Annalisa Phillips Wilson, “Those ‘in the Lord’ Are Free: 1 Corinthians 7 and a Stoic Paradox,” JTS 76 (2025), 466-467.
In verse 22, Paul says that the slave who has been called is the Lord’s freedman (ἀπελεύθερος), a statement that echoes the well-known paradox of the ‘free slave’. The notion of a sage who, through his virtue, maintained metaphorical freedom while legally enslaved arises in numerous texts, as seen below, and is especially associated with Stoic teaching. Philo, in a treatise indebted to Stoic ethics, advises ‘Casting aside, therefore, specious quibblings and the terms which have no basis in nature but depend upon convention, such as “homebred,” “purchased” or “captured in war,” let us examine the veritable free man, who alone possesses independence, even though a host of people claim to be his masters’. Seneca imagines a person as follows: ‘“He is a slave.” His soul, however, may be that of a freeman. “He is a slave.” But shall that stand in his way?’ Dio Chrysostom, in an oration on this theme, has an enslaved person describing themselves thus: ‘even if I was once in a state of slavery in the fullest sense of the term and had been a slave justly from the very beginning, what is to prevent me now … from being just as free as anybody else?’.
The Amateur Exegete 