14. “Athens and Corinth”

 

The Acts of the Apostles

In the fall of the year 50, the Apostle Paul arrived in Athens, the great capital of classical culture. The apostle came alone; at the end of a challenging year where he had traveled hundreds, thousands of miles; had left Antioch in Syria the previous autumn, and had traveled through all the regions of Anatolia (today’s Turkey) to Troy. After sailing for two days, he moved to Europe, evangelized Philippi, then Thessalonica, then Berea; there he left Luke, Timothy, and Silas to lead the new communities born in Macedonia and moved to Athens alone. Athens was no longer a politically and economically important city. It was still the Greek world’s cultural capital; it was a city full of temples and statues.

The Jew Paul trembles when he sees all those representations that, according to his religious education, should not have existed; he mainly dislikes this polytheism, this diversity of gods and cults that were practiced in the city of Athens and felt the need to announce the truth that has conquered him. He trembles in his heart, and looking at it, he finds an interesting sign; he sees an altar, a small religious object, a votive offering, dedicated to an unknown God: ΑΓΝΩΣΤΩ ΘΕΩ (Agnosto Zeó). Perhaps some rich Athenian person, having obtained grace and not knowing which deity to thank, had dedicated this sacred sanctuary to an unknown God; not to offend anyone, he has dedicated it to the God whom he couldn’t know who He was.

That quote served Paul as a provocation. It gave him an idea of where to start. He began talking with some Stoic and Epicurean philosophers, who abounded in the market square of Athens, in the agora, or in the entrance, where all the philosophical questions that could be of interest were discussed. Luke himself says that the Athenians are interested in the latest news. When a new preacher teaches original doctrines, they hear it immediately because they are hungry for the latest news.

Then Paul finds an opportunity that seems favorable to him; they take him to a hill where they held meetings and made decisions, the Areopagus, a beautiful rocky hill just in front of the Acropolis in Athens. And there, they decide to listen to him; they ask him to present his doctrine in synthesis. Paul begins with a masterpiece of rhetoric; the second part of chapter 17 of the Acts of the Apostles refers us to this admirable speech that the Apostle Paul gave in Athens using the method of classical rhetoric, adapting to the ear, tastes, and habits of their interlocutors.

He seems to have done well because he delivers a reasonable discourse for the Greeks, and yet it is a failed discourse; it does not convince the addressees, do not move to a faith adhesion, and perhaps Luke wanted to outline a slightly different speech than Paul was used to emphasizing how a particular type of preaching that intends to adapt too much to the audience is not successful because it does not communicate Christian novelty, but simply seems to adjust to the standard way of thinking. Paul employs a philosophical language; part of that expression he saw written on the religious statue. He says with an attitude of ‘captatio benevolentiae’: “I see that in every respect, you are very religious. For as I walked around looking carefully at your shrines, I even discovered an altar inscribed, ‘To an Unknown God.’ What therefore you unknowingly worship, I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and all that is in it, the Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in sanctuaries made by human hands, nor is he served by human hands because he needs anything. Rather it is he who gives to everyone life and breath and everything.”

It is a controversial polemic against the pagan cult, against temples and statues, against religious services that brought food to the gods as offerings. Paul says the God whom I proclaim to you, “He made from one the whole human race to dwell on the entire surface of the earth… so that people might seek God, even perhaps grope for him and find him, though indeed he is not far from any one of us.” So, this God sought-after by your philosophers—he implicitly says—is like the blind man. “For he is not far from any of us, for ‘In him, we live and move and have our being (it is a stoic formula that can be adapted to those philosophers) “as some of your poets have said.”

And he quotes the Greek poet Aratus de Soli. “For we too are his offspring.” We, humans, are ‘ghenos,’ God’s lineage. “Since therefore we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the divinity is like an image fashioned from gold, silver, or stone by human art and imagination.” God has gone through centuries of ignorance, and the ignorance is that of your philosophers and your great culture that, however, has not managed to find God. Now the God you do not know decides to fill your ignorance and has established himself to make himself known to all peoples” because he has established a day on which he will ‘judge the world with justice’ through a man he has appointed, and he has confirmed all by raising Him from the dead.”

He comes to announce Jesus Christ; he has departed from afar, made some controversy, but in a veiled way, he used the language of the philosophers and poets and came to announce the resurrection of Jesus. When he speaks of the resurrection, he is blocked, and they “began to scoff… We should like to hear you on this some other time.” They don’t even understand what Paul is talking about; they think that ‘anastasis’ is the name of a female deity… it is the name of the resurrection, but it is taken as an ‘Eastern hypostasis’ along with another deity called Jesus.

Greek philosophers do not at all like the discourse ‘resurrection of the dead.’ Not because they are incredulous; they are well convinced of the soul’s immortality, are heirs of a Platonic tradition, but to believe in the soul’s immortality is something different from announcing the resurrection of the flesh. Paul proposes the value of the body, of concrete humanity, while the Greek tradition is willing to defend the soul’s immortality as liberation from the bodily prison. Paul is preaching the value of the body and human history that in eschatology, in the final phase of God’s project will be fully valued and recreated. They do not listen to him, interrupt that speech, and do not accept his preaching.

A tiny group of people remains somehow attached to Paul, but the cultural world of Athens has called him a charlatan. The narrator of the Acts uses the term: ‘spermo logos,’ one that throws words like a sower, but in vain, a charlatan who is content with meaningless ramblings. Paul must leave the capital of culture with a failure on his shoulders that weighs even more heavily than the beating he received in other cities, and so, at the beginning of winter, he arrives in Corinth, not far from Athens.

It is a city built on the isthmus, which takes its name from the city itself and therefore meets two ports: one in the Aegean and another in the Ionian and it was the passage of the ships to avoid the circumnavigation of the Peloponnese, the southern part of Greece with a very jagged coast, full of rocks, which made sailing very dangerous, so it was much more convenient to bring the boats to shore and through a track, called ‘diolkos’ (path through which the boats could cross the isthmus of Corinth by land making a portage, going from the Gulf of Corinth to the Saronic Gulf. The roadway, extending between 6 and 8 kilometers, included rudimentary lanes) to transport them from one port to another. It took one day. Then imagine a ship arriving at the eastern port, the sailors unload the goods in wagons; the ship is dragged to the shore, there are workers capable of these operations that transport the ship by force of arms along the isthmus. Then the boat is put in the water in the other port, the goods are reloaded, and the ship can leave.

It takes a day or two to do this operation; the sailors meanwhile have a day off, and Corinth is equipped not only to have workers to transport the ship’s cargo, unload and load the goods but also to offer fun to the sailors who had a day off. Corinth was a city of prostitution; many notorious places offered wine, women, and music. They provided a hobby for a sizeable proletarian population passing through, with cheap money, to enjoy life.

The ancient city of Corinth had been destroyed a few centuries earlier and rebuilt at Julius Caesar’s time. The great leader had paid his veterans with a piece of land and a house in Corinth, and many had moved to live in Corinth; it had become a port city, full of traffic, the ideal place for those who had traded. There lived wealthy transport entrepreneurs and a tide of simple people, we would say proletarians who lived from manual labor or entertainment. In this city of low cultural and especially moral level, Paul arrives alone, tired, disappointed, and in an environment like the port; with all the characteristics we can imagine, Paul begins Christian preaching.

It is interesting to compare the noble and cultured Athens and the popular, ignorant, vulgar Corinth. Despite this contradiction, it is only in Corinth that the Gospel takes root. Among the arrogant aristocratic philosophers of Athens, the Gospel has not taken root. Instead, in that infamous environment of Corinth, evangelical preaching finds a home. Rethinking these things, Fabrizio De André’s phrase comes to mind: ‘From manure, flowers are born; from diamonds, nothing is born.’ Athens represents the atmosphere of the diamond, cold, that does not give rise to anything; it is culture closed in itself, self-centered and self-referential.

Corinth is a human world, perhaps corrupt, full of sins, vices, bad habits, no cultural interests, but of humanity, true humanity, a human dunghill where seeds can produce flowers. And people finding one like Paul, have matured, have grown, have overcome that low level, have raised the standard of their lives, they have united with Christ. In Corinth, there is a considerable Jewish presence. Therefore, as always, Paul begins from the synagogue; he preaches in the synagogue, and several also welcome him, and even the synagogue’s head becomes a Christian.

Some, however, oppose him, and Paul then leaves the synagogue and seeks accommodation in the same square where the synagogue was. He is staying at the house of a certain Titus Justus; it is a typical Roman name; he must have had a room on the first floor that he rents to Paul, who uses this room as a meeting point; becomes a meeting place where he presents the Gospel. Having just arrived in Corinth, Paul was fortunate enough to meet in the synagogue two wealthy Jews coming from Rome: Aquila and his wife Prisca, familiarly known as Priscilla. In Rome, there were some problems, and Emperor Claudius had expelled the Jews from Rome.

The Roman historian Suetonius remembers that saying that the emperor expelled from Rome the Jews’ assiduously tumultuous’ (continuously in revolt) ‘impolsore Chersto.’ It is one of the most important texts in Latin pagan literature that give testimony of the first preaching of Christian in Rome. Suetonius does not know anything about Christianity; he thinks there is in Rome a guy present, called Cresto, which is the cause of the riots. He hears ‘Cristo’ being said but finds it strange that he is called a tool and imagines it is written with the ‘eta,’ the ‘long e’ which is pronounced as ‘i’. Therefore, it is a matter of pronunciation that is not spelled correctly. For this very reason, it has great historical value because the historian reports a news item without understanding what it is about. He says that the Jews of Rome, in the time of Claudius, in the year 49, were continually in turmoil because of a certain ‘Cresto.’ We read Christ, who is not a character present, but it is an important fact.

The Jews of Rome, in the year 49, before Peter and Paul arrived, already have news of Jesus. Some recognize him as Christ; others reject him and argue among themselves. The emperor intervenes drastically and sends out many of them, especially the richest. Aquila and Priscilla are victims of this expulsion and change the location of their factory, moving to Corinth, an ideal environment for business. They have a canvas factory, tents, and as Paul was a mat weaver by trade, they meet in the synagogue and hire Paul, giving him work and hospitality in their home. Perhaps they were already Christians, but if not, indeed knowing Paul, they are converted. Paul preaches the Gospel, works with his hands, and earns his food in his free time.

In his free time, he goes there, in the synagogue square, and meets the people; meets the people of Corinth, those who are passing through and offers another kind of fun; it offers the Gospel. When Silas and Timothy arrive from Macedonia, they work to support the group, and Paul has all the time available to preach the Gospel. He stays there for a year and a half; it is a record; until this moment, he had never waited so long in a city. He finds that there are many people in that city, so he commits with great zeal for the proclamation of the Gospel.

A year and a half later, there was a change of governor because Corinth is the capital of Achaia, southern Greece, and this caused the Jews to take advantage of it to accuse Paul. Still, the governor Gallio, proconsul of Achaia, is a wise man, the brother of the philosopher Seneca. As soon as he heard the Jews’ accusation, he said: “If it were a matter of some crime or malicious fraud, I should with reason hear the complaint of you Jews, but since it is a question of arguments over doctrine and titles and your law, see to it yourselves. I do not wish to be a judge of such matters. They all seized Sosthenes, the synagogue official, and beat him in full view of the tribunal. He was beaten up in the marketplace as an incompetent who could not carry out a trial. “But none of this was of concern to Gallio.”

Paul, now free, takes the boat and returns to Antioch. Thus, it ends the second voyage. We are in the fall of 52. Another significant moment has come to an end in which the apostle has given life to new and beautiful Christian communities.