Reading Someone Else's Mail

Over half the books of the New Testament are letters, and a letter is an occasional document. It exists because of an occasion: a question asked, a crisis reported, a delegation arriving, a rumour that needed killing. Nobody writes a letter to produce a systematic theology. They write to answer the thing in front of them, and they leave unsaid everything both parties already agree about. That last clause is the whole difficulty. A letter is the densest and most elliptical writing there is, because it assumes shared knowledge that we do not share, and when Paul reminds a congregation of what they already know he is not being coy. He is doing what every letter writer does, and we are the ones standing outside the conversation.

In 1895 and again in his 1908 Light from the Ancient East, Adolf Deissmann pressed a distinction that reshaped the field: a letter is a real piece of private correspondence, while an epistle is a literary composition dressed in letter form for the reading public. Cicero's published collections belong to the second category; the thousands of scraps of ordinary correspondence recovered from Egyptian rubbish heaps at Oxyrhynchus belong to the first. Deissmann put Paul firmly with the rubbish heaps, and the point was liberating: this is not literature about religion, it is a man writing to people he knows.

Later work softened the line without erasing it. Stanley Stowers, in Letter Writing in Greco-Roman Antiquity (1986), showed that the two categories are ends of a spectrum rather than a pair of boxes, that ancient letter writing was a taught craft with handbooks behind it, and that Paul is clearly an educated writer working with recognised conventions. Pseudo-Demetrius lists twenty-one letter types; Pseudo-Libanius lists forty-one. Paul uses the standard shape, which you can see by laying four of his openings side by side: sender, recipients, a greeting, a thanksgiving, then the body, then moral instruction, then greetings, then a closing in his own hand.

So the honest description is a real letter, written by a trained writer, using a public form, to a particular congregation, about particular trouble. Every one of those five terms matters when you go to apply it. And there is a sixth fact about how these letters were made. Near the end of Romans comes a sentence most readers skate over: 'I, Tertius, who wrote down this letter, greet you in the Lord' (Romans 16:22). Tertius is a secretary, an amanuensis, and he has slipped his own greeting into the apostle's letter. Paul did not, in the ordinary case, write with his own hand. He dictated, and you can see the seam where he takes the pen: 'See what large letters I am using to write to you with my own hand!' in Galatians 6:11, the signatures in 1 Corinthians 16:21, Colossians 4:18 and 2 Thessalonians 3:17, and in Philemon 19 an IOU in his own writing. A first-century reader would have understood at once. The body was dictated; the signature authenticates it.

E. Randolph Richards, in The Secretary in the Letters of Paul (1991) and later in Paul and First-Century Letter Writing (2004), sets out the degrees of freedom a secretary could be given, from word-for-word transcription, through recording shorthand and writing up a fair copy, to being handed the substance and asked to compose. All three are attested in the period. Which one Paul used we do not know, and it probably varied. Be careful what you build on this, in both directions: secretarial theory legitimately loosens the inference from style to author, which means a critic cannot treat style as a fingerprint and a defender cannot treat the secretary as a solution to every anomaly. Dictation introduces a real unknown into stylistic argument about the Pastoral Epistles, and the authorship debates are not settled by it.

One further consequence is easy to miss. These letters were dictated aloud and then read aloud to an assembled congregation, probably by the courier who carried them, who may well have been briefed to answer questions. Sound and rhythm are doing work. When the same word rings four times in six verses, that is not accident, and it was heard before it was ever studied.

If these are crafted documents rather than transcribed conversation, then they have structure, and finding the structure is part of finding the meaning. Two lines of work have been especially useful, and each has been pushed too far by its enthusiasts.

The first is rhetorical criticism. Ancient education trained speakers in three species of persuasion, forensic for accusation and defence, deliberative for a future course of action, and epideictic for praise and blame, and it trained them in a standard arrangement: an opening to win a hearing, a statement of the facts, a thesis, the proof, and a closing. In 1979 Hans Dieter Betz published a commentary on Galatians in the Hermeneia series reading the whole letter as an apologetic letter in forensic rhetoric laid out on that pattern: a prescript at 1:1-5, the exordium at 1:6-11, a narratio through the autobiography at 1:12 to 2:14, the propositio at 2:15-21, a long probatio at 3:1 to 4:31, an exhortatio at 5:1 to 6:10, and then the epistolary postscript at 6:11-18. Margaret Mitchell's Paul and the Rhetoric of Reconciliation (1991) did something comparable for 1 Corinthians, reading it as deliberative rhetoric aimed at concord, with the appeal in 1:10 that there be no divisions among you functioning as the propositio of the entire letter. George Kennedy's New Testament Interpretation through Rhetorical Criticism (1984) made the method accessible to a generation of students.

The gain is real: you stop reading a letter as a string of topics and start reading it as an argument going somewhere. The caution is also real, and it comes in two forms. The first is that the classification itself is unstable. Betz called Galatians forensic; Kennedy and Robert Hall read the exhortation as deliberative; Ben Witherington reclassified the whole letter as deliberative; and R. Dean Anderson objected that the paraenesis of chapters 5 and 6 cannot be fitted into a forensic scheme at all. The second is Philip Kern's argument in Rhetoric and Galatians (1998) that the ancient handbooks describe oratory limited in scope, venue and style, and functioned descriptively rather than as templates for composition; Kern and others add that the surviving letter-writing manuals do not use these categories at all. Kern concluded that Paul wrote Galatians independently of the rules of Greco-Roman rhetoric, and pointed out that the proposed outlines diverge widely enough that no stable structure emerges, which is awkward for a method claiming to recover an obvious one. Analysts do converge in places, including several who largely follow Betz, so the disagreement is about how much the model delivers rather than whether it delivers anything. A sensible position is that Paul persuades, and that studying how persuasion was taught in his world illuminates his letters, without assuming that he sat with a handbook open.

The second line of work is the diatribe. In his 1910 dissertation Rudolf Bultmann compared Paul's style to the Cynic and Stoic diatribe, and in 1981 Stanley Stowers reworked the comparison in The Diatribe and Paul's Letter to the Romans, arguing that the diatribe belongs not to street preaching but to the philosophical school, where a teacher advances an argument by raising and demolishing objections from an imagined student. Once you see it in Romans you cannot unsee it. An interlocutor appears and is addressed directly at 2:1 and again at 2:17. Objections are put in someone else's mouth and then repudiated with the phrase mē genoito, which the BSB renders 'Certainly not!' and which occurs ten times in Romans, at 3:4, 3:6, 3:31, 6:2, 6:15, 7:7, 7:13, 9:14, 11:1 and 11:11.

The interpretive payoff is immediate and practical. Romans 6:1, 'Shall we continue in sin so that grace may increase?', is not Paul's teaching and not even a real question from a real person; it is the objection he has set up in order to answer. A reader who does not recognise the device can end up attributing to Paul the very position he is refuting, which is exactly the error we saw in 1 Corinthians 6:12. Recognising voices is not a technicality. It decides who is speaking, and therefore what is being taught.

1 Corinthians is the best teaching case in the New Testament, because Paul keeps telling us how he came by his information. Chloe's people have reported quarrels (1:11). It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among them (5:1). The Corinthians have written a letter, now lost, which he answers under headings marked by the Greek peri de, 'now concerning', at 7:1, 7:25, 8:1, 12:1, 16:1 and 16:12. A delegation, Stephanas and Fortunatus and Achaicus, has arrived and refreshed his spirit (16:17-18). And he has already written them at least one earlier letter, which we do not have (5:9).

Out of that you can build a fairly detailed picture of the occasion: a congregation split into factions around personalities, proud of its wisdom and its freedom, tolerating a scandal, suing one another in the courts, divided over marriage and celibacy, divided over meat from temples, disorderly at the Lord's supper, competitive about spiritual gifts, and unsure whether resurrection means a body. That reconstruction is worth making, and the first question of application depends on it.

The technique has a name, mirror reading: inferring the shape of the problem from the shape of the response, as you would infer a face from its reflection. It also has a well-documented failure rate. John Barclay's 1987 study Mirror-Reading a Polemical Letter, working on Galatians, is the standard treatment, and its value for a student is that it names four ways the method goes wrong. Undue selectivity, where you build the opponents out of the verses that suit your theory and ignore the rest. Over-interpretation, where you squeeze more out of a statement than it can carry. Mishandling polemics, where you take a writer's fighting caricature of his opponents as a neutral description of them. And latching on to particular words, as if any striking term must be a quotation from the other side.

Barclay's seven criteria are worth memorising: weigh the type of utterance, whether assertion, denial, command or aside; weigh the tone; count how often a theme recurs; ask how clearly the statement points to a specific counter-position; notice what is unfamiliar in the letter and so unlikely to be the writer's own idiom; test whether your reconstruction is consistent with the letter as a whole; and test whether it is historically plausible in that time and place. Then comes the move that is the heart of his method and the part most often dropped when he is cited: place each element of your reconstruction on a scale of probability, from what is virtually certain at one end down to what is frankly incredible at the other, and publish the rating alongside the reconstruction rather than presenting every part of it as equally firm.

Apply that ranking honestly to 1 Corinthians and you get three tiers. Nearly certain: there were factions, there was a dispute about idol food, there was disorder at the supper, some denied a bodily resurrection. Probable: there was an ascetic party pressing celibacy, and a group whose confidence in its knowledge Paul thought dangerous. Speculative: the detailed theological systems reconstructed for those groups, whether over-realised eschatology, proto-gnosticism, or a Hellenistic dualism about the body. That third tier is where a great deal of twentieth-century scholarship lives, and a student should know it is the softest ground.

Greek manuscripts have no quotation marks. They have no punctuation of the kind you are used to at all, and in the earliest copies not even consistent spaces between words. Every quotation mark in your New Testament was put there by an editor or a translation committee who judged that the writer had stopped speaking in his own voice. Those judgments are not arbitrary, and they are not neutral either.

1 Corinthians is where this bites hardest. The BSB, the translation this course quotes, marks quoted slogans in three verses. In 6:12, twice, 'Everything is permissible for me,' but not everything is beneficial, and again, 'Everything is permissible for me,' but I will not be mastered by anything. In 6:13, 'Food for the stomach and the stomach for food'. In 10:23, 'Everything is permissible,' twice again. Other translations, the ESV among them, also put quotation marks into 8:1 and 8:4, which the BSB leaves as running text: 'We know that we all have knowledge,' and 'We know that an idol is nothing at all in the world, and that there is no God but one.' Read them both ways and ask whether they sound like Paul or like Corinth. Verse 8:8, that food does not bring us closer to God, reads like another slogan and the BSB leaves it unmarked.

Marked or not, in every one of those cases the reading is more or less agreed among commentators: these are Corinthian catchphrases, and Paul repeats them in order to concede what is true in them and then cut them down to size. Notice what that does to a familiar proof text. If 'Everything is permissible for me' is the Corinthians' slogan and not Paul's doctrine, then a sermon on Christian liberty built on 6:12 is quoting the people Paul is correcting.

Then there is 7:1, where the agreement runs out. The BSB prints the second half as Paul's own statement, with no quotation marks: 'Now for the matters you wrote about: It is good to abstain from sexual relations.' A long interpretive tradition, Jerome among it, reads it the same way, as Paul's opening statement, after which the chapter is a series of concessions to human weakness. The ESV, the NRSV and the NIV read it the other way, as a quotation: the Corinthians have written to say that it is good for a man not to touch a woman, and chapter 7 is Paul's careful, qualified, sympathetic-but-firm response to an ascetic position. The whole feel of the chapter changes. On the first reading Paul is permitting marriage to people who cannot manage celibacy; on the second he is defending marriage against people who despise it.

You can argue this, and both sides have a real case. For the BSB's choice: the same verdict, 'it is good', comes back in Paul's own undisputed voice in verse 8, 'It is good for them to remain unmarried, as I am', and again in verse 26. Verse 7 has Paul wishing all were as he is, and verses 32 to 35 commend singleness on their own terms, so an ascetic leaning in Paul himself is not invented, and a committee may reasonably withhold quotation marks where, unlike 6:12, no rebuttal follows inside the same sentence. For the quotation: the same letter quotes Corinthian slogans elsewhere, which even the BSB marks; the clause is blunt and unqualified in a way Paul's own sentences in this chapter are not, as the BSB's footnote shows when it gives the literal Greek, 'It is good for a man not to touch a woman'; and verse 2, 'But because there is so much sexual immorality, each man should have his own wife', reads naturally as a correction. Both readings are held by competent people. What a student should take away is not a verdict but a discipline: find out where your translation has made a judgment for you, and know what hangs on it.

All of this converges on one practical rule. The first question of application to a letter is not what does this mean to me. It is what problem was this answering. Until you can state the problem, you do not know what the sentence is doing, and a sentence lifted out of its argument will do whatever you need it to do.

Work it on a hard case. 'Do everything without complaining or arguing' (Philippians 2:14) is a fine sentence to put on a staff room wall, and as a wall verse it means be pleasant at work. Ask what problem it answered and the picture shifts. Philippians is written to a congregation under external pressure, from a prisoner, and it has a named internal rupture at 4:2 between Euodia and Syntyche. Verse 2:14 sits immediately after the hymn of Christ's self-emptying and immediately before an image of a crooked generation. The complaining in view is the corrosion of a small, pressured, mutually dependent community, and the remedy offered is not cheerfulness but the mind of Christ, who did not grasp at status. That reading asks far more of a reader than the wall poster did.

There is a reason the letters, more than any other genre, get flattened into timeless abstraction. Narrative resists it, because a story has people in it doing things at a time and place, and you cannot forget that Abraham lived somewhere. Law resists it, because the oddity of the specifics keeps reminding you that you are in another world. Prophecy resists it, because it names kings. But a letter is made of sentences of general-sounding advice, and its sentences detach cleanly. They can be lifted whole, with no visible damage, and set down anywhere. 'Do everything without complaining' survives the journey looking undamaged, having lost almost everything.

The other side of the warning needs saying with equal force, because the cure can be worse than the disease. A reader who has learned that these are occasional letters can come to treat them as merely occasional: a file of first-century case notes with no claim on anyone now. That is not what the letters think they are. Paul assumes his instruction binds churches he has never visited (1 Corinthians 7:17, 11:16, 14:33). He expects letters to be read across congregations (Colossians 4:16). The occasion is the door into the meaning, not a wall around it.

So hold both. This is somebody else's mail, and you are reading over their shoulder, and you owe them the courtesy of finding out what they had asked. And it was preserved, copied and circulated because the churches judged that the answer reached further than the question. The next lesson is about how to make that reach carefully.