Paul preached in Athens (1 Thess 3:1) and Luke explicitly claims that Paul won some converts of status (Acts 17:34). The Areopagus was Athens’ highest court, so Dionysius as an Areopagite was a prominent citizen. The Areopagus included about a hundred members (making Luke’s report of a small number of adherents among the hearers in 17:34 less implausible than some have supposed). Luke does not identify Damaris, but because Athens had a tradition of restricting women’s public roles, she probably holds some status; while it is unlikely that Athenians would have allowed a woman to sit as a judge on the Areopagus court, she may have been a philosopher, hence part of the group that accompanied Paul to the Areopagus from the marketplace (17:18-19). While Luke is particularly ready to name converts of status (e.g., 13:12, 17:12), he mentions other converts as well (17:34).
Whether these converts formed a church we cannot say for certain (some are doubtful); though clearly one eventually formed there, it did not become a center of the Pauline mission as some other cities did. We have no extant letters to a church in Athens, but it would seem odd for Luke to preserve names if there were in fact no individual converts; he lacks traditions of many other cities or space for converts’s names there (e.g., 13:48-49; 14:1, 20, 23; 19:9-10; 20:17).
This content is by Craig Keener, but edited and posted by Defenders Media.
For more, please check out Dr. Keener’s Between History and Spirit.
