BIBLE STUDIES

CONTRIBUTIONS

CHIEFLY FROM PAPYRI AND INSCRIPTIONS

TO THE HISTORY OF

THE LANGUAGE, THE LITERATURE, AND THE RELIGION

OF HELLENISTIC JUDAISM AND PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANITY

BY

DR. G. ADOLF DEISSMANN

Digitally prepared by Dr. Ted Hildebrandt

(Gordon College, 2006)

TRANSLATED BY

ALEXANDER GRIEVE, M.A., D. PHIL.

T. & T. Clark, Edinburgh, 1901

CONTENTS.

PAGE

PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION vii

EXTRACT FROM THE PREFACE TO Bibelstudien ix

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE xiii

ABBREVIATIONS xv

I. PROLEGOMENA TO THE BIBLICAL LETTERS AND EPISTLES 1

II. CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE HISTORY OF THE LANGUAGE OF THE GREEK BIBLE 61

III. FURTHER CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE HISTORY OF THE LANGUAGE

OF THE GREEK BIBLE 171

Introductory Remarks 173

(i.) Notes on the Orthography 181

1. Variation of Vowels 181

2. Variation of Consonants 183

(ii.) Notes on the Morphology 186

1. Declension 186

2. Proper Names 187

3. Verb 189

(iii.) Notes on the Vocabulary and the Syntax 194

1. So-called Hebraisms 194

2. So-called Jewish-Greek "Biblical" or "New Testament"

Words and Constructions 198

3. Supposed Special "Biblical" or "New Testament" Mean-

ings and Constructions 223

4. Technical Terms 228

5. Phrases and Formulae 248

6. Rarer Words, Meanings and Constructions 256

IV. AN EPIGRAPHIC MEMORIAL OF THE SEPTUAGINT 269

V. NOTES ON SOME BIBLICAL PERSONS AND NAMES 301

1. Heliodorus 303

2. Barnabas 307

3. Manaen 310

4. Saulus Paulus 313

(v)

vi CONTENTS.

PAGE

VI. GREEK TRANSCRIPTIONS OF THE TETRAGRAMMATON 319

VII. SPICILEGIUM 337

1. The Chronological Statement in the Prologue to Jesus

Sirach 339

2. The Supposed Edict of Ptolemy IV. Philopator against the

Egyptian Jews 341

3. The "Large Letters" and the "Marks of Jesus" in

Galatians 6 346

4. A Note to the Literary History of Second Peter 360

5. White Robes and Palms 368

INDEXES 371

AUTHOR'S PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH

EDITION.

Having been honoured by a request to sanction

an English translation of my Bibelstudien and Neue

Bibelstudien, I have felt it my duty to accede to the

proposal. It seems to me that investigations based

upon Papyri and Inscriptions are specially calculated

to be received with interest by English readers.

For one thing, the richest treasures from the

domain of Papyri and Inscriptions are deposited in

English museums and libraries; for another, English

investigators take premier rank among the discoverers

and editors of Inscriptions, but particularly of Papyri;

while, again, it was English scholarship which took

the lead in utilising the Inscriptions in the sphere

of biblical research. Further, in regard to the Greek

Old Testament in particular, for the investigation

of which the Inscriptions and Papyri yield valuable

material (of which only the most inconsiderable part

has been utilised in the following pages), English

theologians have of late done exceedingly valuable

and memorable work. In confirmation of all this I

need only recall the names of F. Field, B. P. Grenfell,

E. Hatch, E. L. Hicks, A. S. Hunt, F. G. Kenyon,

J. P. Mahaffy, W. R. Paton, W. M. Ramsay, H. A.

Redpath, H. B. Swete, and others hardly less notable.

Since the years 1895 and 1897, in which respec-

(vii)

viii AUTHOR'S PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION.

tively the German Bibelstudien and Neue Bibelstudien

were published, there has been a vast increase of

available material, which, again, has been much more

accessible to me as a Professor in the University

of Heidelberg than it was during my residence at

Herborn. I have so far availed myself of portions

of the more recent discoveries in this English edition;

but what remains for scholars interested in such

investigations is hardly less than enormous, and is

being augmented year by year. I shall be greatly

pleased if yet more students set themselves seriously

to labour in this field of biblical research.

In the English edition not a few additional

changes have been made; I must, however, reserve

further items for future Studies. With regard to the

entries kuriako<j (p. 217 ff.), and especially i[lath<rion

(p. 124 ff.), I should like to make express reference

to the articles Lord's Day and Mercy Seat to be

contributed by me to the Encyclopcedia Biblica.

Finally, I must record my heartiest thanks to

my translator, Rev. Alexander Grieve, M.A., D. Phil.,

Forfar, for his work. With his name I gratefully

associate the words which once on a time the trans-

lator of the Wisdom of Jesus Sirach applied with

ingenuous complacency to himself: pollh>n a]grupni<an

kai> e]pisth<mhn prosenegka<menoj.

ADOLF DEISSMANN.

HEIDELBERG,

27th December, 1900.

FROM THE PREFACE TO THE GERMAN

EDITION.

Bible Studies is the name I have chosen for the

following investigations, since all of them are more

or less concerned with the historical questions which

the Bible, and specially the Greek version, raises for

scientific treatment. I am not, of course, of the

opinion that there is a special biblical science.

Science is method: the special sciences are distin-

guished from each other as methods. What is

designated "Biblical Science" were more fitly

named "Biblical Research". The science in ques-

tion here is the same whether it is engaged with

Plato, or with the Seventy Interpreters and the

Gospels. Thus much should be self-evident.

A well-disposed friend who understands some-

thing of literary matters tells me that it is hardly

fitting that a younger man should publish a volume

of "Studies": that is rather the part of the ex-

perienced scholar in the sunny autumn of life. To

this advice I have given serious consideration, but I

am still of the opinion that the hewing of stones is

very properly the work of the journeyman. And in

the department where I have laboured, many a block

must yet be trimmed before the erection of the edifice

can be thought of. But how much still remains to

do, before the language of the Septuagint, the relation

(ix)

x FROM THE PREFACE TO THE GERMAN EDITION.

to it of the so-called New Testament Greek, the

history of the religious and ethical conceptions of

Hellenic Judaism, have become clear even in outline

only; or before it has been made manifest that the

religious movement by which we date our era origin-

ated and was developed in history—that is, in con-

nection with, or, it may be, in opposition to, an already-

existent high state of culture! If the following pages

speak much about the Septuagint, let it be remem-

bered that in general that book is elsewhere much

too little spoken of, certainly much less than was the

case a hundred years ago. We inveigh against the

Rationalists—often in a manner that raises the sus-

picion that we have a mistrust of Reason. Yet these

men, inveighed against as they are, in many respects

set wider bounds to their work than do their critics.

During my three years' work in the Seminarium

Philippinum at Marburg, I have often enough been

forced to think of the plan of study in accordance

with which the bursars used to work about the

middle of last century. Listen to a report of the

matter such as the following :— ¹

"With regard to Greek the legislator has laid

particular stress upon the relation in which this

language stands to a true understanding of the .N.T.

How reasonable, therefore, will those who can judge

find the recommendation that the Septuagint (which,

¹ Cf. the programme (of the superintendent) Dr. Carl Wilhelm Robert:

. . . announces that the Literary Association . . . shall be duly opened . . .

on the 27th inst. . . . [Marburg] Miller's Erben and Weldige, 1772, p. 13.

That the superintendent had still an eye for the requirements of practical

life is shown by his remarks elsewhere. For example, on page 7f., he good-

naturedly asserts that he has carried out "in the most conscientious manner"

the order that "the bursars shall be supplied with sufficient well-prepared

food and wholesome and unadulterated beer". The programme affords a fine

glimpse into the academic life of the Marburg of a past time.

FROM THE PREFACE TO THE GERMAN EDITION. xi

on the authority of an Ernesti and a Michaelis, is of

the first importance as a means towards the proper

understanding of the N.T.), has been fixed upon as

a manual upon which these lectures must be given!

And how much is it to be wished that the bursars,

during the year of their study of this book, should go

through such a considerable part of the same as may

be necessary to realise the purposes of the legislator!"

I am not bold enough to specify the time when

academical lectures and exercises upon the Septua-

will again be given in Germany.¹ But the coming

century is long, and the mechanical conception of

science is but the humour of a day! . . .

I wrote the book, not as a clergyman, but as a

Privatdocent at Marburg, but I rejoice that I am

able, as a clergyman, to publish it.

G. ADOLF DEISSMANN.

HERBORN: DEPARTMENT OF WIESBADEN,

7th March, 1895.

¹ 1. Additional note, 1899: Professor Dr. Johannes Weiss of Marburg

has announced a course upon the Greek Psalter for the Summer Session, 1899;

the author lectured on the Language of the Greek Bible in Heidelberg in the

Winter Session of 1897-98.

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE.

In addition to the supplementary matter specially

contributed to the present edition by the Author,

the translation shows considerable alterations in other

respects. Not only has the smaller and later volume,

Neue Bibelstudien, 1897, found a place in the body

of the book, but the order of the Articles has been all

but completely changed. It has not been thought

necessary to furnish the translation with an index

of Papyri, etc., more especially as the larger Bibel-

studien had none; but there has been added an index

of Scripture texts, which seemed on the whole more

likely to be of service to English readers in general.

The translator has inserted a very few notes, mainly

concerned with matters of translation.

For the convenience of those who may wish to

consult the original on any point, the paging of the

German edition has been given in square brackets,

the page-numbers of the Neue Bibelstudien being

distinguished by an N. In explanation of the fact

that some of the works cited are more fully described

towards the end of the book, and more briefly in the

earlier pages, it should perhaps be said that a large

portion of the translation was in type, and had been

revised, before the alteration in the order of the

Articles had been decided upon.

The translator would take this opportunity of

(xiii)

xiv TRANSLATOR'S NOTE.

expressing his most cordial thanks to Professor

Deissmann, who has taken the most active interest

in the preparation of the translation, and whose

painstaking revision of the proofs has been of the

highest service. A word of thanks is also due to the

printers, The Aberdeen University Press Limited,

for the remarkable accuracy and skill which they

have uniformly shown in the manipulation of what

was often complicated and intricate material.

ALEXANDER GRIEVE.

FORFAR,

21st January, 1901.

THE PRINCIPAL ABBREVIATIONS.

AAB. = Abhandlungen der Konig- Parthey, see p. 322, note 5.

lichen Akademie der Wissen- Paton and Hicks, see p. 131, note 1.

schaften zu Berlin. PER., see p. 179, note 2.

Benndorf u. Niemann, see p. 157, Perg., see p. 178, note 4.

note 1. Peyron (A.), see p. 88, note 1.

BU. = Aegyptische Urkunden aus den R-E ² = Real-Encyclopadie fur protest.

Koeniglichen Museen zu Berlin, Theologie and Kirche von Herzog,

Berlin, 1892 ff. 2. Aufl., Leipzig, 1877 ff.

CIA. = Corpus Inscriptionum Atti- Schleusner = J. F., Novus Thesaurus

barum. philologico-criticus sive lexicon in

CIG. = Corpus Inscriptionum Grae- LXX et reliquos interpretes grae-

carum. cos ac scriptores apocryphos V. T.,

CIL. = Corpus Inscriptionum Latin- 5 voll., Lipsiae, 1820-21.

arum. Schmid (W.), see p. 64, note 2.

Clavis³, see p. 88, note 5. Schmidt (Guil.), see p. 291, note 1.

Cremer, see p. 290, note 2. Scharer, see p. 335, note 2.

DAW. = Denkschriften der K. K. Swete = The Old Testament in Greek

Akademie der Wissenschaften zu according to the Septuagint, edited

Wien. by H. B. Swete, 3 voll., Cambridge,

Dieterich (A.), see p. 322, note 8. 1887-94.

Dittenberger, see p. 93, note 2. Thesaurus =H. Stephanus, Thesaurus

DLZ. = Deutsche Literaturzeitung. Graecae Linguae, edd. Hase, etc.,

Fick-Bechtel, see p. 310, note 4. Paris, 1831-65.

Field, see p. 284, note 2. Thayer, see p. 176, note 3.

Fleck. Jbb. = Fleckeisen's Jahrbacher. ThLZ. = Theologische Literaturzei-

Frankel, see p. 84, note 2. tung.

GGA. = Gottingische gelehrte An- Tromm. = Abrahami Trommii concor-

zeigen. dantiae graecae versionis vulgo

HApAT. = Kurzgefasstes exegetisches dictae LXX interpretum . . ., 2

Handbuch zu den Apocryphen des tomi, Amstelodami et Trajecti ad

A.T., 6 Bde., Leipzig, 1851-60. Rhenum, 1718.

Hamburger, see p. 271, note. TU. = Texte mad Untersuchungen zur

HC. = Hand-Commentar zum N.T. Geschichte der altchristlichen

Hercher, see p. 4, note 1. Literatur.

Humann u. Puchstein, see p. 309, Waddington, see p. 93, note 1.

note 1. Wessely, see p. 322, note 7.

IGrSI., see p. 200, note 1. Wetstein, see p. 350, note 1.

IMAe., see p. 178, note 5. Winer⁷, or Winer-Lunemann = G. B.

Kennedy, see p. 213, note 1. Winer, Grammatik des neutesta-

Kenyon, see p. 323, note 1. mentlichen Sprachidioms, 7 Aufl.

Lebas, see Waddington. von G. Lunemann, Leipzig, 1867.

Leemans, see p. 322, note 6. [9th English edition, by W. F.

Letronne, Recherches, see p. 98, note 3. Moulton, Edinburgh, 1882 = 6th

Recueil, see p. 101, note 6. German edition.]

Lumbroso, Recherches, see p. 98, note 2. Winer-Schmiedel = the same work,

Mahaffy, see p. 336, note 1. 8th Aufl. neu bearbeitet von P. W.

Meisterhans, see p. 124, note 1. Schmiedel, Gottingen, 1894 ff.

Meyer = H. A. W. Meyer, Kritisch ZAW. = Zeitschrift fur die alttesta-

exegetischer Kommentar caber das mentliche Wissenschaft.

N.T. Z KG. = Zeitschrift fur Kirchenge-

Notices, xviii. 2, see p. 283, note 3. sohialite.

(xv)

I.

PROLEGOMENA TO THE BIBLICAL LETTERS

AND EPISTLES.

ginesqe dokimoi trapezitai

PROLEGOMENA TO THE BIBLICAL LETTERS AND

EPISTLES.

I.

I. Men have written letters ever since they could write

at all. Who the first letter-writer was we know not.¹ But

this is quite as it should be: the writer of a letter accom-

modates himself to the need of the moment; his aim is a

personal one and concerns none but himself,—least of all

the curiosity of posterity. We fortunately know quite as

little who was the first to experience repentance or to offer

prayer. The writer of a letter does not sit in the market-

place. A letter is a secret and the writer wishes his secret

to be preserved; under cover and seal he entrusts it to the

reticence of the messenger. The letter, in its essential idea,

does not differ in any way from a private conversation; like

the latter, it is a personal and intimate communication, and

the more faithfully it catches the tone of the private con-

versation, the more of a letter, that is, the better a letter, it

is. The only difference is the means of communication.

We avail ourselves of far-travelling handwriting, because

¹ It appears sufficiently naïve that Tatian (Or. ad Graec., p. 1 15 f

Schwartz) and Clement of Alexandria (Strom. i. 16, p. 364, Potter) should

say, following the historian Hellanikos, that the Persian queen Atossa

(6th-5th cent. B.C.) was the discoverer of letter-writing. For it is in this

sense that we should understand the expression that occurs in both, viz.,

e]pistola>j sunta<ssein, and not as collecting letters together and publishing them,

which R. Bentley (Dr. Rich. Bentley's Dissertation on the Epistles of

Phalaris, London, 1699, p. 535 f., German edition by W. Ribbeck, Leipzig,

1857, p. 532) considers to be also possible; cf. M. Kremmer, De catalogis

heurematum, Leipzig, 1890, p. 15.

4 BIBLE STUDIES. [190, 191

our voice cannot carry to our friend: the pen is employed

because the separation by distance does not permit a tete-a-

tete.¹ A letter is destined for the receiver only, not for the

public eye, and even when it is intended for more than one,

yet with the public it will have nothing to do: letters to

parents and brothers and sisters, to comrades in joy or

sorrow or sentiment—these, too, are private letters, true

letters. As little as the words of the dying father to his

children are a speech—should they be a speech it would be

better for the dying to keep silent—just as little is the letter

of a sage to his confidential pupils an essay, a literary produc-

tion; and, if the pupils have learned wisdom, they will not

place it among their books, but lay it devoutly beside the

picture and the other treasured relics of their master. The

form and external appearance of the letter are matters of

indifference in the determination of its essential character.

Whether it be written on stone or clay, on papyrus or parch-

ment, on wax or palm-leaf, on rose paper or a foreign post-

card, is quite as immaterial² as whether it clothes itself in

the set phrases of the age; whether it be written skilfully

or unskilfully, by a prophet or by a beggar, does not alter

its special characteristics in the least. Nor do the particular

contents belong to the essence of it. What is alone

essential is the purpose which it serves: confidential per-

sonal conversation between persons separated by dis-

tance. The one wishes to ask something of the other,

wishes to praise or warn or wound the other, to thank

him or assure him of sympathy in joy—it is ever something

personal that forces the pen into the hand of the letter-

writer.³ He who writes a letter under the impression that

¹ [Pseudo-] Diogenes, ep. 3 (Epistolographi Graeci, rec. R. Hercher,

Parisiis, 1873, p. 235).—Demetr., de elocut., 223 f. (Hercher, p. 13).—[Pseudo-]

Proclus, de forma epistolari (Hercher, p. 6).

² Cf. Th. Birt, Das antike Buchwesen in seinem Verhaltniss zur Lit-

teratur, Berlin, 1882, top of p. 2.—It is most singular that Pliny (Hist. Nat.,

xiii. 13), and, after him, Bentley (p. 538 f.; German edition by Ribbeck, p.

532 f.), deny that the letters on wax-tablets mentioned by Homer are letters.

³ Demetr., de elocut., 231 (Hercher, p. 14).

191, 192] LETTERS AND EPISTLES. 5

his lines may be read by strangers, will either coquet with

this possibility, or be frightened by it; in the former case

he will be vain, in the latter, reserved;¹ in both cases un-

natural—no true letter-writer. With the personal aim of

the letter there must necessarily be joined the naturalness

of the writer's mood; one owes it not only to himself

and to the other, but still more to the letter as such,

that he yield himself freely to it. So must the letter,

even the shortest and the poorest, present a fragment

¹ Cic., Fam. 15,214, aliter enim scribimus quod eos solos quibus mittimus,

aliter quod multos lecturos putamus. Cic., Phil. 2,7, quam multa iota solent

esse in epistulis quae prolata si sint inepta videantur! quam multa seria neque

tamen ullo modo divolganda!—Johann Kepler wrote a letter to Reimarus

Ursus, of which the latter then made a great parade in a manner painful

to Kepler and Tycho Brahe. Having got a warning by this, Kepler de-

termined that for the future: "scribam caute, retinebo exemplaria".

(Joannis Kepleri astronomi opera omnia, ed. Ch. Frisch, i. [Frankfurt and

Erlangen, 1858], p. 234; of. C. Anschutz, Ungedruckte wissenschaftliche Cor-

respondent zwischen Johann Kepler and Herwart von Hohenburg, 1599,

Prague, 1886, p. 91 f.—The Palatinate physician-in-ordinary Helisaus Ros-

linus († 1616) says about one of his letters which had been printed without

his knowledge: "I wrote it the day immediately following that on which I

first beheld with astonishment the new star—on the evening of Tuesday, the

2/12 October; I communicated the same at once in haste to a good friend in

Strassburg. . . . . This letter (6 paginarum) was subsequently printed without

my knowledge or desire, which in itself did not concern me—only had I

known beforehand, I should have arranged it somewhat better and ex-

pressed myself more distinctly than I did while engaged in the writing of

it" (Joannis Kepleri opp. omn. i., p. 666). Moltke to his wife, 3rd July,

1864: "I have in the above given you a portrayal of the seizure of Alsen,

which embodies no official report, but simply the observations of an eye-

witness, which always add freshness to description. If you think it would

be of interest to others as well, I have no objection to copies being taken

of it in which certain personal matters will be left out, and myself not

mentioned: Auer will put the matter right for you " (Gesammelte Schriften,

tend Denkwurdigkeiten des General-Feldmarschalls Grafen Helmuth von

Moltke, vi. [Berlin, 1892], p. 408 f.). One notices, however, in this "letter,"

that it was written under the impression that copies of it might be

made. Compare also the similar sentiment (in the matter of diary-notes,

which are essentially akin to letters) of K. von Hase, of the year 1877:

"It may be that my knowledge that these soliloquies will soon fall into

other hands detracts from their naturalness. Still they will be the

hands of kind and cherished persons, and so may the thought of it

be but a quickly passing shadow!" (Annalen meines Lebens, Leipzig, 1891,

p. 271).

6 BIBLE STUDIES. [192, 193

of human naivete—beautiful or trivial, but, in any case,

true.¹

2. The letter is older than literature. As conversation

between two persons is older than the dialogue, the song

older than the poem, so also does the history of the letter

reach back to that Golden Age when there was neither

author nor publisher, nor any reviewer. Literature is that

species of writing which is designed for publicity: the

maker of literature desires that others will take heed to

his work. He desires to be read. He does not appeal to

his friend, nor does he write to his mother; he entrusts

his sheets to the winds, and knows not whither they will

be borne; he only knows that they will be picked up and ex-

amined by some one or other unknown to him and unabashed

before him. Literature, in the truest essence of it, differs in

no way from a public speech; equally with the latter it

falls short in the matter of intimacy, and the more it attains

to the character of universality, the more literary, that is

to say, the more interesting it is. All the difference between

them is in the mode of delivery. Should one desire to address,

not the assembled clan or congregation, but the great foolish

public, then he takes care that what he has to say may be

carried home in writing by any one who wishes to have it

so: the book is substituted for oral communication. And

even if the book be dedicated to a friend or friends, still its

dedication does not divest it of its literary character,—it

does not thereby become a private piece of writing. The

form and external appearance of the book are immaterial

for the true understanding of its special character as a

book: even its contents, whatever they be, do not matter.

Whether the author sends forth poems, tragedies or his-

tories, sermons or wearisome scientific lucubrations, politi-

cal matter or anything else in the world; whether his book

is multiplied by the slaves of an Alexandrian bookseller, by

patient monk or impatient compositor; whether it is pre-

served in libraries as sheet, or roll, or folio: all these are as

¹ Demetr., de elocut., 227 (Hereher, p. 13). Greg. Naz., ad Nicobulum

(Hercher, p. 16).

193, 194] LETTERS AND EPISTLES. 7

much matter of indifference as whether it is good or bad, or

whether it finds purchasers or not. Book, literature, in the

widest sense, is every written work designed by its author

for the public.¹

3. The book is younger than the letter. Even were the

oldest letters that have come down to us younger than the

earliest extant works of literature, that statement would still

be true. For it is one which does not need the confirmation

of historical facts—nay, it would be foolish to attempt to give

such. The letter is perishable—in its very nature necessarily

so; it is perishable, like the hand that wrote it, like the eyes

that were to read it. The letter-writer works as little for

posterity as for the public of his own time;² just as the

true letter cannot be written over again, it exists in but a

single copy. It is only the book that is multiplied and

thus rendered accessible to the public, accessible, possibly,

to posterity. Fortunately we possess letters that are old,

extremely old, but we shall never gain a sight of the oldest

of them all; it was a letter, and was able to guard itself and

its secret. Among all nations, before the age of literature,

there were the days when people wrote, indeed, but did not

yet write books.³ In the same way people prayed, of course,

and probably prayed better, long before there were any

service-books; and they had come near to God before they

wrote down the proofs of His existence. The letter, should

we ask about the essential character of it, carries us into

the sacred solitude of simple, unaffected humanity; when we

ask about its history, it directs us to the childhood's years of

the pre-literary man, when there was no book to trouble him.

¹ Birt, Buchwesen, p. 2: " Similarly the point of separation between a

private writing and a literary work was the moment when [in antiquity] an

author delivered his manuscript to his own slaves or to those of a contractor

in order that copies of it might be produced".

² A. Stahr, Aristotelia, i., Halle, 1830, p. 192 f.

³ Wellhausen, Israelitische and Judische Geschichte, p. 58: "Already

in early times writing was practised, but in documents and contracts only ;

also letters when the contents of the message were not for the light of day

or when, for other reasons, they required to be kept secret". Hebrew litera-

ture blossomed forth only later.

8 BIBLE STUDIES. [194, 159

4. When the friend has for ever parted from his comrades,

the master from his disciples, then the bereaved bethink

themselves, with sorrowful reverence, of all that the de-

parted one was to them. The old pages, which the beloved

one delivered to them in some blessed hour, speak to them

with a more than persuasive force; they are read and re-

read, they are exchanged one for another, copies are taken

of letters in the possession of friends, the precious fragments

are collected: perhaps it is decided that the collection be

multiplied—among the great unknown public there may

be some unknown one who is longing for the same

stimulus which the bereaved themselves have received.

And thus it happens now and then that, from motives of

reverent love, the letters of the great are divested of their

confidential character: they are formed into literature, the

letters subsequently become a book. When, by the

Euphrates or the Nile, preserved in the ruins of some

fallen civilisation, we find letters the age of which can

only be computed by centuries and millenniums, the science

of our fortunate day rejoices; she hands over the vener-

able relics to a grateful public in a new garb, and so, in our

own books and in our own languages, we read the reports

which the Palestinian vassals had to make to Pharaoh upon

their tablets of clay, long before there was any Old Testa-

ment or any People of Israel; we learn the sufferings and

the longings of Egyptian monks from shreds of papyrus

which are as old as the book of the Seventy Interpreters.

Thus it is the science of to-day that has stripped these

private communications of a hoary past of their most

peculiar characteristic, and which has at length transformed

letters, true letters, into literature. As little, however, as

some unknown man, living in the times of Imperial Rome,

put the toy into the grave of his child in order that it should

sometime be discovered and placed in a museum, just as

little are the private letters which have at length been trans-

formed into literature by publication, to be, on that account,

thought of as literature. Letters remain letters whether

oblivion hides them with its protecting veil, or whether now

195, 196] LETTERS AND EPISTLES. 9

reverence, now science, or, again, reverence and science in

friendly conspiracy, think it well to withhold the secret no

longer from the reverent or the eager seeker after truth.

What the editor, in publishing such letters, takes from

them, the readers, if they can do anything more than spell,

must restore by recognising, in true historical perspective,

their simple and unaffected beauty.

5. When for the first time a book was compiled from

letters,—it would be reverential love, rather than science,

that made the beginning here—the age of literature had, of

course, dawned long ago, and had long ago constructed

the various literary forms with which it worked. That

book, the first to be compiled from real letters, added

another to the already existent forms. One would, of

course, hardly venture to say that it forthwith added the

literary letter, the epistle,¹ to the forms of published litera-

ture; the said book only gave, against its will, so to speak,

the impetus to the development of this new literary eidos.²

The present writer cannot imagine that the composition

and publication of literary treatises in the form of letters

was anterior to the compilation of a book from actual

letters. So soon, however, as such a book existed, the

charming novelty of it invited to imitation. Had the in-

vitation been rightly understood, the only inducement that

should have been felt was to publish the letters of other

venerable men, and, in point of fact, the invitation was not

seldom understood in this its true sense. From almost

every age we have received such collections of "genuine,"

"real" letters—priceless jewels for the historian of the

human spirit. But the literary man is frequently more

of a literary machine than a true man, and thus, when the

¹ In the following pages the literary letter [Litteraturbrief] will

continue to be so named: the author considers that the borrowed word

appropriately expresses the technical sense.

² F. Susemihl, Geschichte der griechischen Litteratur in der Alexan-

drinerzeit, ii., Leipzig, 1892, p. 579: "It may well be that the first impulse

to this branch of authorship was given by the early collecting together, in

the individual schools of philosophy, such as the Epicurean, of the genuine

correspondence of their founders and oldest members".

10 BIBLE STUDIES. [196, 197

first collection of letters appeared, it was the literary, rather

than the human, interest of it which impressed him; the

accidental and external, rather than the inscrutably strange

inmost essence of it. Instead of rejoicing that his pur-

blind eye might here catch a glimpse of a great human

soul, he resolved to write a volume of letters on his own

part. He knew not what he did, and had no feeling that

he was attempting anything unusual;¹ he did not see that,

by his literary purpose, he was himself destroying the very

possibility of its realisation; for letters are experiences,

and experiences cannot be manufactured. The father of

the epistle was no great pioneer spirit, but a mere para-

graphist, a mere mechanic. But perhaps he had once

heard a pastoral song among the hills, and afterwards at

home set himself down to make another of the same: the

wondering applause of his crowd of admirers confirmed him

in the idea that he had succeeded. If then he had achieved

his aim in the matter of a song, why should he not do the

same with letters? And so he set himself down and made

them. But the prototype, thus degraded to a mere pattern,

mistrustfully refused to show its true face, not to speak of

its heart, to this pale and suspicious-looking companion,

and the result was that the epistle could learn no more

from the letter than a little of its external form. If the

true letter might be compared to a prayer, the epistle which

mimicked it was only a babbling; if there beamed forth

in the letter the wondrous face of a child, the epistle grinned

stiffly and stupidly, like a puppet.

But the puppet pleased; its makers knew how to bring

it to perfection, and to give it more of a human appearance.

Indeed, it happened now and then that a real artist occupied

an idle hour in the fashioning of such an object. This, of

course, turned out better than most others of a similar kind,

¹ Cf. von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Aristoteles and Athen, ii., Berlin,

1893, p. 392: "He [Isocrates] did not understand that the letter, as a con-

fidential and spontaneous utterance, is well written only when it is written

for reading, not hearing, when it is distinguished from the set oration kat

ei#doj". This judgment applies also to real, genuine letters by Isocrates.

197, 198] LETTERS AND EPISTLES. 11

and was more pleasant to look at than an ugly child for

instance; in any case it could not disturb one by its noise.

A good epistle, in fact, gives one more pleasure than a

worthless letter, and in no literature is there any lack of

good epistles. They often resemble letters so much that a

reader permits himself for the moment to be willingly deceived

as to their actual character. But letters they are not, and

the more strenuously they try to be letters, the more vividly

do they reveal that they are not.¹ Even the grapes of

Zeuxis could deceive only the sparrows; one even suspects

that they were no true sparrows, but cage-birds rather, which

had lost their real nature along with their freedom and

pertness; our Rhine-land sparrows would not have left their

vineyards for anything of the kind. Those of the epistle-

writers who were artists were themselves most fully aware

that in their epistles they worked at best artificially,

and, in fact, had to do so. "The editor requests that the

readers of this book will not forget the title of it: it is only

a book of letters, letters merely relating to the study of

theology. In letters one does not look for treatises, still less

for treatises in rigid uniformity and proportion of parts.

As material offers itself and varies, as conversation comes

and goes, often as personal inclinations or incidental occur-

rences determine and direct, so do the letters wind about

and flow on; and I am greatly in error if it be not this

a thread of living continuity, this capriciousness of origin and

circumstances, that realises the result which we desiderate

on the written page, but which, of course, subsequently dis-

appears in the printing. Nor can I conceal the fact that

these letters, as now printed, are wanting just in what

is perhaps most instructive, viz., the more exact criticism of

particular works. There was, however, no other way of

doing it, and I am still uncertain whether the following

letters, in which the materials grow always the more special,

¹ Von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Antigonos von Karystos (Philologischz

Untersuchungen, iv.), Berlin, 1881, p. 151, says, "Such letters as are actually

written with a view to publication are essentially different in character from

private correspondence".

12 BIBLE STUDIES. [198, 199

the more important, the more personal, are fit for printing at

all. The public voice of the market-place and the confidential

one of private correspondence are, and always continue to

be, very different." Herder,¹ in these words, which are a

classical description of the true idea of a letter, claims that

his book has, in fact, the character of actual letters, but is

nevertheless quite well aware that a printed (that is, accord-

ing to the context, a literary) letter is essentially different

from a letter that is actually such.

It is easy to understand how the epistle became a

favourite form of published literature in almost all literary

nations. There could hardly be a more convenient form.

The extraordinary convenience of it lay in the fact that

it was, properly speaking, so altogether "unliterary," that,

in fact, it did not deserve to be called a "form" at all.

One needed but to label an address on any piece of tittle-

tattle, and lo! one had achieved what else could have been

accomplished only by a conscientious adherence to the strict

rules of artistic form. Neither as to expression nor contents

does the epistle make any higher pretensions. The writer

could, in the matter of style, write as he pleased, and the

address on the letter became a protective mark for thoughts

that would have been too silly for a poem, and too paltry

for an essay. The epistle, if we disregard the affixed

address, need be no more than, say a feuilleton or a causerie.

The zenith of epistolography may always be looked upon as

assuredly indicating the decline of literature; literature be-

comes decadent—Alexandrian, so to speak—and although

epistles may have been composed and published by great

creative spirits, still the derivative character of the move-

ment cannot be questioned: even the great will want to

gossip, to lounge, to take it easy for once. Their epistles

may be good, but the epistle in general, as a literary pheno-

menon, is light ware indeed.

6. Of collections of letters, bearing the name of well-

known poets and philosophers, we have, indeed, a great

¹ Briefe, dots Studium der Theologie betreffend, Third Part, Frankfurt

and Leipzig, 1790, Preface to the first edition, pp. i.-iii.

199, 200] LETTERS AND EPISTLES. 13

profusion. Many of them are not "genuine"; they were

composed and given to the world by others under the pro-

tection of a great name.¹ A timid ignorance, having no

true notion of literary usages, inconsiderately stigmatises

one and all of these with the ethical term forgery; it fondly

imagines that everything in the world can be brought be-

tween the two poles moral and immoral, and overlooks the

fact that the endless being and becoming of things is

generally realised according to non-ethical laws, and needs

to be judged as an ethical adiaphoron. He who tremulously

supposes that questions of genuineness in the history of

literature are, as such, problems of the struggle between

truth and falsehood, ought also to have the brutal courage

to describe all literature as forgery. The literary man, as

compared with the non-literary, is always a person under

constraint; he does not draw from the sphere of prosaic

circumstance about him, but places himself under the

dominion of the ideal, about which no one knows better than

himself that it never was, and never will be, real. The

literary man, with every stroke of his pen, removes himself

farther from trivial actuality, just because he wishes to alter

it, to ennoble or annihilate it, just because he can never

acknowledge it as it is. As a man he feels indeed that he

is sold under the domain of the wretched "object". He

knows that when he writes upon the laws of the cosmos,

he is naught but a foolish boy gathering shells by the

shore of the ocean; he enriches the literature of his nation

¹ The origin of spurious collections of letters among the Greeks is

traced back to "the exercises in style of the Athenian schools of rhetoric in

the earlier and earliest Hellenistic period," Susemihl, ii., pp. 448, 579. If

some callow rhetorician succeeded in performing an exercise of this kind

specially well, he might feel tempted to publish it. But it is not impossible

that actual forgeries were committed for purposes of gain by trading with the

great libraries, cf. Susemihl, ii., pp. 449 f. ; Bentley, p. 9 f., in Ribbeck's

German edition, p. 81 ff. ; A. M. Zumetikos, De Alexandri Olympiadisque

epistularum fontibus et reliquiis, Berlin, 1894, p. 1.—As late as 1551, Joachim

Camerarius ventured on the harmless jest of fabricating, "ad institutionem

puerilem," a correspondence in Greek between Paul and the Presbytery of

Ephesus (Th. Zahn, Geschichte des Neutestamentlichen Kanons, ii., 2,

Erlangen and Leipzig, 1892, p. 365).

14 BIBLE STUDIES. [200, 201

by a Faust, meanwhile sighing for a revelation; or he is

driven about by the thought that something must be done

for his unbelief—yet he writes Discourses upon Religion.

And thus he realises that he is entangled in the contradic-

tion between the Infinite and the Finite,¹ while the small

prosperous folks, whose sleepy souls reek not of his pain,

are lulled by him into the delightful dream that we only

need to build altars to truth, beauty, and eternity in order

to possess these things; when they have awaked, they can

but reproach him for having deceived them. They discover

that he is one of themselves; they whisper to each other

that the sage, the poet, the prophet, is but a man after all

—wiser, it may be, but not more clever, or better, than

others. He who might have been their guide—not in-

deed to his own poor hovel but to the city upon the hill,

not built by human hands—is compensated with some

polite-sounding phrase. The foolish ingrates! Literature

presents us with the unreal, just because it subserves the

truth; the literary man abandons himself, just because he

strives for the ends of humanity; he is unnatural, just be-

cause he would give to others something better than him-

self. What holds good of literature in general must also

be taken into account in regard to each of its characteristic

phenomena. Just as little as Plato's Socrates and Schiller's

Wallenstein are "forgeries," so little dare we so name the

whole "pseudonymous"² literature. We may grant at

once, indeed, that some, at least, of the writings which go

under false names were intentionally forged by the writers

¹ Cf. the confession made by U. von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Aristoteles

und Athen, i., Berlin, 1893, Preface, p. vi.: "The task of authorship demands

an end attained—in irreconcilable antithesis to the investigations of science.

The Phaedrus has taught us that the book in general is a pitiful thing as

compared with living investigation, and it is to be hoped that we are wiser in

our class-rooms than in our books. But Plato, too, wrote books; he spoke

forth freely each time what he knew as well as he knew it, assured that he

would contradict himself, and hopeful that he would correct himself, next

time he wrote."

² The term pseudonymous of itself certainly implies blame, but it has

become so much worn in the using, that it is also applied in quite an in-

nocent sense.

201, 202] LETTERS AND EPISTLES. 15

of them; pseudonymity in political or ecclesiastical works

is in every case suspicious, for no one knows better how to

use sacred and sanctifying ends than does the undisciplined

instinct of monarchs and hierarchs, and the followers of

them. But there is also a pseudonymity which is innocent,

sincere, and honest,¹ and if a literary product permits of any

inferences being drawn from it respecting the character of

the writer, then, in such a case of pseudonymity, one may

not think of malice or cowardice, but rather of modesty and

natural timidity. Between the genuine² and the pseudony-

mous epistle there does not exist the same profound and

essential difference as between the epistle and the letter.

The epistle is never genuine in the sense in which the letter

is; it never can be so, because it can adopt the form of the

letter only by surrendering the essence. An epistle of

Herder, however like a letter it may look, is yet not a letter

of Herder: it was not Herder the man, but Herder the

theological thinker and author, that wrote it: it is genuine

in an ungenuine sense—like an apple-tree which, flourishing

in September, certainly has genuine apple blossoms, but

which must surely be altogether ashamed of such in the

presence of its own ripening fruits. Literary "genuine-

ness" is not to be confounded with genuine naturalness.

Questions of genuineness in literature may cause us to rack

our brains: but what is humanly genuine is never a problem

¹ Cf. on this point specially Julicher, Einleitung in das N. T., p. 32 ff.

² The discussion which occupies the remainder of this paragraph is one

which may, indeed, be translated, but can hardly be transferred, into English.

It turns partly on the ambiguity of the German word echt, and partly on

a distinction corresponding to that which English critics have tried to

establish between the words "genuine" and "authentic"—a long-vexed

question which now practice rather than theory is beginning to settle. Echt

means authentic, as applied, for instance, to a book written by the author

whose name it bears; it also means genuine both as applied to a true record

of experience, whether facts or feelings, and as implying the truth (that is

the naturalness, spontaneity or reality) of the experience itself. The trans-

lator felt that, in justice to the author, he must render echt throughout

the passage in question by a single word, and has therefore chosen genuine,

as representing, more adequately than any other, the somewhat wide con-

notation of the German adjective.—Tr.

16 BIBLE STUDIES. [202, 203

to the genuine man. From the epistle that was genuine in

a mere literary sense there was but a step to the fictitious

epistle; while the genuine letter could at best be mimicked,

the genuine epistle was bound to be imitated, and, indeed,

invited to imitation. The collections of genuine Letters

indirectly occasioned the writing of epistles: the collections

of genuine epistles were immediately followed by the litera-

ture of the fictitious epistle.

II.

7. In the foregoing remarks on questions of prin-

ciple, the author has in general tacitly presupposed the

literary conditions into which we are carried by the Graeco-

Roman civilisation, and by the modern, of which that is

the basis.¹ These inquiries seem to him to demand that we

should not summarily include all that has been handed down

to us bearing the wide, indefinite name of letter, under

the equally indefinite term Literature of letters (Brief-

litteratur), but that each separate fragment of these in-

teresting but neglected compositions be set in its proper

place in the line of development, which is as follows—real

letter, letter that has subsequently become literature, epistle, ficti-

tious epistle. Should it be demanded that the author fill

up the various stages of this development with historical

references, he would be at a loss. It has been already in-

dicated that the first member of the series, viz., the letter,

belongs to pre-literary times: it is not only impossible to

give an example of this, but also unreasonable to demand

one. With more plausibility one might expect that some-

thing certain ought to be procured in connection with the

other stages, which belong in a manner to literary times,

¹ The history of the literature of "letters" among the Italian Humanists

is, from the point of view of method, specially instructive. Stahr, Aristotelia,

ii., p. 187 f., has already drawn attention to it. The best information on

the subject is to be found in G. Voigt's Die Wiederbelebung des classischen

Alterthums oder das erste Jahrhundert des Humanismus, ii.³, Berlin, 1893,

pp. 417-436.

203, 204] LETTERS AND EPISTLES. 17

and, as such, can be historically checked. But even if the

broad field of ancient "letters" were more extensively

cultivated than has hitherto been the case, still we could

establish at best no more than the first known instance of

a subsequent collection of real letters, of an epistle or of a

fictitious epistle, but would not reach the beginnings of the

literary movement itself. The line in question can only be

drawn on the ground of general considerations, nor does the

author see how else it could be drawn. No one will ques-

tion that the real letter was the first, the fictitious epistle

the last, link in the development; as little will any one

doubt that the epistle must have been one of the intervening

links between the two.¹ The only uncertainty is as to the

origin of the epistle itself; it, of course, presupposes the

real letter, being an imitation of it; but that it presupposes

as well the collection of real letters, as we think pro-

bable in regard to Greek literature, cannot be established

with certainty for the history of literature in general. As a

matter of fact, the epistle, as a form of literature, is found

among the Egyptians at a very early period, and the author

does not know how it originated there. The Archduke

Rainer's collection of Papyri at Vienna contains a poetical

description of the town of Pi-Ramses, dating from the 12th

century B.C., which is written in the form of a letter, and

is in part identical with Papyrus Anastasi III. in the British

Museum. This MS. "shows that in such letters we have,

not private correspondence, but literary compositions,

which must have enjoyed a wide circulation in ancient

Egypt; it thus affords us valuable materials towards the

characterisation of the literature of ancient Egypt".² If,

¹ Von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Antigonos von Karystos, p. 151: "I

cannot imagine that fictitious correspondence, as a species of literature, was

anterior in time to genuine".

² J. Karabacek, Mittheilungen, aus der Sammlung der Papyrus Erzherzog

Rainer, i., Vienna, 1887, p. 51; cf. J. Krall, Guide-book of the Exhibition

[of the Pap. Erzh. Rainer], Vienna, 1894, p. 32.—The author doubts whether

the term literature should really be applied to the letters in cuneiform

character which were published by Fried. Delitzsch (Beitrage zur Assyriologie,

1893 and 1894) under the title of "Babylonisch-Assyrische Brief littertaur".

18 BIBLE STUDIES. [204, 205

therefore, we can hardly say that the epistle first originated

among the Greeks, yet, notwithstanding the above facts, we

may assume that it might arise quite independently under

the special conditions of Greek Literature, and that, in fact,

it did so arise.

8. Now whatever theory one may have about the origin

of the epistle among the Greeks, that question is of no

great importance for the problem of the historian of literary

phenomena in general, viz., the analysis into their con-

stituent parts of the writings which have been transmitted

to us as a whole under the ambiguous name of "letters".

What is important in this respect are the various categories

to which those constituent parts must be assigned in order

that they may be clearly distinguished from each other.

We may, therefore, ignore the question as to the origin of

these categories—like all questions about the origin of such

products of the mind, it is to a large extent incapable of any

final solution; let it suffice that all these categories are

represented among the "letters" that have been transmitted

from the past. The usage of scientific language is, indeed,

not so uniform as to render a definition of terms super-

fluous. The following preliminary remarks may therefore

be made; they may serve at the same time to justify the

terms hitherto used in this book.

Above all, it is misleading merely to talk of letters,

without having defined the term more particularly. The

perception of this fact has influenced many to speak of the

private letter in contradistinction to the literary letter, and

this distinction may express the actual observed fact that

the true letter is something private, a personal and con-

fidential matter. But the expression is none the less in-

adequate, for it may mislead. Thus B. Weiss,¹ for instance,

uses it as the antithesis of the pastoral letter (Gemeindebrief);

a terminology which does not issue from the essence of

the letter, but from the fact of a possible distinction among

those to whom it may be addressed. We might in the same

way distinguish between the private letter and the family

¹ Meyer, xiv.⁵ (1888), p. 187.

205, 206] LETTERS AND EPISTLES. 19

letter, i.e., the letter which a son, for instance, might send

from abroad to those at home. But it is plain that, in the

circumstances, such a distinction would be meaningless, for

that letter also is a private one. Or, take the case of a

clergyman, acting as army chaplain in the enemy's country,

who writes a letter¹ to his distant congregation at home;

such would be a congregational letter—perhaps it is even read

in church by the locum tenens; but it would manifestly not

differ in the slightest from a private letter, provided, that is,

that the writer's heart was in the right place. The more pri-

vate, the more personal, the more special it is, all the better

a congregational letter will it be; a right sort of congrega-

tion would not welcome paragraphs of pastoral theology—

they get such things from the locum tenens, for he is not

long from college. The mere fact that the receivers of a

letter are a plurality, does not constitute a public in the

literary sense, and, again, an epistle directed to a single

private individual is not on that account a private letter

—it is literature. It is absurd, then, to define the specific

character of a piece of writing which looks like a letter

merely according to whether the writer addresses the re-

ceivers in the second person singular or plural;² the dis-

tinguishing feature cannot be anything merely formal (formal,

moreover, in a superficial sense of that word), but can only be

the inner special purpose of the writer. It is thus advisable,

if we are to speak scientifically, to avoid the use of such

merely external categories as congregational letter, and also to

substitute for private letter a more accurate expression. As

such we are at once confronted by the simple designation

letter, but this homely term, in consideration of the in-

definiteness which it has acquired in the course of centuries,

will hardly suffice by itself; we must find an adjunct for it.

¹ Cf. for instance the letter of K. Ninck to his congregation at Frucht,

of the 1st September, 1870—from Corny ; partly printed in F. Cuntz's Karl

Wilh. Theodor Ninck,. Ein Lebensbild. 2nd edn., Herborn, 1891, p. 94 ff.

² This difference does not, of course, hold in modern English; we can

hardly imagine a letter-writer employing the singular forms thou, thee, But

the distinction does not necessarily hold in German either.—Tr.

20 BIBLE STUDIES. [206, 207

The term true letter is therefore used here, after the example

of writers¹ who are well able to teach us what a letter is.

When a true letter becomes literature by means of its

publication, we manifestly obtain no new species thereby.

To the historian of literature, it still remains what it was

to the original receiver of it—a true letter: even when given

to the public, it makes a continual protest against its being

deemed a thing of publicity. We must so far favour it as

to respect its protest; were we to separate it in any way

from other true letters which were fortunate enough never

to have their obscurity disturbed, we should but add to the

injustice already done to it by its being published.

A new species is reached only when we come to the

letter published professedly as literature, which as such is

altogether different from the first class. Here also we meet

with various designations in scientific language. But the

adoption of a uniform terminology is not nearly so im-

portant in regard to this class as in regard to the true

letter. One may call it literary letter,² or, as has been done

above for the sake of simplicity, epistle—no importance need

be attached to the designation, provided the thing itself be

clear. The subdivisions, again, which may be inferred from

the conditions of origin of the epistle, are of course unessen-

tial; they are not the logical divisions of the concept epistle, but

simply classifications of extant epistles according to their

historical character, i.e., we distinguish between authentic

and unauthentic epistles, and again, in regard to the latter,

¹ E. Reuss, Die Geschichte der h. Schriften N. T.⁶ § 74, p. 70, uses the

expression true letters, addressed to definite and particular readers. Von

Wilamowitz-Moellendorft, Aristoteles und Athen, p. 393; p. 394: real

letters ; ibid., p. 392, letters, e]pistolai< in the full sense of the word. The same

author in Ein Weihgeschenk des Eratosthenes, in Nachrichten der Kgl. Gesell-

schaft der Wissenschaften zu Gottingen, 1894, p. 5: true private letter.--Birt

also uses—besides the designations private writing (Buchwesen, pp. 2, 20, 61,

277, 443) and incidental letter (pp. 61, 325)—the expression true correspondence

(wirkliche Correspandenzen, p. 326). Similarly A. Westermann, De epi-

stolarum scriptoribus graecis 8 progrr., i., Leipzig, 1851, p. 13, calls them

"veras epistolas, h. e. tales, quae ab auctoribus ad ipsos, quibus inscribuntur,

homines revera datae sunt".

² Von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Ein Weihgeschenk des Eratosthenes. p. 3,

207, 208] LETTERS AND EPISTLES. 21

between innocent fabrications and forgeries with a "ten-

dency".

Furnished with these definitions, we approach the im-

mense quantity of written material which has been be-

queathed to us by Graeco-Roman antiquity under the

ambiguous term e]pistolai<, epistulae. The sheets which we

have inherited from the bountiful past, and which have been

brought into confusion by legacy-hunters and legal advisers,

so to speak, perhaps even by the palsied but venerable hand

of their aged proprietrix herself, must first of all be duly

arranged before we can congratulate ourselves on their

possession. In point of fact, the work of arrangement is

by no means so far advanced as the value of the inheritance

deserves to have it.¹ But what has already been done

affords, even to the outsider, at least the superficial impres-

sion that we possess characteristic representatives, from

ancient times, of all the categories of e]poistolai<, which have

been established in the foregoing pages.

III.

9. We can be said to possess true letters from ancient

times—in the full sense of the word possess—only when we

have the originals. And, in fact, the Papyrus discoveries

of the last decade have placed us in the favourable position

of being able to think of as our very own an enormous

number of true letters in the original, extending from the

Ptolemaic period till far on in mediaeval times. The author

is forced to confess that, previous to his acquaintance with

ancient Papyrus letters (such as it was—only in facsimiles),

he had never rightly known, or, at least, never rightly

realised within his own mind, what a letter was. Com-

paring a Papyrus letter of the Ptolemaic period with a

fragment from a tragedy, written also on Papyrus, and of

¹ Among philologists one hears often enough the complaint about

the neglect of the study of ancient "letters". The classical preparatory

labour of Bentley has waited long in vain for the successor of which both it

and its subject were worthy. It is only recently that there appears to have

sprung up a more general interest in the matter.

22 BIBLE STUDIES.

about the same age, no one perceives any external dif-

ference; the same written characters, the same writing

material, the same place of discovery. And yet the two

are as different in their essential character as are reality

and art: the one, a leaf with writing on it, which has served

some perfectly definite and never-to-be-repeated purpose in

human intercourse; the other, the derelict leaf of a book, a

fragment of literature.

These letters will of themselves reveal what they are,

better than the author could, and in evidence of this, there

follows a brief selection of letters from the Egyptian town of

Oxyrhynchus, the English translation of which (from Greek)

all but verbally corresponds to that given by Messrs. Gren-

fell and Hunt in their edition of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri.¹

The author has selected such letters as date from the century

in which our Saviour walked about in the Holy Land, in

which Paul wrote his letters, and the beginnings of the New

Testament collection were made.²

I.

Letter from Chaireas to Tyrannos.³ A.D. 25-26.

"Chaireas to his dearest Tyrannos, many greetings.

Write out immediately the list of arrears both of corn

and money for the twelfth year of Tiberius Caesar

Augustus, as Severus has given me instructions for demand-

ing their payment. I have already written to you to be firm

and demand payment until I come in peace. Do not there-

fore neglect this, but prepare the statements of corn and

money from the . . . year to the eleventh for the presenta-

tion of the demands. Good-bye."

Address : " To Tyrannos, dioiketes ".

¹ The Oxyrhynchus Papyri, edited . . . by Bernard P. Grenfell and

Arthur S. Hunt, Part I., London, 1898 ; Part II., London, 1899. For those

who feel themselves more specially interested in the subject, a comparison

with the original Greek texts will, of course, be necessary.

² The German edition of this work contains a Greek transcription, with

annotations, of ten Papyrus letters (distinct from those given here) from

Egypt, of dates varying from 255 B.C. to the 2nd-3rd centuries A.D.

³ The Oxyrhynchus Papyri, No. 291, ii., p. 291. Chaireas was strategus

of the Oxyrhynchite nome. Tyrannos was dioikhth<j.

LETTERS AND EPISTLES. 23

II.

Letter of Recommendation from Theon to Tyrannos.¹

About A.D. 25.

"Theon to his esteemed Tyrannos, many greetings.

Herakleides, the bearer of this letter, is my brother. I

therefore entreat you with all my power to treat him as

your protege. I have also written to your brother Hermias,

asking him to communicate with you about him. You will

confer upon me a very great favour if Herakleides gains your

notice. Before all else you have my good wishes for un-

broken health and prosperity. Good-bye."

Address: "To Tyrannos, dioiketes".

III.

Letter from Dionysios to his Sister Didyme.² A.D. 27.

"Dionysios to his sister Didyme, many greetings, and

good wishes for continued health. You have sent me no

word about the clothes either by letter or by message, and

they are still waiting until you send me word. Provide the

bearer of this letter, Theonas, with any assistance that he

wishes for. . .. Take care of yourself and all your house-

hold. Good-bye. The 14th year of Tiberius Caesar Augus-

tus, Athyr 18."

Address : " Deliver from Dionysios to his sister Didyme ".

IV.

Letter from Thaeisus to her mother Syras.³ About A.D. 35.

"Thaeisus to her mother Syras. I must tell you

that Seleukos came here and has fled. Don't trouble to

explain (?). Let Lucia wait until the year. Let me know

the day. Salute Ammonas my brother and . . . and my

sister . . . and my father Theonas."

V.

Letter from Ammonios to his father Ammonios.⁴ A.D. 54.

"Ammonios to his father Ammonios, greeting. Kindly

write me in a note the record of the sheep, how many more

¹ The Oxyrhynchus Papyri, No. 292, ii., p. 292.

² Ibid., No. 293, ii., p. 293. ³ Ibid., No. 295, ii., p. 296.

⁴ Ibid., No. 297, ii., p. 298.

24 BIBLE STUDIES.

you have by the lambing beyond those included in the first

return. . . . Good-bye. The 14th year of Tiberius Claudius

Caesar Augustus, Epeiph 29."

Address: "To my father Ammonios".

VI.

Letter from Indike to Thaeisus.¹ Late First Century.

"Indike to Thaeisus, greeting. I sent you the bread-

basket by Taurinus the camel-man; please send me an

answer that you have received it. Salute my friend Theon

and Nikobulos and Dioskoros and Theon and Hermokles,

who have my best wishes. Longinus salutes you. Good-

bye. Month Germanikos 2."

Address: "To Theon,² son of Nikobulos, elaiochristes

at the Gymnasion ".

VII.

Letter of Consolation from Eirene to Taonnophris and

Philon.³ Second Century.

"Eirene to Taonnophris and Philon, good cheer. I

was as much grieved and shed as many tears over Eumoiros

as I shed for Didymas, and I did everything that was fitting,

and so did my whole family,⁴ Epaphrodeitos and Thermuthion

and Philion and Apollonios and Plantas. But still there is

nothing one can do in the face of such trouble. So I leave

you to comfort yourselves. Good-bye. Athyr 1."

Address: "To Taonnophris and Philon".

VIII.

Letter from Korbolon to HerakIeides.⁵ Second Century.

"Korbolon to Herakleides, greeting. I send you the

key by Horion, and the piece of the lock by Onnophris, the

camel-driver of Apollonios. I enclosed in the former packet

a pattern of white-violet colour. I beg you to be good

enough to match it, and buy me two drachmas' weight, and

send it to me at once by any messenger you can find, for

¹ The Oxyrhynchus Papyri, No. 300, ii., p. 301.

² Theon is probably the husband of Thaeisus.

³ The Oxyrhynchus Papyri, No. 115, i., p. 181.

⁴ pa<ntej oi[ e]moi<. Grenfell and Hunt: all my friends.

⁵ The Oxyrhynchus Papyri, No. 113, i., p. 178 f.

216, 217] LETTERS AND EPISTLES. 25

the tunic is to be woven immediately. I received everything

you told me to expect by Onnophris safely. I send you by

the same Onnophris six quarts of good apples. I thank all

the gods to think that I came upon Plution in the Oxy-

rhynchite nome. Do not think that I took no trouble about

the key. The reason is that the smith is a long way from

us. I wonder that you did not see your way to let me have

what I asked you to send by Korbolon, especially when I

wanted it for a festival. I beg you to buy me a silver seal,

and to send it me with all speed. Take care that Onnophris

buys me what Eirene's mother told him. I told him that

Syntrophos said that nothing more should be given to

Amarantos on my account. Let me know what you have

given him that I may settle accounts with him. Otherwise

I and my son will come for this purpose. [On the verso] I

had the large cheeses from Korbolon. I did not, however,

want large ones, but small. Let me know of anything that

you want, and I will gladly do it. Farewell. Payni 1st.

(P.S.) Send me an obol's worth of cake for my nephew."

Address: "To Herakleides, son of Ammonios."

10. But we must not think that the heritage of true

letters which we have received from the past is wholly com-

prised in the Papyrus letters which have been thus finely

preserved as autographs. In books and booklets which have

been transmitted to us as consisting of e]pistolai<, and in

others as well, there is contained a goodly number of true

letters, for the preservation of which we are indebted to the

circumstance that some one, at some time subsequent to

their being written, treated them as literature. Just as at

some future time posterity will be grateful to our learned

men of to-day for their having published the Papyrus letters,

i.e., treated them as literature, so we ourselves have every

cause for gratitude to those individuals, for the most part

unknown, who long ago committed the indiscretion of

making books out of letters. The great men whose letters,

fortunately for us, were overtaken by this fate, were not on

that account epistolographers; they were letter-writers—

like, the strange saints of the Serapeum and the obscure

men and women of the Fayyum. No doubt, by reason of

their letters having been preserved as literature, they have

26 BIBLE STUDIES. [217, 218

often been considered as epistolographers, and the misunder-

standing may have been abetted by the vulgar notion that

those celebrated men had the consciousness of their cele-

brity even when they laughed and yawned, and that they

could not speak or write a single word without imagining

that amazed mankind was standing by to hear and read. We

have not as yet, in every case, identified those whom we

have to thank for real letters. But it will be sufficient for

our purpose if we restrict ourselves to a few likely instances.

The letters of Aristotle († 322 B.C.) were published at a

very early period: their publication gave the lie, in a very

effective manner, to a fictitious collection which came out

shortly after his death.¹ These letters were "true letters,

occasioned by the requirements of private correspondence,

not products of art, i.e., treatises in the form of letters".²

This collection is usually considered to be the first instance

of private letters being subsequently published.³ It is there-

fore necessary to mention them here, though, indeed, it is

uncertain whether anything really authentic has been pre-

served among the fragments which have come down to us;⁴

by far the greater number of these were certainly products

of the fictitious literary composition of the Alexandrian

period.⁵—The case stands more favourably with regard to

the nine letters transmitted to us under the name of Isocrates

(† 338 B.C.).⁶ The most recent editor⁷ of them comes to

the following conclusions. The first letter, to Dionysios, is

authentic. The two letters of introduction, Nos. 7 and 8, to

Timotheos of Heracleia and the inhabitants of Mitylene

respectively, bear the same mark of authenticity: "so much

¹ Von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Antigonos von Karystos, p. 151.

² Stahr, Aristotelia, p. 195.

³ Von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Antigonos von Karystos, p. 151; Suse-

mihl, ii., 580.

⁴ Hercher, pp. 172-174. ⁵ Susemihl, ii., 580 f.

⁶ Hercher, pp. 319-336.

⁷ Von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Aristoteles und Athen, ii., pp. 391-399.

It is unfortunate that some of the most recent critics of Paul's Letters had

not those few pages before them. They might then have seen, perhaps,

both what a letter is, and what method is.

218, 219] LETTERS AND EPISTLES. 27

detail, which, wherever we can test it, we recognise to be

historically accurate, and which, to a much greater extent,

we are not at all in a position to judge, is not found in

forgeries, unless they are meant to serve other than their

ostensible purposes. There can be no talk of that in the

case before us. In these letters some forms of expression

occur more than once (7, 11 = 8, 10), but there is nothing

extraordinary in that. If Isocrates wrote these we must

credit him with having issued many such compositions."¹

These genuine letters of Isocrates are of interest also in

regard to their form, as they show "that Isocrates applied

his rhetorical style also to his letters. . . . Considered from

the point of view of style, they are not letters at all."² The

author considers this fact to be very instructive in regard to

method; it confirms the thesis expressed above, viz., that in

answering the question as to what constitutes a true letter,

it is never the form which is decisive, but ultimately only

the intention of the writer; there ought not to be, but as a

matter of fact there are, letters which read like pamphlets;

there are epistles, again, which chatter so insinuatingly that

we forget that their daintiness is nothing but a suspicious

mask. Nor need one doubt, again, the genuineness of the

second letter—to King Philip: "its contents are most un-

doubtedly personal".³ Letter 5, to Alexander, is likewise

genuine, "truly a fine piece of Isocratic finesse: it is genuine

—just because it is more profound than it seems, and because

it covertly refers to circumstances notoriously true".⁴ The

evidence for and against the genuineness of letter 6 is

evenly balanced.⁵ On the other hand, letters 3, 4 and 9 are

not genuine; are partly, in fact, forgeries with a purpose.⁶

This general result of the criticism is likewise of great value

in regard to method: we must abandon the mechanical idea

of a collection of letters, which would lead us to inquire as to

the genuineness of the collection as a whole, instead of

inquiring as to the genuineness of its component parts. Un-

discerning tradition may quite well have joined together one

¹ P. 391 f. ² P. 392. ³ P. 397.

⁴ P. 399. ⁵ P. 395. ⁶ Pp. 393-397.

28 BIBLE STUDIES. [219, 220

or two unauthentic letters with a dozen of genuine ones;

and, again, a whole book of forged "letters" may be, so to

speak, the chaff in which good grains of wheat may hide

themselves from the eyes of the servants: when the son of

the house comes to the threshing-floor, he will discover them,

for he cannot suffer that anything be lost.—The letters of

the much-misunderstood Epicurus († 270 B.C.) were collected

with great care by the Epicureans, and joined together with

those of his most distinguished pupils, Metrodorus, Polyaenus,

and Hermarchus, with additions from among the letters

which these had received from other friends,¹ and have in

part come down to us. The author cannot refrain from

giving here² the fragment of a letter of the philosopher to

his child (made known to us by the rolls of Herculaneum),

not, indeed, as being a monument of his philosophy, but be-

cause it is part of a letter which is as simple and affectionate,

as much a true letter, as that of Luther to his little son

Hans:—

. . . [a]] feu<gmeqa ei]j La<myakon u[giai<nontes e]gw> kai> Puqo-

klh?j ka[i> !Erm]arxoj kai> K[th<]sippoj, kai> e]kei? kateilh<famen

u[g[i]ai<nontaj qemi<stan kai> tou>j loipou>j [fi<]lo[u]j. eu# de>

poie[i]j kai> su> e[i] u[]giai<neij kai> h[ m[a<]mmh [s]ou kai> pa<p%

kai> Ma<trw[n]i pa<nta pe[i<]qh[i, w!sp]er kai> e@[m]prosqen. eu#

ga>r i@sqi, h[ ai]ti<a, o!ti kai> e]gw> kai> o[i<] loipoi> pa<ntej se me<ga

filou?men, o!ti tou<toij pei<q^ pa<nta . . . .

Again in Latin literature we find a considerable num-

ber of real letters. "Letters, official³ as well as private,

make their appearance in the literature⁴ of Rome at an

early period, both by themselves and in historical works,⁵

¹ Susemihl, i., p. 96 f.; H. Usener, Epicurea, Leipzig, 1887, p. liv.

² From Usener's edition, p. 154.

³ Of course, official letters, too, are primarily "true letters," not litera-

ture, even when they are addressed to a number of persons.—(This note and

the two following do not belong to the quotation from Teuffel-Schwabe.)

⁴ Hence in themselves they are manifestly not literature.

⁵ The insertion of letters in historical works was a very common literary

custom among the Greeks and Romans. It is to be classed along with the

insertion of public papers and longer or shorter speeches in a historical report.

If it holds good that such speeches are, speaking generally, to be regarded as

220, 221] LETTERS AND EPISTLES. 29

and, soon thereafter, those of distinguished men in collec-

tions."¹ We may refer to a single example—certainly a very

instructive one. Of Cicero († 43 B.C.) we possess four collec-

tions of letters; in all 864, if we include the 90 addressed

to him. The earliest belongs to the year 68, the latest is

of the date 28th July, 43.² "Their contents are both per-

sonal and political, and they form an inexhaustible source

for a knowledge of the period,³ though partly, indeed, of

such a kind that the publication of them was not to Cicero's

advantage. For the correspondence of such a man as Cicero,

who was accustomed to think so quickly and feel so strongly,

to whom it was a necessity that he should express his thoughts

and feelings as they came, either in words or in letters to

some confidential friend like Atticus, often affords a too

searching, frequently even an illusory,⁴ glance into his inmost

soul. Hence the accusers of Cicero gathered the greatest

part of their material from these letters."⁵ The letters show

a noteworthy variation of language: "in the letters to Atti-

cus or other well known friends Cicero abandons restraint,

while those to less intimate persons show marks of care and

elaboration".⁶ The history of the gathering together of

Cicero's letters is of great importance for a right understand-

the compositions of the historian, yet, in regard to letters and public papers,

the hypothesis of their authenticity should not be always summarily rejected.

In regard to this question, important as it also is for the criticism of the

biblical writings, see especially H. Schnorr von Carolsfeld, Uber die Reden and

Briefe bei Sallust, Leipzig, 1888, p. 1 ff., and the literature given in Scharer, i.,

p. 66, note 14 [Eng. Trans. I., I., p. 90]; also Teuffel-Schwabe, 1., p. 84,

pos. 3, and Westermann, i. (1851), p. 4.

¹ W. S. Teuffel's Geschichte der romischen Literatur, revised by L.

Schwabe i., Leipzig, 1890, p. 83.

² Teuffel-Schwabe, p. 356 ff.

³ This point is also a very valuable one for the critic of the biblical

"letters" in the matter of method. For an estimation of the historical im-

portance of Cicero's letters, the author refers, further, to J. Bernays, Edward

Gibbon's Geschichtswerk in the Gesammelte Abhh. von J. B., edited by H.

Usener, ii., Berlin, 1885, p. 243, and E. Ruete, Die Correspondenz Ciceros in

den Jahren 44 and 43, Marburg, 1883, p. 1.

⁴ The present writer would question this.

⁵ Teuffel-Schwabe, i., p. 356 f. ⁶ Ibid., i., p. 357.

30 BIBLE STUDIES. [221, 222

ing of similar literary transactions. "Cicero did not himself

collect the letters he had written, still less publish them, but

even during his lifetime his intimate friends were already

harbouring such intentions."¹ "After Cicero's death the

collecting and publishing of his letters was zealously pro-

moted; in the first place, undoubtedly, by Tiro, who, while

Cicero was still living, had resolved to collect his letters."²

Cornelius Nepos, according to a note in that part of his

biography of Atticus which was written before 34 B.C., had,

even by that date, a knowledge, from private sources, of the

letters to Atticus;³ "they were not as yet published, indeed,

as he expressly says, but, it would appear, already collected

with a view to publication. The first known mention of a

letter from Cicero's correspondence being published is found

at the earliest" in Seneca.⁴ The following details of the

work of collection may be taken as established.⁴ Atticus

negotiated the issue of the letters addressed to him, while

the others appear to have been published gradually by Tiro;

both editors suppressed their own letters to Cicero. Tiro

arranged the letters according to the individuals who had

received them, and published the special correspondence of

each in one or more volumes, according to the material he

had. Such special materials, again, as did not suffice for a

complete volume, as also isolated letters, were bound up in

miscellanea (embracing letters to two or more individuals),

while previously published collections were supplemented in

later issues by letters which had only been written subse-

quently, or subsequently rendered accessible. The majority

of these letters of Cicero are "truly confidential outpourings

of the feelings of the moment,"⁵ particularly those addressed

to Atticus—"confidential letters, in which the writer ex-

¹ Teuffel-Schwabe, p. 357, quotes in connection with this Cic. ad

Attic., 16, 55 (44 B.C.) mearum epistularum nulla est sunagwgh<, sed habet Tiro

instar LXX, et quidem sent a te quaedam sumendae; eas ego oportet perspiciam,

carrigam; tum denique edentur,—and to Tiro, Fam., 16, 171 (46 B.c.) tuas quo-

que epistulas vis referri in volumina.

² Teuffel-Schwabe, p. 357. ³ Ibid.

⁴ Ibid., p. 358. ⁵ Ibid., p. 83.

222, 223] LETTERS AND EPISTLES. 31

presses himself without a particle of constraint, and which

often contain allusions intelligible to the receiver alone. In

some parts they read like soliloquies."¹ The authenticity

of the letters to Brutus, for instance, has been disputed by

many, but these assailants "have been worsted on all points,

and the authenticity is now more certain than ever. The

objections that have been urged against this collection, and

those, in particular, which relate to the contradictions be-

tween Cicero's confidential judgments upon individuals and

those he made publicly or in utterances of other times, are

of but little weight."²

11. The fact that we know of a relatively large number

of literary letters, i.e., epistles, of ancient times, and that,

further, we possess many such, is a simple consequence of

their being literary productions. Literature is designed not

merely for the public of the time being; it is also for the

future. It has not been ascertained with certainty which

was the first instance of the literary letter in Greek litera-

ture. Susemihl³ is inclined to think that the epidictic

triflings of Lysias († 379 B.C.) occupy this position—that is,

if they be authentic—but he certainly considers it possible

that they originated in the later Attic period. Aristotle em-

ployed the "imaginary letter" (fictiver Brief) for his Protrep-

tikos.⁴ We have "didactic epistles" of Epicurus, as also of

Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and we may add to these such

writings of Plutarch as De Conjugalibus Praeceptis, De Tran-

quillitate Animi, De Animae Procreatione⁵—literary productions

to which one may well apply the words of an ancient expert

in such things,⁶ ou] ma> th>n a]lh<qeian e]pistolai> le<gointo a@n,

a]lla> suggra<mmata to> xai<rein e@xonta prosgegramme<non, and

ei] ga<r tij e]n e]pistol^? sofi<smata gra<fei kai> fusiologi<aj,

¹ Teuffel-Schwabe, i., p. 362.

² Ibid., p. 364. This is another point highly important in regard to

method,—for the criticism of the Pauline Letters in particular.

³ ii., p. 600.

⁴ Von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Aristoteles und Athen, ii., p. 393.

⁵ Westermann, i. (1851), p. 13. See Susemihl, ii., p. 601, for many

other examples in Greek literature.

⁶ Demetr. de elocut., 22S (Hercher, p. 13), and 231 (H., p. 14).

32 BIBLE STUDIES. [223, 224

grafei me<n, ou] mh>n e]pistolh>n gra<fei.¹ Among the Romans,

M. Porcius Cato († 149 B.C.) should probably be named as one

of the first writers of epistles;² the best known, doubtless,

are Seneca and Pliny. L. Annaeus Seneca³ († 165 A.D.) began

about the year 57—at a time when Paul was writing his

“great” letters—to write the Epistulae Morales to his friend

Lucilius, intending from the first that they should be pub-

lished; most probably the first three books were issued by

himself. Then in the time of Trajan, C. Plinius Caecilius

Secundus⁴ († ca. 113 A.D.) wrote and published nine books

of "letters"; the issue of the collection was already com-

plete by the time Pliny went to Bithynia. Then came his

correspondence with Trajan, belonging chiefly to the period of

his governorship in Bithynia (ca. September 111 to January

113). The letters of Pliny were likewise intended from the

first for publication, "and hence are far from giving the

same impression of freshness and directness as those of

Cicero";⁵ "with studied variety they enlarge upon a multi-

tude of topics, but are mainly designed to exhibit their author

in the most favourable light";⁶ "they exhibit him as an

affectionate husband, a faithful friend, a generous slaveholder,

a noble-minded citizen, a liberal promoter of all good causes,

an honoured orator and author";⁷ "on the other hand,

the correspondence with Trajan incidentally raises a sharp

contrast between the patience and quiet prudence of the

emperor and the struggling perplexity and self-importance

of his vicegerent".⁸ "All possible care has likewise been

bestowed upon the form of these letters."⁹

There are several other facts illustrative of the extremely

¹ A saying of the Rhetor Aristides (2nd cent. B.c.) shows how well an

ancient epistolographer was able to estimate the literary character of his

compositions. In his works we find an e]pi> ]Aleca<ndr& e]pita<fioj dedicated t^?

boul^? kai> t&? dh<m& Kotuae<wn, of which he himself says (i., p. 148, Dindorf),

o!per ge kai> e]n a]rx^? th?j e]pistolh?j ei#pon h} o! ti bou<lesqe kalei?n to> bibli<on.

Hence Westermann, iii. (1852), p. 4, applies to this and to another " letter "

of Aristides the name declamations epistolarum sub specie latentes.

² Teuffel-Schwabe, i., pp. 84, 197 f. ³ Ibid., ii., p. 700.

⁴ Ibid., ii., pp. 849, 851 ff. ⁵ Ibid., ii., p. 852.

⁶ Ibid., ii., p. 849. ⁷ Ibid., ii., p. 852.

⁸ Ibid. ⁹ Ibid.

224, 225] LETTERS AND EPISTLES. 33

wide dissemination of the practice of epistle-writing among

the Greeks and Romans. The epistle, having once gained a

position as a literary eidos, became differentiated into a

whole series of almost independent forms of composition.

We should, in the first place, recall the poetical epistle¹

(especially of Lucilius, Horace, Ovid); but there were also

juristic epistles—a literary form which probably originated

in the written responsa to questions on legal subjects;²

further, there were epistulae medicinales,³ gastronomic "letters,"⁴

etc. In this connection it were well to direct particular

attention to the great popularity of the epistle as the special

form of magical and religious literature. "All the Magic

Papyri are of this letter-form, and in all the ceremonial and

mystic literature—to say nothing of other kinds—it was the

customary form. At that time the pioneers of new religions

clothed their message in this form, and even when they

furnish their writings with a stereotype title of such a kind,

and with particularly sacred names, it would yet be doing

them an injustice simply to call them forgers."⁵

12. A very brief reference to the pseudonymous epis-

tolography of antiquity is all that is required here. It will

be sufficient for us to realise the great vogue it enjoyed, after

the Alexandrian period, among the Greeks and subsequently

among the Romans. It is decidedly one of the most char-

acteristic features of post-classical literature. We already

find a number of the last-mentioned epistles bearing the

names of pretended authors; it is, indeed, difficult to draw

a line between the "genuine" and the fictitious epistles

when the two are set in contrast to letters really such.⁶ As

may be easily understood, pseudonymous epistolography

specially affected the celebrated names of the past, and not

least the names of those great men the real letters of whom

were extant in collections. The literary practice of using

¹ Teuffel-Schwabe, i., p. 39 f. ² Ibid., i., p. 84.

³ Ibid., i., p. 85. ⁴ Susemihl, ii., p. 601.

⁵ A. Dieterich, Abraxas, p. 161 f. Particular references will be found

there and specially in Fleck. Jbb. Suppl. xvi. (1888), p. 757.

⁶ Cf. pp. 15 and 20 above.

34 BIBLE STUDIES. [225, 226

assumed or protective names was found highly convenient by

such obscure people as felt that they must make a contribu-

tion to literature of a page or two; they did not place their own

names upon their books, for they had the true enough pre-

sentiment that these would be a matter of indifference to their

contemporaries and to posterity, nor did they substitute for

them some unknown Gaius or Timon: what they did was to

write "letters" of Plato or Demosthenes, of Aristotle or

his royal pupil, of Cicero, Brutus or Horace. It would be

superfluous in the meantime to go into particulars about any

specially characteristic examples, the more so as the present

position of the investigation still makes it difficult for us to

assign to each its special historical place, but at all events

the pseudonymous epistolography of antiquity stands out

quite clearly as a distinct aggregate of literary phenomena.

Suffice it only to refer further to what may be very well

gleaned from a recent work,¹ viz., that the early imperial

period was the classical age of this most unclassical manu-

facturing of books.

IV.

13. The author's purpose was to write Prolegomena to

the biblical letters and epistles: it may seem now to be high

time that he came to the subject. But he feels that he

might now break off, and still confidently believe that he has

not neglected his task. What remains to be said is really

implied in the foregoing pages. It was a problem in the

method of literary history which urged itself upon him; he

has solved it, for himself at least, in laying bare the roots by

which it adheres to the soil on which flourished aforetime

the spacious garden of God—Holy Scripture.

To the investigator the Bible offers a large number of

writings bearing a name which appears to be simple, but

which nevertheless conceals within itself that same problem

—a name which every child seems to understand, but upon

which, nevertheless, the learned man must ponder deeply

¹ J. F. Marcks, Symbola critica ad Epistolorgraphos Graecos, Bonn, 1883.

226, 227] LETTERS AND EPISTLES. 35

if ever he will see into the heart of the things called by it.

"Letters"! How long did the author work with this term

without having ever once reflected on what it meant; how

long did it accompany him through his daily task in science

without his observing the enigma that was inscribed on its

work-a-day face! Others may have been more knowing:

the author's experiences were like those of a man who

plants a vineyard without being able to distinguish the

true vine-shoots from the suckers of the wild grape. That

was, of course, a sorry plight—as bad as if one were to

labour upon Attic tragedies without knowing what an Attic

tragedy is. One may, indeed, write a letter without

necessarily knowing what a letter is. The best letter-

writers have certainly not cherished any doctrinaire opinions

on the subject. The ancient Greek and Latin "guides to

letter-writing"¹ appeared long after Cicero: neither did the

Apostles, for that matter, know anything of Halieutics.

But if one is to understand those literary memorials in the

Bible which have come to us under the name of "letters,"

and to make them intelligible to others, the first condition

is, of course, that one must have an historical comprehen-

sion of his purpose, must have previously divested the

problematic term of its problematic character: ou] ga>r e]peidh>

e]pistolh> prosagoreu<etai e[nik&? o]no<mati, h@dh kai> pasw?n tw?n

kata> to>n bi<on ferome<nwn e]pistolw?n ei$j tij e]sti xarakth>r kai>

mi<a proshgori<a, a]lla> dia<foroi, kaqw>j e@fhn.² If we rightly

infer, from an investigation of ancient literature, that the

familiar term "letter" must be broken up—above all, into the

two chief categories real letter and epistle, then the biblical

"letters" likewise must be investigated from this point of

¹ Cf. on this Westermann, (1851), p. 9 f. For Greek theorists in

letter-writing, see Hercher, pp. 1-16; for the Latin, the Rhetores Latini,

minores, em., C. Halm, fasc. ii., Leipzig, 1863, pp. 447 f. and 589.

² [Pseudo-]Procl. De Forma Epistolari (Hercher, p. 6 f.). This quota-

tion, it is true, refers not to the various logical divisions of the concept

"letter," but to the 41 [!] various sub-classes of true letters. The process of

distinguishing these various classes ([Pseudo-]Demetr. [Hercher, p. 1 ff.]

similarly enumerates 21 categories) is, in its details, sometimes very extra-

ordinary.

36 BIBLE STUDIES. [228

view. Just as the language of the Bible ought to be studied

in its actual historical context of contemporary language;¹

just as its religious and ethical contents must be studied in

their actual historical context of contemporary religion and

civilisation²—so the biblical writings, too, in the literary in-

vestigation of them, ought not to be placed in an isolated posi-

tion. The author speaks of the biblical writings, not of the bibli-

cal literature. To apply the designation literature to certain

portions of the biblical writings would be an illegitimate

procedure. Not all that we find printed in books at the pre-

sent day was literature from the first. A comparison of the

biblical writings, in their own proper character, with the

other writings of antiquity, will show us that in each case

there is a sharp distinction between works which were

literature from the first and writings which only acquired

that character later on, or will show, at least, that we must

so distinguish them from each other. This is nowhere more

evident than in the case under discussion. When we make

the demand that the biblical "letters" are to be set in their

proper relation to ancient letter-writing as a whole, we

do not thereby imply that they are products of ancient

epistolography; but rather that they shall be investigated

simply with regard to the question, how far the categories

implied in the problematic term letter are to be employed

in the criticism of them. We may designate our question

regarding the biblical letters and epistles as a question

regarding the literary character of the writings transmitted

by the Bible under the name letters,³ but the question re-

garding their literary character must be so framed that the

answer will affirm the preliterary character, probably of

some, possibly of all.

¹ Cf. p. 63 ff.

² The author has already briefly expressed these ideas about the history

of biblical religion in the essay Zur Methode der Biblischen, Theologie des

Neuen Testamentes, Zeitschrift fur Theologie und Kirche, iii. (1893), pp. 126-139.

³ E. P. Gould, in an article entitled "The Literary Character of St.

Paul's Letters" in The Old and New Testament Student, vol. xi. (1890), pp.

71 ff. and 134 ff., seems to apply the same question to some at least of the

biblical "letters," but in reality his essay has an altogether different purpose.

229] LETTERS AND EPISTLES. 37

The latter has been maintained by F. Overbeck,¹—at

least in regard to the "letters" in the New Testament. He

thinks that the Apostolic letters belong to a class of writings

which we ought not to place in the province of literature at

all;² the writer of a letter has, as such, no concern with

literature whatever,—"because for every product of litera-

ture it is essential that its contents have an appropriate

literary form".³ The written words of a letter are nothing

but the wholly inartificial and incidental substitute for

spoken words. As the letter has a quite distinct and

transitory motive, so has it also a quite distinct and re-

stricted public—not necessarily merely one individual, but

sometimes, according to circumstances, a smaller or larger

company of persons: in any case, a circle of readers which

can be readily brought before the writer's mind and dis-

tinctly located in the field of inward vision. A work of

literature, on the other hand, has the widest possible pub-

licity in view: the literary man's public is, so to speak, an

imaginary one, which it is the part of the literary work to

find.⁴ Though Overbeck thus indicates with proper precision

the fundamental difference between the letter and literature,

¹ Uber die Anfange der patrristischen Litteratur in the Historische Zeit-

schrift, 48, Neue Folge 12 (1882), p. 429 ff. The present writer cannot but

emphasise how much profitable stimulation in regard to method he has

received from this essay, even though he differs from the essayist on im-

portant points.

² P. 429, and foot of p. 428.

³ P. 429. Overbeck would seem sometimes not to be quite clear with

regard to the term form, which he frequently uses. The author understands

the word in the above quotation in the same way as in the fundamental pro-

position on p. 423: "In the forms of literature is found its history". Here

form can be understood only as Eidos. The forms of literature are, e.g.,

Epos, Tragedy, History, etc. Overbeck, in his contention that the form is

essential for the contents of a literary work, is undoubtedly correct, if he is

referring to the good old ei@dh of literature. No one, for example, will expect

a comedy to incite fo<boj kai> e@leoj. But the contention is not correct when it

refers to such a subordinate literary Eidos as the epistle. The epistle may

treat of all possible subjects—and some others as well. And therefore when

all is said, it is literature, a literary form—even when only a bad form

(Unform).

⁴ P. 429.

38 BIBLE STUDIES. [229, 230

yet he has overlooked the necessary task of investigating

whether the Apostolic letters—either as a whole or in part

—may not be epistles, and this oversight on his part is the

more extraordinary, since he quite clearly recognises the dis-

tinction between the letter and the epistle. He speaks, at

least, of "artificial letters," and contrasts them with "true

letters";¹ in point of fact, he has the right feeling,² that

there are some of the New Testament letters, the form of

which is quite obviously not that of a letter at all, viz., the

so-called Catholic Epistles: in some of these the form of

address, being so indefinite and general, does not correspond

to what we expect in a letter, and, in fact, constitutes a

hitherto unsolved problem. Hence he is inclined to class

them along with those New Testament writings "which, in

their own proper and original form, certainly belong to

literature,³ but which, in consideration of the paucity of

their different forms, must not be thought of as qualifying

the New Testament to be ranked historically as the be-

ginning of that literature". Easy as it would have been

to characterise the "letters," thus so aptly described, as

epistles, Overbeck has yet refrained from doing this, and

though he seems, at least, to have characterised them as

literature, yet he pointedly disputes⁴ the contention that

Christian literature begins with "the New Testament,"—

that is, in possible case, with these letters,—and he ex-

pressly says that the "artificial letter" remains wholly

outside of the sphere of this discussion.⁵

14. The present writer would assert, as against this,

that "in the New Testament," and not only there but also

in the literature of the Jews as well as of the Christians of

post-New-Testament times, the transmitted "letters" permit

of quite as marked a division into real letters and epistles, as

is the case in ancient literature generally.

14. Most investigators of the New Testament letters

seem to overlook the fact that this same profound difference

¹ P. 429 at the top. ² P. 431 f.

³ Overbeck here means the Gospels, Acts of the Apostles and Revelation.

⁴ P. 426 IL ⁵ P. 429.

231] LETTERS AND EPISTLES. 39

already manifests itself clearly in the "letters" found

among the writings of pre-Christian Judaism. Looking

at the writings of early Christianity from the standpoint

of literary history, we perceive that Jewish literature¹ was

precisely the literary sphere from which the first Christians

could most readily borrow and adopt something in the way

of forms, ei@dh, of composition.² If, therefore, the existence of

the ei#doj of the epistle can be demonstrated in this possibly

archetypal sphere, our inquiry regarding the early Christian

"letters" manifestly gains a more definite justification.

Should the doubt be raised as to whether it is conceivable

that a line of demarcation, quite unmistakably present in

"profane" literature, should have also touched the outlying

province of the New Testament, that doubt will be stilled

when it is shown that this line had actually long intersected

the sphere of Jewish literature, which may have been the

model for the writers of the New Testament. Between the

ancient epistles and what are (possibly) the epistles of early

Christianity, there subsists a literary, a morphological connec-

tion; if it be thought necessary to establish a transition-link,

this may quite well be found in the Jewish epistles. The

way by which the epistle entered the sphere of Jewish author-

ship is manifest: Alexandria, the classical soil of the epistle

and the pseudo-epistle, exercised its Hellenising influence

¹ Not solely, of course, those writings which we now recognise as

canonical.

² The influence of a Jewish literary form can be clearly seen at its best

in the Apocalypse of John. But also the Acts of the Apostles (which, along

with the Gospels, the present writer would, contra Overbeck, characterise as

belonging already to Christian literature) has its historical prototype, in the

matter of form, in the Hellenistic writing of annals designed for the edifi-

cation of the people. What in the Acts of the Apostles recalls the literary

method of "profane" historical literature (e.g., insertion of speeches, letters,

and official papers), need not be accounted for by a competent knowledge of

classical authors on the part of the writer of it; it may quite well be ex-

plained by the influence of its Jewish prototypes. When the Christians

began to make literature, they adopted their literary forms, even those

which have the appearance of being Graeco-Roman, from Greek Judaism, with

the single exception of the Evangelium—a literary form which originated

within Christianity itself.

40 BIBLE STUDIES. [232

upon Judaism in this matter as in others. We know not

who the first Jewish epistolographer may have been, but it

is, at least, highly probable that he was an Alexandrian.

The taking over of the epistolary form was facilitated for

him by the circumstance that already in the ancient and

revered writings of his nation there was frequent mention

of "letters," and that, as a matter of fact, he found a number

of "letters" actually given verbatim in the sacred text.

Any one who read the Book of the Prophet Jeremiah

with the eyes of an Alexandrian Hellenist, found, in chap.

29 (the prophet's message to the captives in Babylon),¹

something which to his morbid literary taste seemed like an

epistle. As a matter of fact, this message is a real letter.

perhaps indeed the only genuine one we have from Old

Testament times; a real letter, which only became literature

by its subsequent admission into the book of the Prophet.

As it now stands in the book, it is to be put in exactly the

same class as all other real letters which were subsequently

published. In its origin, in its purpose, Jer. 29, being a

real letter, is non-literary, and hence, of course, we must not

ask after a literary prototype for it. The wish to discover

the first Israelitic or first Christian letter-writer would be

as foolish as the inquiry regarding the beginnings of Jewish

and, later, of Christian, epistolography is profitable and

necessary; besides, the doctrinaire inquirer would be cruelly

undeceived when the sublime simplicity of the historical

reality smiled at him from the rediscovered first Christian

letter—its pages perhaps infinitely paltry in their contents:

some forgotten cloak may have been the occasion of it—

who will say? Jer. 29 is not, of course, a letter such as

anybody might dash off in an idle moment; nay, lightnings

quiver between the lines, Jahweh speaks in wrath or in

blessing,—still, although a Jeremiah wrote it, although it

be a documentary fragment of the history of the people and

the religion of Israel, it is still a letter, neither less nor more.

The antithesis of it in that respect is not wanting. There

¹ It is, of course, possible, in these merely general observations, to avoid

touching on the question of the integrity of this message.

233] LETTERS AND EPISTLES. 41

has been transmitted to us, among the Old Testament

Apocryphal writings, a little book bearing the name e]pistolh>

[Ieremi<ou. If Jer. 29 is a letter of the prophet Jeremiah,

this is an Epistle of "Jeremiah". Than the latter, we could

know no more instructive instance for the elucidation of the

distinction between letter and epistle, or for the proper

appreciation of the idea of pseudonymity in ancient litera-

ture. The Greek epistolography of the Alexandrian period

constituted the general literary impulse of the writer of the

Epistle of "Jeremiah," while the actual existence of a real

letter of Jeremiah constituted the particular impulse. He

wrote an epistle,—as did the other great men of the day: he

wrote an epistle of "Jeremiah," just as the others may have

fabricated, say, epistles of "Plato". We can distinctly see,

in yet another passage, how the motive to epistolography

could be found in the then extant sacred writings of

Judaism. The canonical Book of Esther speaks, in two

places, of royal letters, without giving their contents: a

sufficient reason for the Greek reviser to sit down and

manufacture them, just as the two prayers, only mentioned

in the original, are given by him in full!¹

Having once gained a footing, epistolography must

have become very popular in Greek Judaism; we have still

a whole series of Graeco-Jewish "letters," which are un-

questionably epistles. The author is not now thinking of

the multitude of letters, ascribed to historical personages,

which are inserted in historical works²; in so far as these

are unauthentic, they are undoubtedly of an epistolary

¹ The following is also instructive: It is reported at the end of the

Greek Book of Esther that the "Priest and Levite" Dositheus and his son

Ptolemaeus, had "brought hither" (i.e., to Egypt) the e]pistolh> tw?n Frourai<

(concerning the Feast of Purim) from Esther and Mordecai (LXX Esther

9^{29, cf. 20}), which was translated (into Greek) by Lysimachus, the son of

Ptolemaeus in Jerusalem. It would thus seem that a Greek letter concern-

ing Purim, written by Esther and Mordecai, was known in Alexandria. It

is not improbable that the alleged bearers of the "letter" were really the

authors of it.

² The Books of Maccabees, Epistle of Aristeas, specially also Eupolemos

(cf. thereon J. Freudenthal, Hellenistische Studien, part i. and ii., Breslau,

1875, p. 106 ff.), Josephus.

42 BIBLE STUDIES. [234

character, but they belong less to the investigation of

epistolography than to the development of historical style.

We should rather call to mind books and booklets like the

Epistle of Aristeas, the two¹ epistles at the beginning of the

2nd Book of Maccabees, the Epistle of "Baruch" to the nine and

a half tribes in captivity, attached to the Apocalypse of

Baruch,² perhaps the twenty-eighth "Letter of Diogenes,"³ and

certain portions of the collection of "letters" which bears the

name of Heraclitus.⁴

15. Coming, then, to the early Christian "letters" with

our question, letter or epistle? it will be our first task to de-

termine the character of the "letters" transmitted to us

under the name of Paul. Was Paul a letter-writer or an

epistolographer? The question is a sufficiently pressing one,

in view of the exceedingly great popularity of epistolography

in the Apostle's time. Nor can we forthwith answer it,

even leaving the Pastoral epistles out of consideration, and

attending in the first place only to those whose genuineness

is more or less established. The difficulty is seen in its

most pronounced form when we compare the letter to

Philemon with that to the Romans; here we seem to have

two such heterogeneous compositions that it would appear

questionable whether we should persist in asking the above

disjunctive question. May not Paul have written both

letters and epistles? It would certainly be preposterous to

assume, a priori, that the "letters" of Paul must be either

all letters or all epistles. The inquiry must rather be

directed upon each particular "letter"—a task the ful-

filment of which lies outside the scope of the present

¹ C. Bruston (Trois lettres des Juifs de Palestine, ZAW. x. [1890], pp.

110-117) has recently tried to show that 2 Macc. 1¹-2¹⁸ contains not two but

three letters (1^1-7a, 1 ^7b-10a, 1 ^10b-2¹⁸).

² Unless this be of Christian times, as appears probable to the present

writer. In any case it is an instructive analogy for the literary criticism of

the Epistle of James and the First Epistle of Peter.

³ Cf. J. Bernays, Lucian and die Kyniker, Berlin, 1879, p. 96 ff.

⁴ J. Bernays, Die heraklitisclien Briefe, Berlin, 1869, particularly p.

61 ff.

235] LETTERS AND EPISTLES. 43

methodological essay.¹ But, as it is, the author may

here at least indicate his opinion.

It appears to him quite certain that the authentic

writings of the Apostle are true letters, and that to think

of them as epistles² is to take away what is best in them.

They were, of course, collected, and treated as literature—in

¹ At some future time the author may perhaps pursue the subject

further. He hopes then to treat also of so-called formal matters (form of

the address, of the beginning and the end, style of letter, etc.), for which he

has already gathered some materials.

² But seldom has this been more distinctly maintained than quite re-

cently by A. Gercke, who designates the letters of Paul, in plain language,

as "treatises in the form of letters" (GGA., 1894, p. 577). But this great

and widely-prevalent misconception of the matter stretches back in its be-

ginnings to the early years of the Christian Church. Strictly speaking, it

began with the first movements towards the canonisation of the letters.

Canonisation was possible only when the non-literary (and altogether un-

canonical) character of the messages had been forgotten; when Paul, from

being an Apostle, had become a literary power and an authority of the past.

Those by whom the letters were treated as elements of the developing New

Testament considered the Apostle to be an epistolographer. Further, the

pseudo-Pauline "letters," including the correspondence between Paul and

Seneca, are evidences of the fact that the writers of them no longer under-

stood the true nature of the genuine letters; the bringing together of the

Apostle and the epistolographer Seneca is in itself a particularly significant

fact. We may also mention here the connecting—whether genuine or not—

of Paul with the Attic orators (in the Rhetorician Longinus: cf. J. L.

Hug, Einleitung in die Schriften des Neuen Testaments, ii.³, Stuttgart and

Tubingen, 1826, p. 334 ff.; Heinrici, Das zweite Sendschreiben des Ap. P. an

die Korinthier, p. 578). The same position is held very decidedly by A.

Scultetus († 1624), according to whom the Apostle imitates the "letters" of

Heraclitus (cf. Bernays, Die heraklitischen, Briefe, p. 151). How well the

misunderstanding still flourishes, how tightly it shackles both the criticism

of the Letters and the representation of Paulinism, the author will not

further discuss at present; he would refer to his conclusions regarding

method at the end of this essay. In his opinion, one of the most pertinent

things that have been of late written on the true character of Paul's letters

is § 70 of Reuss's Introduction (Die Geschichte der heiligen Schrr. N.T.

P. 70). Mention may also be made—reference to living writers being omitted

—of A. Ritschl's Die christl. Lehre von der Rechtfertigung und Versohnung, ii.³,

P. 22. Supporters of the correct view were, of course, not wanting even in

earlier times. Compare the anonymous opinion in the Codex Barberinus,

iii., 36 (saec. xi.): e]pistolai> Pau<lou kalou?ntai, e]peidh> tau<taj o[ Pau?loj i]di<% e]pi-

ste<llei kai> di ] au]tw?n ou{j me>n h@dh e[w<rake kai> e]di<dacen u[pomimnh<skei kai>

e]pidiorqou?tai, ou{j de> mh> e[w<rake spouda<zei kathxei?n kai> dida<skein in E. Klostermann's

Analecta zur Septuaginta, Hexapla und Patristik, Leipzig, 1895, p. 95.

44 BIBLE STUDIES. [236, 237

point of fact, as literature in the highest sense, as canonical

—at an early period. But that was nothing more than an

after-experience of the letters, for which there were many

precedents in the literary development sketched above.

But this after-experience cannot change their original char-

acter, and our first task must be to ascertain what this

character actually is. Paul had no thought of adding a

few fresh compositions to the already extant Jewish epistles,

still less of enriching the sacred literature of his nation;

no, every time he wrote, he had some perfectly definite

impulse in the diversified experiences of the young Christian

churches. He had no presentiment of the place his words

would occupy in universal history; not so much as that

they would still be in existence in the next generation, far

less that one day the people would look upon them as Holy

Scripture. We now know them as coming down from the

centuries with the literary patina and the nimbus of canoni-

city upon them; should we desire to attain a historical

estimate of their proper character, we must disregard both.

Just as we should not allow the dogmatic idea of the mass

to influence our historical consideration of the last Supper

of Jesus with His disciples, nor the liturgical notions of a

prayerbook-commission to influence our historical considera-

tion of the Lord's Prayer, so little dare we approach the

letters of Paul with ideas about literature and notions

about the canon. Paul had better work to do than the

writing of books, and he did not flatter himself that he

could write Scripture; he wrote letters, real letters, as did

Aristotle and Cicero, as did the men and women of the

Fayyum. They differ from the messages of the homely

Papyrus leaves from Egypt not as letters, but only as the

letters of Paul. No one will hesitate to grant that the

Letter to Philemon has the character of a letter. It must

be to a large extent a mere doctrinaire want of taste that

could make any one describe this gem, the preservation of

which we owe to some fortunate accident, as an essay, say,

"on the attitude of Christianity to slavery". It is rather a

letter, full of a charming, unconscious naivete, full of kindly

237, 238] LETTERS AND EPISTLES. 45

human nature. It is thus that Epicurus writes to his

child, and Moltke to his wife: no doubt Paul talks of other

matters than they do—no one letter, deserving the name, has

ever looked like another—but the Apostle does exactly what

is done by the Greek philosopher and the German officer.

It is also quite clear that the note of introduction

contained in Rom. 16 is of the nature of a true letter.

No one, it is to be hoped, will make the objection that

it is directed to a number of persons—most likely the

Church at Ephesus; the author thinks that he has made

it probable that the number of receivers is of no account

in the determination of the nature of a letter.¹ But

the Letter to the Philippians is also as real a letter as

any that was ever written. Here a quite definite situation

of affairs forced the Apostle to take up his pen, and the

letter reflects a quite definite frame of mind, or, at least,

enables us to imagine it. The danger of introducing into

our investigation considerations which, so far as concerns

method,² are irrelevant, is, of course, greater in this case.

Some reader will again be found to contend that, in con-

trast to the private letter to Philemon, we have here a

congregational letter: some one, again, who is convinced of

the valuelessness of this distinction, will bring forward the

peculiarity of the contents the letter is of a "doctrinal"

character, and should thus be designated a doctrinal letter.

This peculiarity must not be denied—though, indeed, the

author has misgivings about applying the term doctrine to

the Apostle's messages; the "doctrinal" sections of the

letters impress him more as being of the nature of con-

fessions and attestations. But what is added towards the

answering of our question letter or epistle? by the expression

¹ Cf. pp. 4 and 18 f.

² The relative lengthiness of the letter must also be deemed an

irrelevant consideration—one not likely, as the author thinks, to be ad-

vanced. The difference between a letter and an epistle cannot be decided

by the tape-line. Most letters are shorter than the Letter to the Philip-

pians, shorter still than the "great" Pauline letters. But there are also

quite diminutive epistles: a large number of examples are to be found in the

collection of Hercher.

46 BIBLE STUDIES. [238, 239

"doctrinal" letter—however pertinent a term? If a letter

is intended to instruct the receiver, or a group of receivers,

does it thereby cease to be a letter? A worthy pastor, let

us say, writes some stirring words to his nephew at the

university, to the effect that he should not let the "faith"

be shaken by professorial wisdom; and he refutes point by

point the inventions of men. Perhaps, when he himself

was a student, he received some such sincere letters from

his father against the new orthodoxy which was then, in its

turn, beginning to be taught. Do such letters forthwith

become tractates simply because they are "doctrinal"?¹

We must carefully guard against an amalgamation of the

two categories doctrinal letter and epistle. If any one be so

inclined, he may break up the letter into a multitude of

subdivisions: the twenty-one or forty-one tu<poi of the old

theorists² may be increased to whatever extent one wishes.

¹ At the present day it would be difficult enough, in many cases, to

determine forthwith the character of such letters. For instance, the so-

called Pastoral Letters of bishops and general superintendents might almost

always be taken as epistles, not, indeed, because they are official, but because

they are designed for a public larger than the address might lead one to

suppose. Further, at the present day they are usually printed from the outset.

An example from the Middle Ages, the "letter" of Gregory VII. to Hermann

of Metz, dated the 15th March, 1081, has been investigated in regard to its

literary character by C. Mirbt, Die Publizistik im Zeitalter Gregors VII.,

Leipzig, 1894, p. 23. Cf., on p. 4 of the same work, the observations on

literary publicity. The defining lines are more easily drawn in regard to

antiquity. A peculiar hybrid phenomenon is found in the still extant cor-

respondence of Abelard and Heloise. It is quite impossible to say exactly

where the letters end and the epistles begin. Heloise writes more in the

style of the letter, Abelard more in that of the epistle. There had, of course,

been a time when both wrote differently: the glow of feeling which, in the

nun's letters, between biblical and classical quotations, still breaks occa-

sionally into a flame of passion, gives us an idea of how Heloise may once

have written, when it was impossible for her to act against his wish, and

when she felt herself altogether guilty and yet totally innocent. Neither,

certainly, did Abelard, before the great sorrow of his life had deprived him

of both his nature and his naturalness, write in the affected style of the

convert weary of life, whose words like deadly swords pierced the soul of the

woman who now lived upon memories. In his later "letters" he kept, though

perhaps only unconsciously, a furtive eye upon the public into whose hands

they might some day fall—and then he was no longer a letter-writer at all.

² See p. 35.

239, 240] LETTERS AND EPISTLES. 47

The author has no objection to any one similarly breaking up

the Pauline letters into several subdivisions, and subsuming

some of them under the species doctrinal letter; only one

should not fondly imagine that by means of the doctrinal

letter he has bridged over the great gulf between letter and

epistle. The pre-literary character even of the doctrinal

letter must be maintained.

This also holds good of the other Letters of Paul, even of

the "great Epistles". They, too, are partly doctrinal; they

contain, in fact, theological discussions: but even in these, the

Apostle had no desire to make literature. The Letter to the

Galatians is not a pamphlet "upon the relation of Christianity

to Judaism," but a message sent in order to bring back the

foolish Galatians to their senses. The letter can only be

understood in the light of its special purpose as such.¹ How

much more distinctly do the Letters to the Corinthians bear the

stamp of the true letter! The second of them, in particular,

reveals its true character in every line; in the author's

opinion, it is the most letter-like of all the letters of Paul,

though that to Philemon may appear on the surface to have

a better claim to that position. The great difficulty in the

understanding of it is due to the very fact that it is so truly

a letter, so full of allusions and familiar references, so per-

vaded with irony and with a depression which struggles

against itself—matters of which only the writer and the

readers of it understood the purport, but which we, for the

most part, can ascertain only approximately. What is

doctrinal in it is not there for its own sake, but is altogether

subservient to the purpose of the letter. The nature of the

letters which were brought to the Corinthians by the fellow-

workers of Paul, was thoroughly well understood by the

receivers themselves, else surely they would hardly have

allowed one or two of them to be lost. They agreed, in fact,

with Paul, in thinking that the letters had served their

purpose when once they had been read. We may most

deeply lament that they took no trouble to preserve the

letters, but it only shows lack of judgment to reproach

¹ Cf. the observations upon this letter in the Spicilegium below.

48 BIBLE STUDIES. [240, 24]

them on this account. A letter is something ephemeral,

and must be so by its very nature;¹ it has as little desire

to be immortal as a tete-et-tete has to be minuted, or an

alms to be entered in a ledger. In particular, the temper

of mind in which Paul and his Churches passed their

days was not such as to awaken in them an interest for

the centuries to come. The Lord was at hand; His advent

was within the horizon of the times, and such an anticipa-

tion has nothing in common with the enjoyment of the

contemplative book-collector. The one-sided religious temper

of mind has never yet had any affection for such things as

interest the learned. Modern Christians have become more

prosaic. We institute collections of archives, and found

libraries, and, when a prominent man dies, we begin to

speculate upon the destination of his literary remains: all

this needs a hope less bold and a faith less simple than

belonged to the times of Paul. From the point of view

of literature, the preservation even of two letters to the

Corinthians is a secondary and accidental circumstance,

perhaps owing, in part, to their comparative lengthiness,

which saved them from immediate destruction.

The Letter to the Romans is also a real letter. No doubt

there are sections in it which might also stand in an epistle;

the whole tone of it, generally speaking, stamps it as different

from the other Pauline letters. But nevertheless it is not

a book, and the favourite saying that it is a compendium of

Paulinism, that the Apostle has, in it, laid down his Dog-

matics and his Ethics, certainly manifests an extreme lack

of taste. No doubt Paul wanted to give instruction, and

he did it, in part, with the help of contemporary theology, but

he does not think of the literary public of his time, or of

Christians in general, as his readers; he appeals to a little

company of men, whose very existence, one may say, was

unknown to the public at large, and who occupied a special

position within Christianity. It is unlikely that the Apostle

¹ This explains why, of the extant "letters" of celebrated men who

have written both letters and epistles, it is the latter that have, in general,

been preserved in larger numbers than the former. Compare, for instance,

the extant "letters" of Origen.

241, 242] LETTERS AND EPISTLES. 49

would send copies of the letter to the brethren in Ephesus,

Antioch or Jerusalem; it was to Rome that he despatched

it: nor did the bearer of it go to the publishers in the

Imperial City,¹ but rather to some otherwise unknown

brother in the Lord—just like 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 Romans 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 talai<pwroj e]gw> a@nqrwpoj 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.

13²², to be a lo<goj th?j paraklh<sewj, and one would have no

occasion whatever to consider it anything but a literary ora-

tion--hence not as an epistle² at all—if the e]pe<steila 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 cir-

cumstance 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

50 BIBLE STUDIES. [242, 243

the greetings at the close did not permit of the supposition

that it had at one time opened with something of the nature

of an address as well. The address has been lost; it might

all the more easily fall out as it was only a later insertion.

The address is, indeed, of decisive importance for the under-

standing of a letter, but in an epistle it is an unessential

element. In the letter, the address occupies, so to speak,

the all-controlling middle-ground of the picture; in the

epistle it is only ornamental detail. Any given lo<goj can be

made an epistle by any kind of an address. The Epistle

to the Hebrews stands on the same literary plane as the

Fourth Book of Maccabees, which describes itself as a

filosofw<tatoj lo<goj; the fact that the latter seems to

avoid the appearance of being an epistle constitutes a purely

external difference between them, and one which is im-

material for the question regarding their literary character.—

The author is chiefly concerned about the recognition of the

"Catholic" Epistles, or, to begin with, of some of them at

least, as literary epistles. With a true instinct, the ancient

Church placed these Catholic Epistles as a special group over

against the Pauline. It seems to the author that the idea

of their catholicity, thus assumed, is to be understood from

the form of address in the "letters," and not primarily from

the special character of their contents.¹ They are composi-

is a brochure, the literary eidos of which cannot be determined just at once.

But the special characterisation of it does not matter, if we only recognise

the literary character of the booklet. That it could be placed among the

"letters" (i.e., in this case, epistles) of the N.T., is partly explained by the

fact that it is allied to them in character: literature associated with litera-

ture. Hence the present writer cannot think that Weiss (Meyer, xiv.⁵ [1888],

p. 15) is justified in saying: "It is certainly a useless quarrel about words to

refuse to call such a composition a letter in the sense of the New Testament

letter-literature". The question letter or epistle? is in effect the necessary pre-

condition for the understanding of the historical facts of the case. The

“sense” of the New Testament letter-literature, which Weiss seems to assume

as something well known, but which forms our problem, cannot really be

ascertained without first putting that question.—The author does not venture

here to give a decision regarding the Second and Third Epistles of John; the

question "letter or epistle?" is particularly difficult to answer in these cases.

¹ This idea of a catholic writing is implied in the classification of the

Aristotelian writings which is given by the philosopher David the Armenian

243, 244] LETTERS AND EPISTLES. 51

tions addressed to Christians—one might perhaps say the

Church—in general. The catholicity of the address implies,

of course, a catholicity in the contents. What the Church

calls catholic, we require only to call epistle, and the un-

solved enigma with which, according to Overbeck,¹ they

present us, is brought nearer to a solution. The special

position of these "letters," which is indicated by their

having the attribute catholic instinctively applied to them,

is due precisely to their literary character; catholic means

in this connection literary. The impossibility of recognising

the "letters" of Peter, James and Jude as real letters fol-

lows directly from the peculiarity in the form of their

address. Any one who writes to the elect who are sojourners

of the Diaspora in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia and

Bithynia, or to the twelve tribes which are of the Diaspora, or

even to them which have obtained a like precious faith with us,

or to them that are called, beloved in God the Father and kept

for Jesus Christ, must surely have reflected on the question

as to what means he must employ in order to convey his

message to those so addressed. Quite similarly does that

other early Christian epistle still bear the address to the

Hebrews; quite similarly does the author of the epistle at

the close of the Apocalypse of Baruch write to the nine-and-a-

half tribes of the Captivity, and Pseudo-Diogenes, ep. 28,² to

the so-called Hellenes. The only way by which the letters

could reach such ideal addresses was to have them reproduced

in numbers from the first. But that means that they were

literature. Had the First Epistle of Peter,³ for instance, been

intended as a real letter, then the writer of it, or a substitute,

would have had to spend many a year of his life ere he could

deliver the letter throughout the enormous circuit of the

(end of the fifth cent. A.D.) in his prolegomena to the categories of Aristotle

(Ed. Ch. A. Brandis, Schol. in Arist., p. 24a, Westermann, iii. [1852], p. 9).

In contrast to meriko<j special, kaqoliko<j is used as meaning general; both

terms refer to the contents of the writings, not to the largeness of the public

for which the author respectively designed them.

¹ P. 431. ² Hercher, p. 241 ff.

³ For the investigation of the Second Epistle of Peter see the observa-

tions which follow below in the Spicilegium.

52 BIBLE STUDIES. [245

countries mentioned. The epistle, in fact, could only reach

its public as a booklet; at the present day it would not be

sent as a circular letter in sealed envelope, but as printed

matter by book-post. It is true, indeed, that these Catholic

Epistles are Christian literature: their authors had no desire

to enrich universal literature; they wrote their books for a

definite circle of people with the same views as themselves,

that is, for Christians; but books they wrote. Very few

books, indeed, are so arrogant as to aspire to become univer-

sal literature; most address themselves to a section only of

the immeasurable public—they are special literature, or

party literature, or national literature. It is quite admissible

to speak of a literary public, even if the public in question be

but a limited one—even if its boundaries be very sharply

drawn. Hence the early Christian epistles were, in the first

instance, special literature; to the public at large in the

imperial period they were altogether unknown, and, doubt-

less, many a Christian of the time thought of them as

esoteric, and handed them on only to those who were

brethren; but, in spite of all, the epistles were designed

for some kind of publicity in a literary sense: they were

destined for the brethren. The ideal indefiniteness of this

destination has the result that the contents have an ecumeni-

cal cast. Compare the Epistle of James, for instance, with

the Letters of Paul, in regard to this point. From the

latter we construct the history of the apostolic age; the

former, so long as it is looked upon as a letter, is the enigma

of the New Testament. Those to whom the "letter" was

addressed have been variously imagined to be Jews, Gentile

Christians, Jewish Christians, or Jewish Christians and

Gentile Christians together; the map has been scrutinised

in every part without any one having yet ascertained where

we are to seek—not to say find—the readers. But if Diaspora

be not a definite geographical term, no more is the Epistle

of "James" a letter. Its pages are inspired by no special

motive; there is nothing whatever to be read between the

lines; its words are of such general interest that they

might, for the most part, stand in the Book of Wisdom, or the

246] LETTERS AND EPISTLES. 53

Imitation of Christ. It is true, indeed, that the epistle reveals

that it is of early Christian times, but nothing more. There

is nothing uniquely distinctive in its motive, and hence no

animating element in its contents. "James" sketches from

models, not from nature. Unfortunately there has always

been occasion, among Christians, to censure contentions and

sins of the tongue, greed and calumny; indignation at the

unmercifulness of the rich and sympathy with the