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Paul and First-Century Letter Writing: Secretaries, Composition and Collection is unavailable, but you can change that!

Traditional Christian art depicts Paul the letter writer, pen in hand, attentive to the Spirit. We might think we know better and imagine him pacing in agitation as he rapidly dictates to a secretary his letter to the Galatians. But in reality neither of these pictures is accurate. In Paul’s day, producing a letter was a time-consuming and costly business. And we have ample resources from the...

We began this book by looking at the practical logistics of how letters were scratched onto a papyrus sheet. After looking at several aspects of this process, including coauthors, rough drafts and secretaries, we spent several chapters looking at the actual letters of Paul. We examined more technical matter like epistolary genre (classifying letters), rhetoric and style analyses. Now we turn our focus once more back toward Paul’s historical situation. Once a letter
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