No. The nearest thing to it is one English word in the King James, and the Greek behind that word is not about quantity at all.
Let your moderation be known unto all men. The Lord is at hand.
Philippians 4:5 (KJV)
The proverb attaches itself to that one word. Read the verse in 1611 English and it sounds like a rule about portions, and the phrase people repeat follows naturally from it.
The translators used that word once
The Greek is epieikes. It appears five times in the New Testament.
At 1 Timothy 3:3 the King James makes it patient, in a list of things an overseer must be. At Titus 3:2, at James 3:17 where it describes the wisdom from above, and at 1 Peter 2:18 about masters who are easy to work for, the same translators write gentle.
Once, at Philippians 4:5, they wrote moderation. Five appearances, four of them patient or gentle, and the English proverb grew out of the fifth.
Three verses earlier, two women are fighting
The context settles it without any lexicon at all.
I beseech Euodias, and beseech Syntyche, that they be of the same mind in the Lord.
Philippians 4:2 (KJV)
Two women in that congregation had fallen out badly enough that Paul names them in a letter he knew would be read aloud to everybody they knew. Then he tells the church to rejoice. Then, in the next breath, comes the verse about moderation.
Paul does not arrive at portion sizes by way of a quarrel between two colleagues, he arrives at giving ground.
No modern version keeps moderation
The World English Bible has “let your gentleness be known to all men,” and the New International, the New King James, the New Revised Standard and the New American Standard all say much the same. Where the others differ they differ from each other and not from that: reasonableness in the English Standard, graciousness in the Christian Standard, considerate in the New Living, forbearance in the Revised Standard and the American Standard and Young.
Eleven modern versions and five English words, none of them about a quantity and every one of them about not pressing. The word describes what you are when somebody leans on you and you do not lean back as hard as you could.
Which is why the second half of the verse matters, and it gets dropped even more often than the first. The Lord is at hand. The gentleness has a reason attached, and the reason is that the one who settles things is close, so you can afford to let this one go.
None of that is advice about portions, and all of it is advice about how hard to push.
The idea has a real home, and it is Greek
Moderation as a virtue is one of the most serious ideas the ancient world produced, and it belongs to philosophy and not to Paul.
Aristotle builds his ethics on it. Virtue sits between two failures, one of excess and one of deficiency, and he is explicit that he is talking about amounts. In all quantity, he writes, you can take the greater part, the less, or the exactly equal, and the exactly equal is the mean between excess and defect. Courage, he says, is a mean where boldness and fear are both in play, and generosity a mean in giving, and the whole system is built on dials.
Then there is a turn worth having. The lexicons gloss Paul’s word as equitable, from a root meaning to yield, and the classic account of equity is in the same Ethics, three books further on. The equitable man, he writes, is not apt to press the letter of the law but is content to waive his strict claims though backed by it, and it is characteristic of him to take less than his due. The philosopher who built the mean out of amounts uses Paul’s word for giving ground.
The Latin tag is ne quid nimis, nothing too much, and Terence puts it in a play in the second century before Christ, where a father is praising his son for doing everything in measure. That is the same comedy the other proverb in this series came out of, which is a fair indication of how much of our folk wisdom reached us through Roman comedy.
The answer I used to give
Somebody would ask me whether a thing was all right, and I would say all things in moderation, and I thought I was being pastoral.
A wonderful answer, for a counselor who does not want to work. It sounds wise, it commits to nothing, and it hands the question back with a dial on it. Nobody ever asked me that question because they wanted a quantity. They asked because they suspected they were held, and wanted to know if they were right.
Paul asks a different question
He does have a rule for this, and it is not a measurement.
All things are lawful unto me, but all things are not expedient: all things are lawful for me, but I will not be brought under the power of any.
1 Corinthians 6:12 (KJV)
Under the power of. That is the test, and it is a question about who is in charge rather than how much. You can be mastered by a small and perfectly moderate amount, taken every day at the same hour, without ever once exceeding a sensible portion.
Paul finishes that chapter by telling the Corinthians their bodies are not their own, having been bought at a price. Ownership, again. The Greeks asked how much, and Paul asks whose.
And at Philippians 4:5 he is asking neither one. He wants you to be the sort of person other people find easy to deal with, because the Lord is at hand and the argument you are currently winning will not need winning much longer.
Euodias and Syntyche have been dead for nineteen centuries and we still know they fell out, because Paul wrote it down and the letter survived. Whatever it was about, it did not need winning either.