Acts 17:18

Babbler] lit. 'a picker up of seeds' (like a bird); hence a shallow talker who picks up scraps of information, and retails them at secondhand. And the resurrection] better, and Anastasis.' The Athenians, either in jest or in earnest, seem to have understood Anastasis (the Resurrection) to be a female deity, the wife of Jesus.

Epicureans and Stoics. At this time Stoicism was the philosophy of the majority of serious-minded people, Epicureanism that of the frivolous and irreligious. The Stoics, so called from the Porch (Stoa Pœcile) at Athens, in which their founder, Zeno of Citium, lectured (about 278 b.c.), had many points of contact with Judaism, especially with Pharisaism. Josephus speaks of the tenets of the Stoics and of the Pharisees as being very similar. The spirit of both was somewhat narrow and austere. Both rejected compromise, believing that a man should suffer persecution and even death rather than depart in the least degree from the path of piety and virtue. Both were devoted to Law, the Pharisees to the Law of Moses, the Stoics to the Law of Nature, which they regarded as an actual code imposed on mankind by the Creator. The Stoics were strong fatalists, denying the freedom of the will; the Pharisees were strong predestinarians. Both believed in Providence, or the rational ordering of the world by an intelligent being, a doctrine denied by the Epicureans. The Pharisees were monotheists; the Stoics approximated to monotheism. They believed in a Divine Reason, or Logos, pervading all things and ordering all things, though (being Pantheists) they regarded it as the soul of the world, rather than as a distinct and transcendent personal Being. They also believed in a future life for man, though not in actual immortality. St. Paul, therefore, decidedly sympathised with the Stoics as against the Epicureans, whose doctrine that the end of life is pleasure, was, of course, highly distasteful to him. Epicureanism was reprobated both by Jews and by serious pagans. Josephus says: 'The Epicureans cast providence out of life, and deny that God takes care of human affairs, and hold that the universe is not directed with a view to the continuance of the whole by the blessed and incorruptible Being, but that it is carried along automatically and heedlessly.'