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.
Written on the heart
Epictetus says no one is born knowing a right-angled triangle, but everyone comes into the world with a notion of good and evil. Paul says Gentiles who do by nature what the law requires show its work written on their hearts.
Romans 2:15, in every translation this tool compares.
The real question: Epictetus and Paul both say people are born knowing right from wrong. Do they mean the same knowing? Nobody taught the toddler that hitting his sister was unfair, but he knows it. Is that knowledge a gift, a leftover, or a witness against him?
"For we came into the world without any natural idea of a right-angled triangle; of a diesis, or a semitone, in music; but we learn each of these things by some artistic instruction. … But who ever came into the world without an innate idea of good and evil, fair and base, becoming and unbecoming, happiness and misery, proper and improper; what ought to be done, and what not to be done?"
φύσει (physei), by nature. Epictetus 2.11.2 uses it of what we do not have by nature: οὐδεμίαν φύσει ἔννοιαν, no natural notion of a triangle. For good and evil he uses ἔμφυτον ἔννοιαν, an innate notion (2.11.3). Paul uses φύσει at 2:14, Gentiles do by nature what the law requires, and adds συνείδησις (syneidēsis), conscience, at 2:15. The site's lexicon marks the ethical sense of συνείδησις as Stoic and late. The entry is filed as argument because Epictetus's own word for the moral knowledge is ἔμφυτος, not φύσει.
Both say moral knowledge is not taught like geometry but found in everyone. The NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible, on 2:15, says ancient thinkers often spoke of a universal natural law giving people innate knowledge of what is right, and often connected it with conscience; many Diaspora Jewish thinkers said the same.
What the knowledge is for. Epictetus says it is where philosophy begins: the beginning of philosophy is a consciousness of our own weakness, and the work is to apply the notions rightly (2.11.1, 4). Paul says it is evidence in a trial: their thoughts accuse or excuse them on the day God judges by Christ Jesus (2:15-16). The study note says the point was to make Gentiles responsible, and that for Paul the law on the heart could be obeyed only when written as part of the new covenant (Jeremiah 31).
The idea is common to Stoics and Diaspora Jews, as the study note says, and the word for conscience carries Stoic use, as the site's lexicon says. No source in hand says Paul drew on Epictetus. The pairing shares an argument, not a borrowed text.
Not a claim that Paul thought conscience saves. In Romans 2 it is a witness at judgment, not a way out of it.
- Epictetus, Discourses 2.11.1-4, Greek text ed. Heinrich Schenkl (Teubner, 1916), Perseus Digital Library (canonical-greekLit)
- Epictetus, Discourses, trans. Thomas Wentworth Higginson (Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1890), 2.11, Perseus Digital Library
- SBL Greek New Testament, Romans 2:14-15, via MorphGNT
- Site Greek lexicon (Abbott-Smith), word-study-lexicon.json, G4893 and G5449
- NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible (Zondervan, 2016), note on Romans 2:15
