Charles Ellicott Commentary Acts 17:18

"And certain also of the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers encountered him. And some said, What would this babbler say? others, He seemeth to be a setter forth of strange gods: because he preached Jesus and the resurrection." — Acts 17:18 (ASV)

Certain philosophers of the Epicureans, and of the Stoics.—The two schools were at this time the great representatives of Greek thought. The former took its name from its founder, Epicurus, who lived a long and tranquil life at Athens, from 342 to 270 BC. As holding their meetings in a garden, which he had left by his will in trust as a place of study for his disciples, they were sometimes known as the School of the Garden, and as such were distinguished from those of the Porch (Diogenes Laertius, Epicurus, chapter 10).

His speculations embraced at once a physical and an ethical solution to the problems of the universe. Rejecting, as all thinking men did, the popular Polytheism, which yet they did not dare openly to renounce, he taught that the gods, in their eternal tranquility, were too far off from man to trouble themselves about his sorrows or his sins.

They needed no sacrifices and answered no prayers. The superstition that enslaved the minds of most men was the great evil of the world, the source of its crimes and miseries. For him, as in our own time with Strauss, the last enemy to be destroyed was the belief in an immortality of retribution. A man’s first step towards happiness and wisdom was to emancipate himself from its bondage;

the next was to recognize that happiness consisted in the greatest aggregate of pleasurable emotions. Experience taught that what are called pleasures are often more than counterbalanced by the pains that follow, and sensual excesses were therefore to be avoided. Epicurus’s own life seems to have been distinguished by generosity, self-control, and general kindness, and even by piety and patriotism (Diogenes Laertius, Epicurus, chapter 5).

But as no law was recognized as written in the heart, and human laws were looked on as mere conventional arrangements, each man was left to form his own estimate of what would give him most pleasure. Consequently, most men decided for a life of ease and self-indulgence, sometimes balanced by prudential calculations, sometimes sinking into mere voluptuousness. The poetry of Horace presents, perhaps, the most attractive phase of popular Epicureanism. The sense that has come to be attached to the modern word “Epicure,” as applied to one whose life is devoted to the indulgence of the sense of taste, shows to what a depth of degradation it could sink.

In the world of physics, Epicurus has been claimed as anticipating some of the results of modern science. The ideas of creation and control were alike excluded. Matter had existed from eternity, and the infinite atoms of which it was composed had, under the action of attractive and repelling forces then unknown, entered into manifold combinations. From these combinations, as the last stage of evolution, the world of nature as it now lies before us had emerged. The poem of Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, may be regarded as the grandest utterance of this negative and practically atheistic system, but its real nobleness lies chiefly in its indignant protest against the superstition that had cast its veil of thick darkness over all the nations.

It may be well to give one or two characteristic examples of each of these phases. On the one side, we have the ever-recurring advice of the popular poet of society to remember that life is short and to make the most of it:—

“Quid sit futurum cras, fuge quærere: et,
Quem Fors dierum cunque dabit, lucro
Appone.”

[“Strive not the morrow’s chance to know,
But count whate’er the Fates bestow
As given you for your gain.”] —Horace, Odes 1.9.

“Sapias, vina liques, et spatio brevi
Spem longam reseces. Dum loquimur, fugerit invida
Ætas. Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero.”

[“Be wise, and let your wines flow clear,
And as you greet each short-lived year,
Curb hope’s delusive play:
E’en as we speak, our life glides by;
Enjoy the moments as they fly,
Nor trust the far-off day.”] —Horace, Odes 1.11.

The student of Scripture will recognize an Epicurean element of this kind in one of the two voices that alternate in the Book of Ecclesiastes, “It is good and comely for one to eat and to drink, and to enjoy the good of all his labour that he taketh under the sun all the days of his life” (Ecclesiastes 5:18. Compare also Ecclesiastes 3:19; Ecclesiastes 8:15; Ecclesiastes 9:7). It appears as the avowed principle of the evil-doers in the Apocryphal Book of Wisdom that, as probably the work of a contemporary writer, represents the impression made by the dominant Horatian phase of Epicureanism on a devout and thoughtful Jew:—

“Our time is a very shadow that passeth away . . . Come on, therefore, let us enjoy the good things that are present . . . Let us crown ourselves with rose-buds before they are withered . . . Let none of us go without his part of our voluptuousness.”—().

There is a nobler ring, it must be acknowledged, in the bold language in which Lucretius sings the praises of Epicurus:—

“When this our life lay crushed before men’s eyes
Beneath the yoke of Faith, who from on high
With horrid aspect frightened mortal hearts,
It was a Greek, himself a mortal too,
Who first had courage to lift up his eyes
And to her face withstand her. Tales of gods,
And thunderbolts from Heaven, with all their threats,
Were impotent to stay him. . . .
. . . . So at last
Faith in its turn lies trampled under foot,
And we through him have triumphed over Heaven.”

—Lucretius, De Rerum Natura 1.67-80.

We can understand how St. Paul would assert, in opposition to this school of thought: the personality of the living God, as Creator, Ruler, Father; the binding force of the law written in the heart; intuitive morality as opposed to mere utilitarianism; and the nobleness of a hero-soul raised above pleasure, and living not for itself, but for others and for God.

And in teaching them this, he—in this respect differing from the mere professor of a higher philosophy—would point to the Resurrection and the Judgment as that which would confound the pleasure-seeker by giving him tribulation and anguish, and would assign glory and immortality to the patient worker of righteousness .

The Stoics—who took their name not from their founder (Zeno of Citium in Cyprus), but from the Stoa Poikile, the painted porch at Athens, adorned with frescoes of the battle of Marathon, where Zeno used to teach—presented a higher phase of thought. Josephus (Vita, section 2) compares them with the Pharisees, and their relation to the moral life of heathenism at this time presented many features analogous to those that we find in the influence of that sect in Palestine.

They taught that true wisdom consisted in being the master, and not the slave, of circumstances. The things that are not in our power are not things to seek after or shrink from, but are to be accepted with calm equanimity.

The seeker after wisdom learned, therefore, to be indifferent alike to pleasure or pain, and aimed at an absolute apathy. The theology of the Stoics was also of a nobler kind than that of Epicurus. They spoke of a divine Mind pervading the universe and ordering all things by its Providence. They recognized its government in the lives of nations and individual men and probably reconciled, as the Pharisees did, their acceptance of its decrees with a practical belief in the freedom of the individual will.

In the Manual of Ethics by Epictetus (written under Nero) and the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, we see how the slave and the emperor stood on common ground. In Seneca, we see how often the Stoics spoke in the accents of Christian ethics.

Many of the Stoics were sought after as tutors for the sons of noble families and occupied a position of influence not unlike that of Jesuit confessors and directors in France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The main drawbacks were:

1. that in aiming at apathy for themselves they excluded sympathy with others as disturbing their tranquility;
2. that in striving after an ethical perfection in the strength of their own will, they anticipated the position of the Pelagians in the history of the Christian Church; and
3. that, as with the Pharisees, the high ideal was often but a mask for selfish and corrupt lives.

They, also, were too often “hypocrites,” acting a part before the world to which their true character did not correspond. In the language of the satirist:—

“Qui Curios simulant et Bacchanalia vivunt.”
[“They pose as heroes, and as drunkards live.”]

—Juvenal, Satires 2.3.

It is evident that there would be many points of sympathy between the better representatives of this school and St. Paul. However, for them also, the message that spoke of Jesus and the Resurrection—of God sending His Son into the world to be first crucified and then raised from the dead—would seem an idle dream. They would shrink from the thought that they needed pardon and redemption and could do nothing true and good in their own strength without the grace of God.

What will this babbler say?—Better, What might this babbler mean? The Greek noun, literally seed-picker, was primarily applied to a small bird of the finch tribe. The idle gossips of the agora picking up news and, eager to retail it, the chattering parasites of feasts, were likened by the quick wit of Athenian humorists to such a bird as it hopped and chirped. So Zeno himself called one of his disciples, who had more words than wisdom, by the same contemptuous name (Diogenes Laertius, Zeno, chapter 19). The philosophers, in their scorn of the stranger who was so ready to discuss great questions with anyone he met, applied the derisive epithet to him.

He seemeth to be a setter forth of strange gods.—This was, it will be remembered, the precise charge on which Socrates had been condemned (Xenophon, Memorabilia 1.1.1). In his case, it rested on his constant reference to the dæmôn, the divine monitor who checked and guided him, in whose voice he heard something like the voice of God. However, the secret of his condemnation by his countrymen was to be found less in what he actually taught than in the questions with which he vexed their inmost soul and made them conscious of ignorance or baseness. The questions of St. Paul, as he reasoned “of righteousness, temperance, and judgment to come,” were equally disturbing.

Because he preached unto them Jesus, and the resurrection.—The verb implies continuous action. This was the ever-recurring theme of his discourses. It is possible that with the strong tendency of the Greek mind to personify all attributes and abstract thoughts, St. Paul’s hearers saw in the word Anastasis (= Resurrection) the name of a new goddess, representing the idea of immortality, to be worshipped in conjunction with Jesus. Therefore, they used the plural and spoke of his bringing in “strange gods.” So temples and altars had been dedicated to Concord, and the history of Athens told how Epimenides had bidden them erect two altars to Insolence and Outrage (Cicero, De Legibus 2.11), as the two demons by whom their city was being brought to ruin.

What startled them in the Apostle was that he taught not only the immortality of the soul—which had entered into the popular mythical belief and had been enforced with philosophical arguments by Socrates and Plato—but also the resurrection of the body. In 1 Corinthians 15:35, we see the character of the objections raised to this doctrine and the manner in which St. Paul answered them.