Acts 17:17,18

Therefore disputed he in the synagogue … and in the market.

Paul’s discussions in the synagogue and market place

I. The parties with whom Paul reasoned. These may be looked on in two aspects:--

1. Theologically.

(1) The “Jews” were monotheists. They believed in the one true and living God, and in Moses as His great minister.

(2) The “Epicureans” were atheists. They ascribed the creation of the world to chance; they had no faith in the one infinite Creator of heaven and earth.

(3) The Stoics were pantheists. They confounded the universe with God, or regarded it rather as God. Paul had to deal, therefore, with these three great intellectual systems. Each would require a very different line of argument.

2. Ethically. These three represented three great cardinal moral evils--

(1) Self-righteousness in the Jew.

(2) Carnality in the Epicurean.

(3) Indifferentism in the Stoics.

II. The subjects on which he discoursed--“Jesus and the resurrection.”

1. The greatest person in the history of the race.

2. The greatest fact in the history of this person.

III. The effects of the discussion.

1. Contempt. “What will this babbler say?” Paul was probably no orator in their sense, nor was he of commanding presence.

2. Misconception. They thoroughly misunderstood him. “He seemeth to be a setter forth of strange gods.”

3. Curiosity (Acts 17:19). This was so far the most favourable result. The apostle’s teaching succeeded up to this point in generating in them the desire to know something more about the new doctrine. (D. Thomas, D. D.)

St. Paul in the market place

1. St. Paul seems to have had so little thought of his own dignity, and we find his most efficient work was accomplished when he turned his back upon the synagogue, and went down into the market place. Yes, hither, rather than to the court or the palace. He did not wait for the people to come to him--he went to them. In the history of the new religion it was always so. The Scribes and Pharisees of John the Baptist’s day sought him, but he never sought them. Herod sent for John, but John never hung about the court, and when he was summoned to the royal presence, uttered unpleasant truths with great plainness. Nay, Christ Himself discloses a singular indifference to the reformation of either the religious or secular rulers of the time. And, when we follow the history of St. Paul, we find Agrippa, Felix, and Festus send for the apostle. So that there was no want of opportunity to make an impression in high places--and yet, the new religion resolutely sought the low ones.

2. It has been supposed that this was because the new religion aimed to testify to its sympathy with the masses. It was not aristocratic, it was democratic. Its Founder was not one of the “privileged classes,” He was a mechanic. And so it turned away from courts, and went where sorrow and need were most surely to be found. All which is true enough, but by no means the whole truth. The new religion turned its footsteps to the marketplace, because it discerned that in the transformation of the passions, hopes, and interests of the market place was to be found the redemption of humanity. Plato had said that “no relief would ever reach the ills of men until either statesmen became philosophers, or philosophers assumed the government of states.” To him the only hope of the commonwealth was in a perfect system of government, perfectly administered. It is what many of us are thinking today. But the hope of a nation really lies in the elevation and redemption of individual character among its people; and according to the New Testament, without waiting to reconstruct governments, we must begin by striving for the new creation of individual character.

3. And, in just so far as it has won any substantial victories, it is thus that the religion of Christ has worked from the beginning. Meantime we cannot overlook the fact that there have gone forward the triumphs of civilisation. When the Church points to what the faith of the Crucified has done for the individual life, the apostles of learning and science point to what these have done for society and the state, And who of us can see this without admiration.? But who of us can see it without seeing something more? With the growth of wealth there has come the growth of poverty; with the multiplication of the arts, the multiplication of evil uses to which those arts may be turned; with the birth of new sciences, there has confronted us the birth of new and hateful vices. Who of us is not awed as he sees the splendours of London or Paris or Vienna? And yet within a stone’s throw of some tall palace or some stately museum, what festering courts; what wretchedness and degradation! Is this the product of the highest civilisation, and if it is, how is it better than that barbarism on which, so complacently, it professes to look down? To such questions as these there can be but one answer. There is not a reform, a science, an art, a single step in the purification of our forms of government, that is not a step in the right direction. But the millennium will never come by that road. You may make government as just as was Aristides. You may make the streams of official patronage and power as pure and as wholesome as the sparkling waters of a mountain spring. But you cannot cure a cancer with spring water. You cannot restore the lost reason by means of a wholesome diet and a padded cell. “There is a spirit in man, and the inspiration of the Almighty giveth him understanding.” To that spirit, personally, something must speak as with a message from God.

4. And so we find the apostle as the messenger of that spirit, pleading and arguing in the market place. How hopeless it must have seemed at first! With what a light laugh they must have listened to this “babbler.” How useless, his fellow Israelites kept assuring him, doubtless, was any attempt to get a hearing there! It is the same cry now. What are you going to do about the ever-increasing mass of people who are growing up in as genuine heathenism as any that is to be found in Dahomey? How vain to attempt to gain an entrance or to make an impression there! Thank God that the apostle was wiser, and knew better than this. He knew that in the market place then, as in the tenement now, there beat the same human hearts and ached the same unanswered wants that were throbbing anywhere else. He knew that there was no one so degraded, so hardened but that somewhere in him there was the small crevice through which the truth could find its way. Above all, he knew that the more hopeless was the darkness the more urgent was the need and call for light. And so he begins at the bottom--in the market place--with the individual soul.

5. This message of the apostle, a personal message to the personal soul, is mine to you today. This religion of ours, is it a pastime for Sundays, or is it a message and a mandate for Sundays and week days alike? Will you hearken to it only here, or will you own its authority in the house and in the market place as well? If the world is to become better, it must become better because we have consented to become better. In urging such reform it is my business to hold up before you here a high ideal, and to bid you at whatever cost, to strive to realise it. Not unfrequently, I am told, “What is the use of setting up an impossible mark of attainment only to daunt one by the dismal discrepancy of his own endeavours.” And yet, who of us would be genuinely contented with any other? When, from those loftier levels, the Master’s truth comes trembling down to our souls, there is something in us that answers to it. Even so, I think, at Athens, there were some who were carrying heavy and unshared burdens. With what unspeakable thankfulness, when at last they heard of Him who had come to lift off those burdens, must they have turned to Him and gladly laid them at His feet! (Bp. H. C. Potter, D. D.)

The Agora

The Agora, in all Greek cities the centre and focus of life, must not be confounded with an ordinary “market.” It was one to a certain extent. In one portion there were booths containing common articles of consumption, as well as bazaars for those of luxury. Other parts would be more suggestive of our own Covent Garden; shops for flowers and fruit; vegetables and oranges from the surrounding gardens; oil from the olive groves on the slopes of Lycabettus; honey from Hymettus; even fish from the shores of Salamis and Euboea. Mingling somewhat incongruously with these, we have the mention of stalls for books and parchments; a clothes booth; a depot for stolen goods; and the slave market called “Cyclus.” It was in this respect, a convenient trading centre for the surrounding city. But its main features and use were very different. Architecturally it must have been impressive. It is described by a writer as a “natural amphitheatre.” There was the Altar of the Twelve Gods, from which emanated, in varied directions, the streets of the city and the roads of Attica. Here, in one place, was the “Stoa Basileios,” “the Royal Porch” dedicated to Aurora; here, in another, is a Stoa dedicated to Zeus, with paintings of various deities by the artist Euphranor. These and similar ornamental buildings rose at all events on two sides, one of which was confronted with the Statues of the Ten Heroes. Xenophon tells us that, at certain festivals, it was customary for the knights to make the circuit of the Agora on horseback, beginning at the statue of Hermes, and paying homage to the statues and temples around. That garrulous throng whom Paul met here was composed of philosophers, artists, poets, historians, supplemented by a still livelier contingent of gossip mongers and idlers of every kind which gathered under alcove and colonnade to converse on “burning questions.” Moreover, anterior to the art of printing, and when journalistic literature was a future revelation, it formed the only means and opportunity of discussing the politics of the hour. Even the varied colour, blending and contrasted in this babel of confusion, must have been striking and picturesque, if the dress of the modern Greek is a survival of classic ages. Then the Agora opened its gates, not to natives only, but to “strangers” (verse 21). We can think therefore of “excursionists” and merchants, either in pursuit of pleasure or of gain, or both combined, from other towns and capitals near and distant. Noisy traffickers from Corinth and Thessalonica, Ephesus and Smyrna, Antioch and Damascus; sailors and voyagers from the Alexandrian vessel or Roman galley at anchor in the Piraeus. Here and there a Jew with sandalled feet, his long robe girdled round the waist and fringed with blue ribbon. Here and there some soldiers from the barracks--now on foot, now mounted--the flash of their helmets mingling with the red and yellow mantles of the market women, or with the still rarer keffeih and fillets of the swarthy children of the Arabian or Syrian deserts. What a rare “symposium”; what a singular whirlpool of thought in this “tumultuous Agora!” (J. R. Macduff, D. D.)

Certain philosophers of the Epicureans, and of the Stoics, encountered him.--

Epicureans and Stoics

It is a moment of perpetual and universal human interest, this moment of our text, when philosophers of the Epicureans and of the Stoics encountered Paul, the Christian, with his preaching of Jesus and of the Resurrection. For it was the moment when the gospel met the two sides of human life together, and spoke to them together, and contrasted its oneness with their dividedness, its wholeness with their partialness, and showed its mission of reconciliation. Who does not know what I mean when we talk of the two sides of life? Who is so young that he has not had life come up to him in the form of a question with something to be said on both sides? Who is so old as to have outgrown such questions? What day but presents one of them? Does not the great earth itself give you a perpetual parable of your single life, and each single life upon it? How it turns between day and night! I cannot think it is wrong to illustrate in this way Christ’s coming to the two sides of life, each true in itself, but partial; both truths, but half truths; each to the other inconceivable, except through the coming of Christ, the higher Light and the Reconciler. Epicureans and Stoics--these two classes of men represented the two opposite points of the sphere of life. Both represented facts, but separated ones. One was a class of men and minds who had started from the very high truth that good was sure to be the highest happiness, and had degenerated quickly into the mere pursuit of happiness and pleasure, as if they were good and would bring good of themselves. These were Epicureans. And their opposites were Stoics, a class of men and minds who had started from the noble truth that the highest good involves and is hardship and bravery, and had as quickly degenerated into mere proud endurance--pride in their own strength as the only good, and scorn of any gentleness or pleasure. One said, “It is a bright world, let us just enjoy it”; another, “It is a hard world, let us just endure it.” One would become selfish in luxury, the other selfish in strength and denial; the one was caught in sweetness, the other in bitterness; the one blinded by excess of light, the other by excess of darkness. They were the reverse sides of the globe of life. And yet could anything have been truer or nobler than the facts upon which they each rested? Is not virtue happiness? Is not virtue hardship and endurance? But half truths must degenerate into error. One side of human life by itself must deteriorate and become bad and selfish, and sink just as one side of a scale without a corresponding weight upon the other side must fall. So the happiness of virtue, and the hardness of virtue, had become on either side mere self-enjoyment and self-confidence. So human life must fall into error, however high it begins, unless it encounters some higher life and light. It never has anything except its own one human tendency to rely upon, which runs away with it if not corrected, and the half truth becomes a whole error. The best of lives at its best is one-sided, and alone, without Christ, will degenerate. Its noble tendencies will narrow upon self. It will surely end in meanness and error. Paul, then, meets these degenerate representatives of noble reverse rides of life, Epicureans and Stoics; and they are together as they encounter Paul. In their degenerate form they have a common union--not union in a higher life, but in a lower life, in a common selfishness. Is it a strange alliance? And yet your own single life may show the same thing--the armour under the silk. How much you may endure for pleasure’s sake; how you toil selfishly in order to enjoy selfishly; and yet the toil and enjoyment are perfectly out of sympathy with each other. There is nothing in common between them but the thought of self. That hollow union is the best the earthly life can make between the two sides, which say, “I ought to be happy and I ought to endure.” The two ideas of enjoyment and endurance go on seemingly as hopelessly separate as ever, whether in one life or two lives. Unless Christ meet them, and their union be in what Paul preached, Jesus and the Resurrection. What happens then? First, this, and it is the great thing which the gospel was meant to do, and I beg your closest attention to it. The gospel is bent on giving the two Divine motives, a Divine Person and a Divine future, Jesus and the Resurrection. It does not announce duties; it brings warm, stimulating motives. It preaches Jesus, who is the deep love of God for you, Him whose love and strength has come from the high heaven for you, come to the deep sin for you, come across the breadth of the world to you, come through the long years to you. Return His love, and you are in the happiness of virtue at once. The happiness of His companionship is the happiness of virtue. In His company you reach that fulness of joy. And now see, it is a happiness which also includes endurance. It does not depend on circumstances. It comes from the love of a Person, of Jesus the Lord. Am I bound to Him? Then I am happy; notwithstanding how self is put down, or how circumstances change. Happiness is not a mere luxury, not a quietness, not a favourable arrangement of circumstances. But it is my friendship with Jesus, which any man can have, and with which any man can endure, and be at once both as good an Epicurean as Epicurus, and as good a Stoic as Zeno. Now turn it over and begin with the other side; not how men think of happiness, but how they think of endurance. Suppose that a man says, “It is hard for me to do my duty, to be dutiful and faithful. I suppose I must just nerve myself to it and go to it as a necessity.” He and you are apt to think he is very brave, and is acting just in the right spirit. You let him go off in that way, and even give him your encouragement. But the gospel never left a man in that way. It never told a man to go and do a thing because he had to do it, and had better make the best of it and go with a good grace. But it preaches Jesus as Paul preached Him to the Stoics as well as Epicureans. “Do it, bear it, with Jesus and for Jesus. Go to it out of no necessity, but for the love of the Lord, who sets and leads the toil or suffering, and has borne so much for you. Can you not deny self for Him and His commands?” As the gospel gives no effeminate happiness, so now it gives no bitter bravery, no dreary courage, but a joyful endurance that is happier than any earthly delight in selfish pleasures; and the two sides of life are one in that preaching of Jesus which Paul brought to Stoics and Epicureans. But Paul gave them another teaching--“the Resurrection”; another motive, not only a Divine Person to love, but a Divine future to reach. Enjoyment and endurance had become simply different ways of getting through the present world, and they knew nothing else. The Epicurean said, “This is all there is; let us try to enjoy it as we can.” The Stoic said, “This is all I know of; let us try to bear it as we must.” But enjoyment and endurance are two very different things when the Resurrection is announced to them, and the Epicureans and the Stoics both encounter Paul. A present opening into a future changes both of them. See what it does for happiness. It makes it no longer the happiness of present possession, but of anticipation and preparation. It makes it active and brave. It is no longer the happiness of a man who sits in the midst of his gathered harvest and eats of his fruits luxuriantly. It is the happiness of one who is enduring the care and toil of preparation and exposure in view of a future harvest. And see on the other side how Paul’s truth of a resurrection changed endurance. It is no longer a bit of stern, proud resolution not to give up, to laugh bitterly and bear it hopelessly, but it is a bravery that is happy also in the great hope of result, a crown laid up, a prize at the end of the race. That alone sends cheerful sunlight through the workshop of life, the knowledge that it is a preparation for a Divine future. Do you not believe that Peter went to his preaching, after he learnt that Christ had risen, much more happily than he went to his fishing when he thought Christ was dead, and that he had just to go back and win his daily bread in the old dreary way? One was endurance with a rich future of results, the other was endurance under a mere present load of necessity. The one was happiness, also, the other was bitterness. So the glad light of a resurrection makes the Christian Stoic as light-hearted as the happiest of Epicureans. So life’s two sides help each other, and it is both sweet and strong. (Frederick Brooks.)