Acts 17:28
Acts 17:2828‘For in Him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are His offspring.’
The Watchtower is comfortable with the theology here — in Jehovah all things have life and existence — and generally passes over the source of the quotation. Where the poets are noticed, they are treated as incidental illustration. The Watchtower position that God's people keep clear of worldly and pagan material makes the fact that Paul is quoting pagan religious poetry in a sermon an awkward one, and it is rarely dwelt on.
Two things are happening in one verse, and both are useful. First, Paul quotes pagan poets — Epimenides and Aratus — in a sermon, approvingly, as saying something true. The line "we are also his offspring" comes from a hymn to Zeus. Paul lifts a true sentence out of a false context and puts it to work for the true God. That is worth showing a Witness who has been taught that material with pagan associations is contaminated by origin. Second, it settles a question about the canon that comes up whenever Jude's quotation of Enoch is raised. An inspired writer can quote a non-inspired source without making it Scripture. Paul quotes Aratus here and Epimenides again in ; nobody has ever proposed adding their poems to the Bible. Quotation is not canonisation — which is exactly why Jude quoting 1 Enoch tells you nothing about Enoch's status. Both points land the same way: the early church knew how to take what was true from the surrounding culture without taking what was false. Compare , , .