Acts Chapter 17: Three Cities, Three Audiences

Paul’s second missionary journey moves through Macedonia and into Greece and gives us one of the most instructive sequences in Acts — the same man, the same gospel, three completely different audiences, three completely different approaches, three completely different results. Thessalonica, Berea, Athens. What stays constant is the message. What changes is everything else.

Thessalonica

They traveled through Amphipolis and Apollonia and came to Thessalonica, where there was a synagogue. As his custom was, Paul went in, and for three Sabbaths he reasoned with them from the Scriptures. The word is dialegomai — dialogue, back and forth, engaged discussion. Paul did not deliver monologues. He opened the Scriptures and worked through them with his audience, answering questions, addressing objections, following the text wherever it led.

His thesis was the same one he had argued in Pisidian Antioch: the Messiah had to suffer and rise from the dead — and this Jesus whom I am proclaiming to you is the Messiah. He established from the prophets that a suffering, dying, rising Messiah was exactly what the Tanakh predicted. Then he identified the one who fit. The argument was not: believe me because I say so. The argument was: open your Scriptures and look.

Some of the Jews were persuaded. A large number of the devout Greeks — God-fearers who attended the synagogue — believed. And not a few of the leading women. The pattern is consistent throughout Acts: the gospel draws responsive hearts across every social boundary, and often attracts more Gentile God-fearers than it does established Jews.

The unbelieving Jews were moved by envy — Luke states the motivation plainly. They recruited wicked men from the marketplace and set the city in an uproar. They attacked the house of Jason, Paul’s host, looking for Paul and Silas. Not finding them, they dragged Jason and some brothers before the city authorities with the charge: these men who have turned the world upside down have come here too, and Jason has welcomed them. They are all acting against the decrees of Caesar saying there is another king — Yeshua.

Turned the world upside down. That was the charge. It was meant as an accusation. It reads in Acts as a compliment. The brothers sent Paul and Silas away by night to Berea.

Berea

The Bereans were more noble-minded than those in Thessalonica. Luke’s description of why is worth reading slowly: they received the word with all eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so.

Two things together. They received the word eagerly — open, willing, not defensive. And they examined the Scriptures daily to verify it. They did not take Paul’s word for it. They did not accept his conclusions because of his reputation or his credentials. They went to the Scriptures themselves and checked. Every day. And as they checked they found that what he was teaching was there — and many of them believed.

The Berean posture is the posture this entire series has been advocating from the beginning. Do not receive what any teacher says — including this one — because the teacher says it. Receive it because the Scriptures say it. Check the text. Do the work. Follow the evidence wherever it leads. That is not doubt. That is the way Yehovah designed His people to relate to His word. The Bereans were called noble not because they were skeptical of Paul but because they were devoted to the Scriptures above any individual teacher.

When Jews from Thessalonica found out Paul was teaching in Berea they came and stirred up the crowds there too. The brothers sent Paul to the coast. Silas and Timothy stayed in Berea. Paul went on to Athens.

Athens

Athens was past its political prime but still the intellectual center of the ancient world. The city where Socrates had taught, where Plato had written, where Aristotle had studied. It was also, as Paul walked through it, covered in idols. Every intersection had its shrine. Every temple housed its deity. The city was a monument to the human religious impulse going in every direction except toward the Creator.

Paul’s spirit was provoked within him as he saw the city full of idols. While he waited for Silas and Timothy he reasoned in the synagogue with the Jews and God-fearing Gentiles and in the marketplace daily with whoever happened to be there. Some Epicurean and Stoic philosophers engaged with him. Some called him a babbler — the word meant a seed-picker, someone who collected intellectual scraps from various sources without understanding any of them. Others said: he seems to be a preacher of foreign deities. They brought him to the Areopagus.

The Areopagus — Mars Hill — was both a physical location and a council of Athens’ intellectual leaders who evaluated new teachings. It was the most prestigious intellectual audience in the ancient world. Paul stood in the middle of it.

The Mars Hill Sermon

Men of Athens, I observe that you are very religious in every way. As I passed through and examined the objects of your worship I found an altar with this inscription: To an Unknown God. What therefore you worship in ignorance, this I proclaim to you.

It is a masterful opening. Not condemnation. Not mockery. An observation. You built an altar to cover your theological blind spot. Let me tell you who belongs on that altar.

Paul builds from creation. The God who made the world and everything in it — He is Lord of heaven and earth and does not dwell in temples made by human hands, nor is He served by human hands as if He needed anything, since He Himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything. He made from one the whole human race to live on the face of the earth, having determined their appointed times and the boundaries where they would live, so that they should seek Yehovah, and perhaps grope for Him and find Him — though He is actually not far from any one of us.

He quotes their own poets. In Him we live and move and have our being — likely Epimenides the Cretan. We are His offspring — Aratus the Stoic. He finds the points where their own tradition has stumbled toward truth and uses them as stepping stones. He is not compromising the gospel. He is building a bridge from their existing knowledge toward the one they do not yet know.

Then the bridge leads somewhere they did not expect: therefore, being Yehovah’s offspring, we ought not to think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of man. The times of ignorance Yehovah overlooked, but now He commands all people everywhere to repent.

All people. Everywhere. The universal scope of the gospel confronts Greek philosophical particularism directly. And the reason for urgency: He has fixed a day on which He will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom He has appointed, and of this He has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.

The resurrection. That is where the sermon ends. And it is where the audience fractures. Some mocked. The Epicureans and Stoics both rejected bodily resurrection — one group because they believed death ended existence, the other because they viewed the body as a prison the soul was better off leaving behind. Some said: we will hear you again about this. And some believed — including Dionysius, a member of the Areopagus council itself, and a woman named Damaris, and others with them.

Athens produced the smallest recorded response of any city Paul visited. He did not stay long. Some have read the Athens sermon as a strategic failure — Paul himself wrote to the Corinthians that when he arrived among them he had decided to know nothing except Yeshua the Messiah and Him crucified, suggesting he adjusted his approach after Athens. But failure is the wrong word for a city where members of the most prestigious intellectual council in the ancient world came to faith. Faithful proclamation to resistant soil still produces fruit. The yield is not always what we projected.

Next: Acts Chapter 18 — Eighteen Months in the Most Corrupt City on Earth