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.
Autarkes: content, or self-sufficient?
Paul says he has learned to be autarkes in whatever state he is in. Marcus Aurelius uses the same word for the man who needs nothing from outside.
Philippians 4:11, in every translation this tool compares.
The real question: when Paul says he has learned to be content, is he using the philosophers' word for needing no one, or using it for something else? She told her mother she was managing fine on her own. That could mean she needs nobody, or that someone is holding her up whom her mother cannot see. Which kind of fine is Paul?
"Then thou wilt be neither free, nor sufficient for thy own happiness, nor without passion."
αὐτάρκης (autarkēs), Strong's G842, once in the New Testament, at Philippians 4:11. In Meditations 6.16 it is one of three marks of the person who has stopped prizing applause and outward goods: free, self-sufficient, untroubled. In Meditations 3.11 the noun αὐτάρκεια (autarkeia) stands in a list of virtues, and Long renders it "contentment." The site's Greek lexicon gives Philippians 4:11 the philosophical sense, self-sufficient, independent, and subjectively, contented, and adds that in ordinary papyri the word simply means enough. The noun appears at 2 Corinthians 9:8 and 1 Timothy 6:6.
Both describe a person whose peace does not rise and fall with supplies. Paul knows how to be brought low and how to have plenty (4:12). Marcus says that a man who keeps prizing other things must envy and suspect whoever could take them away. The NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible says Greco-Roman thinkers emphasized the value of being content and so needing nothing more than oneself.
The next verse. Paul's sufficiency has a source outside him: he can do all things through the one who strengthens him (4:13). Marcus keeps the source inside, in acting by one's own constitution, which is where 6.16 says honor lies. The same study note puts it in one line: Paul's dependence is on Christ rather than on himself. Paul keeps the philosophers' word and changes what it rests on.
The word is plainly shared and plainly philosophical; the site's lexicon and the study note agree on that. Neither says Paul took it from a Stoic text. Marcus reigned AD 161-80, about a century after Paul's time in Corinth in AD 51/2 as Wright and Bird date it, so he cannot be Paul's source, and this pairing shows the word in Stoic use, not a line of borrowing. On the sources in hand, the link is shared vocabulary from the moral language of the day.
Not a claim that Paul was a Stoic. The word was common coin among moralists. What Paul hangs on it is the difference.
- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 6.16 and 3.11, Greek text ed. J. H. Leopold, Perseus Digital Library (canonical-greekLit)
- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, trans. George Long, Books 3 and 6, Internet Classics Archive, http://classics.mit.edu/Antoninus/meditations.6.six.html
- SBL Greek New Testament, Philippians 4:11, via MorphGNT
- Site Greek lexicon (Abbott-Smith), word-study-lexicon.json, G842 and G841
- NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible, ed. John H. Walton and Craig S. Keener (Zondervan, 2016), notes on Philippians 4:11-13 and 1 Timothy 6:6
- N. T. Wright and Michael F. Bird, The New Testament in Its World (SPCK and Zondervan Academic, 2019), illustration caption giving Marcus's reign as AD 161-80, and ch. 15 on Gallio and the date of Paul in Corinth
