What Saint Paul did in Athens !

Episode 6: Athens – The Unknown God
(Acts 17:22–34)

Welcome & Series Context

Welcome back, truth-seekers, to 2 Minutes with the Lord and our Mission Series: Paul in 12 Cities. This season, we are following St. Paul across the ancient world, discovering how the Gospel was preached, received, and lived out in city after city. I am your host on this podcast, Fr. Veigas Dominic SVD. I am happy to be here with you all to discuss yet another city from the Bible.

Today, we arrive in Athens — the centre of philosophy, culture, and art in the ancient world. Here, Paul faced not mobs or prisons, but a different challenge: the intellectual pride of a city full of idols and ideas. In Athens, Paul proclaimed the one true God — the “Unknown God” they worshipped without knowing.

Where is Athens?

Athens was the intellectual centre of the Greco-Roman world, home to renowned philosophers such as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. By Paul’s time, it had declined politically but remained a city of cultural prestige, filled with temples, altars, and statues.

Acts 17 tells us that Paul was distressed to see the city full of idols. He reasoned with Jews in the synagogue and with philosophers in the marketplace — Epicureans, who sought pleasure, and Stoics, who valued reason and self-control. They brought him to the Areopagus, a council of learned men, to explain his “new teaching.”

Standing in the midst of statues and altars, Paul pointed to one inscribed: “To an Unknown God.” From there, he preached the God who made the world, who needs nothing from human hands, and who revealed Himself fully in Jesus Christ, whom He raised from the dead. Some sneered, some were curious, but a few believed — including Dionysius and Damaris.

Our Key Verse for today is

“Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said: ‘People of Athens! I see that in every way, you are very religious. As I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with the inscription 'to an unknown god.' So you are ignorant of the very thing you worship — and this is what I am going to proclaim to you.’” – Acts 17:22–23