Jesus answered, "Is it not written in your law, 'I said, you are gods'?

If those people to whom the word of God came were called 'gods' (and the scripture cannot be broken),

saying to Aaron, 'Make us gods who will go in front of us, for this Moses, who led us out of the land of Egypt -- we do not know what has happened to him!'

So when the crowds saw what Paul had done, they shouted in the Lycaonian language, "The gods have come down to us in human form!"

Also some of the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers were conversing with him, and some were asking, "What does this foolish babbler want to say?" Others said, "He seems to be a proclaimer of foreign gods." (They said this because he was proclaiming the good news about Jesus and the resurrection.)

And you see and hear that this Paul has persuaded and turned away a large crowd, not only in Ephesus but in practically all of the province of Asia, by saying that gods made by hands are not gods at all.

If after all there are so-called gods, whether in heaven or on earth (as there are many gods and many lords),

Formerly when you did not know God, you were enslaved to beings that by nature are not gods at all.