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.
Your brother, the slave
Epictetus scolds a master who cannot bear his slave: the slave is his brother, a son of Zeus. Paul sends Onesimus back no longer as a slave but as a beloved brother.
Philemon 1:16, in every translation this tool compares.
The real question: when Epictetus and Paul both call a slave a brother, are they making the same demand on the master? The boss calls the cleaner part of the family at the Christmas party. It may change nothing on Monday, or it may change everything. What does each writer expect the master to do?
"But how is it possible to bear such things? O slavish man! will you not bear with your own brother, who has God for his Father, as being a son from the same stock, and of the same high descent?"
ἀδελφός (adelphos), Strong's G80, brother. Epictetus 1.13.3: ἀνάσχῃ τοῦ ἀδελφοῦ τοῦ σαυτοῦ, will you not bear with your own brother, who has Zeus as forefather. In 1.13.4 slaves are ἀδελφοὶ φύσει, brothers by nature. Philemon 16: οὐκέτι ὡς δοῦλον ἀλλὰ ὑπὲρ δοῦλον, ἀδελφὸν ἀγαπητόν, no longer as a slave but more than a slave, a beloved brother.
Both tell a master that the person he owns is his kin. Both rest it on a shared origin above the master's purchase. Epictetus answers the master who says he bought them with a charge that he is looking at the laws of dead men and not the laws of the gods (1.13.5).
The ground of the kinship. For Epictetus every slave is a brother by nature, because all descend from Zeus. For Paul, Onesimus is a brother both in the flesh and in the Lord (16), and Paul asks Philemon to receive him as he would receive Paul himself (17). The NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible notes that Roman law treated slaves as both persons and property, but family obligations would not allow one to treat a full brother as property. Epictetus asks the master to be patient with a brother. Paul asks him to welcome one.
The word is shared and the argument is close. The study note on Ephesians 6:9 says Aristotle complained of a few thinkers, presumably early Stoics, who held slaves to be their masters' spiritual equals, and that so far as we know only Paul suggests in practice that masters treat slaves the same way. No source in hand says Paul knew Epictetus's discourse.
Not an abolition text in either writer. Epictetus does not tell the master to free the slave, and Paul's request is about Onesimus, not the institution.
- Epictetus, Discourses 1.13.3-5, Greek text ed. Heinrich Schenkl (Teubner, 1916), Perseus Digital Library (canonical-greekLit)
- Epictetus, Discourses, trans. Thomas Wentworth Higginson (Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1890), 1.13, Perseus Digital Library
- SBL Greek New Testament, Philemon 16, via MorphGNT
- NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible (Zondervan, 2016), notes on Philemon 16 and Ephesians 6:9
