Unknown God

 ( 1913 Introductions ) 

The Unknown God or Agnostos Theos () is a theory by Eduard Norden first published in 1913 that proposes, based on the Christian Apostle Paul's Areopagus sermon in Acts 17:23, that in addition to the Olympian twelve and the innumerable Greek mythology, ancient Greece worshipped a deity they called "Agnostos Theos"; that is: "Unknown God", which Norden called "Un-Greek".

In Athens, there was a temple specifically dedicated to that god and very often Athenians would swear "in the name of the Unknown God" (Νὴ τὸν Ἄγνωστον, ).Pseudo-Lucian, Philopatris, 9.14 Apollodorus, PhilostratusPhilostratus, Vita Apollonii 6.3 and Pausanias wrote about the Unknown God as well. Pausanias' Description of Greece in 6 vols, Loeb Classic Library, Vol I, Book I.1.4

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Paul at Athens According to the book of Acts, contained in the Christian New Testament, when the Apostle Paul visited Athens, he saw an altar with an inscription dedicated to that god (possibly connected to the Cylonian affair), Plutarch's Lives and, when invited to speak to the Athenian elite at the Areopagus, gave the Areopagus sermon:

Because Paul's Yahweh could not be named, according to the customs of his people, it is possible that Paul's Athenian listeners would have considered his God to be "the unknown god par excellence".

His listeners may also have understood the introduction of a new god by allusions to Aeschylus' The Eumenides; the irony would have been that just as the Eumenides were not new gods at all but the Furies in a new form, so was the Christian God not a new god but rather the god the Greeks already worshipped as the Unknown God.

Lynn Allan Kauppi (2025). 9780567080974, Continuum International Publishing Group. ISBN 9780567080974

His audience would also have recognized the quotes in verse 28 as coming from Epimenides and Aratus, respectively.

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Archaeology There is an altar, perhaps dedicated to the Unknown God, which was unearthed in 1820 on the Palatine Hill of Rome. It contains a Latin inscription:

This could be translated into English as: "Whether sacred to god or to goddess, Gaius Sextius Calvinus, son of Gaius, praetor, restored this on a vote of the senate."

The altar is currently exhibited in the Palatine Museum.

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In Ancient Egypt The idea of an unknown god, however, seems to predate the Greeks. For in Ancient Egypt, Amun was an unknowable god, not only in the sense of his name being unknown, but also his identity or essence.

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In Neoplatonism For Plotinus, the first principle of reality is "the One", an utterly simple, ineffable, unknowable subsistence which is both the creative source of the Universe and the teleological end of all existing things.

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See also

• Si deus si dea
• Unmoved mover]]
• Dii involuti
• General revelation

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External links

• Translated by Max Mueller

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