Because he hath appointed a day. — Here the speaker would seem, to both sets of hearers, to be falling back into popular superstition. Minos and Rhadamanthus, and Tartarus and the Elysian Fields, — these they had learnt to dismiss, as belonging to the childhood of the individual and of mankind, —
“Esse aliquid Manes et subterranea regna
Vix pueri credunt.”....
[“Talk of our souls and realms beyond the grave,
The very boys will laugh and say you rave.”]
— Juvenal, Sat. ii. 149.
The Epicurean rejected the idea of a divine government altogether. For the Stoic, to quote a line from Schiller, —
“Die Welt-geschichte ist das Welt-gericht,”
[“And the world’s story is its judgment day, “]
and he expected no other. The thought of a day of judgment as the consummation of that history, which was so prominent in St. Paul’s teaching, was altogether strange to them.
By that man whom he hath ordained. — Literally, by a man. Who the man was, and what proof there was that he had been raised from the dead, were questions either reserved for a later stage of teaching, or interrupted by the derision of the hearers. Up to this point they had listened attentively, but that the dead should be raised again seemed to them — as to the Sadducean, to the Greeks generally — absolutely incredible (Acts 26:8; 1 Corinthians 15:35).