The Ambivalence of Paul in Athens

Reflections on the Lectionary for May 14th

A cat on the top of the Areopagus, sitting near some graffiti, in Athens when I visited there in 2018.

When I was in college, I had a t-shirt with Acts 17:22 on it. That’s because I attended a school named after the place mentioned in that verse, that was the setting for this story in the lectionary reading from Acts 17:22-31. Here in the NRSV the place name is untranslated, rendered Areopagus, but often in English translations it’s rendered literally, as Mars Hill, which was a hill in Athens named after the god Mars (or Ares, hence Areopagus). There are churches, seminaries, and universities named after Mars Hill, including my own alma mater Mars Hill University (which was known as Mars Hill College in my day). Those institutions are usually named for the place in Athens because it represented the meeting point of classical knowledge and Christian piety; in Paul’s visit there and in his speech, so the thinking goes, you can see the great philosophical systems of ancient Athens come into contact with the Christian message.

Maybe.

I’ve been writing about this passage a lot lately, in my forthcoming book about Acts, in an article that is currently out for review, and in a conference paper I delivered at the Society of Biblical Literature meeting last November. All of those projects use postcolonial theory as a starting point, and especially the work of a scholar named Achille Mbembe. I have found that reading Acts through Mbembe’s work almost completely flips the story as we usually have heard it. Once you start reading Acts postcolonially, it’s hard to read it as the kind of triumphant tale about the inexorable spread and success of Christianity that so many Christians consider it to be. Instead, the story of Acts becomes a lot more ambivalent and conflicted, and the directions of the flows of power in the text become a lot more chaotic. Yes, it’s still a story about the Jesus movement spreading westward across the Mediterranean basin, into ever-increasingly powerful spaces and places (like Athens itself, and eventually Rome). But the story also portrays its heroes, people like Stephen and Paul and Peter, as always subject to imperial power and violence and only ever gaining at best partial successes. If you begin from a starting point of Christianity’s ultimate triumph and union with the Roman Empire, then the story reads triumphantly, like an inevitable rise to the top. But if you read it from the perspective of the late first century or early second century, and if you read it from the perspective of people who are on the undersides of systems of power today, it starts to look less certain, more contingent, and honestly, far more interesting.

This speech of Paul’s in Athens is usually understood as a big moment for him. Paul holds forth in the seat of the philosophers, and he convinces some of those philosophers to hear more about what he has to say. But I’m not sure how convincing he was in the speech. In the parts of the story that aren’t in the lectionary this week, there’s a lot of ambivalence to their response. And Paul, rather than citing the words of Jesus or some kind of credal formula, is citing in 17:28 the words of a philosopher and a poet. He’s speaking on their terms, not his own. He’s working really hard to make himself understood to the Athenians, not in the ways of speaking that are most known to him, but on the terms of their intellectual systems. And, look at the action that leads to him giving the speech in the first place; he’s not really in control of his own body, and he’s shuffled around from place to place like a piece of luggage. The whole way this story is told is kind of halting and iffy, even though we have usually understood it as a big showpiece moment in which Paul arrives and makes a splash. If you read closely, Paul doesn’t go to Athens and to Mars Hill to give a missionary speech; he doesn’t even really mean to go to Athens at all. He’s delivered there by someone else. And when he gets there, they call him a “babbler,” literally a “seed-picker” (the word in Greek is spermologos, and its meaning is hard to pin down, but it’s not a compliment). They see right through Paul and his quotations from philosophers and poets, and they make fun of him for picking up the seeds of other people’s thoughts.

There are lots of layers to why Acts might portray its main hero this way. The book itself seems to take an ambivalent stance toward Roman power, sometimes lifting it up and sometimes portraying it as corrupt, so maybe showing Paul as important and powerful but not too important and powerful was part of its storytelling strategy. Or maybe the story happened this way, and the author is simply reporting it in a way that can be interpreted either as a triumph or a bit of an embarrassment. It’s hard to tell. What’s easier to tell is how the story has been understood in the history of Christian interpretation; usually, Acts 17 is told as a story of Paul’s triumph. And that tells us as much about ourselves as it does about Paul.

Christians today can’t help but read their own history through a lens of success. We know how the story developed after Paul’s career and after the period of the New Testament: the rise to prominence under Constantine, the unity with powerful governments throughout history, the cultural strength that Christianity has today…all of that is kind of baked into our understandings of the story. So it’s hard for us to read something like Acts ambivalently, because we know that the story ends (or at least continues) in Christian power. We have a hard time imagining a moment when things were uncertain and unclear. We always want to read the ending into the beginning.

I wonder, though, whether that perspective limits our understanding. I wonder what we have to gain from reading it differently. When I say “we” here, I mean mostly the kinds of American Protestant Christians with whom I rub religious elbows most often; “we” are used to having a certain amount of cultural and political and economic power, and so we tend to read stories like this one from that perspective and assume that Paul was winning whatever game he was playing in Athens. But we miss a lot when we read this way. We miss the ability to see what it might be like to be on the outside of a cultural system, as Paul might actually be in Acts 17, looking into a collection of ideas that we don’t fully understand. As Christianity diminishes in importance and prominence in the United States, and churches increasingly find themselves on the margins of power, stories like this one might become really valuable resources for them. What happens if we imagine ourselves in Paul’s shoes in Athens, trying to make ourselves and our strange beliefs understood to a bunch of people who might be disinterested in what we have to say or who have scorn for us? It sounds a little bit familiar, to be honest. Paul’s situation in Athens is not too different from our situation today, where we’re on the outside of certain conversations looking in, and struggling to get folks to care about what we have to say.

Paul left Athens, I imagine, somewhat unsatisfied. It wasn’t a complete failure; a few folks jumped onto his bandwagon. But it wasn’t the slam dunk that we sometimes assume; your talk has never gone very well if people have called you a seed-picker. In fact, Paul was rarely successful anywhere in Acts, if you’re measuring by the standard of convincing lots of people of something and escaping unscathed. Paul’s career as described in Acts (and his own letters) was pretty up-and-down, full of disappointment and pitfalls. That up-and-down, conflicted story is better suited to the church of the 21^st century than it was to the church of the 20^thcentury or the 18^th century or the 16^th or 4^th centuries, who might have seen themselves more easily in the triumphant version. The ambivalent story is a better story for people who are treading water, trying to keep their heads above the surface, than it is for people who are winning.

Maybe we don’t need to turn Paul into a hero or an avatar for ourselves at all. Lots of people make that argument, and they aren’t necessarily wrong. But I think stories like Acts 17 show the potential for Paul to act as a mirror for us to look into and see something about ourselves. He’s a little bit lost in

Athens, he’s a punching bag for people who have more clout than he does, he is trying on other people’s words to make himself seem relevant. He’s in a place where it wasn’t his idea to go, talking to people who aren’t necessarily interested in what he has to say, doing the best he can with what he’s got. That seems like a familiar story to me, and a story worth telling again and hearing differently this time.