Acts 17:34

34. Dionysius One eminent man, and one woman sufficiently notable to be named, with a few others nameless, who appear not to have been organized into a Church, were the converts of that day. Unreliable tradition, however, makes Dionysius a future bishop of Athens, and a volume of mythical theology, by some unknown writer, is falsely ascribed to his authorship.

Opposite as were the tempers and causes which produced the rejection of Jesus by the Jews and the Athenians, they were at bottom the same traditional prepossession. What the Temple, and Moses, and the Old Testament were to the Jew, that the Acropolis, the tutelar Athene, and philosophy, were to the Athenian a binder of his whole soul to the proud past, filling him with contempt for the innovator. Alike against the Temple and the Acropolis the apostle pronounced the divine protest, and left his irrevocable words of destruction upon both, to be fulfilled by time and Providence.

It was Athens, not Paul, that suffered that day the real defeat. She lost an honourable record in Christian history. She lost the honour of being the Fourth Great European Church. Though repeatedly passed, she was, probably, never revisited by the apostle. She was addressed by no apostolic epistle, received no honourable New Testament mention. When we speak of the Greek Church, we think not so readily of Athens as of Antioch, of Corinth, of Constantinople, or even of St. Petersburg.