Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Acts · About this commentary
Some mocked, and some believed
Acts 17:32-34
32 Now when they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some mocked; but others said, “We want to hear you again concerning this.” · WEB
The resurrection is where the Athenians stop listening, and the meager result is reported without apology or adjustment.
The interruption comes at a precise point: when they heard of the resurrection of the dead. Everything before it had been tolerable. A single creator, a providence ordering nations, an admonition against images, even a coming judgment — a Stoic could have followed most of that. The bodily raising of a dead man could not be accommodated by any school in the room.
The reason is worth stating because it is often missed. These were not people who found miracles impossible in principle; their city was full of gods who did remarkable things. What they could not accept was the value implied. Greek thought at its most refined regarded the body as what the soul was better off without, so a salvation that ends in a raised body is not merely improbable to them but undesirable — an escape reversed.
The responses divide three ways, and the writer records all three without comment. Some mocked, which is what the philosophical marketplace does to an unfashionable claim. Others said We want to hear you again concerning this, which sounds better and, in a city the narrator has already described as living for the next new thing, may be the politest form of dismissal available. And Paul went out from among them — no invitation extended, no return visit recorded.
Then the result: But certain men joined with him and believed, including Dionysius the Areopagite, and a woman named Damaris, and others with them.
It is a small harvest and the text does not dress it up. There is no church at Athens mentioned afterward, no letter written to one, and no return visit in this book. Set beside Thessalonica, where three Sabbaths produced a congregation, or Corinth, where eighteen months produced one large enough to need two letters, the most celebrated speech in the New Testament is followed by the thinnest recorded outcome of any city Paul preached in.
But the names are kept, and that is the writer's answer. Dionysius was a member of the council itself — one of the men who summoned Paul to explain himself is converted by the explanation. Damaris is named, and women were not ordinarily present at such proceedings, so her presence and her name are both deliberate. And others with them leaves the number open.
What this ending settles is a question the chapter has been raising. Paul's approach at Athens is sometimes read as a mistake he corrected afterward, on the strength of a remark about knowing nothing but Christ crucified 1 Corinthians 2:2. The text gives no support for that. The speech ends where every other sermon in the book ends, with a resurrection and a summons to repent; the method was adapted to the hearers and the message was not; and the smallness of the result is reported as plainly as the crowds elsewhere. A book that wanted to promote its hero's technique would not have kept the score.
held with reason What this mark means