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.
Death is nothing terrible
Epictetus says death is nothing terrible; the terror is our opinion of it. Paul calls death the last enemy and taunts it: where is your sting?
1 Corinthians 15:55, in every translation this tool compares.
The real question: Epictetus and Paul both refuse to be afraid of death. Is it the same refusal? Two men walk past a chained dog without flinching. One has decided dogs are harmless. The other knows the dog is chained. Which kind of fearlessness is each writer offering?
"Men are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of things. Thus death is nothing terrible, else it would have appeared so to Socrates. But the terror consists in our notion of death, that it is terrible."
θάνατος (thanatos), death, stands in both, but the key word is in the verdict. Epictetus: ὁ θάνατος οὐδὲν δεινόν, death is nothing dreadful. Paul: ἔσχατος ἐχθρὸς καταργεῖται ὁ θάνατος, the last enemy to be destroyed is death (15:26), and ποῦ σου θάνατε τὸ κέντρον, where, O death, is your sting (15:55). The shared word is the ordinary one; the judgments on it are opposite, so the entry is filed as argument.
Both say the fear of death need not rule a person. The NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible, on Hebrews 2:15, says most ancient thinkers explained that fear of death accomplished nothing, some such as Epicureans arguing that death was annihilation and others such as Stoics arguing that cooperating with Fate was the most reasonable course.
Epictetus removes the terror by revaluing death: it was never bad. Paul keeps death bad, an enemy, and removes the terror by its defeat: the sting of death is sin, and God gives the victory through Jesus Christ (15:56-57). The same note says Jesus overcame enslavement to the fear of death not by assuaging anxiety but by truly overcoming death. The study note on Philippians 1:20-23 adds that Paul knows death remains an evil.
The pairing is drawn here, with the study notes supplying the Stoic background. No source in hand says Paul knew this saying, or Epictetus Paul's letter. The texts share the subject and the refusal of fear, not the reasoning.
Not a disagreement about courage. Both men are brave about death. They disagree about whether death is the enemy.
- Epictetus, Enchiridion 5, Greek text ed. Heinrich Schenkl (Teubner, 1916), Perseus Digital Library (canonical-greekLit)
- Epictetus, The Enchiridion, trans. Thomas Wentworth Higginson (Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1890), ch. 5, Perseus Digital Library
- SBL Greek New Testament, 1 Corinthians 15:26 and 15:55-56; Hebrews 2:14-15, via MorphGNT
- NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible (Zondervan, 2016), notes on Hebrews 2:15 and Philippians 1:20-23
