What Does Acts 17:19 Mean?

(19) **They took him, and brought him unto Areopagus.**—The name may stand either for the Hill of Mars, simply as a locality, or for the Court which sat there, and was known as the Court of the Areopagus, and which, as the oldest and most revered tribunal in Athens, owing its origin to Athena, and connected with the story of Orestes and the worship of the propitiated *Erinnyes* (the Avengers) as the *Eumenides* (the Gentle Ones), still continued to exercise jurisdiction in all matters connected with the religion of the state, and numbered among its members men of the highest official rank. It had originally consisted only of those who had filled the office of Archon and were over sixty years of age. Its supreme authority had been in some measure limited by Pericles, and it was as the organ of the party who opposed the ideas of freedom and progress of which he was the representative, that Æschylus wrote the tragedy of the *Eumenides, *in which the divine authority of the Court was impressed upon men’s minds. Here, however, the narrative that follows presents no trace of a formal trial, and hence it has been questioned whether the Apostle was brought before the *Court* of the Areopagus. Unless, however, there had been some intention of a trial, there seems no reason for their taking him to the Areopagus rather than to the Pnyx or elsewhere; and the mention of a member of the Court as converted by St. Paul’s preaching, makes it probable that the Court was actually sitting at the time. The most natural explanation of the apparent difficulty is, that as the charge of bringing in “strange deities” was one which came under the jurisdiction of the Areopagus Court, the crowd who seized on St. Paul hurried him there, not presenting a formal indictment, but calling for a preliminary inquiry, that his speech accordingly, though of the nature of an *apologia, *was not an answer to a distinct accusation, and that having heard it, the Court looked on the matter as calling for no special action, and passed to the order of the day. **May we know . . .?**—The form of the question, courteous in semblance, but with a slight touch of sarcasm, is eminently characteristic in itself, and shows also that there was no formal accusation, though the words that followed suggested the thought that there possibly might be materials for one. What had been said was “strange” enough to require an explanation.