Acts 17:16-31

“In him we live and move and have our being.” (Acts 17:28)

The Areopagus speech is Luke’s specimen of preaching to hearers with no scripture, and it is constructed accordingly. There is no appeal to the prophets; instead v. 28 quotes two Greek poets, the second line identified in antiquity with the opening of Aratus’ Phaenomena and the first commonly attributed to Epimenides. Paul starts from an inscription he has read in the city (v. 23) and argues downward from creation to judgment, granting what philosophers already held, that God needs nothing from human hands (v. 25), before naming what they did not, a fixed day and a man raised from the dead (v. 31). Luke frames it with a dry aside about Athenians spending their time on whatever is newest (v. 21), and the speech is interrupted precisely at the resurrection, the point where Greek anthropology would not follow. In the Easter season the resurrection functions here not as consolation but as the ground of a universal summons.

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