The great interest of this section lies in Paul’s speech to the council of Areopagus. It provides us with a paradigm of his preaching to pagans, where, rather than “beginning with Moses and all the prophets” (Luke 24:27), that is, with the “revealed theology,” his approach was by way of “natural theology.” An earlier example of this method was seen in 14:15–17. But Paul was here facing a very different audience from the Lystrans. With them he had spoken of God as the one who gave the seasons and the crops, but with the Areopagites a philosophical approach was demanded and an appeal not so much to the evidence of nature as to the inner witness of God to human consciousness and conscience. But the question remains, Could (or would) Paul have made such a speech? The closest we can come to it…