Tool Alpha
The Stoic Reader
Stoic texts read beside the New Testament passages that share their words or their argument, and where the New Testament turns.
If the foot could reason
Epictetus says a citizen of the world should act like a hand or foot that could reason and always chose for the whole. Paul has the foot speak: because I am not a hand, I am not of the body.
1 Corinthians 12:15, in every translation this tool compares.
The real question: Epictetus and Paul both make the foot talk. Are they making it say the same thing? The left-back complains he never gets to score. One coach tells him to think of the team. Another tells him the team is nothing without him. Which is each writer saying to the foot?
"What then does the character of a citizen imply? To hold no private interest; to deliberate of nothing as a separate individual, but rather like the hand or the foot, which, if they had reason, and comprehended the constitution of nature, would never pursue, or desire, but with a reference to the whole."
πούς (pous), foot, and χείρ (cheir), hand. Epictetus 2.10.4: εἰ ἡ χεὶρ ἢ ὁ ποὺς λογισμὸν εἶχον, if the hand or the foot had reason. 1 Corinthians 12:15: ἐὰν εἴπῃ ὁ πούς, ὅτι οὐκ εἰμὶ χείρ, if the foot should say, because I am not a hand. Ordinary words, but the same two limbs in the same figure.
Both use a thinking limb to teach that the part exists for the whole. The NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible says personifying impersonal objects so that they could speak was a device orators used to hold attention.
Epictetus's foot, if it could think, would give up its own interest entirely, and the next sentences say a wise man would even co-operate with his own sickness and death because the whole is superior to the part (2.10.5). Paul's foot is told it belongs, whatever it feels (12:15), and the body is told it cannot do without it (12:21). Epictetus sacrifices the part to the whole. Paul defends the part inside the whole, and says God arranged each member as he chose (12:18).
The image and its two limbs are shared, and the study notes on 12:12 and 12:15-16 place it among ancient rhetorical and political commonplaces. No source in hand says Paul knew this discourse.
Not two versions of the same lesson. Epictetus teaches the part to want nothing for itself. Paul teaches the body to honor the part.
- Epictetus, Discourses 2.10.3-5, Greek text ed. Heinrich Schenkl (Teubner, 1916), Perseus Digital Library (canonical-greekLit)
- Epictetus, Discourses, trans. Thomas Wentworth Higginson (Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1890), 2.10, Perseus Digital Library
- SBL Greek New Testament, 1 Corinthians 12:15-16, via MorphGNT
- NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible (Zondervan, 2016), notes on 1 Corinthians 12:12, 12:15-16 and 12:21
