Unknown God

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In addition to the twelve main gods and the innumerable lesser deities, ancient Greeks worshiped a deity they called Agnostos Theos, that is: the Unknown god. In Athens, there was a temple specifically dedicated to that god and very often Athenians would swear "in the name of the Unknown god" (Νή τόν Άγνωστον).^[1] Apollodorus, Philostratus and Pausanias wrote about the Unknown god as well.^{[citation needed]} The Unknown god was not so much a specific deity, but a placeholder, for whatever god or gods actually existed but whose name and nature were not revealed to the Athenians or the Hellenized world at large.

According to a story told by Diogenes Laërtius, Athens was once in the grips of a plague and desperate to appease the gods with the appropriate sacrifices. Thus Epimenides gathered a flock of sheep to the Areopagus and released them. The sheep roamed about Athens and the surrounding hills. On Epimenides suggestion wherever a sheep stopped and lied down a sacrifice was made to the local god of that place. Many of the gardens and buildings of Athens were indeed associated with a specific god or goddess and so the appropriate alter was constructed and the sacrifice was made. However, at least one, if not several sheep lead the Athenians to a location that had no god associated with it. Thus an altar was built there without a god's name inscribed upon it.

[edit] 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, and began to proselytize to the Athenians:

²²Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said: "Men of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. ²³For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. Now what you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim to you. ²⁴"The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands. ²⁵And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else. ²⁶From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live. ²⁷God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. ²⁸'For in him we live and move and have our being.' As some of your own poets have said, 'We are his offspring.' ²⁹"Therefore since we are God's offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone—an image made by man's design and skill. ³⁰In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent. ³¹For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to all men by raising him from the dead."

—Acts 17:22-17:31, (NIV)

A reference to what has been called the "Epimenides paradox," in the New Testament Epistle to Titus 1:12 has been taken to confirm the Apostle Paul's familiarity with Epimenides, although the authorship of that letter is disputed.