In this chapter I want to try and answer the question of whether Paul's moral teachings were meant to be fitting for ordinary humans. This may seem a strange question, but perhaps less so when we remember that the concept of the sage loomed as central to Hellenistic ethical thought. And, according to Seneca, the sage was an ideal human (Ep. 42.1; also, Alexander, De Fato 196.24–197.3) as rare as the Phoenix that appears only once in 500 years, so hardly an ordinary human. Stoics did not even consider as sages the extraordinary founders of Stoicism: Zeno and Chrysippus. The concept of the sage affected moral thought widely well into the Roman Empire and the later Christian idea of the saint.

But I take my start on Paul's moral thought from another characteristic of ancient philosophy and ancient thought more broadly. Unlike the principled rejections of the metaphysical and the ontological that arose in the wake of Kant's self-proclaimed “Copernican Revolution” and which in the middle third of the last century characterized modern philosophy, the ancients held that rigorous moral thinking must be based on some conception of the way the world is, including what it consists of and how it works. Platonists had a cosmos made up of something like thought, the noetic, and its relative absence, matter. Epicureans had a world of colliding and sometimes compounding atoms and Stoics a world composed of pneuma in various degrees of tension creating a scala naturae, a hierarchy of being. This physics in each case plays an indispensable role in how the system brings about achievement of the ethical goal. In some forms of Platonism, by proper use of the mind one acquires a noetic existence and the abilities to exercise that noetic power. In Epicureanism, recognition of the non-teleological nature of a world of colliding atoms allows an untroubled life shared with others. In Stoicism, being in harmony with the divine pneumatic nature of the world allows one to live according to its providential order and unfolding.

This assumption that the question “how should we live and act?” only makes sense on the basis of understanding how the world is, coheres with ancient Mediterranean folk and West Asian scribal traditions.