¹Paul and those traveling with him passed through Amphipolis and Apollonia and stopped in Thessalonica, where there was a Jewish synagogue.

²Paul went there as usual, and for three Sabbath days in a row he talked with the Jews about the Scriptures.

³He explained and proved that the Messiah had to suffer and rise from the dead. “This Jesus I’m telling you about is the Messiah!” he said.

⁴He won over some of the Jews, who joined him and Silas. A large number of Greeks who worshiped God joined them too, as did quite a few important women.

⁵But other Jews were jealous. They rounded up some troublemakers from the marketplace, formed a mob, and started a riot in the city. The Jews rushed to Jason’s house to look for Paul and Silas because they wanted to bring them out to the crowd.

⁶But they didn’t find them there, so they dragged Jason and some of the other believers to the city officials. “Those men who’ve upset the entire world have now come here!” they shouted.

⁷“And Jason has welcomed them into his house. They’re all disobeying Caesar’s commands, claiming that there’s another king called Jesus.”

⁸When the crowd and the city officials heard this, there was an uproar.

⁹The officials made Jason and the others post bond to make sure they would return to the court. Then they let them go.

¹⁰As soon as it was night, the believers sent Paul and Silas away to Berea. When they arrived there, they went to the Jewish synagogue.

¹¹The Berean Jews were more reasonable than those in Thessalonica. They received Paul’s message gladly and studied the Scriptures carefully every day to see if what Paul said was true.

¹²Many of the Berean Jews believed, along with a number of important Greek women and many Greek men.

¹³But the Jews in Thessalonica found out that Paul was preaching God’s word in Berea. Some of them went and stirred up the crowds there as well.

¹⁴Right away the believers sent Paul to the coast, but Silas and Timothy stayed in Berea.

¹⁵The believers who went with Paul took him to Athens. Then they returned with the message that Silas and Timothy should join him there as soon as possible.

¹⁶While Paul was waiting for them in Athens, he became upset when he saw how full the city was of statues of gods.

¹⁷So he went to the synagogue and talked both with Jews and with Greeks who worshiped God. Each day he also spoke with anyone who happened to be in the marketplace.

¹⁸A group of Epicurean and Stoic thinkers began to argue with him. Some of them asked, “What is this person blabbing on about?” Others said, “He seems to be talking about gods we’ve never heard of.” They said this because Paul was preaching the good news about Jesus and saying that he’d risen from the dead.

¹⁹They brought him to a meeting of the Areopagus, where they asked him, “What are these new ideas you’re teaching?

²⁰You have some strange thoughts we’ve never heard before. We want to know what they mean.”

²¹All the people in Athens, both locals and foreigners, spent all their time talking about and listening to the latest ideas.

²²Paul stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said, “People of Athens! I see that you are very religious in every way.

²³As I walked around, I looked carefully at the things you worship. I even found an altar that said,

Now I’m going to tell you about this ‘god’ that you worship without knowing who he is.

²⁴“He’s the God who made the world and everything in it. He’s the Lord of heaven and earth, and so he doesn’t live in temples built by human hands.

²⁵He doesn’t depend on people, because he doesn’t need anything from them. Instead, he himself gives all people life and breath and everything else they have.

²⁶From one man he made all the people who now live all over the earth. This God decided exactly when and where each group of people should live.

²⁷He did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him. But he isn’t far from any one of us.

²⁸‘In him we live and move and exist,’ as some of your own poets have said, because ‘we are his children.’

²⁹“And since we are God’s children, we shouldn’t think that God is made out of gold or silver or stone. He isn’t a statue that humans have designed and made.

³⁰In the past, God didn’t judge people for what they didn’t know, but now he commands all people everywhere to turn away from their sins.

³¹He has set a day when he will judge the entire world fairly, and he has appointed a man to be its judge. God has proved this to everyone by raising that man from the dead.”

³²When they heard Paul talk about the dead being raised, some of them laughed at that idea. But others said, “We want to hear you speak about this again.”

³³When Paul left the meeting of the Areopagus,

³⁴some of the people joined with him as believers in Jesus. Dionysius, a member of the Areopagus, was one of them. A woman named Damaris also became a believer, along with some others.