agnostos

Agnostos is a Greek adjective meaning unknown or unknowable. It derives from the privative prefix a- and gnosis, meaning knowledge, yielding a literal sense of “not knowledge” or “not known.” In classical Greek, agnostos describes things that are not known, hidden, or not understood, and it appears in various literary and philosophical contexts.

In Christian usage, the term is encountered in the phrase “the unknown god” (Greek: agnostos theos), used in the New Testament to refer to a deity unknown to the pagans of Paul’s audience in Athens. The expression signals a distinction between the unknown god and traditional pagan gods and is frequently cited in discussions of early Christian outreach to Greco-Roman audiences.

In modern philosophy and theology, agnostos underpins ideas about what is unknowable or beyond human knowledge. From this root, terms such as agnosticism and the agnostic have developed, describing a position that knowledge on certain questions—such as the existence or nature of the divine—is unattainable or not currently known. Beyond religious contexts, agnostos can also be used to denote things that are beyond the scope of inquiry or verification in epistemology.

Today, agnostos is relatively rare in contemporary English outside scholarly or theological writing, with agnosticism and agnostic being the more common terms used to express related ideas.