Acts 17:16-21

CRITICAL REMARKS

Acts 17:16. Athens.—Described by Milton (Paradise Regained, Acts 4:20) as “the eye of Greece,” and “the mother of arts and eloquence.” The capital of Attica was situated about five miles from the harbour of Piræus, partly on a group of rocky hills, and partly upon the low land surrounding these, and separating them one from the other. Of these rocky eminences the loftiest was the Acropolis, which stood almost in the middle of the town, and to which a magnificent marble staircase led up through the Propylæum, built by Pericles. Here were, besides other works of art, the colossal statue of Athene Promachus, the glorious Parthenon, or Virgins’ house, replete with the masterpieces of Phidias, and “the colossal statue (of Athens) of ivory and gold, the work of Phidias, unrivalled in the world, save only by the Jupiter Olympius of the same artist” (Conybeare and Howson, 1:330).

Acts 17:17. In the market.—The Agora, richly decorated with statues, lying between the two hills, Pnyx on the west and Museum on the south-west of the Acropolis, was “the centre of a glorious public life, when the orators and statesmen, the poets and artists, of Greece found there all the incentives of their noblest enthusiasm” (Ibid., i. 326).

Acts 17:18. This babbler.—ὁ σπερμολδγος. Lit., sted-picker, properly a bird, in which sense it is used by Aristophanes (Birds, 232); hence one who prowls about the market-place picking up and retailing gossip, or one who lives by his wits; hence, again, “a contemptible and worthless person.” Or the allusion may be to the chattering of such birds, whence the word may denote “a babbler.” Zeno called by this name one of his disciples, who had more words than wisdom (Diog. Laert., Zeno, c. 19); and Demosthenes used this expression of ready-tongued opponents. “Many an Athenian is likely to have babbled all the week through about this babbler at the Areopagus” (Stier). “Probably the nearest and most instructive parallel in modern English life to Spermologos is ‘Bounder’ allowing for the difference between England and Athens. In both there lies the idea of one who is ‘out of the swim,’ out of the inner circle, one who lacks that thorough knowledge and practice in the rules of the game, that mould the whole character and make it one’s nature to act in the proper way and play the game fair” (Ramsay, St. Paul, p. 243).

Acts 17:19. Areopagus.—This ancient college of justice in Athens, whose province it was to pronounce judgment on the worst criminal cases, had its name from the elevation, Mars’ Hill (Acts 17:22), upon the east end of which it had its sittings. It was approached from the market-place by a flight of steps cut in the rock, and on its summit had, also cut in the rock, a row of seats, in which the judges sat, and room for a considerable number of spectators and listeners. Ramsay (St. Paul, etc., pp. 241 ff.), thinks Paul was brought before the Council of Areopagus, neither to be tried by the city judges, nor to address the Athenian people, nor to discuss with the philosophers, but to explain to the university court the nature of his doctrines. (See Hints on Acts 17:19.)

Acts 17:21. Either to tell or to hear some new thing.—Compare Demosthenes: “Is it your sole ambition to wander through the public places, each inquiring of the other, what new advices?” (Philippic, Acts 1:11); and Thucydides (3:38): “And so you are the best men to be imposed upon with novelty of argument,” etc. “It is just the same to-day with the upper and lower classes in our great cities. It is ever καινὁτερόν τι; or, as they are wont to say, One new thing supplants another” (Stier).

HOMILETICAL ANALYSIS.—Acts 17:16

Paul at Athens; or, Alone in a Heathen City

I. Waiting for Silas and Timothy.—

1. Alone. These two friends having been left behind in Macedonia, Silas in Berœa, and perhaps Timothy in Thessalonica, to carry forward the spiritual movement which had there been initiated when those who had brought the apostle as far as to Athens had departed, he naturally began to realise the isolation of his position as a stranger in a large heathen city. Nor is it likely that the brilliant scenes on which he gazed in that fair metropolis of the ancient world did much to relieve his depression. Besides, largely on account of bodily weakness, the apostle may have felt himself in need of friendly sympathy and assistance in order to effective working in Athens. Hence, on sending back his conductors to Barœa, he deemed it prudent to entrust them with instructions for both Silas and Timothy to rejoin him with all speed. Doubtless he expected to await their arrival at Athens; but as the turn of events once more constrained him to leave the Achaian capital sooner than he had anticipated, it was not till he had reached Corinth that his esteemed colleagues overtook him (Acts 18:5).—Silas coming from Berœa, and Timothy from Thessalonica, to which city (as above conjectured, though see “Critical Remarks,” and “Hints” on Acts 17:14) he had been despatched from Berœa, instead of Paul (1 Thessalonians 2:18). Meanwhile the apostle found himself in Athens alone (1 Thessalonians 3:1). Yet,

2. Not alone. Like his glorified Master, who, in the days of His flesh, when forsaken by His disciples, affirmed that though alone He was yet not alone, because the Father was with Him (John 16:32), the apostle in his solitude enjoyed first the companionship of that gracious Lord on whose business he had come to Athens, who had said, “Lo! I am with you always, even unto the end of the world” (Matthew 28:20), and whose “comforts,” it need not be doubted, in that season of “thoughtfulness” delighted his soul (Psalms 94:19). Then, like him who said he was “never less alone than when alone,” the apostle had the fellowship of his own thoughts, which, if they had much to depress, were fitted also in no small measure to cheer. The recollection of the toils and sufferings he had passed through since entering on his lifework of preaching the gospel to the heathen could hardly fail at times to cast “the pale hue of sickly thought” upon his spirit, though even that could not daunt his heroic soul. But, on the other hand, the remembrance of how he had been sustained throughout his arduous warfare, and of how astonishingly the work of the Lord had prospered in his hand, would more than counterbalance his depressing reminiscences. Lastly, he might have found, though it is doubtful if he did, in the fresh scenes upon which he gazed in that brilliant capital, the means of relieving the tedium of his lonely hours. “It was at Athens,” writes Farrar, “that the human form, sedulously trained, attained its most exquisite and winning beauty; there that human freedom put forth its most splendid power; there that human eloquence displayed its utmost subtlety and grace; there that art reached to its most consummate perfection; there that poetry uttered alike its sweetest and its sublimest strains; there that philosophy attained to the most perfect music of human expression, its loftiest and deepest thoughts”; but it may be questioned if these considerations affected Paul with the like enthusiasm they inspire in the breast of modern travellers.

II. Surveying the Athenian city.—

1. The spectacle he beheld. That which arrested Paul’s attention, presumably from the moment of his landing at the harbour of Piræus, as he walked up slowly between the ruins of the Long Walls towards the shining city, and while he, later on, sauntered through its streets and lingered in its market-place, was not its geographical situation, or its architectural beauty, or its air of culture and refinement, but its religious condition. Like Babylon of old, which was “a land of graven images,” and whose people were “mad upon idols” (Jeremiah 50:38), the Athens of Paul’s day was “wholly given over to idolatry,” literally stuffed full of idols. “A person could hardly take his position at any point in ancient Athens where the eye did not range over temples and statues of the gods almost without number” (Hackett). Petronius (Satires, 17) was wont to say that it was easier to find a god at Athens than a man; while, according to Pausanias, Athens had more images than all the rest of Greece put together. Some of the streets were so crowded with those who sold idols that it was almost impossible to make one’s way through them. “Every god in Olympus found a place in the Agora; and as if the imagination of the Attic mind knew no bounds in this direction, abstractions were deified and publicly honoured. Altars were erected to fame, to modesty, to energy, to persuasion, to pity” (Conybeare and Howson, i. 328, 329). Finally, lest any divinity should be overlooked, the inhabitants had erected an altar with this inscription, “To the unknown God.” It is of course objected that ancient writers, such as Pausanias and Philostratus, only knew of altars “to unknown gods” not “to an, or the, unknown god”; but neither can their ignorance be allowed to invalidate the testimony of Paul, nor can it be incontrovertibly demonstrated that the “altars of unknown gods mentioned by the above writers referred to a plurality of deities, and not to a plurality of altars; while, even if the former supposition be accepted as correct, it does not follow that Paul may not have observed one inscribed as Luke reports. There is even a “great probability that by ‘the unknown God’ was actually meant Jehovah” (Lewin).

2. The feeling it aroused. “His spirit was stirred within him,” provoked or filled with indignation;

(1) at the profanation of the holy name of God implied, in the very existence of an idol;
(2) at the prostitution of manhood exhibited in the worship of a graven image;
(3) at the unspeakable source of moral corruption opened in the degrading rites by which such divinities were honoured; and
(4) at the terrible display of Satanic power given in the subjection of a whole city to such a caricature of religion as idolatry really was. Nor would the apostle’s indignation be lessened, but immensely heightened, by the fact that in Jerusalem he had never witnessed an idol.

III. Disputing with its inhabitants.—

1. Where, and when?

(1) In the synagogue on the Sabbath. Although “no trace of any building which could have been a synagogue has been found at Athens” (Farrar), there is no ground for calling in question the accuracy of Luke’s statement that one existed there in Paul’s day, and that Paul, according to his wont (Acts 17:2), entered it on the Sabbath.

(2) In the market-place on the other days of the week. Located at the foot of the Acropolis and the Areopagus, the market-place of Athens was a busy scene. “Around were porticoes fitted up as bazaars for the sale of a thousand articles of commerce; here and there were circular sheds, one for the sale of slaves, another of provisions. In one place was the flesh market, in another the horse market; here the mart of books, there the stalls of fruit and flowers” (Lewin).
2. With whom, and about what?

(1) On the Sabbath day or days in the synagogue with the Jews and devout persons or proselytes there assembled; and the fact that there were Jews and proselytes in the Greek capital shows that even in that idolatrous city the name of Jehovah could not have been utterly unknown. On the week days in the market-place with those encountered there, amongst whom mingled representatives of the various schools of philosophy for which Athens was celebrated (see below).

(2) With the former his theme of disputation would be the Messiahship of Jesus, which, as on other occasions, he would endeavour to establish from the Scriptures (Acts 17:2); with the latter he would reason not about philosophy or science, politics or trade, but about religion and theology, and, in particular, about the true knowledge of God and about the folly of idol worship, about the true wisdom which descended from heaven, and about the resurrection and eternal life.

IV. Confronting the philosophers.—

1. Their designations.

(1) Epicureans. The founder of this sect, Epicurus, born 342 B.C.—i.e., six years after the death of Plato, in his thirty-sixth year—opened at Athens a philosophical school, over which he presided till his death in B.C. 270. The principal tenets of his philosophy were, that the summum bonum of human life consisted in happiness or pleasure; that this happiness was to be found in sobriety and temperance, contentment with little and a life generally in accord with nature; that death was not an evil to be feared; that man has no moral destiny; and that the gods which in his system were more phantoms than gods, took no manner of interest in mundane affairs (Schwegler’s History of Philosophy, pp. 131–134). With his followers happiness became convertible with sensual pleasures (1 Corinthians 15:32), belief in inert and shadowy divinities degenerated into practical atheism, and man’s soul, if he had one, was nothing but a body composed of finer atoms than the fleshly tabernacle in which it was enshrined. They were thus the Greek Sadducees of their day.

(2) The Stoics. Followers of Zeno, who was born in Citium, a town of Cyprus about 340 B.C., and opened a school in an Athenian arcade (Stoa, whence the name Stoic), these were virtually pantheists, who believed that the world was God’s body, and God the world’s soul, that the highest law of human action was to live in accordance with nature, and that virtue, apart from all personal ends, was man’s sole good; but in point of fact they were commonly nothing better than fatalists, who boasted of their indifference to the world, and affected an ideal of morals which in practice became unreal (Schwegler, pp. 123–131).
2. Their exclamations.

(1) What will this babbler say? Better, what might this seed picker, this idle prater mean? I.e., if he has any meaning. These depositaries of the world’s wisdom looked upon the apostle as only another specimen of those market-place loungers and gossips who picked up scraps of information and retailed them to others, and whom the quick-witted humorists of the day likened to a sparrow, rook, or other bird which hopped about the streets and squares of the city picking up crumbs (see “Critical Remarks” on Acts 17:18).

(2) He seemeth to be a setter forth of strange gods (or daemons)—the very charge preferred against Socrates (Xen., Mem., i. 1, § 1)—“because,” Luke explains, “he preached unto them Jesus and the resurrection.” This, the reason advanced by the philosophers for their exclamation, Luke must have learnt from Paul himself. The philosophers, it has been thought, mistook Anastasis for the name of a second divinity in addition to Jesus (Chrysostom, Theophylact, Spence, Plumptre, Holtzmann); but it is more likely that the gods referred to were the God of the Hebrews, the true God and His Son Jesus Christ (Alford, Hackett, De Wette).

3. Their interrogations.

(1) Where these were put. At the Areopagus or Mars’ Hill, “where the most awful court of judicature had sat from time immemorial, to pass sentence on the greatest criminals, and to decide the most solemn questions connected with religion. The judges sat in the open air upon seats hewn out in the rock, on a platform ascended by a flight of stones immediately from the ‘Agora’ ” (Conybeare and Howson, i. 346).
(2) How these were put! “May we know what this new doctrine or teaching is that is spoken by thee?” “We would know what these things mean.” The questions do not indicate that Paul was formally arraigned, but merely that he was called upon to furnish an explanation of the theological novelties to which they had listened—which, all things considered, was a fair enough demand. The words in which their demand was couched do not resemble those in which a prisoner at the bar is addressed by a judge; nor does the speech, made by Paul in reply, in the least degree resemble a defence.

(3) Why these were put. Partly out of a desire for information—the teaching sounded strange to their ears—but chiefly out of idle curiosity, which was a notorious characteristic of the Athenians (see, however, “Critical Remarks” and “Hints” on Acts 17:19).

Learn.—

1. The essential loneliness of God’s people in a sinful world.
2. The earnest activity which Christ’s servants should everywhere exhibit.
3. The natural incapacity of the human heart to comprehend the gospel.
4. The two principal obstacles to the reception of the truth, pleasure and pride.
5. The comparative frivolity of all earthly engagements in comparison with the business of salvation.

HINTS AND SUGGESTIONS

Acts 17:16. Athens: A Microcosmus.—A city—

I. Of degraded idolaters, who worshipped the creature more than the Creator.

II. Of ignorant philosophers, who professed themselves to be wise, but were all the while fools.

III. Of arrant triflers, who had no just conception of the seriousness of life.

Acts 17:18. Strange Gods.

I. Senseless images.—Dumb idols such as were and are worshipped by the heathen.

II. Local divinities.—Such deities as were supposed to be restricted to particular lands and peoples—e.g., the gods of the Egyptians, Babylonians, Phœnicians, etc.

III. Impersonal abstractions.—Such as are worshipped by philosophers and others, both ancient and modern; as e.g., the All, the Great Unknown, the Power behind the Visible, etc.

IV. Material possessions.—Such as are worshipped under the names of Mammon, Wealth, Riches, by all classes of society.

Jesus and the Resurrection. Jesus—

I. The efficient cause (John 5:25).

II. The personal principle (John 11:25).

III. The archetypal pattern (Philippians 3:21).

IV. The first fruits of the Resurrection (1 Corinthians 15:23).

The Athenian Philosophers and their Relation to Christianity.

I. The Epicureans.—“The Epicurean system was essentially materialistic. The senses formed the only source of knowledge. The world was traced back to atoms, out of whose accidental concurrence all things were formed. Even the soul was said to be only a body of ethereal and fiery substance fashioned out of fine atoms. Hence the immortality of the soul was a delusion, the freedom of the will a deception, and the gods superfluous; only quite illogically Epicurus allowed them to exist, but denied them all world-government and participation in the fortunes of men. The highest good of man, placed as he is in this senseless and heartless existence, is pleasure; wisdom to attain to the highest measure of this in life; and virtue, the conduct leading to this aim.”

II. The Stoics.—“The Stoical system, on the other hand, was essentially pantheistic. It distinguished in the world—all, matter and force. It named the latter in relation to the whole, it is true, Reason, Providence, Godhead, but thought of it only as not self-existent, in personal, and therefore also not truly spiritual essence, as an all-forming and all-animating fire which brings forth the creatures and the worlds and again destroys them. The human soul, a spark of this impersonal godhead, and consequently without immortality, has, according to the Stoics, its highest good in virtue; but virtue is a life in accordance with nature, the agreement of the human will with the law of the world, consequently above all resignation in presence of world-governing fate.”

III. Their relation to Christianity.—“According to these doctrines of the Epicureans and Stoics, which present numerous resemblances to modern un-Christian modes of thinking, it is conceivable that both, notwithstanding their different views of the world and of morals, should have agreed, with reference to the gospel of the apostle, to see in it a new Oriental enthusiasm desirous of being admitted to Greek philosophical rank and especially in the resurrection message, a fable to be laughed at.”—Beyschlag.

Acts 17:19. The Teaching of Christianity at Once, Old and New.

I. Old, as the fall of man, being contained in the first promise; New, as the latest need of man, being able to adapt itself to the ever-varying phases of human civilisation.

II. Old, as the outgrowth of the Hebrew dispensation; New, as the substance of a fresh revelation.

III. Old, as being the subject of prophetic anticipation; New, as being the burden of a specially sent teacher, Christ.

IV. Old, as gathering up and crowning all God’s utterances in the past; New, as exhibiting all that is required to meet the exigencies of the future.

The New Doctrines of Christianity.

I. The unity of God.—Though not new to the Jews it was new to the Athenians.

II. The brotherhood of man.—Even to the Jews as well as Greeks this was an unheard-of idea.

III. The resurrection of Christ.—To both Jew and Greek this was a stumbling block and a strange thing.

IV. The reality of a judgment day.—The conception of such a general assize had never before entered into the world’s mind.

V. The duty of repentance.—Men may previously have admitted the necessity in certain cases of reformation. Repentance in the sense of godly sorrow for sin against God was a novelty.

Unto the Areopagus; or, In the University at Athens.—“Two questions have to be answered in regard to the scene that follows: Why was Paul taken before the council? and what were the intentions of the philosophers in taking him there?

1. It is clear that Paul appeared to the philosophers as one of the many ambitious teachers who came to Athens hoping to find fame and fortune at the great centre of education. Now, certain powers were vested in the council of Areopagus to appoint or invite lecturers at Athens, and to exercise some control over the lecturers in the interests of public order and morality. There is an almost complete lack of evidence what were the advantages and the legal rights of a lecturer thus appointed, and to what extent or in what way a strange teacher could find freedom to lecture in Athens. There existed something in the way of privileges vested in the recognised lecturers; for the fact that Cicero induced the Areopagus to pass a decree inviting Cratippus, the peripatetic philosopher, to become a lecturer in Athens, implies that some advantage was thereby secured to him. There certainly also existed much freedom for foreigners to become lecturers in Athens, for the great majority of the Athenian professors and lecturers were foreign. The scene described in Acts 17:18 seems to prove that the recognised lecturers could take a strange lecturer before the Areopagus, and require him to give an account of his teaching, and pass a test as to its character.

2. When they (the philosophers) took him to the court to satisfy the supreme university tribunal of his qualifications, they probably entertained some hope that he would be overawed before that august body, or that his teaching might not pass muster, as being of an unsettling tendency (for no body is so conservative as a university court).”—Ramsay, St. Paul, the Traveller and the Roman Citizen, pp. 246, 247.

Acts 17:21, with Revelation 21:5. The Idolatry of Novelty.—It cannot be denied that there is in all lives—probably not least in the busiest and the loftiest—an element of dulness. This is only to say that there must be routine in every life which is either active or useful. The Athenians of the first text were not mere gossips or newsmongers. The first sound of the words does them some injustice. Their idolatry of novelty by no means exhausted itself in inventing or embellishing or retailing scandalous or mischievous stories against the great men of their city, or against humbler neighbours “dwelling securely by them.” Their treatment of St. Paul shows this. He was not a man of sufficient notoriety or sufficient importance to attract the attention of the mere tattler or scandalmonger. It was because he raised grave questions, going to the very root of the national and individual life—questions of “Jesus” and of “resurrection”—that these idolaters of novelty were attracted. The idolatry of novelty has a wide range. There are those amongst us whose idolatry of novelty never rises to the level of the Athenian. In vain for them the preaching in ten thousand churches of Jesus and the resurrection, even could that doctrine be for once new. Enough for them the last new fashion in dress, the last new horror in the police-courts, the last new tragedy or comedy in the newspapers, the last new mystery or the last new misadventure in society. This sort of idolatry of novelty, this base, vulgar, grovelling curiosity, is of no value whatever beyond the evidence which it affords, more than half by negatives, to the instinct which is in all of us that this is not our rest. It may be enough to say of this worship of novelty, that, as often as not, perhaps (if we knew all) in nine cases out of ten, it is but another name for the worship of falsehood. No trouble whatever is taken by the caterers for this table to make sure whether its supply has anything more in it than a germ, if even a germ, of fact however worthless. But in itself, even where “news” and “lies” are not synonyms, how paltry, how unworthy of an immortal being is this form of the idolatry of novelty! Let us try it in another and higher region—the region of art and literature. There the idolatry of novelty becomes the worship of originality. And need I say what the effort to be original becomes in the hands of the commonplace? Need I speak of the exaggerations, the contortions, the burlesques of the would-be originalities of landscape and portrait-painting? Alas! the rage for novelty does not exhaust itself in the province of art. It is the condition of success in the historian, to invert received opinions of character, and to rewrite history itself into contraries. But the mischief stops not even here. The preacher himself is tried by his originality. A cruel trial this for the weak, vain man, who is miserable without an audience, and must purchase it at any cost. Yet how preferable any dulness to this sort of brilliancy! The subject widens before us, and we must lose no more time in bringing it to its practical application in the one higher province still. The Athenian development of the worship of novelty will be our guide here. We can scarcely wonder that the fanciful mythology of the earlier days of that wonderful people should have sunk, before the Christian era, from a beautiful though insubstantial faith into a cold and half-conscious hypocrisy—a miserable form for the many, a political expedient for the few. Philosophers and statesmen had long ceased to worship. But the former dreamed and the latter acted in agreement thus far—that a thorough iconoclasm would be dangerous, if not to the welfare of the people, at least to the tranquillity of the State. That altar of which St. Paul availed himself with such skill in his address on Mars’ Hill, “To the Unknown God,” was probably the only one which had any honest votary in the then population of Athens. Those Athenians might well have an open ear for the preacher of a new divinity. This was but to confess, what was no secret by this time, that their anonymous altar was still standing, and that they waited to worship till it had a name. For them the idolatry of novelty was their hope and their religion. Alas, brethren, that we should have come round again to those days! After all these centuries we too are left with an anonymous altar, and the worship of English hearts is offered once again at the shrine of an unknown, an avowedly unknowable, God. There is not an arrival of a so-called new apostle, there is not an importation of a so-called new divinity, for which this modern Athens has not at least one of its ears open. There is no pretence and no burlesque of a new commerce with the invisible, which cannot hold its séances in darkened chambers with a certainty of a sufficient gathering and a great probability of a crowd of awe-struck questioners outside. We are told that some one has dared to say, within the Christian Church of London, that Buddha himself is second only (if second) to Jesus Christ in morals, and superior to Christ Himself in this, that he never claimed for himself divinity. The idolatry of novelty can no further go—at least not while “he who now letteth will let”—but soon he shall be taken out of the way, and then shall “the lawless one” be revealed—to be unmasked and consumed in his season by the One mightier. We will turn now to the other and better half of the subject, and try to show, in a few concluding sentences, how considerately, how mercifully, our Lord Jesus Christ, and His Heavenly Father our Lord God, enters into that natural want of something new, which lies at the root of the worship of the ugly idol which we have sought to characterise in this sermon. Do you suppose that Jesus Christ, God in Christ, is unaware, as of the many woes and crimes of earth, so of this particular feature of it, and specially of this earth of England and London—its flatness, its staleness, its dulness, its monotony, as it is felt certainly in all but its ten thousand upper lives—and what are they among the teeming multitudes which make up the population of either? What is the second text of this morning? “He that sitteth upon the throne saith, Behold, I make all things new.” The very feeling, the very sense of monotony which has made impatient man set up this paltry idol of novelty—is here provided for by God Himself saying, “Behold I make (not a few things, but) all things new.” Yes, you will say—somewhere and some day, in that visionary region, in that far-off unrealisable world, of which St. John’s Apocalypse tells. Well—despise not the world to come. Think not scorn of that pleasant land. But let me tell you of a nearer “making all things new.” Let me tell you of it first in a word of St. John, and then finally in a word of St. Paul. There are two ways of fulfilling the promise of renovation. One is by the renewal of the thing itself—the other is by the renewal of the eye that views it. If the one is the promise of the text, the other is the promise elsewhere alike of St. John and St. Paul.—Dean Vaughan.