"Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way.
23 For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of
your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, 'To an
unknown god.' What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to
you.
24 The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of
heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands,
25 nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he
himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things.
From these
verses we get a sense of Paul’s persuasiveness and statesmanship. We also
see something very important. Just as the Jews were ready for a Messiah,
the Greeks were ready for and were looking for God. In fact they were
looking so hard they had created gods for everything!
As ready
as they were, however, to receive this new religion, they had no education
or background on which to base their newly acquired faith. So they did
what they knew, and viewed the worship of the God of Abraham the way that
was natural and familiar to them.
In his
book This Hebrew Lord, John Shelby Spong writes:
When I
analyze the language, the concepts, the understandings, the meanings in
traditional religious patterns today, I discover that they come to us not
from our biblical Hebrew heritage at all; rather they are the direct
outgrowth of the Neoplatonic roots of Greek philosophy.
The
Christian faith was born in a Hebrew context,