It's the narrative

This is not at all to say, of course, that we should think of narrative as something that is only in the background of practices, normative judgments, metaphysical accounts of the world, and so forth. Narrative, to the contrary, is present in all layers of a tradition’s particularity (even if inchoate or left unarticulated). Nor should we think of any sort of regular historical order, as if narratives must precede practice or reflective questioning. Again, to the contrary, it could easily be the case that narratives arise in light of questions pertaining to long-established practices (why do we do what we do?) or particular queries about existence, for example (why is the world here rather than not?). But as long as practices make sense and as long as “metaphysical” queries proceed beyond the mere statement of the questions themselves, narratives will be found and/or constructed and (re)told. To put it into terms more familiar to scholars of the New Testament and early Christianity, demonstrating that Paul’s letters have a “narrative substructure” simultaneously elucidates the ground of their possibility as intelligible speech. Which is but another way of saying that even in naming particular texts as Christian or Stoic, We presuppose a narrative that allows us to locate them in just this way.—One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions, 200–201