Acts 17:14-26

¹⁴So then, without delay, the brothers sent Paul away, as if to go by sea, while both Silas and Timothy remained there.

¹⁵But those who were conducting Paul actually took him all the way to Athens; and receiving a command to Silas and Timothy that they should come to him as quickly as possible, they started back.

¹⁶Now while Paul was waiting for them in Athens, his spirit was increasingly aroused within him as he observed that the city was full of idols.

¹⁷So he reasoned both in the synagogue with the Jews and devout persons, and in the marketplace day by day with those who happened to be there.

¹⁸Then certain philosophers, both Epicureans and Stoics, encountered him. Some said, “What might this idea-scavenger want to say?” Others said, “He seems to be a proclaimer of foreign deities”—because he was preaching Jesus and the resurrection.

¹⁹So taking him in tow they led him to the Areopagus and said: “May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting?

²⁰Because you are bringing some strange things to our ears, and we would like to know what they might mean.”

²¹(Now all Athenians and resident foreigners spent their time in nothing else but to tell, or else to hear, some novelty.)

²²So standing in the middle of the Areopagus Paul said: “Men of Athens, I perceive that in all things you are very religious;

²³because as I went along and scrutinized the objects of your worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO UNKNOWN GOD. Now then, the one you worship as ‘unknown’, this is the One I proclaim to you:

²⁴The God who made the world and everything in it, since He is Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples built by hands,

²⁵neither is He cared for by men's hands, as though He needed anything, since He Himself has always given life and breath to all.

²⁶And from one blood He made every ethnic nation of men to dwell on all the surface of the earth, having determined their appointed times and the boundaries of their dwellings,