Are You Starting a New Religion?

Inducting Athenians into new religions was illegal. Knowing that helps us see that Paul focused on proclaiming the high God, the one deity who is superior to every other deity or object of worship, and that he also focused on proclaiming the humanity of Jesus. He did not want to be seen as peddling a new religion; his goal was to inform the ignorance of his hearers regarding the objects of religious worship that were all around them. This text has been taken as a model of cross-cultural engagement, and so it is. It cannot answer all our questions about how to evangelize cultured pagans — but it definitely shows that the Kingdom came to Athens too, and that the good news about Jesus is clearly superior to the most impressive parts of pagan culture there.