Salt wind pushes off the Saronic Gulf and travels five miles inland across the urban sprawl of Athens. Carved stone deities pack every public square and street corner in this Roman province of Achaia.
A solid marble mass rises 377 feet above the lower city grid. Athenians call this bald outcropping the Areopagus. Roman civic leaders and local magistrates meet on this rock to regulate public teaching. Epicureans and Stoics climb the carved stone steps to debate foreign ideas and manage a population obsessed with novel arguments.
Hundreds of stone altars line the paved roads leading up to this judicial rock. Greek geographer Pausanias documented these specific monuments to unknown gods early in the second century a.d. while walking the local routes. A traveling Jewish tentmaker stands near these anonymous markers and tells the council that a single creator built the entire universe. He insists this supreme God does not live in stone temples and requires no human service because he gives life to all mortal creatures.
For in him mortals live and move and possess their existence.
This statement strips away the utility of carved idols and localized shrines. The speaker demands a complete change of mind based on a coming judicial reckoning supervised by a resurrected man. The sudden claim of a physical resurrection fractures the listening crowd. A few council members attach themselves to the traveler while the rest mock the idea of a returning corpse and walk down the marble steps.