Cross-Book Trailhead · Acts 17 · 1 Corinthians 15 · Titus 1
Paul and the Poets
Three times, and only three, Paul reaches past Scripture for pagan Greek verse — at Mars Hill, in a letter to Corinth, and coaching Titus about Crete — and each time turns a culture's own literature into an argument for the God, the resurrection, or the honesty the gospel demands. But the lines number four, not three: the Mars Hill sentence quotes two different poets back to back. Split it and the pattern shows — Epimenides is quoted twice, once to affirm and once to convict. One method, three very different rooms.
Three Occasions, Four Lines
— the whole list — and why the count is not three: one sentence at Mars Hill carries two different poets- Poet
- Epimenides of Knossosquoted twice
- Work
- Cretica — a lost poem, known only through later quotation
“for in him we live, and move, and have our being”
The attribution rests on later witnesses rather than a surviving text of the poem, so it is the standard scholarly identification, not a certainty. What is certain is that this clause and the next are two different borrowings, not one.
- Poet
- Aratus of Soli — the same thought in Cleanthes
- Work
- Aratus, Phaenomena 5 — the same thought in Cleanthes, Hymn to Zeus
“For we are also his offspring”
This is the clause Paul actually flags as a quotation — “as certain even of your own poets have said” — and his plural, poets, is the tell that more than one source is in play in this sentence.
Where Paul stood
On Mars Hill, before Athens' own philosophers, quoting the Athenians' own poets back to them mid-sermon — two of them, in a single breath.
What he did with it
Paul finds lines written about Zeus that are true of the real God — creaturely dependence, divine offspring — and redirects them: the God these poets groped toward without knowing him is the God Paul is now naming (Acts 17:23, “what therefore ye worship in ignorance, this I set forth unto you”).
- Poet
- Menander
- Work
- Thaïs (fragment), a stage comedy
“Be not deceived: Evil companionships corrupt good morals.”
Where Paul stood
Writing to a church he planted, arguing for the bodily resurrection against members who denied it.
What he did with it
A stage proverb about bad company, deployed as moral triage: the Corinthians denying the resurrection are corrupting the rest through ordinary social influence, not exotic heresy. Paul reaches for a line his largely Greek audience would already know by heart.
- Poet
- Epimenides of Knossos — the second timequoted twice
- Work
- a lost Cretan poem, surviving for us only inside Paul's own sentence and later patristic report
“One of themselves, a prophet of their own, said, Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, idle gluttons.”
The same poet traditionally credited with the first clause of Acts 17:28 — which is what makes Epimenides the only voice Paul reaches for twice, and the only one he turns in two opposite directions.
Where Paul stood
Not addressing Cretans directly — coaching Titus, his delegate, on how to read and confront the culture he is planting churches in.
What he did with it
The sharpest of the four lines: Paul calls a pagan poet “a prophet of their own” and endorses his own people's proverb against them — “this testimony is true” (1:13) — as a diagnostic tool for a documented culture of dishonesty, not a claim of revelation for Epimenides. See The Cretan Lie below.
Acts 17:28 is usually counted as one quotation, and that is the miscount worth undoing. The verse runs two borrowings back to back: “for in him we live, and move, and have our being” — attributed to Epimenides — then a citation formula, “as certain even of your own poets have said,” and only then the Aratus line, “For we are also his offspring.” Paul's own plural does the arithmetic for us. Three occasions; four lines.
Epimenides, Twice
— the one poet Paul goes back to — and the reason this page has a spine at allOnce the Mars Hill sentence is split, a pattern appears that the old count hid. Aratus is quoted once. Menander is quoted once. Epimenides is quoted twice — once in a sermon to unconverted Athenian philosophers, once in a private letter to a delegate on Crete — and each time Paul is doing something a Christian teacher is usually warned not to do.
Athens — the Cretan's line used to affirm
On the standard reconstruction, the line belonged to a poem defending Zeus against the Cretans' claim that he was dead and buried. On Paul's lips it becomes a true statement about the living God: in him we live, and move, and have our being. The poet was arguing that his god was not a corpse. Paul agrees — about a different God, and for better reasons.
Crete — the same Cretan's line used to convict
The second borrowing turns the poet against his own island: Cretans are always liars. The same source that supplied a warrant for the sermon supplies the indictment for the mission field — and Paul underwrites it, “this testimony is true” (Titus 1:13).
One poet, two opposite uses: affirmation and rebuke. That is the clearest evidence on the page that Paul is not endorsing a body of pagan literature wholesale. He is reading it — weighing line by line what is true, and putting each true line exactly where it does work for the gospel and nowhere else.
“he gave himself to the study of so much Greek literature as might be turned to Christian account in his future work.”
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown, Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871), on Acts 17:28 · public domain
The Cretan Lie
— Titus 1:12's backdrop — why this particular proverb, and why it stingsThe proverb “to Cretanize” (Greek kretizein) was already a known Greco-Roman idiom for “to lie” before Paul ever wrote to Titus. Its standing example was Crete's own boast that Zeus was buried on the island — at Mt. Ida, or Mt. Juktas — a claim that, taken seriously, means the Cretans' own chief god was mortal, and that they were lying about him. The lie Epimenides names is not a generic slur; it is the specific, self-incriminating lie a culture told about its own god.
“The hundred-citied Crete” (Homer, Iliad 2.649) had a real reputation in antiquity for piracy and mercenary deception, later suppressed under Rome's conquest (69–67 BC) — a documented backdrop, not an invention of Paul's. “Prophet” is Paul's ad hominem term for a recognized native cultural authority, not a claim of divine inspiration for Epimenides; the pastoral point lands immediately — “this testimony is true. For which cause reprove them sharply, that they may be sound in the faith” (Titus 1:13).
“Epimenides' sarcasm was that its human inhabitants supplied the place of wild beasts.”
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown, Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871), on Titus 1:12 · public domain
What the Method Licenses — and Doesn't
— truth wherever found, taken captive to Christ, held at full strength on both sidesWhat it licenses
Common grace leaves fragments of truth even in pagan literature, and a missionary may use a culture's own words as a bridge — citing what an audience already believes to argue toward what it needs to believe. Paul's Areopagus sermon is the clearest case: he moves from the Athenians' own altar (“to an unknown god”) and their own poets straight to the resurrection and the judgment (Acts 17:23, 28, 31). The doctrine this rests on is common grace, not shared revelation — Epimenides is not treated as inspired, only as accurately quotable.
What it doesn't license
Not one of the four lines is left standing on its own authority. Each is immediately redirected, corrected, or subordinated: the Zeus-hymn line is repointed at the true God the Athenians “worship in ignorance”; the stage proverb is deployed against a doctrinal error (denying the resurrection), not as a stray maxim; and Epimenides' proverb is followed by a command to “reprove them sharply,” not to rest content with a clever quotation. 2 Corinthians 10:5 names the posture precisely — “bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ.”
MannaFest flag — Paul's practice is a narrow, load-bearing precedent, not a broad license: four lines on three occasions across the whole of a large corpus, each pressed into direct service of a gospel claim in the very next clause. It licenses citing accurately-observed truth from outside the church to build a bridge toward Christ — it does not license treating any extra-biblical source as a co-equal witness to revelation, nor does it soften a single one of the corrections Paul attaches to every quotation he makes.