Friday, May 17, 2013

Stoicism and Colossians

Reading through Colossians closely and grading the exegetical papers for my Advanced Greek Course, I've been struck by the similarities between Colossians and Stoicism.

(the bust to the left is of Epictetus, one of my favorite Stoics and a close contemporary of Paul)

I know there has been a lot of work on Paul and Stoicism from Troels Engberg-Pederson and a few other monographs comparing Stoic thought to Romans and the "Body of Christ" metaphor. But I've yet to see anything that explicitly compares and contrasts Colossians to early/middle Stoic literature.

It would seem to me that Colossians would be a very helpful point of comparison. Does anyone know of work or a person  comparing the two? I'm pretty ignorant of Colossians scholarship since it's never been a major research interest of mine, so perhaps I'm just really late to a party that's already over, but I thought I would check.

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