Paul’s Attitude at Athens (Acts 17

Commentators have interpreted Acts 17:16–34 in various ways. George Otis’s choice to associate Paul’s attitude and activity at Athens with spiritual mapping is an invitation to have another look at that text. Paul, being a human like anyone else, had background influences informing his perception of the images he saw at Athens. Whether this background influence is sufficient to interpret Paul’s response as an expression of cultural naiveté on the one hand or as spiritual mapping on the other depends on the textual data and background information available to us from his Jewish background and from evidence about the culture and thought of the first-century Greco-Roman world in which Paul lived. This article concludes that Paul was not expressing cultural naiveté at Athens, though it would be a stretch also to conclude that his action was spiritual mapping in the manner in which the concept is understood today even when lessons can be drawn from it for today’s practice

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