Final Reflections on "Epictetus The Complete Works" As It Relates to the Study of the New Testament

 I ended my journey with Epictetus today, having finished "The Complete Works" and thoroughly enjoying it. Along the way, I've posted a number of thoughts as well as citations from his discourses. There are however a few things that I would like to reflect on about it.
1) The use of language and translation. Epictetus spoke Koine Greek, and his discourses and handbook are written almost entirely in this 2,000 year old dialect. This is also the dialect in which the New Testament is written exclusively. For the student of the New Testament, and anyone who aspires to be able to read and translate the New Testament, the importance of this contemporaneous witness to the language outside of a "Christian religious" context cannot be overstated.
     To the speaker of a language, the words he uses mean just what they mean, neither more nor less. Two people who speak the same language are able to communicate because they understand the mutually agreed upon meaning of both the words and the grammar and syntax with which those words are used. It is also understood, perhaps less so but still, that 1:1 meaning translation of one word for another is rare between two different languages. This is why, in many translations of the N.T., you will find the same word translated at least three or four different ways, and one word in English can render at least three or four Greek words as well. For the Koine Greek speaker, when he chose a word, he wasn't thinking about which meaning he was going to give to that word, because for him or her, there was only one meaning to that word in the same way there is only one actual meaning to any given English word for the English speaker. We understand the different ways the word could be used, but they all fall within the scope of that one meaning.
     The actual meaning of a word matters, and the lexical definition of a word matters. It's how we understand and translate that word from the Koine dialect into English. What I have observed over the years is that the dictionaries and lexicons of Koine Greek (most of them compiled in the nineteenth century or early twentieth) are almost uniformly biased towards Christian religious, and specifically Protestant definitions because they are written as resources to translate the New Testament specifically so that it reads in line with Protestant, and frequently Protestant Evangelical teaching. Whether this was intentional or not is up for debate. However, when you use resources that are more broadly targeted, and take into account the wider body of ancient Greek literature, then you begin to see different spectrums of meaning assigned to those words. For example, the BAGD, which is the standard lexicon for Koine specifically, is incredibly biased towards traditional Protestant religious definitions, whereas the Liddell-Scott, which takes into account the larger body of ancient Greek literature, is not.
     It has been said that if you control the meaning of a word, you control the people using that word. And if you control the lexical definitions that Christian translators use to make their translations, then you control what the translations do and do not say. And if you control what the translations do and do not say, you control what the people who read them are supposed to believe.
      Where does Epictetus fit into all of this? He speaks Koine, and is not a Christian. He mentions "Galileans" only once in book four of his discourses, otherwise he is a dyed in the wool Roman Greek Stoic philosophy who acknowledges and worships Zeus and the rest of the Olympian pantheon and reveres Socrates as nearly a prophet of Zeus himself. He uses words like "hamartano," which is almost universally translated in the NT as "sin," yet he means "error," or "mistake," as the word actually meant for hundreds if not thousands of years. He uses the word "logos" to mean "reason," "rationality," but more importantly, Logos as the divine governing principle which actively created and ordered the universe and in which every human being has a share, and not just "word." He uses the exact same words and language as is found in the writings of the New Testament, but it would make no sense whatsoever in the context of who he was and what he was to translate his words using the same religious meanings we would use to translate the same words in the New Testament. I imagine that were we to peruse the Greek texts of other non-Christian authors of the period, we would find much the same thing. And if we should, shouldn't we question why we've been using erroneous translations and meanings which are meant to favor one particular theological branch of Christianity?
2) As I have previously written, it became clear to me in many, many places in Epictetus' discourses that there were so many parallels of metaphor, logic, and analogy between his explanation of Stoic ethics and the words of both Jesus and Paul that it cannot be a coincidence. Yet Epictetus, even though his would have been teaching at least fifty years after Christ's resurrection, does not mention anything at all about either Jesus or Paul. All of his metaphors and analogies appear to be drawn from either deductive reasoning or from the pagan Greek poets and Stoic philosophers. I don't think it's unreasonable to say that Stoic philosophy and ethics were just as ubiquitous throughout the Roman Empire as Christian philosophy and ethics are throughout the United States today. Even when Jesus takes the coin and asks whose face and name are on it, so does Epictetus in one of his discourses. Jesus used the imagery of a plant needing to take root in order to thrive and produce fruit, so does Epictetus. There are so many parallels it would be impossible to list them all here in this relatively brief reflection. And Paul is no different as one could make the case that where Paul says, "To whomever you offer yourself a slave to obey, you are a slave of that one you obey" is one of the core principles of Epictetus' Stoicism. And so I think, at the very least, a strong argument can be made that these parallels exist because they are coming from the same Voice, the same Source, the same Logos speaking through and to different cultural worldviews to get the same point across on how we are to live.
     I was going to post a third point, but I can't remember what it was. It's getting late for me, and I'm getting tired. 5:15 am comes all too early. The points I have already made are likely going to be argued with, if not overtly, then internally by many readers. But these things cannot just be swept under the rug because they don't fit the narrative. They cannot be ignored because some pastor or Bible teacher either doesn't like them or doesn't understand them. Burying them doesn't make them go away, and it leaves us with a skewed understanding of the cultural context in which the things of the New Testament were said and written. And because of that, it leaves us misunderstanding what the authors of the New Testament were actually saying. And that is unconscionable if we truly believe God inspired them to say what they did, in the language they did, and in the cultural worldview they did.