Archived Daily Manna | Rejoice Fellowship | A mission to release people to rejoice in the world.

Message: Paul did not generally write his epistles, in the sense of putting his pen to the papyrus. There are two possible reasons for this. First, it simply was not the general practice for an eminent scholar to pen his own work. The mechanics of writing were more laborious in 50 A.D. than today. There was a lot of technical bother with the paper, the pen, the ink, and getting the letters into straight lines. Even more important, the professional scribes who penned letters and books were highly literate. It is hard to imagine that John, a fisherman and the son of a fisherman, could read and write at all, much less very well. And there is little doubt that the Gospel of Mark was either dictated to him by Peter — who was likely illiterate — or written by Mark using Peter as his factual source, his eyewitness. But Paul, unlike most of the original disciples, was quite literate. He had been trained as a Pharisee. It is hard to tell how good Paul might have been as a writer, but from the highly sophisticated and sometimes overarching poetic genius of his epistles, one might speculate that he was a brilliant writer; he could probably even read and write a fair amount of Hebrew. A page of Exodus, from an illuminated Tanakh. A page of Exodus, from an illuminated Tanakh (Hebrew Bible). Many Christians do not realize that, at the time of Christ, Hebrew was a long-dead language. In fact, the first Jewish Bible, written and collected 300 years before Christ, was written in Greek so that Jews might be able to read it! Hebrew was read and spoken only as a liturgical language, much like Latin in the Catholic Church before Vatican II. The modern Hebrew spoken in Israel is actually a resurrected language, invented to supply the need for a native language to the new state of Israel. It had not been spoken for 2,500 years. So, most likely, Paul did not need a scribe (unlike the original disciples). Yet, we know from today’s verse, and similar verses (e.g. Romans 16:22, 1 Corinthians 16:21) that Paul did not physically pen the great bulk of his epistles. It seems that most often he wrote a single line in his epistles as a sort of signature, to guarantee their authenticity. Apparently, some of his readers knew his hand well enough to be able to vouch for a letter, where a line had been written in his characteristic penmanship. (2 Thessalonians 3:17) Jesus heals a blind man But why did he do this? We get a hint from his reference to the large size of his letters. Paul probably had serious problems with his eyesight. We do not have room to gather together the evidence here, but the case is compelling, taken from small clues throughout the New Testament. As a last word, we cannot have a discussion of great scribes without mentioning Luke. Few people realize that he wrote more of the New Testament than anyone else. His gospel and the Book of Acts have a higher word count than the works of either John or Paul. Some scholars, however, believe that Luke’s primary source was Paul! And if one believes that this brilliant and dedicated physician was essentially Paul’s mouthpiece, as Mark was to Peter, then one is even more impressed at the degree to which Paul is responsible for the New Testament.