Introducing the Ancient Greeks: From Bronze Age Seafarers to Navigators of the Western Mind

by Edith Hall

When Jesus was alive and preaching, Jews in his homeland were therefore antipathetic to Greek thought, while between the Jews and Greeks of Alexandria, for the most part, there was mutual tolerance and even admiration. After Jesus’s death, the Jews in Jerusalem and Alexandria who had converted to Christianity could not agree upon whether they were supposed to be converting Gentiles, including Greeks, or just Jews. But Paul had no doubts at all. The enterprising apostle knew what would please a Greek audience: According to the Acts of the Apostles, he quoted from Greek poetry, and even alluded to Aeschylus’s Eumenides when he addressed the Athenians at the Areopagus, where Aeschylus’s Orestes had sought justice in the play (Acts 17). Paul’s experience in Athens, whether historical or not, is worth pausing over, because it encapsulated the different reactions of the Greeks to the Jewish-Christian apostolic mission, at least as an intelligent Christian writer saw it (Acts 17:16–21):