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Hear more stories like Debra's@uhc.com benefits, features and or devices vary by plan, area limitation and exclusions apply. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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B
Hello everybody and welcome back to New Books in Biblical Studies, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. I'm Jonathan Lookedew, the host of the channel. Today we'll be talking to Peter Arst Grabner about his new book Letters and Letter Writing, published by Brill in 2023. Peter, welcome to the show.
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C
Thank you so much for having me. I'm pretty excited.
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B
Well, thank you. Thank you very much for being on the podcast today to talk about your book letters and letter writing. Before we dive into the book, could you start just by telling us a little bit about yourself? Sure.
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C
So I studied theology first in Salzburg and Rome and only later on I picked up classics as well. I wanted to do something in addition and so classics, especially Ancient Greek, was in my interest. And the funny thing about that is that during my entire studies of classics I heard about this papyri, but only about literary papyri. So about this oldest evidence of Greco Roman literature, but nothing about papyri as evidence of everyday life of antiquities. But before I dove more into papyri, I did a dissertation on a linguistic topic. So very theoretical, very dry, but it was fun for me because sorry, these are my dogs. I'm living here with two dogs.
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B
That's perfect. Yeah.
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C
So they are introducing themselves right now.
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B
It's a wonderful thing to have them on the show, too.
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C
Thank you. Thank you. So a very linguistic topic, but after finishing that, it was already on Paul, so on Letters of Paul, but very theoretical, with a new methodology. So after finishing that, I said to myself, well, one linguistic study in a lifetime is enough. And all of a sudden, papyri caught my interest. The reason for that was also quite an interesting one, because my professor of classics, he invited me to give a class for the students of Ancient Greek. So I was at the Department of Biblical Studies, teaching there, doing my research there. But at the other department, I was asked to do a class there, and I didn't want to do that myself, so I asked my colleague in New Testament studies if he would be interested to do it together. And also we could. Moreover, we could do a class, not only a New Testament text, because that would have been quite boring to us, you see, reading the New Testament parts of it every day and now eventually having students who really know Greek. So we thought, let's do something special. Let's compare the letters of Paul to papyrus letters. So private letters preserved on papyri. So that's basically how I ended up in papyrology. At the end of that semester of the class, we went to the Vienna collection, which is the second largest papyris collection in the world. So they are housing 180,000 artifacts, not only papyri pari, but also ostraca and parchments and also early Arabic papers, et cetera. And the director of that collection was very supporting to young scholars who were interested in that. So I immediately got fascinated by this material. And since then, I've become much more a papyrologist. And I was a theologian and New Testament scholars, I have to say.
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B
Well, it sounds like a great example of how teaching and research can really overlap and lead into one another. That's a fascinating story, and thank you very much for that. As you mentioned, you've written a lot about papyri and particularly papyrus letters. From papyrus letters to early Christian letters included in the New Testament and onto many other letters in between. What led you to begin? Well, I suppose you've introduced a little bit, but can I ask maybe just a little bit more, what led you to begin studying specifically ancient letters and now then to write this book?
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C
Yeah, I started to study the letters of Paul quite early because my dissertation was on letters of Paul. I also had attended several Seminars during my graduate studies on Paul. So that was kind of natural to be specialized on that with papyrus letters. I already mentioned this first class we gave for students in ancient Greek on papyrus letters and letters of the New Testament. And during that time, it dawned to me that if I were living in ancient times, these papyri, they are the best source to tell me what my own life would have been like. And I really got fascinated in that. So as a boy, of course, I was dreaming about when I had lived in ancient times. I could have been Alexander the Great, maybe not so much Julius Caesar, because the way how he ended, maybe Augustus or some Cicero or whoever, see one of the great philosophers or emperors or. Or whatever, but that's far from reality. I grew up as the son of a working man who was working as a nurse in the hospital. My father, my mother was staying at home raising us kids, and later on working in a bakery. So just thinking about my own life and then looking back, back to life in antiquities, I immediately saw, oh, these are the sources telling me what my life could have been like and the life of my colleagues, my friends, et cetera, et cetera, and especially the papyrus letters. They are such a vivid source. We have so many papyri covering ancient everyday life. We have, for instance, we have tax receipts. All of them are kind of similar. So if you know the different types of tax receipts, different types of taxes, the rest is something like repetition. So kind of all text received for the poll tax looks the same. But letters, every letter is an individual letter. Every letter is a single artifact. It's different from contracts. As wonderful as it is to study contracts, like marriage contracts, divorce contracts, all kinds of deeds, leases, etc. Etc. Etc. The letters, it seems to me, they cover most intensively the life as it was, the everyday life with all the problems that people had in those days. And when you look at those, you realize that the human problems, the human situations, they haven't changed a lot in the past 2,000 years. So the time from the time from which we have these papyrus documents, it's the same problems in families who should inherit something. It's the problems with love and marriage. We have love letters, but we also have letters by husbands having an argument with the wife or the other way around, you see? And so you can really study this material and already learn how in antiquities, people were dealing with their affairs, and if they were dealing with that in a very fortunate way or in a way that was quite ineffective, and that's what, in general, we could learn from History. So there's nothing new on the planet, let's say. Yes, we have computers, we have the Internet, et cetera. The Internet is a marvelous tool for papillology with so many artifacts, images and databases online. But the problems that we have as human beings, quite the same. There was a particular papyrus letters that especially caught my interest and started my research. And that was the papyrus from the Berlin collection. It was published in the first volume of the Berlin, which is abbreviated BGU number 423. It's a letter of a soldier. So of course, Ridman papyrus, originating from the 2nd century CE from a soldier who was of Egyptian origin, but after traveling over the Mediterranean, finally arrived in Misenum, so in the port, or next to Rome, of the Imperial Navy. So he joined the navy there. And after his arrival he wrote a letter and sent it back to his father back home in Egypt, where the letter was found, excavated in modern times and edited. And in this letter there is a particular topic that was picked up most famously by Adolf Tysman. So this is a very important pioneer of the field that I'm studying now. Adolf the who was among the earliest paprologists who got interested, interested in comparing this documentary papyrus or also papyrus letters with the text of the New Testament. So letters with New Testament letters, et cetera. And in this letter of this Egyptian soldier, Roman Egyptian soldier, this guy whose name was Appion, mentions that he is thanking the Lord Serapis for this God saved him from trouble at sea, so that he eventually arrived safely at Misenum in Italy. And Deismann wrote about that. So here we have the perfect analogy to Paul's thanksgiving passages at the beginning of most of his letters. And I looked at that and I realized, oh no, that's not a parallel, it's not the same. Because when we look at Paul, we have this greeting at the beginning of a Paul and letter. And when there's a thanksgiving following the opening greeting, it's very formal, like Paul expresses his thanksgiving to God for the good situation. So the faith of the community, of the Christ group, they're helping each other, their love among each other, etc. And here we don't have the Thanksgiving in Appian's letter, not right at the beginning after the greeting, but he informs his father what was happening. And in the middle of the letter, and in a very free way, he mentions that he thanking the Lord Serapis because he saved him from trouble at sea. So I realized, well, maybe there's something to do about it. Maybe I should look about this particular Topic again. So thanksgiving phrases in papyrus letters and in Paul and compare them with each other. And I found there are parallels, but not the one that Deismann had already identified. This doesn't work. But there are thanksgiving phrases exactly at the same place where Paul introduces them. So right after the opening reading. And they are all related to an individual situation, which means a thanksgiving in a papyrus letter cannot be introduced in any letter. It depends on a particular situation. And the situation is the current letter writer has previously received a letter from his letter partner. And in his letter partner's letter he was informed that the other guy is doing well, he is healthy and doing well, sometimes that he was ill, but now he is healthy again. And now the current letter writer writes, I am thanking the Lord Serapis, maybe again, or I'm thanking the gods after receiving your ladder because you're healthy, because you're doing well. And so I checked with Paul, is there a similarity in Paul's letters? And I found out, yes, there are. It's the same place in Paul's letters. But I also realized, so that's not as a formula, it's not part of the letter opening, it's already part of the opening of the letter corpus. The letter corpus where Paul already addresses the current situation of the letter. The current situation of him writing the letter now, not a different letter, the letter to Corinthians, for example, or to Philemon, whatever. In his current situation, he has received news from the community and these were good news. And because of the good news, he thanked now, of course, not the Greek or Roman gods, but his God. And for the well being now with Paul, of course, for the faith, for the spiritual well being, let's say, of the community. And interestingly enough, in every Paul and letter where we have this Thanksgiving, we find somewhere in the letter a mention that Paul actually received good news. So the most important or most vivid example is Romans. We all know that Romans was not addressed to a community that Paul already knew in person. We can be pretty sure that Paul did not receive a letter from Roman Christ troops before writing his letter to Romans. But when you look at the Thanksgiving, Paul explains, I thanked God and then it is mentioned. Because your spiritual well being is heard all over the world. It's heard in the entire cosmos. So in this way, Paul again uses this convention to express thanksgiving to a God, Paul receiving good news about the recipients in the entire cosmos. It is heard that you are so wonderful people. Of course, Paul got this good news as well. So that was kind of really my first Important article. My second important article. Then I wrote. And as you know, this topic never left me. I'm still excited about that. And so in this new series, Papyrus in the New Testament. It was kind of a natural development evolution that after so many decades that I've been working and studying these papyrus letters, I wanted to put everything together, you see into one book. So the essence of that. And also present several papyriv letters.
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We may need to change that jingle.
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B
It's a. It's a wonderful book that does collect so much of what you've studied throughout your career. And I think that that answer exhibits just the value of studying papyri and how we learn both about the everyday life of the people who wrote these letters and also perhaps can connect that to Paul and to other letters that we find from early Christians. I noticed as I was reading through your book that you open with a letter to readers. And that letter to readers I found to be a really creative introduction to the book. I loved it. I wonder, when you talk with students or researchers who are starting in their study of ancient letters, what are some of the points that you highlight for such new scholarship?
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C
Yeah, it's still one of the most important highlights that I mentioned, the similarity between ancient life and modern life and everyday life, so that you really get so many glimpses of what life in those days was like. So to give you just one example, maybe we all have this idea of ancient slavery, that these landlords in Italy owned thousands of slaves. And so when there was an uprising, they just got thousands, 1,000 or hundreds of the slaves executed things like that. When we look into the papyri, we see what was going on in average life. So not only in the elite we learn a lot about the elite as well, because, of course, the elite was the part of the civilization of human beings who were well trained and educated and who know best how to read and write. Well, it's quite interesting that sometimes even people with quite poor education were able to write a letter so to express themselves, at least in a basic way. So, for instance, in the papyri, regarding this example of slavery, all of a sudden we realize, oh, Greco, Egyptian or Roman, Egyptian household. So household, including all the slaves and people working in the fields, et cetera. So they had as average, only one or two slaves. So the highest number of a household slaves that we find evidence in the papyri is 11. 11 slaves. So not 100, not thousand, not 5011, but that's by far the highest number. The average is one or two. So now just imagine if your only one slave does something wrong. Are you going to execute that guy? Are you going to punish that guy severely so that he would almost die because he has done something wrong? Certainly you wouldn't do that. That would be stupid. Because afterwards you need the money to buy another slave. And we really find, for instance, in testaments that the testator regulates, for instance, after my death, the slave woman so and so should be free together with her children, because she has served well all the time and I had a very close relationship with her. Or we find that there's a whole correspondence, for instance, between a slave and his master who was a landlord in Egypt. And we find out due to these letters between both people, that the slave, whose name was E.P. agatos, he had a very high responsibility. So he gave orders to slaves who were subordinates to him. He received the letters with the oaths from his master, and then he was responsible to manage several of the estates of his landlord. Only in one of several of the letters he is ordered to pay craftspeople to pay taxes, things like that, altogether an amount of much more than 100 drachmas. So definitely this guy must have had his money in cash, in his whatever, in his room or in his cottage, being responsible for that, taking care of it, because it just received orders from the master, just telling him. And there's no money mentioned, sent with the letters. If people did that, they mentioned it in a letter so that you knew how much money the letter carrier has to hand over to you. That was mentioned. Goods, money sent together with the letter are always mentioned, kind of a safety, so that you, as the recipient of the letter and of goods, can check, has this letter carrier handed over to me, the exact amount of money. There's never an amount of money mentioned in a letter to Epagatus, but he is dealing with a lot of money, paying bills, etc. It even turns out this guy was not the smartest guy at all. So sometimes he was quite stupid. His master once is blaming him. You are such a stupid guy. I have ordered you to send me to pigs for a birthday party. But instead of telling the donkey driver to have them shipped to my place, you told that guy to drive them on foot on the way. Obviously in a very dry and hot time of the year, because these two pigs died on the way. So not always the smartest guy, but still having a high responsibility. When I'm dealing with letters, I especially tell or always told my students to take formulas seriously. It seems to me that we often think of formulas as something quite unimportant. So something without a lot of content, and then explaining something like, oh, this is just a formula. I think we should take formulas more seriously in the following way. A formula was a perfect way of telling, with only a few words, your addressee, what is your intention when you are writing the following paragraph, what is your intention when writing a letter, etc. Etc. So like the Thanksgiving formula that are already mentioned, you can say it's just a formula. There's not much of containing. You don't learn much a Thanksgiving formula. You just learn, okay, this guy receives good news, the other one is healthy again, yeah, maybe that's of some importance. But now I thank the gods. Yeah, maybe he went to the temple every day or once a week, or once a month, whatever, doing his prayer, thanking the gods and uttering his wishes, whatever. So what do we learn from a Thanksgiving clause? Regarding contents? Maybe not so much, but we learn a lot about how communication worked. Because when you start a letter by telling your addressee, I thanked my God after receiving, after hearing that you are doing well again, that you are healthy again. That is one of the ways to tell through a formula, through an epistolary convention, to tell your address. See, our way of communicating our relationship is intact. The other way is when we realize there's also an opposite to that. Because we have many letters at the same spot of the letter, the letter writer is claiming his addressee. For instance, I have sent you already three letters, but you didn't even reply once. This is now the fifth letter I'm writing to you and you didn't care about telling me anything about your situation. I am worried. Something like that. That's a completely different situation. So these formulas, they should really be not neglected because they tell us a lot about how communication worked. And if you also take into account that in ancient times people didn't know about paragraphs, they didn't know about titles or subtitles, they didn't know about interpunctuation, about commas, etc. They just wrote the text line by line without word breaks, you see. So the entire structure of a text and also of a letter was done by formula, by special words, by hinting at this or that. So you didn't catch the attention of the reader or the recipient of a letter, by structuring your letter in paragraphs, et cetera. But by using words like, I am sure you know that you know this is for instance, a formula also used by Paul. I don't want you to be unaware of this and that you should know. I want you to know there's no content in that. But from that we immediately see, oh, that was something important. Paul really wanted them to listen to that. So when we look at these formulas, we get a very nice structure, sometimes different from the structure that we have in modern editions, translations of the New Testament. We can really see what was the structure done by Paul? Where did he want his audience to listen very carefully.
- [31:26]
A
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- [32:53]
B
That's really, really helpful and a really rich, I think, discovery that, that we get perhaps only by exposing ourselves. Sorry, I should define we. I suppose I have in mind other New Testament scholars that I, that I interact with, but, but by defining ourselves or exposing ourselves to, to these papyri. So that's, that's really a rich thing. I wonder. There's so many things I want to ask after hearing that answer. But after someone wrote a letter, how are these letters then transported across the Roman world once someone finished writing it?
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C
That's also a very exciting topic. So the general situation, and when I say general, maybe you already hear that there is a special situation, a particular strange, whatever situation is with the general situation was as follows. There was the so called cursus publicus. So that was the postal system of the state of the empire introduced by Augustus. But that was only for the military and for the administration, not for private letters. But apart from this general situation, of course, we have examples where soldiers, generals used or we might even say misused the crucifix publicus for their own private correspondence. We have very funny examples for that, very dramatic examples for the people involved in those days. For instance, we have the letter of a legionary who was serving in Nubia, so far away from Alexandria, far away from Caranis, where his mother was living. He was writing a letter to his mother. We don't know how this letter was transported, but we are informed in this letter what he tried to do before writing it already for months, because he's telling his mother, I have been trying to send you a letter since months. And now I was close to succeed because I was hoping that I would be sent to the prefect, to Alexandria, with letters of the military. So with official correspondence. And I had hoped that on the way I could visit you, make a turn to Karanis, visit his mother and submit his own letter to the mother or visit her. He even writes that I had already given some money to this official so that he would choose me as the next one to be sent to the prefect with official correspondence. Of course, this is a way of distributing or sending or forwarding letters that I would say there's only very little chance that that worked. Might have worked for Paul. The situation for Paul was so definitely not using the official postal system of the Roman Empire, but he relied, as all the other private letter writers, letter senders on friends, on letter Carriers who were members of the family, relatives, friends, slaves. There are many slaves used as letter carriers, of course. So you can imagine when a household had only one or two slaves, the one slave was used also as a letter carrier, but not only for that. Maybe working in the fields as well. Or if there were two, maybe one was more professional and well trained in writing. Maybe he was used as a secretary and as a letter carrier as well, which could mean he could be used as the secretary by the recipient to write the reply letter and bring it back again, things like that. So that's how the system of letter carrying worked. Of course, you could also pay a letter carrier. You could pay, in Egypt, for instance, a skipper who was going by boat up or down the Nile, taking goods with him. You could go to the captain and ask him, could you please submit this letter to this person at the port of that city? Sometimes we have addresses on the back of these papyrus letters where we are informed that sometimes these letters were not submitted to the addressee himself, but maybe to the landlord or to the owner of the house or the neighbor, things like that. So in Paul's case, we can. Well, in some cases we have mentioned letter carriers in Paul's letters. And similar to Paul's letters, that doesn't happen very often. So letter carriers are not very often mentioned by names, but sometimes they are, like in Paul. Sometimes it could take quite a long time to find a reliable letter carrier. Also, this is very well attested in papyrus letters. And that could even be one of the reasons why most of Paul's letters are so long. Because if you don't have a letter carrier at hand at a regular basis, but you have to wait, for instance, for Timothy to return and then be sent away again with another letter, which might take several weeks, you start writing and you go on, and another thought comes to your mind and the letter might get quite long. Of course, the usual papyrus letters, they are not very long, the usual ones. But with Paul, that could be part of the picture why Paul's letters are that long.
- [39:44]
B
It's really, really fascinating to think about how waiting on a letter carrier might contribute to the length of a letter as well.
- [39:55]
C
There are also dangers, also dangers that happened during the submission. That's also an interesting topic. So it's in some way related to the letter carriers, and that's why reliable letter carrier was so important. So we have evidence, for instance, that someone replies now, yeah, I received the letter that you sent me, but it was quite damaged. Obviously it fell into the water. So I was not able to read it, so the letter carrier didn't take enough care, or the letter was eaten by mice. Papyrus is food for all kinds of animals. It's a plant, so things like that. So that could be a reason for a compilation theory of 2 Corinthians. Because regarding compilation theories, I asked myself, well, is there any reason, any biological reason, any way to explain why a compiler compiled two letters of Paul into one? I mean, to have two instead of one might be an advantage. You have two instead of one, so why compile them into one? Well, if one of the two got damaged and you want to publish in your collection both, and a long letter always got damaged at the beginning because that was the outer part or the most outside part of his crow of a long letter. So that part got damaged first. So in case what we now have in 2 Corinthians 10:13, if this was a separate letter, if this got damaged by storing it, not on the way carrying it to the Corinthians, but storing it before publication, that might have been a good reason to attach it to another completely preserved letter. So just to cut off the entire opening, which was only fragmentarily preserved, and make one out of the two. So that's in some way also related to letter carrying, to what happened after receiving a letter, reading the letter, archiving it. So we know about family archives, that they kept the letters together with their documents, the family documents. We know that sometimes the letter authors kept copies of their letters with them at home. So Paul might have kept copies of his letters with himself. So also everything of that is quite well attested by papyrus letters.
- [43:07]
B
It really is fascinating to think how just ordinary circumstances influenced were certainly part of Paul's life, but perhaps influenced the reception or the maintenance of the letters after the they were sent.
- [43:24]
C
Fascinating.
- [43:26]
B
Well, there's so many things I want to ask you. And I know one of the things that we haven't yet had a chance to talk about, but is very important for the book, is that there is a whole collection of letters that have been translated that you include in your book. And I found that very helpful and very rich. I wonder, before we go, I wonder, can I ask you what you're working on now and what we can maybe keep an eye out for you or from you in the future.
- [43:58]
C
Yeah. Right now I'm about finishing the proofreading of the forthcoming volume in the other series. So the PK and T series, Babylogis Commentare, it's a nine Testament Babylogical Commentaries on the New Testament, which is the volume on Galatians and if anyone is familiar with this series, so far we have published only volumes in German and all these volumes have the same structure. So an introduction and excursus and then verse by verse and word by word commentary and selecting all the biological heritage on every term, on every phrase, on every topic covered in the particular book. The volume on Galatians will be the first English volume which is not so new regarding the series because that was the idea right from the start, that the series will contain German volumes and English volumes as well. So Galatians will be an entirely, a volume entirely written in English. Moreover, it will not have this verse by verse and word by word commentary. Because we opened up the format, I realized that this is for many authors obviously the not so exciting and on the other hand the hard part to complete the volume, to do the word by word commentary if the term is a new one, so not covered in an earlier volume. If you find a very exciting evidence in the papyri. So maybe different from Paul or maybe that you find out like Irish the Thanksgiving report that oh, okay, when I see that was the meaning in everyday life, if I attach this meaning to Paul, does it make sense? And if the answer is yes, it makes sense, maybe even better sense than earlier interpretations. That's always the exciting part of these Bible logic commentaries. But these terms that are attested more than 1,000 times and always with the same meaning, that's the tough part. You have to work through it and it's very time consuming. So that's why we opened up the format so that the authors have also the opportunity to either continue the old format, whoever wants to do that more than welcome. But if not, just also select some topics, make a nice volume of, let's say 300, 400 pages and the publisher will publish that as well. So that will be Galatians selection of topics. And it's not done by a single author, but by several authors who are all very esteemed papyologists and New Testament scholars. Because this volume is based on an international meeting. And so the articles are based on the papers presented at the, at that meeting and some additional articles. So I myself am quite excited about these forthcoming volumes. I'm really happy that so many scholars were working on that and contributing. And the other thing of a larger publication that right now I'm only collecting ideas is the hopefully fourth volume of Papyrian the New Testament. So the third volume is forthcoming. It will be the volume by John Kloppen work on associations. Hopefully it will be published Sometime next year, that will be volume number three of P and T. And the fourth volume will be on craftspeople, on slaves and on soldiers. So slavery, you already realized it's another of my favorite topics. Craftspeople, of course, prominently also covering Paul's craft as a tent maker or weaver or whatever his craft really was. But also other crafts like Purple dealer Lydia, of course, also including prostitutes. So a very traumatic chapter. And of course, I'm still attending conferences and contributing to one or the other first shift or writing articles for journals, things like that. So enough to do. Enough to do.
- [49:01]
B
It sounds like it, yes. It sounds like quite a lot. And two very exciting volumes to watch out for. Well, three very exciting volumes that you mentioned to watch out for from the various series that you edit and of course, your essays that you. You seem to be quite prolific in the various chapters and essays that you write so well. Peter, thank you so much. These sound like really wonderful projects and thank you especially for being on the show to talk about this project, about letters.
- [49:32]
C
Thank you so much.
- [49:33]
B
Well, thank you. Yeah. Thank you for talking about letters and letter writing. Yeah. I've really enjoyed it and I hope that our audience will as well. So thank you and thank you very much, everyone. Take care.
- [50:01]
A
And Doug Limu and I always tell you to customize your car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual, but now we want you to feel it. Cue the Emu music. Limu. Save yourself money today day. Increase your wealth.
- [50:15]
C
Customize and save.
- [50:17]
A
We say that may have been too much feeling. Only pay for what you need@libertymutual.com Liberty Liberty. Liberty. Liberty Savings Ferry unwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company Affiliates Excludes Massachusetts.