Paul is in Athens, waiting for Silas and Timothy to join him. His spirit is troubled by the profusion of idols in the city, and he gets into lively disputes about the phenomenon with Jews and God-fearing gentiles in the synagogue on the Sabbath and for the rest of the week with philosophers and other layabouts in the agora. This is the real Paul—not the letter writer so much—of whom we get no more than a glimpse in Acts and in the reconstruction of his quarrels with the Jews in Romans.
Presumably, his message to the Jews was the apocalyptic one about YHWH’s impending judgment on the pagan world, which we will get to shortly, but we don’t hear what their response was. He has piqued the curiosity of the philosophers, however, and they invite him to tell them more about these novel eastern divinities, Jesus and Resurrection, that he has been going on about.
Recent discussion