UNKNOWN GOD (ἄγνωστος θεός). The inscr. observed by Paul on an altar at Athens, to which he referred in his Areopagus address (Acts 17:22-31).

The existence of such an altar, presumably built in a scrupulous attempt to include every possible deity, was an indication of the Athenians’ religious sensitivity. It also betrayed a lack of religious knowledge, which Paul sought to remedy in his address.

As no comparable dedication to a single unknown deity has been found, the genuineness of this inscr. has been questioned. However, there is evidence of inscrs. to unknown deities in the pl. (Pausanius, Description of Greece i. 1. 4; Philostratus, Appolonius of Tyana vi. 3. 5; Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers i. 110). It is also theorized that in a polytheistic culture, a single deity would not have been addressed, and that Paul might have altered a polytheistic inscr. to fit his monotheistic concepts. On the contrary, the syncretism of the Hel. period, the occasional merging of Jewish ideas with pagan forms, and the tendency toward both the unifying of principles and the personifying of abstract religious concepts, provided a matrix within which such an inscr. was not at all unlikely.

Bibliography E. Norden, Agnostos Theos (1913); K. Lake, “The Unknown God,” in F. J. Foakes-Jackson and E. Lake, eds., The Beginnings of Christianity, Pt. 1, V (1933), 240-246; B. Gärtner, The Areopagus Speech and Natural Revelation (tr. C. H. King, 1955), 242-247.