How Stoicism can help us

For anyone who wants an alternate view (by Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Aphorism #9):

"Do you want to live "according to nature"? O you noble Stoics, what a verbal swindle! Imagine a being like nature - extravagant without limit, indifferent without limit, without purposes and consideration, without pity and justice, simultaneously fruitful, desolate, and unknown - imagine this indifference itself as a power - how could you live in accordance with this indifference?8 Living - isn't that precisely a will to be something different from what this nature is? Isn't living appraising, preferring, being unjust, being limited, wanting to be different? And if your imperative "live according to nature" basically means what amounts to "live according to life"- why can you not just do that? Why make a principle out of what you yourselves are and must be? The truth of the matter is quite different: while you pretend to be in raptures as you read the canon of your law out of nature, you want something which is the reverse of this, you weird actors and self-deceivers! Your pride wants to prescribe to and incorporate into nature, this very nature, your morality, your ideal. You demand that nature be "in accordance with the stoa ," and you'd like to make all existence merely living in accordance with your own image of it - as a huge and eternal glorification and universalizing of stoicism! With all your love of truth, you have forced yourselves for such a long time and with such persistence and hypnotic rigidity to look at nature falsely, that is, stoically, until you're no long capable of seeing nature as anything else - and some abysmal arrogance finally inspires you with the lunatic hope that, because you know how to tyrannize over yourselves - Stoicism is self-tyranny - nature also allows herself to be tyrannized. Is the Stoic then not a part of nature?.... But this is an ancient eternal story: what happened then with the Stoics is still happening today, as soon as a philosophy begins to believe in itself. It always creates a world in its own image. It cannot do anything different. Philosophy is this tyrannical drive itself, the spiritual will to power, to a "creation of the world," to the causa prima [first cause]."

I have seven translations. I really like the Grube one.

Greco-Buddhism, as its name suggests, is Buddhism with Greek influence, not vice versa.

I have the following;

1) The translation by Gregory Hays is the most accessible. Get the "Modern Library" hardcover edition. Has a nice introduction and notes.

2) The translation by Martin Hammond in "Penguin Classics" is also very good. Has detailed introduction and notes.

3) The translation with detailed notes by A.S.L.Farquharson is considered one of the definitive ones. Get the hardcover published by "Everyman's Library".

4) Finally there is a good translation by Robin Hard in "Oxford World's Classics". Robin Hard has also translated Epictetus "Discourses" and hence you may find his work unifying.

Early Christianity is the fulfillment of 1st Century Judaism with Jesus Christ being revealed as the Messiah and King. Modern day Judaism, that is Rabbinic Judaism (which followed some time after the destruction of the 2nd Temple) denies Jesus as that expected Messiah and has an expectation of someone else that is to come.

For Christians, The Old Testament and New Testament are very much coupled together. There's a lot of prophecies and typologies you can read about from the Old Testament that finds its fulfillment in Jesus and the New Testament (such as the suffering Messiah).

I'd suggest C.S. Lewis' book "Mere Christianity" (who was good friends and influenced to convert by J.R.R. Tolkien and G.K. Chesterton) to get a clearer picture of Christianity without the sugar coating we commonly get from the media today. Lewis brings up the Trilemma, which is unique only to the founder of Christianity.