Paul's Speech to the Areopagus. He opens with a compliment to the religiosity of the Athenians. He has walked up and down the city and marked the many objects of worship; he has also found an altar with the inscription To the Unknown God (the argument that follows calls for the definite article). There are various instances in antiquity of such an inscription; though always, it is true, in the plural, not the singular number. Jerome says the inscription in the text must have run To the unknown and foreign gods, and in Pausanias, Philostratus, and other ancient writers such inscriptions are spoken of. In Deissmann's St. Paul (p. 261) an inscription is described which has recently been unearthed at Pergamum, also in the plural. That in our text is the only example in antiquity of the inscription in the singular, and Paul's argument is based on it in that form. It would dedicate the altar on which it appeared to a god of whose name and title the founder was not sure, but whom he took to be a real being. Paul uses the inscription in an opposite sense and makes it refer to the one Supreme God, Maker of the world.
Acts 17:25. That God needs nothing is a commonplace in ancient philosophy and literature. made of one: AV of one blood, according to an old reading, might refer to the ancient belief, excluded by Genesis, in the autochthonous origin of man. God has settled the order in which each people is to come and the territory it is to occupy; the purpose of the whole is that they should seek for Him; He is not hard to find. your own poets: the quotation (cf. Titus 1:12) is from a Stoic poet Aratus (Phaenom. 5). Cleanthes, also a Stoic, has a similar sentiment: For we are his (Zeus's) race. Paul had no need to be familiar with Greek poetry in order to quote a line no doubt well known to every one. In Acts 17:29 he comes back to the images. Athens had many artificers of such things, but if man is of God's race, no human figure in whatever precious metal can express the Divine to which he is kindred. A sentence should follow, condemning the view of God which lies behind idolatry: but the speech hurries to its conclusion. God might have visited earlier the mistaken worship of Him in idolatry (Romans 2:4) but He has not done so. Now, however, the day of judgment is at hand (Psalms 9:8); men are called to repent; the Judge is known, He whom God raised from the dead.
Acts 17:32. Nothing indicates judicial proceedings; the scene ends abruptly with the moderate success secured by Paul. One male convert is named, Dionysius, a member of the court of Areopagus, and one woman, Damaris; and there were others. Of the church of Athens we hear no more; it is perhaps included in 1 Corinthians 1:2.