It just doesn't translate

When we pose the question about God in reverse—how to “translate" the Christian use of the word theos into Stoic usage so that the Stoics would say the same thing with the word God in their grammar that the Christians said in theirs—we are immediately confronted with this problem: the linguistic/conceptual resources needed to render the Christian use of God in Stoic grammar do not exist. There is no word for the Christian use of God because the thought that would entail what God means vis-a-vis the cosmos did not exist within the Stoic take on the whole of things. Moreover, there is no possible way to get the Christian sense of God as “God-as-determined-by-the-history-of-the-Jews-and-Jesus-of-Nazareth” into Stoic grammar. One might as well simply tell the entire Christian story. And, in fact, that is the point: to render God and all that this word entails is to render the narrative that makes the word God mean what it does to both Christians and Stoics. Were the Christian and the Stoic stories the same, the word God would refer to the same thing. But they are not, and the word God is not “translatable.”—One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions, 227

<idle musing>
And therein lies the reason why the Gospels are narratives and why the speeches in the book of Acts are always historical narratives. You have to tell the story in order for people to understand what Rowe calls the grammar. God doesn't mean the same thing to different worldviews. You have to define it, but the way to define it best is via narrative—and even then you risk misunderstandings.
</idle musing>