Table of Contents | Chapter
2
The Letters to the Seven Churches of Asia
W. M. Ramsay
1904
Chapter 1: Writing, Travel, and Letters Among the Early Christians
Many writers on many occasions have perceived and described the important part which
intercommunication between the widely separated congregations of early Christians, whether
by travel or by letter, played in determining the organisation and cementing the unity of
the Universal Church. Yet perhaps all has not been said that ought to be said on the
subject. The marvellous skill and mastery, with which all the resources of the existing
civilisation were turned to their own purposes by St. Paul and by the Christians
generally, may well detain our attention for a brief space.
Travelling and correspondence by letter are mutually dependent. Letters are unnecessary
until travelling begins: much of the usefulness and profit of travelling depends on the
possibility of communication between those who are separated from one another. Except in
the simplest forms, commerce and negotiation between different nations, which are among
the chief incentives to travelling in early times, cannot be carried out without some
method of registering thoughts and information, so as to be understood by persons at a
distance.
Hence communication by letter has been commonly practised from an extremely remote
antiquity. The knowledge of and readiness in writing leads to correspondence between
friends who are not within speaking distance of one another, as inevitably as the
possession of articulate speech produces conversation and discussion. In order to fix the
period when epistolary correspondence first began, it would be necessary to discover at
what period the art of writing became common. Now the progress of discovery in recent
years has revolutionised opinion on this subject. The old views, which we all used to
assume as self-evident, that writing was invented at a comparatively late period in human
history, that it was long known only to a few persons, and that it was practised even by
them only slowly and with difficulty on some special occasions and for some peculiarly
important purposes, are found to be utterly erroneous. No one who possesses any knowledge
of early history would now venture to make any positive assertion as to the date when
writing was invented, or when it began to be widely used in the Mediterranean lands. The
progress of discovery reveals the existence of various systems of writing at a remote
period, and shows that they were familiarly used for the ordinary purposes of life and
administration, and were not reserved, as scholars used to believe, for certain sacred
purposes of religion and ritual.
The discovery that writing was familiarly used in early time has an important bearing
on the early literature of the Mediterranean peoples. For example, no scholar would now
employ the argument that the composition of the Iliad and the Odyssey must
belong to a comparatively late day, because such great continuous poems could not come
into existence without the ready use of writing--an argument which formerly seemed to tell
strongly against the early date assigned by tradition for their origin. The scholars who
championed the traditional date of those great works used to answer that argument by
attempting to prove that they were composed and preserved by memory alone without the aid
of writing. The attempt could not be successful. The scholar in his study, accustomed to
deal with words and not with realities, might persuade himself that by this ingenious
verbal reasoning he had got rid of the difficulty; but those who could not blind
themselves to the facts of the world felt that the improbability still remained, and
acquiesced in this reasoning only as the least among a choice of evils. The progress of
discovery has placed the problem in an entirely new light. The difficulty originated in
our ignorance. The art of writing was indeed required as an element in the complex social
platform on which the Homeric poems were built up; but no doubt can now be entertained
that writing was known and familiarly practised in the East Mediterranean lands long
before the date to which Greek tradition assigned the composition of the two great poems.
A similar argument was formerly used by older scholars to prove that the Hebrew
literature belonged to a later period than the Hebrew tradition allowed; but the more
recent scholars who advocate the late date of that literature would no longer allow such
reasoning, and frankly admit that their views must be supported on other grounds; though
it may be doubted whether they have abandoned as thoroughly as they profess the old
prejudice in favour of a late date for any long literary composition, or have fully
realised how readily and familiarly writing was used in extremely remote time, together
with all that is implied by that familiar use. The prejudice still exists, and it affects
the study of both Hebrew and Christian literature.
In the first place, there is a general feeling that it is more prudent to bring down
the composition of any ancient work to the latest date that evidence permits. But this
feeling rests ultimately on the fixed idea that people have gradually become more familiar
with the art of writing as the world grows older, and that the composition of a work of
literature should not, without distinct and conclusive proof, be attributed to an early
period.
In the second place, there is also a very strong body of opinion that the earliest
Christians wrote little or nothing. It is supposed that partly they were either unable to
write, or at least unused to the familiar employment of writing for the purposes of
ordinary life; partly they were so entirely taken up with the idea of the immediate coming
of the Lord that they never thought it necessary to record for future generations the
circumstances of the life and death of Jesus, until lapse of long years on the one hand
had shown that the Lord's coming was not to be expected immediately, and that for the use
of the already large Church some record was required of those events round which its faith
and hope centred, while on the other hand it had obscured the memory and disturbed the
true tradition of those important facts. This opinion also rests on and derives all its
influence from the same inveterate prejudice that, at the period in question, writing was
still something great and solemn, and that it was used, not in the ordinary course of
human everyday life and experience, but only for some grave purpose of legislation,
government, or religion, intentionally registering certain weighty principles or important
events for the benefit of future generations. Put aside that prejudice, and the whole body
of opinion which maintains that the Christians at first did not set anything down in
writing about the life and death of Christ--strong and widely accepted as it is,
dominating as a fundamental premise much of the discussion of this whole subject in recent
times--is devoid of any support.
But most discussions with regard to the origin, force, and spirit of the New Testament
are founded on certain postulates and certain initial presumptions, which already contain
implicit the whole train of reasoning that follows, and which in fact beg the whole
question at starting. If those postulates are true, or if they are granted by the reader,
then the whole series of conclusions follows with unerring and impressive logical
sequence. All the more necessary, then, is it to examine very carefully the character of
such postulates, and to test whether they are really true about that distant period, or
are only modern fallacies springing from the mistaken views about ancient history that
were widely accepted in the eighteenth and most part of the nineteenth century.
One of those initial presumptions, plausible in appearance and almost universally
assumed and conceded, is that there was no early registration of the great events in the
beginning of Christian history. This presumption we must set aside as a mere prejudice,
contrary to the whole character and spirit of that age, and entirely improbable; though,
of course, decisive disproof of it is no longer possible, for the only definite and
complete disproof would be the production of the original documents in which the facts
were recorded at the moment by contemporaries. But so much may be said at once, summing up
in a sentence the result which arises from what is stated in the following pages. So far
as antecedent probability goes, founded on the general character of preceding and
contemporary Greek or Graeco-Asiatic society, the first Christian account of the
circumstances connected with the death of Jesus must be presumed to have been written in
the year when Jesus died.
But the objection will doubtless be made at once--If that be so, how can you account
for such facts as that Mark says that the Crucifixion was completed by the third hour of
the day (9 a.m., according to our modern reckoning of time), while John says that the
sentence upon Jesus was only pronounced about the sixth hour, i.e. at noon. The reply is
obvious and unhesitating. The difference dates from the event itself. Had evidence been
collected that night or next morning, the two diverse opinions would have been observed
and recorded, already hopelessly discrepant and contradictory.
One was the opinion of the ordinary people of that period, unaccustomed to note the
lapse of time or to define it accurately in thought or speech: such persons loosely
indicated the temporal sequence of three great events, the Crucifixion, the beginning and
the end of the darkness, by assigning them to the three great successive divisions of the
day--the only divisions which they were in the habit of noticing or mentioning--the third,
sixth, and ninth hours. Ordinary witnesses in that age would have been nonplused, if they
had been closely questioned whether full three hours had elapsed between the Crucifixion
and the beginning of the darkness, and would have regarded such minuteness as unnecessary
pedantry, for they had never been trained by the circumstances of life to accuracy of
thought or language in regard to the lapse of time. Witnesses of that class are the
authority for the account which is preserved in the three Synoptic Gospels. We observe
that throughout the Gospels of Mark and Luke only the three great divisions of the
day--the third, sixth and ninth hours--are mentioned. Matthew once mentions the eleventh
hour (20:9); but there his expression does not show superior accuracy in observation, for
he is merely using a proverbial expression to indicate that the allotted season had almost
elapsed. A very precise record of time is contained in the Bezan Text of Acts 19:9;
"from the fifth to the tenth hour"; but this is found only in two MSS, and is
out of keeping with Luke's ordinary looseness in respect of time and chronology; and it
must therefore be regarded as an addition made by a second century editor, who either had
access to a correct source of information, or explained the text in accordance with the
regular customs of Graeco-Roman society.
The other statement, which is contained in the Fourth Gospel, records the memory of an
exceptional man, who through a certain idiosyncrasy was observant and careful in regard to
the lapse of time, who in other cases noted and recorded accurate divisions of time like
the seventh hour and the tenth hour (John 1:39, 4:16, 4:52). This man, present at the
trial of Jesus, had observed the passage of time, which was unnoticed by others. The
others would have been astonished if any one had pointed out that noon had almost come
before the trial was finished. He alone marked the sun and estimated the time, with the
same accuracy as made him see and remember that the two disicples came to the house of
Jesus about the tenth hour, that Jesus sat on the well about the sixth hour, that the
fever was said to have left the child about the seventh hour. All those little details,
entirely unimportant in themselves, were remembered by a man naturally observant of time,
and recorded for not other reason than that he had been present and had seen or heard.
It is a common error to leave too much out of count the change that has been produced
on popular thought and accuracy of conception and expression by the habitual observation
of the lapse of time according to hours and minutes. The ancients had no means of
observing precisely the progress of time. They could as a rule only make a rough guess as
to the hour. There was not even a name for any shorter division of time than the hour.
There were no watches, and only in the rarest and most exceptional cases were there any
public and generally accessible instruments for noting and making visible the lapse of
time during the day. The sun-dial was necessarily an inconvenient recorder, not easy to
observe. Consequently looseness in regard to the passage of time is deep-seated in ancient
thought and literature, especially Greek. The Romans, with their superior endowment for
practical facts and ordinary statistics, were more careful, and the effect can be traced
in their literature. The lapse of time hour by hour was often noted publicly in great
Roman households by the sound of a trumpet or some other device, though the public still
regarded this as a rather overstrained refinement--for why should one be anxious to know
how fast one's life was ebbing away? Such was the usual point of view, as is evident in
Petronius. Occasionally individuals in the Greek-speaking provinces of the East were more
accurate in the observation of time, either owing to their natural temperament, or because
they were more receptive of the Roman habit of accuracy. On the other hand, the progress
of invention has made almost every one in modern times as careful and accurate about time
as even the exceptionally accurate in ancient times, because we are all trained from
infancy to note the time by minutes, and we suffer loss or inconvenience occasionally from
an error in observation. The use of the trumpeter after the Roman fashion to proclaim the
lapse of time is said to have been kept up until recently in the old imperial city of
Goslar, where, in accordance with the more minute accuracy characteristic of modern
thought and custom, he sounded every quarter of an hour.
But it does not follow that, because the ancients were not accustomed to note the
progress of the hours, therefore they were less habituated to use the art of writing. It
is a mere popular fallacy, entirely unworthy of scholars, to suppose that people became
gradually more familiar with writing and more accustomed to use it habitually in ordinary
life as time progressed and history continued. The contrary is the case; at a certain
period, and to a certain degree, the ancients were accustomed to use the art familiarly
and readily; but at a later time writing passed out of ordinary use and became restricted
to a few who used it only as a lofty possession for great purposes.
It is worth while to mention one striking example to give emphasis to the fact that, as
the Roman Empire decayed, familiarity with the use of writing disappeared from society,
until it became the almost exclusive possession of a few persons, who were for the most
part connected with religion. About the beginning of the sixth century before Christ, a
body of mercenary soldiers, Greeks, Carians, etc., marched far away up the Nile towards
Ethiopia and the Sudan in the service of an Egyptian king. Those hired soldiers of fortune
were likely, for the most part, to belong to the least educated section of Greek society;
and, even where they had learned in childhood to write, the circumstances of their life
were not of a kind likely to make writing a familiar and ordinary matter to them, or to
render its exercise a natural method of whiling away an idle hour. Yet on the stones and
the colossal statues at Abu Simble many of them wrote, not merely their name and legal
designation, but also accounts of the expedition on which they were engaged, with its
objects and its progress.
Such was the state of education in a rather humble stratum of Greek society six
centuries before Christ. Let us come down eleven centuries after Christ, to the time when
great armies of Crusaders were marching across Asia Minor on their way to Palestine. Those
armies were led by the noblest of their peoples, by statesmen, warriors, and great
ecclesiastics. They contained among them persons of all classes, burning with zeal for a
great idea, pilgrims at once and soldiers, with numerous priests and monks. Yet, so far as
I am aware, not one single written memorial of all those crusading hosts has been found in
the whole country. On a rock beside the lofty castle of Butrentum, commanding the approach
to the great pass of the Cilician Gates--that narrow gorge which they called the Gate of
Judas, because it was the enemy of their faith and the betrayer of their cause--there are
engraved many memorials of their presence; but none are written; all are mere marks in the
form of crosses.
In that small body of mercenaries who passed by Abu Simbel 600 years before Christ,
there were probably more persons accustomed to use familiarly the art of writing than in
all the hosts of the Crusaders; for, even to those Crusaders who had learned to write, the
art was far from being familiar, and they were not wont to use it in their ordinary
everyday life, though they might on great occasions. In those 1700 years the Mediterranean
world had passed from light to darkness, from civilisation to barbarism, so far as writing
was concerned. Only recently are we beginning to realise how civilised in some respects
was mankind in that earlier time, and to free ourselves from many unfounded prejudices and
prepossessions about the character of ancient life and society.
The cumbrousness of the materials on which ancient writing was inscribed may seem
unfavourable to its easy or general use. But it must be remembered that, except in Egypt,
no material that was not of the most durable character has been or could have been
preserved. All writing-materials more ephemeral than stone, bronze, or terra-cotta, have
inevitably been destroyed by natural causes. Only in Egypt the extreme dryness of climate
and soil has enabled paper to survive. Now the question must suggest itself whether there
is any reason to think that more ephemeral materials for writing were never used by the
ancient Mediterranean peoples generally. Was Egypt the only country in which writers used
such perishable materials? The question can be answered only in one way. There can be no
doubt that the custom, which obtained in the Greek lands in the period best known to us,
had come down from remote antiquity: that custom was to make a distinction between the
material on which documents of national interest and public character were written and
that on which mere private documents of personal or literary interest were written. The
former, such as laws, decrees and other State documents, which were intended to be made as
widely known as possible, were engraved in one or two copies on tablets of the most
imperishable character and preserved or exposed in some public place: this was the ancient
way of attaining the publicity which in modern time is got by printing large numbers of
copies on ephemeral material. But those public copies were not the only ones made; there
is no doubt that such documents were first of all written on some perishable material,
usually on paper. In the case of private documents, as a rule, no copies were made except
on perishable materials.
Wills of private persons, indeed, are often found engraved on marble or other lasting
material; these were exposed in the most public manner over the graves that lined the
great highways leading out from the cities; but wills were quasi-public documents in the
classical period, and had been entirely public documents at an earlier time, according to
their original character as records of a public act affecting the community and acquiesced
in by the whole body.
Similarly, it can hardly be doubted that, in a more ancient period of Greek society,
documents which were only of a private character and of personal or literary interest were
likely to be recorded on more perishable substances than graver State documents. This
view, of course, can never be definitely and absolutely proved, for the only complete
proof would be the discovery of some of those old private documents, which in the nature
of the case have decayed and disappeared. But the known facts leave no practical room for
doubt.
Paper was in full use in Egypt, as a finished and perfect product, in the fourth
millennium before Christ. In Greece it is incidentally referred to by Herodotus as in
ordinary use during the fifth century BC. At what date it began to be used there no
evidence exists; but there is every probability that it had been imported from Egypt for a
long time; and Herodotus says that, before paper came into use on the Ionian coast, skins
of animals were used for writing. On these and other perishable materials the letters and
other commonplace documents of private persons were written. Mr. Arthur J. Evans has found
at Cnossos in Crete "ink-written inscriptions on vases," as early as 1800 or
2000 years BC; and he has inferred from this "the existence of writings on papyrus or
other perishable materials" in that period, since ink would not be made merely for
writing on terra-cotta vases (though the custom of writing in ink on pottery, especially
on ostraka or fragments of broken vases, as being cheap, persisted throughout the
whole period of ancient civilisation).
Accordingly, though few private letters older than the imperial time have been
preserved, it need not and should not be supposed that there were only a few written.
Those that were written have been lost because the material on which they were written
could not last. If we except the correspondence of Cicero, the great importance of which
caused it to be preserved, hardly any ancient letters not intended for publication by
their writers have come down to us except in Egypt, where the original paper has in a
number of cases survived. But the voluminous correspondence of Cicero cannot be regarded
as a unique fact of Roman life. He and his correspondents wrote so frequently to one
another, because letter-writing was then common in Roman society. Cicero says that, when
he was separated from his friend Atticus, they exchanged their thought as freely by letter
as they did by conversation when they were in the same place. Such a sentiment was not
peculiar to one individual: it expressed a custom of contemporary society. The truth is
that, just as in human nature thought and speech are linked together in such a way that
(to use the expression of Plato) word is spoken thought and thought is unspoken word, so
also human beings seek by the law of their nature to express their ideas permanently in
writing as well as momentarily in speech; and ignorance of writing in any race points
rather to a degraded and degenerate than to a truly primitive condition.
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