Between Stoa Poikile and Ecclesia - Approach to an Evangelical Text
Between Stoa Poikile and Ecclesia - Approach to an Evangelical text - Dan ŢĂREANU* Abstract: The study makes a detailed analysis of the episode of St. Apostle Paul’s en- counter with the Stoic philosophers in the Athenian Areopagus, highlighting the subtleties of the Stoic and Judeo-Christian conception of God, cosmos, matter, world, man, etc. which confronted in the Apostle’s short dialogue with the Athe- nian philosophers, described in Acts 17, 17-20. Keywords: Paul in Areopag, God, stoicism, christianism, matter, world, man, cosmos Arriving to Athens to affirm and preach what the French philosopher Alain Badiou called the personal belief-conviction-certitude in the Resurrection-event of Jesus Christ, the Apostle Paul is in the position to resort, both in Agora, and in Areopagus, to a kerygmatic exercise which, in addition to being profoundly transcultural (Marcel Dumais), has to be, for the first and only time, one with explicit philosophical connotation or, rather, anti-philosophical as it is described by the same Alain Badiou. In other words, the scholar (former) Pharisee Saul of Tarsus of Cilicia, being called to address the Epicurean and Stoic philoso- phers (Acts 17:17-20) and, implicitly, to the dominant philosophies of the early Christian era, puts together for the first time in history, the Christianity freshly emerged from Judaism, that Christianity, for which the doctrinary element was still far from being decanted (academician Gheorghe Vlăduţescu), and the Greek wisdom, forcing them to interact, to confront in terms of ideational content and emphasizing their constructive dissonant fundamentals, in this case the anto- * PhD Dan Ţăreanu, independent researcher.
[Show full text]