Acts 17:34

τινὲς δὲ : may contrast the favourable with the unfavourable, or perhaps merely continuous. κολληθέντες, see above on Acts 5:13, implies close companionship upon which their conversion followed, see additional note. Διονύσιος ὁ Ἀ.: “quam doctrinam scurræ rejecerunt, Areopagita vir gravis accipit”. Dionysius was a member of the Council, the words can mean nothing less it is evident, therefore, that this convert must have been a man of some distinction, as an Areopagite would previously have filled the office of Archon. On the honour attached to the term cf. Cicero, Pro Balbo, xii., and instances cited by Renan, Saint Paul, p. 209, note. It is not improbable that St. Luke may have received from him the draft of St. Paul's address. On the other hand the conversion of a man occupying such a position has excited suspicion, and Baur, Paulus, i., 195, considers that the whole scene on the Areopagus is unhistorical, and owes its origin to the tradition that an Areopagite named Dionysius was converted. So Holtzmann holds that the whole scene was placed on the Areopagus, because, according to report, a member of the Areopagus was converted, Apostelgeschichte, p. 393, similarly Weizsäcker. See further, “Dionysius,” B.D. 2, Hastings' B.D., Smith and Wace, Dictionary of Christian Biography, i., p. 846; Felten, Apostelgeschichte, p. 337 and notes below. Δάμαρις : perhaps Δάμαλις, a heifer, a name popular amongst the Greeks, so Grotius, Wetstein, and Renan, Saint Paul, p. 209, note; see critical note above. We know nothing certain about her, but Ramsay makes the interesting conjecture that as the woman is not described as εὐσχήμων (cf. the description of the women at Thessalonica, Berœa, and Pisidian Antioch, Acts 13:50; Acts 17:4; Acts 17:12), she may have been a foreign woman (perhaps one of the educated Hetairai), as at Athens no woman of respectable position would have been present amongst St. Paul's audience. St. Chrysostom (so St. Ambrose and Asterius) thought that she was the wife of Dionysius, but St. Luke calls her γυνή, not ἡ γυνή αὐτοῦ. No mention is made of her in (but see above critical note), and Ramsay accounts for this by the view that the reviser of Codex Bezæ was a Catholic, who objected to the prominence given to women in Acts, and that under the influence of this feeling the changes occurred in Acts 17:12 (see above) and 34: this prominence assigned to women was, in Ramsay's view, firstly, pagan rather than Christian, and, secondly, heretical rather than Catholic; Church in the Roman Empire, pp. 160, 161; see “Damaris,” Hastings' B.D., and Felten, Apostelgeschichte, p. 337. καὶ ἕτεροι : a significant contrast to the precise results of the Apostle's preaching elsewhere, and yet a contrast which carries with it an evidence of truth. Spitta, p. 242, justly remarks that he knows not how the author of the “We” sections, who was not present at Athens, could have represented the activity of St. Paul in that city better than he has done; the idle curiosity of the Athenians, Acts 17:21, and after a speech received with ridicule and indifference, a scanty result, graphically represented by two names, of which it is a mere assertion to say that they refer to the sub-apostolic age. Spitta thus refuses to allow any justification for Weizsäcker's rejection of the historical worth of the narrative. Thus in the simple notice of the results of St. Paul's preaching we gain an indication of the historical truthfulness of the narrative. If anywhere, surely at Athens a forger would have been tempted to magnify the influence of St. Paul's intellectual power, and to attribute an overwhelming victory to the message of the Gospel in its first encounter with the philosophic wisdom of the world in a city which possessed a university, the greatest of any of that time, which was known as “the eye of Greece, mother of arts,” whose inhabitants a Jewish philosopher (Philo) had described as the keenest mentally of all the Greeks. In answer to the earlier criticism of Zeller and Overbeck, we may place the conclusion of Weiss that the result of St. Paul's labours is plainly not described after a set pattern, but rests upon definite information, whilst Wendt, who refers the composition of the speech, as we have it, to St. Luke, and regards it as derived from information of a speech actually delivered at Athens, insists equally strongly upon the difficulty of supposing that such slender results would be represented as following, if the speech had been composed with a view of exalting Jewish and Christian monotheism against polytheism. Moreover the narrative bears the stamp of truthfulness in its picture of the local condition of Athens, and also in its representation of St. Paul's attitude to the philosophical surroundings of the place and its schools. “One must be at home in Athens,” writes Curtius, “to understand the narrative rightly,” and no one has enabled us to realise more fully the historical character and vividness of the scene than Curtius himself in the essay to which reference is made above, of which the concluding words are these, that “he who refuses to accept the historical value of the narrative of Paul in Athens, tears one of the weightiest pages out of the history of humanity” (Gesammelte Abhandlungen, ii., p. 543, “Paulus in Athens”: see further, Knabenbauer, pp. 308, 309). The character of the people, the moving life of the Agora, the breadth of view which could comprehend in one short speech the crude errors of the populace and the fallacious theology of the schools, “the heart of the world” too generous to ignore all that was best in men's thoughts of God's providence and of human brotherhood, and yet too loving to forget that all men had sinned, and that after death was the judgment we recognise them all. If we turn to the speech itself we find abundant evidence of characteristic Pauline thoughts and teaching (cf. e.g., Acts 17:27 and Romans 1:19; Romans 2:14; Acts 17:26 and Romans 5:12; 1 Corinthians 15:45; Acts 17:30 and Romans 3:25, etc., Zöckler, p. 268, and instances in notes above, McGiffert, Apostolic Age, p. 259), and it is worthy of note that Weizsäcker, while rejecting with Baur, Zeller, Schwegler, and Overbeck the account of St. Paul's visit to Athens as unhistorical, fully recognises, after an examination of the Apostle's method of dealing with idolatry and polytheism in Romans 1:20, that if we compare with the Apostle's own indications the fine survey of the world, and especially of history from a monotheistic standpoint, ascribed to him by the Acts at Lystra, Acts 14:15, and afterwards at Athens, Acts 17:24, the latter, whatever its source, also gives us a true idea of Paul's method and teaching, Apostolic Age, i., p. 117, E.T. On the whole tone of the speech as incredible as a later composition, see Ramsay, St. Paul, p. 147 ff., whilst no one perhaps has drawn up more clearly than Wetstein, see on Acts 17:25, the consummate skill of the speech addressed to an audience comprising so many varieties of culture and belief. (To the strange attempt of Holtzmann to reproduce at some length the argument of Zeller, who maintains that the scene at Athens was a mere counterpart of the scene of Stephen's encounter with his foes at Jerusalem, a sufficient answer may be found in Spitta, Apostelgeschichte, p. 240.)

If we ask from whom the report of the speech was received, since Luke, Silas, Timothy all were absent, it is possible that a Christian convert like Dionysius the Areopagite may have preserved it (Zöckler); but a speech so full of Pauline thoughts, and so expressive of Athenian life and culture, may well have been received at least in substance from St. Paul himself, although it is quite conceivable that the precise form of it in Acts is due to St. Luke's own editing and arrangement (see for an analysis of the language of the speech Bethge, Die Paulinischen Reden der Apostelgeschichte, p. 82). The results of St. Paul's work at Athens were small if measured by the number of converts, although even amongst them it must not be forgotten that it was something to gain the allegiance to the faith of a man holding the position of Dionysius the Areopagite (see further an interesting account of the matter in Expository Times, April, 1898). But in addition to this, it is also important to remember that St. Paul has given us “an invaluable method of missionary preaching” (Lechler, Das Apost. Zeitalter, p. 275), that to the Church at Athens Origen could appeal against Celsus as a proof of the fruits of Christianity (Bethge, p. 116), that its failing faith was revived in time of persecution by its bishop Quadratus, the successor of the martyr-bishop Publius; that in the Christian schools of Athens St. Basil and St. Gregory were trained; and that to an Athenian philosopher, Aristides, a convert to Christ, we owe the earliest Apology which we possess (Athenagoras too was an Athenian philosopher), see Farrar, St. Paul, i., p. 551; Humphry, Commentary on the Acts. It is significant that St. Paul never visited Athens again, and never addressed a letter to the Saints at Athens, although he may well have included them in his salutation to “the Saints which are in the whole of Achaia,” 2 Corinthians 1:1.