Paul quotes two Greek sources here as support for his point that the creator God does not need temples or service from humans. The first allusion is to Epimenides the Cretan, a poet also cited in Titus 1:12. The original poem no longer exists, but it appears in a number of other ancient writers. The second citation is from Aratus, a Cilcian poet (Phaenomena 5). The original line, “in him we move and live and have our being,” was pantheistic, but Paul spins this line into a statement about God as the source of our life.
We might ask how Paul came to know these lines of poetry. There are not many modern readers who can quote freely from current poets or philosophers. One possibility is that he had some secular education which could be applied to the preaching of the gospel. We might imagine Paul thinking through his…
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