8 Bible Verses about Syncretism

So he sprang up and began to walk about. Then the crowds, seeing what Paul had done, rent the air with their shouts in the Lycaonian language, saying, "The gods have assumed human form and have come down to us." They called Barnabas 'Zeus,' and Paul, as being the principal speaker, 'Hermes.' And the priest of Zeus--the temple of Zeus being at the entrance to the city--brought bullocks and garlands to the gates, and in company with the crowd was intending to offer sacrifices to them.

While Paul was waiting for them in Athens, his spirit was stirred within him when he noticed that the city was full of idols. So he had discussions in the synagogue with the Jews and the other worshippers, and in the market place, day after day, with those whom he happened to meet. A few of the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers also encountered him. Some of them asked, "What has this beggarly babbler to say?" "His business," said others, "seems to be to cry up some foreign gods." This was because he had been telling the Good News of Jesus and the Resurrection.read more.
Then they took him and brought him up to the Areopagus, asking him, "May we be told what this new teaching of yours is? For the things you are saying sound strange to us. We should therefore like to be told exactly what they mean." (For all the Athenians and their foreign visitors used to devote their whole leisure to telling or hearing about something new.) So Paul, taking his stand in the centre of the Areopagus, spoke as follows: "Men of Athens, I perceive that you are in every respect remarkably religious. For as I passed along and observed the things you worship, I found also an altar bearing the inscription, 'TO AN UNKNOWN GOD.' "The Being, therefore, whom you, without knowing Him, revere, Him I now proclaim to you.

But there were also some wandering Jewish exorcists who undertook to invoke the name of Jesus over those who had the evil spirits, saying, "I command you by that Jesus whom Paul preaches." There were seven sons of one Sceva, a Jew of high-priestly family, who were doing this. "Jesus I know," the evil spirit answered, "and Paul I have heard of, but who are you?"read more.
And the man in whom the evil spirit was sprang on two of them, over-mastered them both, and treated them with such violence, that they fled from the house stripped of their clothes and wounded.

Do not be drawn aside by all sorts of strange teaching; for it is well to have the heart made stedfast through God's grace, and not by special kinds of food, from which those who scrupulously attend to them have derived no benefit.

You cannot drink the Lord's cup and the cup of demons: you cannot be joint-partakers both in the table of the Lord and in the table of demons.

Now, however, having come to know God--or rather to be known by Him--how is it you are again turning back to weak and worthless rudimentary notions to which you are once more willing to be enslaved? You scrupulously observe days and months, special seasons, and years.

Let no one defraud you of your prize, priding himself on his humility and on his worship of the angels, and taking his stand on the visions he has seen, and idly puffed up with his unspiritual thoughts.

As to eating things which have been sacrificed to idols, we are fully aware that an idol is nothing in the world, and that there is no God but One. For if so-called gods do exist, either in Heaven or on earth--and in fact there are many such gods and many such lords-- yet *we* have but one God, the Father, who is the source of all things and for whose service we exist, and but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom we and all things exist.