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.
From thee, in thee, to thee
Marcus addresses Nature: from you are all things, in you all things, to you all things. Paul ends Romans 11 with all things from God, through God and to God.
Romans 11:36, in every translation this tool compares.
The real question: when Marcus and Paul use nearly the same little words about where all things come from and go to, are they saying the same thing about God? Two people both say the house is everything to them. One means the house is all there is. The other means the man who built it is. Which is each writer saying?
"Everything harmonizes with me, which is harmonious to thee, O Universe. Nothing for me is too early nor too late, which is in due time for thee. Everything is fruit to me which thy seasons bring, O Nature: from thee are all things, in thee are all things, to thee all things return."
The formula of prepositions with πάντα (panta), all things. Marcus 4.23: ἐκ σοῦ πάντα, ἐν σοὶ πάντα, εἰς σὲ πάντα, from you all things, in you all things, to you all things. Romans 11:36: ἐξ αὐτοῦ καὶ δι’ αὐτοῦ καὶ εἰς αὐτὸν τὰ πάντα, from him and through him and to him are all things. The first and last prepositions match exactly. The middle one differs: Marcus has ἐν, in; Paul has διά, through.
Both close a meditation on the order of things with a doxology of origin and goal. The NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible says philosophers distinguished levels of causation with terms such as from, through and for, and that all the levels apply in 11:36.
Marcus is speaking to Nature and to the universe, and the formula is the reason he can call nothing too early or too late. Paul is speaking of the God whose judgments are unsearchable (11:33), and he follows the formula with to him be the glory forever. The middle preposition carries the difference. In Marcus all things are in Nature, because Nature is the whole. In Paul all things are through God, who stands distinct from what he made.
The prepositions are a shared philosophical way of talking about causes, as the study note says. Marcus reigned AD 161-80, long after Romans, so he is a witness to the formula, not its source for Paul. No source in hand says Paul took the formula from a Stoic text; the link is the vocabulary of causation.
Not pantheism in Paul. The middle word is the guard: through him, not in him.
- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 4.23, Greek text ed. J. H. Leopold, Perseus Digital Library (canonical-greekLit)
- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, trans. George Long, Book Four, Internet Classics Archive, http://classics.mit.edu/Antoninus/meditations.4.four.html
- SBL Greek New Testament, Romans 11:36, via MorphGNT
- NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible (Zondervan, 2016), note on Romans 11:36
