²² Then Paul stood in front of the Areopagus and said, “Athenians, I see how extremely spiritual you are in every way. ²³ For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, ‘To an unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. ²⁴ The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands,^{(A) 25} nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things.^{(B) 26} From one ancestor^[a] he made all peoples to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live,^{(C) 27} so that they would search for God^[b] and perhaps fumble about for him and find him—though indeed he is not far from each one of us.^{(D) 28} For ‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said,

²⁹ “Since we are God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the deity is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals.^{(F) 30} While God has overlooked the times of human ignorance, now he commands all people everywhere to repent,^{(G) 31} because he has fixed a day on which he will have the world judged in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.”^(H)