33—34-
µέσου αὐτῶν.
34. τινὲς δὲ ἄνδρες κολληθέντες αὐτῷ
381
[ή ἐπίστευσαν ' ,
ἐν ots καὶ Διονύσιος 6 ᾿Αρεοπαγίτης, καὶ γυνὴ ὀνόματι Δάμαρις,! καὶ
ἕτεροι σὺν αὐτοῖς.
1 Before και ετερ. D (Flor.) add ευσχηµων.
The words και Ύννη ovop. A. are
omitted in D (retained by Blass in B), see comment., and also by Hilg., who adds
ενσχηµων after Αρεοπ.
critical note), and Ramsay accounts for this by the view that the reviser of Codex Bezz was a Catholic, who objected to the prominence given to women in Acts, and that under the influence of this feel- ing the changes occurred in xvii. 12 (see above) and 34: this prominence assigned to women was, in Ramsay’s view, firstly, pagan rather than Christian, and,secondly, heretical rather than Catholic ; Church in the Roman Empire, pp. 160, 161; see “‘ Damaris,” Hastings’ B.D., and Felten, Apostelgeschichte, p. 337.--καὶ ἕτεροι: a significant contrast to the precise results of the Apostle’s preaching elsewhere, and yet a contrast which carries with it an evidence of truth. Spitta, p. 242, justly remarks that he knows not how the author of the ‘‘We’”’ sections, who was not present at Athens, could have repre- sented the activity of St. Paul in that city better than he has done; the idle curiosity of the Athenians, ver. 21, and after a speech received with ridicule and indifference, a scanty result, graphically represented by two names, of which it is a mere assertion to say that they refer to the sub-apostolic age. Spitta thus τε- fuses to allow any justification for Weizsacker’s rejection of the historical worth of the narrative. Thus in the simple notice of the results of St. Paul’s preaching we gain an indication of the historical truthfulness of the narrative. If anywhere, surely at Athens a forger would have been tempted to magnify the influence of St. Paul’s intellec- tual power, and to attribute an over- whelming victory to the message of the Gospel in its first encounter with the philosophic wisdom of the world in a city which possessed a university, the greatest of any of that time, which was known as ‘the eye of Greece, mother of arts,’ whose inhabitants a Jewish philo- sopher (Philo) had described as the keenest mentally of all the Greeks. In answer to the earlier criticism of Zeller and Overbeck, we may place the conclusion of Weiss that the result of St. Paul’s labours is plainly not described after a set pattern, but rests upon de- finite information, whilst Wendt, who
refers the composition of the speech, as we have it, to St. Luke, and regards it as derived from information of a speech actually delivered at Athens, insists equally strongly upon the difficulty of supposing that such slender results would be represented as following, if the speech had been composed with a view of ex- alting Jewish and Christian monotheism against polytheism. Moreover the nar- rative bears the stamp of truthfulness in its picture of the local condition of Athens, and also in its representation of St. Paul’s attitude to the philosophical surroundings of the place and its schools. ‘‘ One must be at home in Athens,” writes Curtius, “to understand the narrative rightly,” and no one has enabled us to realise more fully the historical character and vividness of the scene than Curtius him- self in the essay to which reference is made above, of which the concluding words are these, that ‘‘ he who refuses to accept the historical value of the narrative of Paulin Athens, tears one of the weightiest pages out of the history of humanity ” (Gesammelte Abhandlungen, ii., p. 543, “Paulus in Athens”: see further, Kna- benbauer, pp. 308, 309). The character of the people, the moving life of the Agora, the breadth of view which could compre- hend in one short speech the crude errors of the populaceand the fallacious theology of the schools, “the heart of the world ” too generous to ignore all that was best in men’s thoughts of God’s providence and of human brotherhood, and yet too loving to forget that all men had sinned, and that after death was the judgment— we recognise them all, If we turn to the speech itself we find abundant evi- dence of characteristic Pauline thoughts and teaching (cf, ¢.g., ver. 27 and Rom, i. 19, ii. 14; ver. 26 and Rom. ν. 12, 1 Cor. xv. 45; ver. 30 and Rom. iii. 25, etc., Zockler, p. 268, and instances in notes above, McGiffert, Apostolic Age, p. 259), and it is worthy of note that Weizsacker, while rejecting with Baur, Zeller, Schwegler, and Overbeck the ac- count of St. Paul’s visit to Athens as unhistorical, fully recognises, after an examination of the Apostle’s method of