18Amongst others, some Epicurean and Stoic Philosophers joined issue with him. Some asked “What is this prater wanting to make out?”, while others said “He seems to be a preacher of foreign Deities.” (This was because he was telling the good news about Jesus and the resurrection).
19So they laid hold of him and took him to the Court of Areopagus. “May we hear,” they asked, “what new teaching this is which you are giving?
20For you are bringing some strange things to our notice, and we should like to know what they mean.”
21(All Athenians and the foreigners staying in the city found no time for anything else but telling, or listening to, the last new thing.)
22So Paul took his stand in the middle of the Court, and said — “People of Athens, on every hand I see signs of your being very devout.
23For as I was going about, looking at your sacred shrines, I came upon an altar with this inscription — ‘To an Unknown God.’ What, therefore, you worship in ignorance, that I am now proclaiming to you.
24The God who made the world and all things that are in it — he, Lord as he is of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by hands,
25neither do human hands minister to his wants, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives, to all, life, and breath, and all things.
26He made all races of the earth's surface — fixing a time for their rise and fall, and the limits of their settlements —
27That they might search for God, if by any means they might feel their way to him and find him. And yet he is not really far from any one of us;
28for in him we live and move and are. To use the words of some of your own poets — ‘His offspring, too, are we.’
Acts 17
Acts 17:18-28