017:018 A few of the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers also encountered him. Some of them asked, "What has this beggarly babbler to say?" "His business," said others, "seems to be to cry up some foreign gods." This was because he had been telling the Good News of Jesus and the Resurrection. 017:019 Then they took him and brought him up to the Areopagus, asking him, "May we be told what this new teaching of yours is? 017:020 For the things you are saying sound strange to us. We should therefore like to be told exactly what they mean." 017:021 (For all the Athenians and their foreign visitors used to devote their whole leisure to telling or hearing about something new.) 017:022 So Paul, taking his stand in the centre of the Areopagus, spoke as follows: "Men of Athens, I perceive that you are in every respect remarkably religious. 017:023 For as I passed along and observed the things you worship, I found also an altar bearing the inscription, `TO AN UNKNOWN GOD.' "The Being, therefore, whom you, without knowing Him, revere, Him I now proclaim to you. 017:024 GOD who made the universe and everything in it--He, being Lord of Heaven and earth, does not dwell in sanctuaries built by men. 017:025 Nor is He ministered to by human hands, as though He needed anything-- but He Himself gives to all men life and breath and all things. 017:026 He caused to spring from one forefather people of every race, for them to live on the whole surface of the earth, and marked out for them an appointed span of life and the boundaries of their homes; 017:027 that they might seek God, if perhaps they could grope for Him and find Him. Yes, though He is not far from any one of us. 017:028 For it is in closest union with Him that we live and move and have our being; as in fact some of the poets in repute among yourselves have said, `For we are also His offspring.' 017:029 Since then we are God's offspring, we ought not to imagine that His nature resembles gold or silver or marble, or anything sculptured by the art and inventive faculty of man. 017:030 Those times of ignorance God viewed with indulgence. But now He commands all men everywhere to repent, 017:031 seeing that He has appointed a day on which, before long, He will judge the world in righteousness, through the instrumentality of a man whom He has pre-destined to this work, and has made the fact certain to every one by raising Him from the dead." 017:032 When they heard Paul speak of a resurrection of dead men, some began to scoff. But others said, "We will hear you again on that subject." 017:033 So Paul went away from them.