Biblion Bible Commentary
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Athens: a city full of idols
Acts 17:16-21
16 Now while Paul waited for them at Athens, his spirit was provoked within him as he saw the city full of idols. · WEB
Waiting alone in the most cultured city in the world, Paul is not impressed but distressed — and the argument he starts gets him a hearing before the council.
He is at Athens waiting for his colleagues, with no plan to work there. What was to be a pause becomes the most famous encounter in the book because of a reaction he could not suppress.
His spirit was provoked within him as he saw the city full of idols. The verb is a strong one, used in the Greek Old Testament of God's own anger at idolatry. Athens was the intellectual capital of the world, and a visitor was expected to admire it. What Paul sees is a city whose every public space is crowded with images, and the sight makes him angry and grieved at once.
That is the emotional engine of the chapter, and it matters because the speech he eventually gives is so courteous. The courtesy is a decision, not a temperament.
He works two rooms at once. He reasoned in the synagogue with the Jews and the devout persons — the usual method — and in the marketplace every day with those who met him. The second is new. The agora was where Athenians argued for a living, and a foreigner setting up there is doing what the city's own philosophers had done for centuries.
Two schools engage him and they are well chosen. The Epicureans held that the gods, if any, were remote and uninvolved, that the world runs by natural causes, and that death is simple dissolution. The Stoics held that a divine reason pervades everything, that virtue is lived in accordance with it, and that the individual is absorbed back into the whole. Between them they cover most of what a thoughtful person in that world believed, and Paul's speech will engage both.
The reactions are recorded with the sting left in. What does this babbler want to say? The word means a bird pecking up seeds, and it describes a scavenger of other people's ideas with nothing of his own — the standard insult for a second-rate teacher. Others say He seems to be advocating foreign deities, and the writer explains why: because he preached Jesus and the resurrection. They have heard two names and assumed a divine pair, which is a natural mistake in a polytheistic city and shows how little of the message had landed.
He is taken to the Areopagus, the venerable council that retained authority over religion and public teaching in the city. Whether this is an examination or an invitation is not stated, and the request is put politely: May we know what this new teaching is?
The narrator then adds a sentence of his own, and it is the only openly editorial comment in the book. Now all the Athenians and the strangers living there spent their time in nothing else, but either to tell or to hear some new thing. It is a dry judgment on a city that mistook novelty for thought, and it prepares the reader for the ending, where a message about a resurrection is received as an interesting item to be discussed again sometime.
settled What this mark means