Paul, by N.T. Wright

Chapter 8

1. So when Paul was brought to the Areopagus, probably in late 50 or early 51, and when he began by declaring that temples to the gods were a category mistake, we should not suppose that he was engaging a philosophers’ debating society. The Areopagus was a court. Paul was on trial. It was a dangerous moment. It could have gone badly wrong. He has no leisure, physical or mental, to play the detached philosopher. It is, however, utterly characteristic of the man that he would seize the opportunity not merely to defend himself—though that is what he is doing throughout the speech—but to do so in such a way as to challenge, with considerable rhetorical skill, the basic assumptions of the Greek worldview.

- What do you imagine ran through Paul’s mind at this opportunity?

2.There is evidence that philosophers were banished from cities because of their teaching. In particular, Athens itself had staged the trial of Socrates (399 BC), seen from that day to this as one of the most important events in the history of philosophy. What was Socrates’s crime? Corrupting the young and introducing foreign divinities. Since there were political motives as well behind Socrates’s trial, we cannot be entirely sure what this meant, but the memory lived on. In Athens of all places, conscious of its long and distinguished history and of the association of that history with the goddess Athene and the victory over the Persians by which her preeminent status had been assured, to have an outsider like Paul bringing strange new teachings would have been much more than a mere philosophical curiosity. He would have been a potential threat to society, to stability, to the worship of the divinities by whose beneficence the city lived, moved, and had its being. He had to be investigated.

- In what ways was Paul a potential threat to the Athenians?

3. To the philosophers in the marketplace, Paul seemed a mere oddity. His essentially Jewish view of the One God and a created universe and his specifically Christian variation on this simply didn’t fit. They were scornful: What can this man be on about, they wondered, scattering words around like someone sowing seeds in every direction? The one thing they picked up on was that he was talking about someone called Jesus and someone or something called “Anastasis”—the Greek word for “resurrection.” They assumed “Jesus and Anastasis” were a new pair of divinities, and “Anastasis,” a feminine noun in Greek, was Jesus’s consort; the two were a divine couple, rather like Isis and Osiris (though there the female is always mentioned first). The result, though, was clear. To the philosophers, Paul seemed to be proclaiming foreign divinities. The echoes of Socrates’s trial were obvious. That is why they took him to the Areopagus.

- Was this Paul’s strategy in order to gain a broader audience?

4. It is, above all, Jewish thought that speaks of the utter transcendence and yet the intimate personal presence of the One God. Paul does not quote the Psalms or Isaiah, but we can see the influence of their double vision of the One God all the way through: the sovereign God, high above and beyond the earth so that its inhabitants are like grasshoppers, yet gently at hand, gathering the lambs in his arms and leading the mother sheep. Paul has absorbed the ancient wisdom of Israel deep into his heart. Thus equipped, he can look out on local inscriptions, monumental temples, philosophical debates, and poetic fancies with equanimity. This is Paul the Jew at the top of his game.

- What do Greeks and Jews have in common here?

5. This complex man, then, carries in his own person the deeply biblical and Jewish worldview, which has been brought into startling new focus by Jesus and the spirit, but not abandoned or marginalized. From that point of view, he can travel the world of Rome and think the thoughts of Greece without fear or shame. In particular, his message of Jesus’s resurrection, without which his whole life and work would mean nothing, contains within itself the news that Jesus’s crucifixion was a victory, not a defeat. His denunciation of idols and temples in his Areopagus speech is not simply Jewish-style polemic, though it is that as well. 

It is the position of someone who believes that all the would-be divine powers in the world have been dethroned, shamed, led in someone else’s triumphal procession as a defeated rabble. The victory of Jesus on the cross, as we have seen, has a deeply intimate meaning for Paul: “The son of God loved me and gave himself for me.” But this is bound up tightly with its cosmic meaning: “He stripped the rulers and authorities of their armor,” he writes to the Colossians, “and displayed them contemptuously to public view, celebrating his triumph over them in him.” He is the Messiah’s man, and that includes all the other elements we have just listed.

- How does the intimacy of the cross transcend pagan idolatry?

6. All this is on display, then, as he addresses the graybeards in the senior court of Athens. His main point ought now to be clear: “What I am saying to you may sound ‘new,’ but it is in fact hidden within your own culture. It is well hidden; in fact, you have covered it up with foolish and unnecessary superstructures. But though the specific news about Jesus and the resurrection may be a shock to your system”—it was, and they laughed at him for it—“the underlying truth that it unveils is a truth about the world and its One Creator God to which, at its best, your culture dimly and distantly bears witness.” 

Paul is not trying to begin with Athenian cultural symbols and build up a philosophical argument that will arrive at Christian truth. He is managing at one and the same time to rebut the charge of “proclaiming foreign divinities” and to sketch a worldview, a metaphysic, in which it might just make sense to say that the One God has unveiled his purpose for the world by raising Jesus from the dead. He is a Sherlock Holmes figure, explaining to the puzzled police chiefs that their different theories about the crime all have some sense to them, but that there is a different overall framework, under their noses all the time but never observed, that will solve the whole thing.

- How brilliant was this game plan?!  Why did it work?

7. Here, then, comes Paul’s thoroughly Jewish and messianic view of God’s future. Like some other Jewish writers of the time and in tune with a good deal of other early Christian evidence, Paul is echoing Psalm 2. The nations of the earth can rage, plot, and strut their stuff, vaunting themselves against the true God; but God will laugh at them and announce that he has established his true king, his “son,” who will call the nations to account. “Now therefore,” says the psalm, “be wise; be warned, O rulers of the earth.” Again we sense Paul’s subtext. Athens, with its symbol of the owl, prided itself as the home of wisdom. No, Paul implies, true wisdom would consist in recognizing that the One Creator God has now unveiled his purpose for the world before all the nations. That purpose is focused on the Jesus who was crucified and raised and marked out thereby as God’s son, the one through whom God would fulfill his ancient promises and put the whole world at last to rights. Paul has thus worked his way around at last to explaining “Jesus and Anastasis”: it is Jesus and resurrection! These are new ideas, of course, and “foreign” in the sense of coming from the Jewish world, not being homegrown in Athens, and indeed flying in the face of the old slogan from Aeschylus. But at a deeper level, Paul is implying that this is not foreign at all; it is, rather, the reality to which so many signposts had been pointing.

- How did Paul’s conclusion go over with Athenians?

8. People have sometimes sneered at Paul for a failed bit of philosophical theology. Hardly anyone was converted—though one member of the court, Dionysius, came to faith along with a woman named Damaris and others. But that wasn’t the point. What mattered is that Paul went out from their presence.He got off.If this was a trial, he was acquitted. Jesus and Anastasis might be new, strange, and even ridiculous to these senior Athenians. But Paul had convinced them that the heart of his message was something to which their own traditions, read admittedly from a certain angle, might all along have been pointing.

- Why was Paul’s acquittal such an important event here?