other · 51 · Athens
He had been arguing in the synagogue and in the marketplace, and the Epicureans and Stoics brought him to the Areopagus to explain himself. What he gave them quotes no scripture at all. He begins from an altar he has seen inscribed to an unknown god, argues from the making of the world to the folly of shrines made by hands, quotes two of their own poets — in him we live and move and have our being — and only at the end reaches the man God has appointed, and the proof given by raising him from the dead. At that some mocked, some said they would hear him again, and Luke names two who believed: Dionysius, a member of the council, and a woman named Damaris. Nothing else is said of either of them anywhere in the New Testament. The speech is the one place in Acts where the gospel is argued entirely on someone else's ground, and the reaction Luke records is laughter.
To answer the Athenians who had asked what this babbler was saying.
Two named converts, an audience that laughed, and the only speech in Acts aimed wholly at pagans.