Acts 17:22
Acts 17:2222Then Paul stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said, “Men of Athens, I see that in every way you are very religious.
Read as Paul confronting idolatry rather than engaging it. Verse 16 says Paul was provoked at seeing the city full of idols, and JWs take the Areopagus speech as a rebuke of false worship from beginning to end — consistent with the Watchtower's teaching that a Christian keeps separate from anything with pagan associations. The Athenians' religiousness is understood as the problem Paul came to denounce.
Paul was provoked, and he still opened by acknowledging what was true about the people in front of him. That combination is the lesson. He did not begin with the idols; he began with the observation that these people were reaching for something, and he treated the reaching as real. This matters at a doorstep more than it looks. When a Witness explains that every custom with a pagan past must be dropped, this verse shows the apostolic instinct running the other way: Paul walked into the most idol-saturated city in the empire, found the one thing in its religion he could build on, and built on it. He did not tell the Athenians to abandon their city. He told them who they had been groping after. Use it gently — the point is not to win a debate about Christmas but to show that Scripture's own missionary works by redirecting a culture rather than fleeing it. Compare , .
The NWT reads "you seem to be more given to the fear of the deities than others are," where most modern translations have "very religious" or "religious in every way." The Greek word Paul chose (deisidaimonesterous) is genuinely two-edged and can carry either sense — the King James renders it "too superstitious" — so the NWT is not alone here. What the rendering does is remove the diplomatic edge that most translators hear in Paul's opening: instead of a courteous acknowledgement that becomes a bridge, the line reads as an opening criticism. Since this speech is the New Testament's clearest example of an apostle engaging a pagan culture on its own ground, the choice quietly shifts the model it offers.