In Athens Paul preached as usual in the synagogue to Jews and "God-fearers"; but he also adopted another and more unusual method--he simply took his stand without introduction in the market place, and spoke to those who chanced by. This method was characteristically Greek; it reminds us of the days of Socrates.
In the market place, Paul encountered certain of the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers. Both of these schools of philosophy had originated almost three hundred years before Christ, and both were prominent in the New Testament period. In their tenets they were very different. The Stoics were pantheists. They conceived of the world as a sort of great living being of which God is the soul. The world does not exist apart from God and God does not exist apart from the world. Such pantheism is far removed from the Christian belief in the living God, Maker of heaven and earth; but as against polytheism, pantheism and theism have something in common. Paul in his speech was able to start from this common ground. In ethics, the Stoics were perhaps nearer to Christianity than in metaphysics. The highest good they conceived to be a life that is led in accordance with reason--that reason which is the determining principle of the world. The passions must be conquered, pleasure is worthless, the wise man is independent of external conditions. Such an ethic worked itself out in practice in many admirable virtues--in some conception of the universal brotherhood of mankind, in charity, in heroic self-denial. But it lacked the warmth and glow of Christian love, and it lacked the living God.
The Epicureans were materialists. The world, for them, was a vast mechanism. They believed in the gods, but conceived of them as altogether without influence upon human affairs. Indeed, the deliverance of man from the fear of the gods was one of the purposes of the Epicurean philosophy. The Epicureans were interested chiefly in ethics. Pleasure, according to them, is the highest good. It need not be the pleasure of the senses; indeed Epicurus, at least, the founder of the school, insisted upon a calm life undisturbed by violent passions. Nevertheless it will readily be seen how little such a philosophy had in common with Christianity.