ANCIENT TEXTS AND ARTIFACTS

Letters and Epistles in Roman Times

In a world without telephones or other modern media, letters were the most important form of communication other than direct conversation. The ancients used them for diplomatic, legal, administrative, and personal matters. Numerous examples have survived, mainly from Egypt, where the arid climate would keep the fragile papyrus paper people wrote on from disintegrating. Archaeologists have recovered countless letters including a variety of subjects such as business transactions and legal matters and other texts thrown away or stored, which were eventually buried by sand as well as those stored in dry caves. For more mainly literary and administrative texts, scribes would copy and recopy them to preserve in administrative archives or libraries.

Regarding the distinctiveness between letters and epistles, some scholars consider an epistle to be primarily writing intended to teach something instead of just passing along business, legal, or other information or personal feelings.

The study of ancient texts has shed considerable light on our understanding of the biblical epistles that compose almost 60 percent of the New Testament, although not all of them have the formal structure of a letter.

Most letters written in the ancient world followed a standard format. Although the New Testament letters sometimes vary from usual Greco-Roman letter writing, they generally reflect the main pattern. Perhaps the most significant difference is that the biblical epistles are much longer than the usual letter. Ancient secular letters were often only a few dozen words, while a biblical epistle is often thousands of words, emphasizing the importance of their contents.

While some variations do appear in individual letters (especially in the body and conclusion), one can outline the basic structure of New Testament epistles as follows:

I) Beginning II) Body III) Conclusion
  1. Sender(s): from whom
  2. Recipient(s): to whom
  3. Formulaic greeting
  4. Thanksgiving (or blessing)
  1. Initial exhortation
  2. Thesis statement
  3. Theological discussions
  4. Ethical admonitions
  1. Practical matters
  2. Individual greetings
  3. Personal postscript
  4. Doxology (or prayer)

Unlike the many ephemeral letters and other documents that the people of the Greco-Roman world routinely threw away in Egypt’s garbage dumps, the early Christians regarded the biblical epistles as especially worth carefully preserving. They passed them from church to church to share each epistle’s teaching and copied and recopied their sacred content to keep in religious centers and schools. We still have them today because of the importance of what they taught.

 

Hooper and Schwartz, Roman Letters: History From A Personal Point Of View.