Bible studies, contributions chiefly from papyri and ... - Predestination

241, 242] LETTEES AND EPISTLES. 49
would send copies of the letter to the brethren in Ephesus,
Antioch or Jerusalem ; it was to Borne that he despatched
it : nor did the bearer of it go to the pubhshers in the
Imperial City,^ but rather to some otherwise unknown
brother in the Lord— just hke many another passenger by the
same ship of Corinth, hastening one to that house, another
to this, there to deliver a message by word of mouth, here
to leave a letter or something else. The fact that the Letter
to the Komans is not so enlivened by personal references as
the other letters of Paul is explained by the conditions under
which it was written : .he was addressing a Church which
he did not yet personally know. Considered in the light of
this fact, the infrequence of personal references in the letter
lends no support to its being taken as a literary epistle ; it is
but the natural result of its non-literary purpose. Moreover,
Paul wrote even the "doctrinal" portions in his heart's
blood. The words raXatTrcopo? eyco avOpaiiro^; are no cool
rhetorical expression of an objective ethical condition, but
the impressive indication of a personal ethical experience : it
is not theological paragraphs which Paul is writing here,
but his confessions.
Certain as it seems to the author that the authentic
messages of Paul are letters, he is equally sure that we
have also a number of epistles from New Testament times.
They belong, as such, to the beginnings of " Christian litera-
ture ". The author considers the Letter to the Hebrews as
most unmistakably of all an epistle. It professes, in chap.
13 ^^, to be a X070? tt}? Tra/ja/cA-rjo-eo)?, and one would have no
occasion whatever to consider it anything but a literary ora-
tion—hence not as an epistle ^ at all—^if the eVeo-retXa and
1 It is a further proof of these " epistles " being letters that we know
the bearers of some of them. The epistle as such needs no bearer, and
should it name one it is only as a matter of form. It is a characteristic circumstance
that the writer of the epistle at the end of the Apocalypse of
Baruch sends his booklet to the receivers by an eagle. Paul uses men as his
messengers : he would not have entrusted a letter to eagles —they fly too high.
2 Nor, strictly speaking, can we count the First Epistle of John as an
epistle—on the ground, that is, that the address must have disappeared. It
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