Moving

Reflections on the Lectionary for May 10th

A cat I photographed on the Areopagus, or Mars Hill, in Athens in December 2018. I call this cat Paul.

We are moving this weekend. As I write this, we are about three hours away from closing on a house, and by the time you read this, we will have been schlepping our stuff across town for three days in one of those lumbering moving trucks. After 19 years in Colorado, we are putting down roots and buying a nice four-bedroom brick house in one of the southern suburbs of Denver.

Packing and moving is an enormously challenge both practically and logistically, but it’s always emotional for me too—a time for a lot of reflection and not a small amount of self-loathing. The reflection comes from going through my stuff, deciding what needs to come with me and what I can let go of, and remembering all the circumstances and moments that I’ll be leaving behind. And the self-loathing is a byproduct of the same thing. As I sort through the mountains of my possessions and realize how very much stuff I own, I always find myself wishing that I could live differently—that I could be the kind of person who can move house in my car, who doesn’t need to think about storage space when looking at real estate listings. But I’m a packrat, and my whole family is too, so the process of packing and moving is always fraught with the realization that we have too much stuff and the frustration that comes with knowing that most of it will end up coming with us to our next house too.

The Book of Acts is a book about moving. For a long time, scholars have noticed how Acts is structured geographically and plotted by movement—how it begins with a story tightly focused on Jerusalem, and then gradually expands outward (as the key geographical verse in 1:8 says) to the ends of the earth. Of course, the earth doesn’t have ends, since it’s a sphere, and the Book of Acts doesn’t reach most of the earth anyway, since the book is set 2,000 years ago before most of the world was accessible to people in the eastern Mediterranean. But by the reckoning of the author of Acts—who probably hailed from somewhere in the eastern half of the Roman Empire, perhaps from Macedonia or somewhere in Syria or Judea—Acts does indeed travel a long way. From those beginnings in Jerusalem, the book follows its characters up into Syria, over into Asia Minor (what’s now Turkey), across the Aegean to Greece and Macedonia, and finally to Italy, where the story concludes in the city of Rome. Acts is a book of movement, and its geographical flow structures both its plot and its meaning. As Jesus says to his followers in 1:8, in a verse that serves as an epigraph for the whole thing, you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.

Historically, Christians have understood the passage that’s in this week’s lectionary to have been one of the most important stops along that journey to the ends of the earth. This story takes place in Athens, which was one of the intellectual capitals of Roman antiquity (along with Alexandria in Egypt and Rome itself). The passage features Paul, who is the main character of the second half of Acts and arguably of the whole thing. And traditionally, Christians have understood this week’s reading from Acts as a moment of triumph—as a high-water mark of Christian mission, where one of the faith’s great heroes made the case for Jesus and the God of Israel in the belly of paganism’s beast, tangling with the best philosophers and poets the ancient world had to offer. According to the traditional understanding of this encounter in Athens, Paul emerged the winner.

I’m not so sure. In my book that comes out in July, I argue that the story of Paul in Athens is far more ambiguous and ambivalent than most Christians think. I argue that while this story has usually been understood as a paradigmatic instance of Paul’s missionary prowess, and while most Christians read this passage as an account of a success in the most difficult of circumstances, a close reading (especially through a postcolonial lens) reveals that the story of Paul in Athens has a lot more minor notes than major chords. As I argue in that book, Paul doesn’t decide to go to Athens, he is taken there by others. He doesn’t choose to give his speech, but he is bullied into it by a gang of cool-kid philosophers, who call him a seed-picker (often translated “babbler” but probably carrying accusations of either country-bumpkin-ness or unoriginality, depending on which scholars you cite). Paul’s speech seems to have been underwhelming; a few folks came up to him afterward to express interest (in 17:34), but it was hardly an old-time tent revival. And most intriguingly, for this week’s passage, Paul didn’t even really talk about Jesus. Paul didn’t really even mention the God of Israel—not really. Certainly Paul’s speech was theological, and if you squint really hard you can see something of the Christian story in it, as in 17:30-31 with references to repentance, judgement, and a man whom he has appointed, who God has raised from the dead. But Paul doesn’t get very specific, and he doesn’t make his case emphatically at all really. Instead, Paul’s essential message is something like, you Athenians have all been right all along, you just don’t understand how or why. And Paul makes that case using the words of Athens’ own intellectual giants.

The quotations in 17:28 are the subject of quite a bit of scholarly debate. There are two quotations in question. The first is in him we live and move and have our being, and second one is for we, too, are his offspring. The second quotation is a bit easier to pin down than the first. The second quotation, for we, too, are his offspring, comes from the poet Aratus, from the third century BCE. Aratus was associated with Athens, where he studied and worked for a while, though he traveled around quite a lot. The bit that Paul quotes comes from a work called the Phenomena, and in its original context the line refers to Zeus. Paul, then, is quoting a poem by a Greek poet, which describes the relationship of human beings to Zeus, to make his point about his God to his Athenian audience.

The first quotation is a little harder to pin down. Many scholars believe that it comes from Epimenides, who lived in the sixth century BCE. The attribution relies on a Syriac commentary on Acts probably written by an 4^th and 5^th century CE Christian, Theodore of Mopsuestia, that links the line from Paul’s speech in Acts to a now-lost bit of writing from Epimenides. That’s a thin thread to hang an argument on—a bit of writing of uncertain authorship that cites a now-lost work of philosophy. But it’s as plausible as anything else. In the fragment of Epimenides that Theodore (or whoever it was) preserved, the line in him we live and move and have our being was used to describe Zeus too. (Another line from the same bit of Epimenides, a small aside about the untrustworthiness of Cretans found in Titus 1:12, is also described in the same piece by Theodore, opening the possibility that the early Christians were really reading a lot of Epimenides for some reason).

So, when Paul stood up in Athens to give his speech—his sermon, as many modern Christians would have it—he said very little specific about Jesus (not even mentioning his name), and only a little bit more about God. But what he did say, far from being an emphatic witness, was clothed in the language and traditions of Zeus and the religiosity of the Athenians. On one hand, that was entirely Paul’s point; he was trying to convince the Athenians that the religious devotion they had already always exhibited was not wrong, exactly, but simply misguided, and that they needed only to abandon their old pantheons and embrace Paul’s own God. But on the other hand, it’s somewhat stunning that Paul made an argument that way—that he cited two ancient Greek texts about Zeus to make his case about Jesus. Modern missiologists—people who study Christian missionary activity and offer best practices for undertaking mission—love this passage. They often read Acts 17:22-31 as the best example of contextual missions—of using a culture’s own traditions and texts and ideas to make the case for Jesus. Missiologists often see what Paul did in Athens as unambiguously good; they think he appropriately took the resources of an older tradition to make the case for his own. But viewed from the vantage point of postcolonial theory, Paul’s appropriation of Athenian intellectual and theological tradition looks less like savvy and more like grasping at straws—like Paul was trying desperately to find an entry point into a culture and a philosophical world in which he decidedly did not belong. It was quintessential seed-picker behavior.

A slightly more generous reading of this passage might conclude that Paul was simply doing what people do when they move. After all, Paul had started out in Asia Minor, in his hometown of Tarsus, and he had made a name for himself in Judea, in and around Jerusalem, where he seems to have found his way into respectability and some degree of power. But then he had his call experience on the road to Damascus and everything changed, and as he moved westward on what modern Christians often call his missionary journeys, Paul needed to decide what to leave behind and what to take with him—and what to pick up along the way. This was a major theme of Paul’s career, and a major crisis in it too, if we take the evidence of his letters alongside Acts. Paul seems to have always been negotiating how much of Jewish tradition needed to be a part of the emerging Christian tradition, and he was always getting into disputes with other Jews about that (especially in 2 Corinthians and Galatians, and in parts of Acts like 21:27-22:29 where Paul’s story is very much wrapped up in disputes about proper Jewish practice and accusations that he was playing fast and loose with Jewish identity). It’s fair to say that much of the material about Paul is in some way connected to this question of how to negotiate one’s identity and tradition as one moves into new contexts and circumstances.

This passage from Acts 17 is often cited in an Athens-meets-Jerusalem sense—as a way to claim space at the intersection of rationality (Athens) and religiosity (Jerusalem). The Areopagus of 17:22 is often translated literally into the Hill of Mars or Mars Hill, and my own undergraduate college alma mater is named Mars Hill University because it was founded by Baptists who valued just that kind of back-and-forth between reason and faith. This story is a favorite one of people who want to situate themselves where intellectualism and religious devotion meet. That’s one of my favorite places to hang out too—at that specific intersection. I’m just not so sure that if we look closely, the story of Paul in Athens really fits that narrative. I think, rather, that after all his moving across the Mediterranean, in Athens Paul found himself out of his depth, pressed upon and picked on by the intellectual elite, and grasping for something to say that could convince the Athenian elite to take him seriously.

There’s one more thing before we end today. At the top of this post I mentioned my book that’s coming out in July from SBL Press. But I have another book coming out in October, also about Acts, and that book was featured in Publishers Weekly, as a part of an article about religious resistance to the second Trump administration. You can read the article here, and you can click here to pre-order that book!