that determines the lives of all who now live. Such is the underlying logic of repentance for ‘everyone, everywhere’.

53 See the collection of essays in Hadot, Pierre, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995)Google Scholar. For a brief entrée into Hadot's thought, see his The Present Alone is Our Happiness: Conversations with Jeannie Carlier and Arnold I. Davidson (Stanford, CA: Stanford University, 2009). Arthur Darby Nock's famous description of philosophy as that which provides the best analogy to early Christianity because it offered a ‘scheme of life’ is in fundamental agreement with basic aspects of Hadot's position.

54 The well-known Stoic division of philosophy into logic, physics, and ethics—which can be traced at least to Xenocrates, the onetime head of the Platonic Academy—is of course in view here. The point is to draw attention to how readily we assimilate such a division into our own terms without realizing that it was a division that corresponded not to three different kinds of abstract philosophical discussion but instead to sets of ‘spiritual exercises’ intended to lead the practitioner more deeply into the philosophical life.

55 ‘O vitae Philosophia dux…’. Book 5 contrasts Philosophia with Fortuna as ultimate determinative factors in one's happiness. Cicero's position, of course, is that—despite the manifest agonies inflicted by Fortuna (esp. 5.1)—Philosophia provides the pattern of life by which virtue, and thus happiness, can be obtained.

56 Whether an Old Man Should Engage in Public Affairs (An Seni Respublica Gerenda Sit), 26. Cf., among many other examples, the opening lines of On Stoic Self-Contradictions (De Stoicorum Repugnatiis), which emphasize the unity of philosophic thought and life.

57 Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, 265.

58 A risk Hadot constructively exploits in his essay on the figure of Socrates (Philosophy as a Way of Life, 147–78).

59 Certain kinds of Cynics would constitute the primary exception (e.g., Diogenes of Sinope). The criticism of Epicurean hypocrisy we find, for example, in Cicero's De Natura Deorum 1.115, presupposes their participation in normal religious/civic life.

60 The general lack of reflection on this aspect of ancient philosophy is a weakness in Hadot's work. He does address this matter in relation to the Skeptics, who directly affirmed the importance of daily life, but as a whole it is disregarded vis-à-vis other philosophical traditions. When Hadot says, for example, that there is a ‘rupture between the philosopher and the conduct of everyday life’ or that a philosopher's daily life is ‘utterly foreign to the everyday world’ (Philosophy as a Way of Life, 57–8), he obscures the fact that traditional philosophical schemes of life could quite easily incorporate large segments of the political and economic status quo. That Aristotle was a tutor to Alexander, or that Seneca (with Burrus) helped to run the Empire while Nero was young, or that Marcus Aurelius drew from Epictetus (or that Marcus Aurelius was himself an Emperor!), and so on should considerably complicate the thesis that the ‘spiritual exercises’ of the philosophers were intended to remove them entirely from normal daily life. Elsewhere it seems that Hadot does recognize this point, but he does not reflect on its significance (e.g., What is Ancient Philosophy? [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 2002] 108Google Scholar). It may well be that Hadot is focused more on the ideal philosophical life than what actually took place, but the critical point about the weight of everyday life—even for philosophers—remains.

61 Even the Skeptics had a view (!), namely, that these matters could not be definitely decided.

62 See, e.g., his Phaedo.

63 Despite the fact that in the ancient world the Christians were occasionally lumped together with the Epicureans—on the idea that both groups denied the gods and were therefore ‘atheists’ (see, e.g., Lucian Alexander the False Prophet 25, 38)—commentators on Acts have rightly seen that Epicureanism is prima facie incompatible with Christianity in a way that constitutes a marked difference from Stoicism. The latter philosophy is really the only one of the two whose echoes rumble loudly enough in Paul's speech to raise serious questions for our consideration.

64 Moreover, this ‘same-saying’ would have to hold for the entirety of the Acts narrative in that the whole of the way Luke tells the story would need to be translatable into a Stoic way of life. That is, were Luke to have written the Areopagus discourse in such a way as to make the argument for translation, we would expect to be able to map Stoicism and Acts onto one another without any major difficulties (or else accuse Luke of gross conceptual ineptitude).

65 Cf. Schneider, Apostelgeschichte, 2.234.

66 Of particular interest is the group (οἱ δέ) that says ‘we will hear you again about this’. I do not take this to signify the philosophical possibility of translation but rather to gesture toward the complex realities of kerygmatic communication. This group hears words they have heard before while simultaneously realizing that something has changed—that their philosophical traditions have been (re)interpreted in ways they do not (yet?) understand. Their interest is thus aroused. They are not resistant to the point of sneering, but neither are they brought to conversion.