Reading the Letters

I wanted to include this article to help influence our language this series and future series dealing with epistles. It’s obviously important to understand any genre when dealing with the text, but we need to be extra careful when handling the letters that form our ecclesiology. Why should someone care that Paul told the Corinthians to avoid sexual sin? I am not a Corinthian. Why are you reading someone else’s mail anyways? Imagine if your grandma wrote to the Norwegians and told them to stop eating cured meats. How is this any different?

Letters in the ancient world

A modern reader first coming to the NT might think it strange that twenty-one of its twenty-seven books are letters, or something very much like letters, and that these make up 35% of the text. Why this particular form?

At least four factors should be borne in mind. First, we sometimes forget how blaseé we are about the sheer wealth of options we have today in the field of communications, almost none of which was open to the first-century church. Letters (we shall see) were established means of both private and public communication; there were not many others. There were ancient equivalents to town criers, some book publication (but no printing), plays, many speeches—but most of these were not realistic options for the kinds of messages the first Christian leaders needed to send.

Secondly, the rapid growth of the Christian church in the first decades of its life required a flexible, inexpensive and prompt means of keeping in touch with believers scattered around the empire. It is difficult to imagine a better alternative from the options available at the time.

Thirdly, as the Christian church grew, it confronted more questions than it could easily cope with. Some of these arose from its own growth out of the religion of the old covenant; some of them stemmed from its confrontation with the paganism of the Graeco-Roman world. Rapid growth and far-flung geography thus combined with kaleidoscopic agendas. In the providence of God, these diverse topics became the means by which the first generation of believers, led by the Spirit, learned to express and defend the faith in extraordinarily rich expressions of the truth. These pressures were often most conveniently addressed by letters; it is not surprising that such letters became under God the church’s charter documents.

Finally, letters were an established means in the ancient world of establishing ‘presence’. We would perhaps speak of ‘keeping in touch’, of ‘maintaining friendship’, in some organizations of ‘preserving lines of authority’. To achieve such ends in the western world we might turn first to telephone and ‘fax’. In the Roman Empire the same ends were achieved through letters, doubtless valued all the more for the delays that frequently separated one missive from the next. Certainly there is evidence that on numerous occasions the NT writers wanted to establish their ‘presence’ for various reasons (e.g. 1 Cor. 5:3–5; Gal. 4:19–20; 1 Thes. 5:27), even though nothing could entirely close the gap in communication opened up by distance (1 Thes. 2:17–3:8; 2 Jn. 12).

Donald A. Carson, “Reading the Letters,” in New Bible Commentary: 21st Century Edition, ed. D. A. Carson et al., 4th ed. (Leicester, England; Downers Grove, IL: Inter-Varsity Press, 1994), 1108.

Types of letters

About a hundred years ago it was argued that ancient Graeco-Roman missives could be divided into two kinds: (i) epistles, i.e. literary productions that somewhat superficially took the form of letters but were meant for universal publication and wide readership; and (ii) letters, occasional writings (i.e. letters occasioned by concrete circumstances) designed to be read by an individual or defined group. Paul’s letters, it was argued, all belong in the latter category. But this simple division is now universally abandoned. It is too simple: far more types of letters have been classified. It is also too rigid, for there is ample evidence that at least some letters addressed to concrete situations were nevertheless treated as having normative interest and significance beyond the original addressee (e.g. Col. 4:16). Moreover, the sheer diversity of NT letters (compare, say, Philemon and 3 John with Romans) calls out for more suitable categories.

One group of scholars has classified ancient letters into ten categories (though these overlap somewhat). What is clear is that ancient letters varied from private, personal communications (such as a letter home asking for money) to formal treatises or tractates that aimed for the widest possible circulation. In between there were shorter public letters (something akin to a modern ‘Letter to the Editor’ without the newspaper!). The NT letters cover a large part of this range, but not all of it. Romans and Hebrews, for instance, stand closer to the tractate end of the spectrum, but even so they remain occasional letters (see Rom. 15:17–22; Heb. 10:32–39; 13:22–24). Philemon, Titus and 3 John stand closer to the other end, but their inclusion in the canon shows they were perceived to have wider authority and relevance than the needs of their first readers might have dictated.

The contents of a letter

Most letters in the ancient world comprised three parts: an opening made up of address and greeting, the main body and a closing. The opening was usually very short: ‘X to Y, Greetings [chairein]’. In the NT, this simple form is preserved in the letter sent by the apostolic council (Acts 15:23), in the letter of Claudius Lysias (Acts 23:26), and in James (1:1). Two NT letters (Hebrews, 1 John) include no such opening at all, raising questions about their genre (see below); but most of them expand the opening, sometimes quite a bit (e.g. Rom. 1:1–7), and change the traditional chairein (‘greetings’) to charis (‘grace’), doubtless under the influence of Christian experience of the grace of God in the gospel (so all of Paul’s letters, 1 and 2 Peter and 2 John).

Some ancient letters included a health-wish or some blessing. Here the NT letters display considerable diversity. The closest thing to a health-wish is 3 John 2, where, remarkably, it is Gaius’s spiritual health that sets the standard for his general well-being. NT letter writers customarily open with thanksgiving to God (all of Paul’s letters except Galatians, 2 Corinthians, 1 Timothy and Titus do); some begin with a paean of praise (2 Corinthians, Ephesians and 1 Peter). Ancient letters tended to close with greetings of various kinds; the NT writers follow the same practice, often adding a doxology or a benediction. Romans is extraordinary for the space it devotes to a sketch of Paul’s travel plans (15:22–29), a request for prayer (15:30–32) and a prayer-wish (as third-person prayers are called; 15:33), a long list of commendations and greetings (16:1–16), and final greetings from co-workers and the concluding grace and benediction (16:20–27). Although some have seen ch. 16 as a later editorial edition, the considerable space Paul devotes to this closing is probably because he had no prior involvement with the church as a whole, and so he was concerned to establish the best possible relations with them in view of his proposed stay with them while heading for Spain.

In the main body, the form of letters from late antiquity differed widely. Some modern scholars have attempted to identify typical forms and sequences, typical transitions from the opening to the body, and so forth. So far these efforts have not commanded wide assent. It seems best simply to respect the diversity, acknowledging that Christian writers could be as creative as others (Paul’s letters are particularly creative and eclectic), and that some peculiarities of NT letters probably owe something to the heritage of Jewish influence that characterized the early church.