Expositor's Bible Commentary Commentary Acts 17:32

"Now when they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some mocked; but others said, We will hear thee concerning this yet again." — Acts 17:32 (ASV)

While the resurrection of Jesus from the dead was the convincing proof to the early Christians and Paul that “God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ” (2 Corinthians 5:19), to the majority of Athenians it was the height of folly. The tragic poet Aeschylus (525–456 B. C.), for example, made the god Apollo say, “When the dust has soaked up a man’s blood, once he is dead, there is no resurrection.” If Paul had talked about the immortality of the soul, he would have gained the assent of most of his audience except the Epicureans. Instead, outright scorn was the response of many of his hearers. Others, probably with more politeness than curiosity or conviction, suggested that they would like to hear Paul on the subject at another time. 33–34 Paul obviously failed to convince the council of the truth of his message, and he evidently failed as well to gain the right to propagate his views. He could tell from this first meeting that sentiment was against him. Some, of course, did believe, for God always has his few in even the most difficult of situations. Among them were Dionysius, who was himself a member of the Council of Ares, and a woman named Damaris. But because no action had been taken to approve Paul’s right to continue teaching in the city, his hands were legally tied. With a vast territory yet to be entered and a great number of people yet to be reached, Paul decided to move on. We hear of no church at Athens in the apostolic age; and when Paul speaks of “the first converts in Achaia,” it is to “the household of Stephanas” in Corinth that he refers (1 Corinthians 16:15). Many have claimed that Paul’s failure at Athens stemmed largely from a change in his style of preaching and that later on at Corinth he repudiated it (cf. 1 Corinthians 1:2–18:5). He spoke, they charge, about providence and being “in God” but forgot the message of grace and being “in Christ”; about creation and appealed to the Greek poets but did not refer to redemption or revelation; about world history but not salvation history; about resurrection but not the cross. We should remember, however, that going to Athens was not part of Paul’s original missionary strategy. Nor should we minimize the working of God’s Spirit or Paul’s message because only a few responded. Still, the outreach of the Gospel at Athens in overall terms must be judged a failure. But the reason for this lay more in the attitude of the Athenians themselves than in Paul’s approach or in what he said.

Though he was directed through a vision to minister in Macedonia (cf. Acts 16:9–10), the mission there had not gone at all as he had expected. Nor had his initial attempt in Achaia provided him with any reason to hope for a change in his fortunes. So he must have traveled from Athens to Corinth in a dejected mood, wondering what worse could happen and why God had allowed matters to fall out so badly. Also, he was almost sick with anxiety over the state of the Thessalonian converts whom he had been forced to leave with the threat of persecution hanging over them (cf. 1 Thessalonians 2:3–17:5). All this drove Paul into depression. He was only human, and he found that his emotions affected his spiritual well-being and his work. Perhaps at this time he prayed repeatedly for deliverance from his “thorn in the flesh,” to which the Lord responded, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” (cf. 2 Corinthians 12:7–10). At Corinth the exact situation is difficult to ascertain, mainly because in his letters to the Corinthians Paul provides so much allusive material about his relations with them, while Luke gives so little in Acts. One reason for this problem is the wide difference of purpose between Paul and Luke in their written materials: Paul’s concern was pastoral and Luke’s apologetic. Luke’s main interest here in Ac 18 is the proceedings before Gallio (vv.12–17), in order (1) to demonstrate that one of the wisest of the Roman proconsuls had declared Christianity to be a religio licita and (2) to warn that if Rome began to persecute the church, it would be acting contrary to Gallio, a ruler renowned for his urbanity and wit.