Acts 17:19-33

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,

²⁷so that they should seek the Lord, if perhaps they might grope for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us;

²⁸because in Him we live and move and have our being. As also some of your own poets have said, ‘For we are also his offspring.’

²⁹Therefore, since we are God's offspring, we ought not to think that the divinity is like gold or silver or stone—something shaped by human skill and imagination.

³⁰Such times of ignorance God did indeed overlook, but now He commands all people everywhere to repent,

³¹because He has appointed a day in which He will judge the inhabited world in righteousness by the Man whom He has ordained; He has given assurance of this to all by raising Him from the dead.”

³²Well when they heard about the resurrection of the dead, some started scoffing, while others said, “We will hear you again about this.”

³³And with that Paul went out from among them.