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The Letters to the Seven Churches of Asia
W. M. Ramsay
1904
Chapter 2: Transmission of Letters in the First Century
While writing springs from a natural feeling of the human mind and must have originated
at a very remote period, and while letters must be almost as old as travelling, the proper
development of epistolary correspondence depends on improvement in the method and the
certainty of transmission. The desire to write a letter grows weaker, when it is uncertain
whether the letter will reach its destination and whether others may open and read it. In
the first century this condition was fulfilled better than ever before. It was then easier
and safer to send letters than it had been in earlier time. The civilised world, i.e. the
Roman world, was traversed constantly by messengers of government or by the
letter-carriers of the great financial and trading companies. Commercial undertakings on
such a vast scale as the Roman needed frequent and regular communication between the
central offices in Rome and the agents in the various provinces. There was no general
postal service; but each trading company had its own staff of letter-carriers. Private
persons who had not letter-carriers of their own were often able to send letters along
with those business communications.
In the early Roman Empire travelling, though not rapid, was performed with an ease and
certainty which were quite remarkable. The provision for travelling by sea and by land was
made on a great scale. Travellers were going about in great numbers, chiefly during the
summer months, occasionally even during the winter season. Their purposes were varied, not
merely commerce or government business, but also education, curiosity, search for
employment in many departments of life. It is true that to judge from some expressions
used in Roman literature by men of letters and moralists, travelling might seem not to
have been popular. Those writers occasionally speak as if travelling, especially by sea,
were confined to traders who risked their life to make money, and as if the dangers were
so great that none but the reckless and greedy would incur them; and the opinion is often
expressed, especially by poets, that to adventure oneself on the sea is an impious and
unnatural act. The well-known words of Horace's third Ode are typical:--
Oak and brass of triple fold
Encompassed sure that heart, which first made bold
To the raging sea to trust
A fragile bark, nor feared the Afric gust;
Heaven's high providence in vain
Has severed countries with the estranging main,
If our vessels ne'ertheless
With reckless plunge that sacred bar transgress
But that point of view was traditional among the poets; it had been handed down from
the time when travelling was much more dangerous and difficult, when ships were small in
size and fewer in numbers, when seamanship and method were inferior, when few roads had
been built, and travel even by land was uncertain. Moreover, seafaring and land travel
were hostile to the contentment, discipline, and quiet orderly spirit which Greek poetry
and philosophy, as a rule, loved to dwell on and to recommend: they tended to encourage
the spirit of self-confidence, self-assertiveness, daring and rebellion against authority,
which was called by Euripides "the sailors' lawlessness" (Hecuba, 602).
In Roman literature the Greek models and the Greek sentiments were looked up to as sacred
and final; and those words of the Roman writers were a proof of their bondage to their
Greek masters in thought.
When we look deeper, we find that very different views were expressed by the writers
who came more in contact with the real facts of the Imperial world. They are full of
admiration of the Imperial peace and its fruits: the sea was covered with ships
interchanging the products of different regions of the earth, wealth was vastly increased,
comfort and well-being improved, hill and valley covered with the dwellings of a growing
population: wars and pirates and robbers had been put an end to, travel was free and safe,
all men could journey where they wished, the most remote and lonely countries were opened
up by roads and bridges. It is the simple truth that travelling, whether for business or
for pleasure, was contemplated and performed under the Empire with an indifference,
confidence, and, above all, certainty, which were unknown in after centuries until the
introduction of steamers and the consequent increase in ease and sureness of
communication.
This ease and frequency of communication under the Roman Empire was merely the
culmination of a process that had long been going on. Here, as in many other departments
of life, the Romans took up and improved the heritage of Greece. Migration and
intermixture of peoples had been the natural law of the Greek world from time immemorial;
and the process was immensely stimulated in the fourth century BC by the conquests of
Alexander the Great, which opened up the East and gave free scope to adventure and trade.
In the following centuries there was abundant opportunity for travelling during the fine
season of the year. The powerful Monarchies and States of the Greek world keep the sea
safe; and during the third century BC, as has been said by Canon Hicks, a scholar who has
studied that period with special care, "there must have been daily communication
between Cos (on the west of Asia Minor) and Alexandria" (in Egypt).
When the weakness of the Senatorial administration at Rome allowed the pirates to
increase and navigation too become unsafe between 79 and 67 BC, the life of the civilised
world was paralysed; and the success of Pompey in re-opening the sea was felt as the
restoration of vitality and civilisation, for civilised life was impossible so long as the
sea was an untraversable barrier between the countries instead of a pathway to unite them.
Thus the deep-seated bent of human nature towards letter-writing had been stimulated
and cultivated by many centuries of increasing opportunity, until it became a settled
habit and in some cases, as we see it in Cicero, almost a passion.
The impression given by the early Christian writings is in perfect agreement with the
language of those writers who spoke from actual contact with the life of the time, and did
not merely imitate older methods and utter afresh old sentiments. Probably the feature in
those Christian writings, which causes most surprise at first to the traveller familiar
with those countries in modern time, is the easy confidence with which extensive plans of
travel were formed and announced and executed by the early Christians.
In Acts 16:1ff a journey by land and sea through parts of Syria, Cilicia, a corner of
Cappadocia, Lycaonia, Phrygia, Mysia, the Troad, Thrace, Macedonia, and Greece is
described, and no suggestion is made that this long journey was anything unusual, except
that the heightened tone of the narrative in 16:7-9 corresponds to the perplexingly rapid
changes of scene and successive frustrations of St. Paul's intentions. But those who are
most intimately acquainted with those countries know best how serious an undertaking it
would be at the present time to repeat that journey, how many accidents might occur in it,
and how much care and thought would be advisable before one entered on so extensive a
programme.
Again, in 18:21 St. Paul touched at Ephesus in the ordinary course of the pilgrim-ship
which was conveying him and many other Jews to Jerusalem for the Passover. When he was
asked to remain, he excused himself, but promised to return as he came back from Jerusalem
by a long land-journey through Syria, Cilicia, Lycaonia, and Phrygia. That extensive
journey seems to be regarded by speaker and hearers as quite an ordinary excursions.
"I must by all means keep this feast that cometh in Jerusalem; but I will again
return unto you, if God will." The last condition is added, not as indicating
uncertainty, but in the usual spirit of Eastern religion, which forbids a resolve about
the future, however simple and easy, to be declared without the express recognition of
Divine approval--like the Mohammedan "inshallah," which never fails when the
most ordinary resolution about the morrow is stated.
In Romans 15:24, when writing from Corinth, St. Paul sketches out a comprehensive plan.
He is eager to see Rome: first he must go to Jerusalem, but thereafter he is bent on
visiting Spain, and his course will naturally lead him through Rome, so that he will,
without intruding himself on them, have the opportunity of seeing the Romans and affecting
their Church on his way.
Throughout medieval times nothing like this off-hand way of sketching out extensive
plans was natural or intelligible; there were then, indeed, many great travellers, but
those travellers knew how uncertain their journeys were; they were aware that any plans
would be frequently liable to interruption, and that nothing could be calculated on as
reasonably certain; they entered on long journeys, but regarded them as open to
modification or even frustration; in indicating their plans they knew that they would be
regarded by others as attempting something great and strange. But St. Paul's method and
language seem to show clearly that such journeys as he contemplated were looked on as
quite natural and usual by those to whom he spoke or wrote. He could go off from Greece or
Macedonia to Palestine, and reckoned with practical certainty on being in Jerusalem in
time for a feast day not far distant.
It is the same with others: Aquila and Priscilla, Apollos, Silas, Epaphroditus,
Timothy, etc., move back and forward, and are now found in one city, now in another far
distant. Unobservant of this characteristic, some writers have argued that Romans 16:3
could not have been addressed to correspondents who lived in Rome, because Aquila and
Priscilla, who were in Ephesus not long before the Epistle was written, are there spoken
of as living among those correspondents. Such an argument could not be used by people who
had fully understood that independence of mere local trammels and connections, and quite a
marvellous freedom in locomotion, are a strongly marked feature of the early Church. That
argument is one of the smallest errors into which this false prepossession has led may
scholars.
Communication by letter supplemented mere travelling. Such communication is the
greatest factor in the developing of the Church; it kept alive the interest of the
Christian congregations in one another, and strengthened their mutual affection by giving
frequent opportunity of expressing it; it prevented the strenuous activity of the widely
scattered local Churches from being concentrated on purely local matters and so
degenerating into absorption in their own immediate surroundings. Thus it bound together
all the Provincial Churches in the one Universal Church. The Christian letters contained
the saving power of the Church; and in its epistolary correspondence flowed its
life-blood. The present writer has elsewhere attempted to show that the early Bishops
derived their importance in great degree from their position as representatives of the
several congregations in their relations with one another, charged with the duty of
hospitality to travellers and the maintenance of correspondence, since through this
position they became the guardians of the unity of the Universal Church and the channels
through which its life-blood flowed.
The one condition which was needed to develop epistolary correspondence to a very much
greater extent in the Roman Empire was a regular postal service. It seems a remarkable
fact that the Roman Imperial government, keenly desirous as it was of encouraging and
strengthening the common feeling and bond of unity between different parts of the Empire,
never seems to have thought of establishing a general postal service within its dominions.
Augustus established an Imperial service, which was maintained throughout subsequent Roman
times; but it was strictly confined to Imperial and official business, and was little more
than a system of special Emperor's messengers on a great scale. The consequence of this
defect was that every great organisation or trading company had to create a special postal
service for itself; and private corespondents, if not wealthy enough to send their own
slaves as letter-carriers, had to trust to accidental opportunities for transmitting their
letters.
The failure of the Imperial government to recognise how much its own aims and schemes
would have been aided by facilitating communication through the Empire was connected with
one of the greatest defects of the Imperial administration. It never learned that the
strength and permanence of a nation and of its government are dependent on the education
and character of the people: it never attempted to educate the people, but only to feed
and amuse them. The Christian Church, which gradually established itself as a rival
organisation, did by its own efforts what the Imperial government aimed at doing for the
nation, and succeeded better, because it taught people to think for themselves, to govern
themselves, and to maintain their own union by their own exertions. It seized those two
great facts of the Roman world, travelling and letter-writing, and turned them to its own
purposes. The former, on its purely material side, it could only accept: the latter it
developed to new forms as an ideal and spiritual instrument.
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