Over the 13+ years of this blog, every time I have talked about whether Peter (or any of Jesus’s other disciples) probably did or even could write one of the books attributed to him, since he (and they) were Aramaic speakers who were almost certainly uneducated and illiterate, but the books are written in highly literary Greek by trained Greek authors, I get a number of queries about whether it is possible that he (or they) may have used secretaries.

For example, maybe Peter dictated and the secretary  cleaned it up and put it into literary Greek for him.  Or Peter gave an educated follower the gist of what he wanted to say, and the secretary composed it for him.  Or Peter wrote it down in Aramaic and the secretary translated it with a few flourishes.  Etc.  There are a range of (other) options you could think of, if you’re familiar with how secretaries today might work.

But did they work that way in the days of Peter and the apostles?  And how would we know?

I’ve addressed the issue a number of times on the blog, but since I have gotten a lot of questions about it here again over the past few weeks, I decided I need to repost on it.

To answer the question with something other than common sense (that is, common guessing), we need to know about secretarial practices in antiquity.  As it turns out, we do know some things, as I’ll explain in this post and the next.

This is taken, in edited form, from my book Forgery and Counterforgery, in which I try to go into a great bit of detail about what we know about writing practices in the ancient world.

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The notion that early Christian authors used secretaries is widespread among laypeople and scholars alike.  You wouldn’t expect layfolk to do a lot of research into the question — it’s not an easy nut to crack.  But you certainly would expect scholars who spend their lives working on these kinds of issues to give it a shot.  But it’s actually surprising how little scholars who claim that the apostles used secretaries (as a common practice in antiquity) ever even try to adduce any evidence for it.

Instead, as a rule, they simply widely assume that since we know some authors did use secretaries – as Paul, at least, certainly did (Rom. 16:22; Cor. 16:21; Gal. 6:11) — then obviously these otherwise unknown persons contributed not only to correct or improve the style of a writing of a document but also to provide the content (that is, to compose or help write the work itself).

But there is a good reason that scholars who propose — or flat out state — the “secretary hypothesis” so rarely cite any evidence to support it. The ancient evidence is very thin, to the point of being non-existent.

The fullest study is by E. Randolph Richards, who is to be commended for combing all the literary sources and papyri remains in order to uncover everything that can reasonably be said about secretaries and their functions in the Roman world during our period. (The Secretary in the Letters of Paul WUNT 2.42 [Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1991]).  He explores every reference and allusion in the key authors: Cicero, Pliny, Plutarch, Suetonius, and so on; he plows through all the relevant material remains from Oxyrhynchus and elsewhere.  It is a full and useful study, valuable for its earnest attempt to provide the fullest accounting of evidence possible.  Somewhat less commendable are the conclusions that Richards draws, at times independently of this evidence.

Richards maintains that secretaries in antiquity could function in four different ways: as recorders of dictation; as copy-editors who modified an author’s style; as co-authors who contributed both style and content; and as composers who produced a letter from scratch, at the instruction of the “author.”

The first category is both abundantly attested in the sources and completely non-problematic.  Secretaries often took dictation, either slowly, syllabatim (syllable-by-syllable) or, if they had the requisite tachygraphic skills (i.e, if they could write fast), as quickly as spoken.   If Paul dictated a letter like Romans, his secretary Tertius simply wrote down what he was told; making himself known only in his somewhat temerarious insertion of Romans 16:22.  Otherwise he recorded the words as Paul spoke them.  Whether Paul was composing orally or dictating from written drafts is another question, but of no relevance to the present issue.  The words on the page are the words Paul spoke, in his style.

It is with the second category that the significance and the evidence begin to move in opposite directions.  If secretaries regularly edited the dictations they received, possibly taking down a draft by dictation and then reworking it into a style they preferred, then all sorts of options would open up for early Christian writings deemed pseudepigraphic on stylistic grounds.   The differences between Colossians and the undisputed Paulines could be explained, as would the discrepancies between 1 and 2 Peter.  What, then, is the evidence?   And is it directly relevant?

Unlike the first category, the evidence that secretaries routinely reworked letters for style is very thin indeed.   All of it derives from the very upper reaches of the Roman highest classes, among authors who utilized highly educated and skilled writers in helping them produce their correspondence.  There is a serious question of how such data are relevant for a completely different social context, with the impoverished and lower-class authors of the Christian writings.  Still, it is worth noting that Cicero, at least, appears to have allowed Tiro on occasion to assist him in stylistically shaping his letters.  And Cicero suggests that the secretary of Atticus, Alexis, may have helped him similarly.

Moreover, Cicero speaks of one letter of Pompey that appears to have been written (or rewritten?) instead by Sestius, and intimates that Sestius wrote other writings in his name (mildly castigating Pompey for this proceeding).  Finally, there is an off-the-cuff comment in the handbook on style by Philostratus that the letters of Brutus may have been stylized by the secretary he used.  This is not so much evidence for the historical Brutus (from 300 years earlier) as evidence of what would have seemed culturally plausible in this later period when Philostratus was writing.

This evidence is notably sparse, but it does indicate that a secretary would occasionally edit an author’s letter stylistically.  Could this not explain, then, why Colossians differs so significantly (in style) from the other Pauline letters?  Or why 1 and 2 Peter are so different from one another?

Several points should be stressed.  First, as already mentioned, the evidence all derives from fabulously wealthy, highly educated, upper-class elites with very highly trained secretaries.  We have no evidence at all for the kinds of letters being dictated by a Paul, or, even more, by an illiterate Aramaic-speaking peasant like Peter.  Second, the kinds of writings in question may be incommensurate.  The vast majority of letters in Greco-Roman antiquity were very short and to the point.  The letters of the papyri appear to average less than a hundred words; at the other end of the spectrum, letters of Cicero averaged around 300 words, Seneca’s around 1000.  The letters of Paul are much longer, on average about 2500 words.

What really matters, however, is not simply length, but complexity.  The Christian letters we have examined so far in this study are not simply pieces of correspondence: they are complicated theological and paranetic treatises, with interwoven themes and subthemes, and intricate modes of argumentation, written in letter form.  Apart from purely formal features (address, thanksgiving, body, closing, etc.) they are simply not like typical Greco-Roman letters, precisely because of what happens in the “body.”   What evidence is there that secretaries were ever given the freedom to rewrite this kind of letter – an extended treatise in letter form –in accordance with their preferred style?  As far as I know, there is no evidence.

This latter point relates to the third.  The kinds of “minor corrective editing” that Richards finds, for example, in the case of Tiro and Cicero is far removed from the complete rewriting of the letters that would have been necessary to make an Ephesians or Colossians come in any sense from the hand of Paul.  Here there are wholesale changes of style at every point.  Where is the evidence that copy-editing ever went to this extreme?  If any exists, Richards fails to cite it.

Finally, it should be noted that in none of the instances we have considered so far, and in none of the ones we will consider throughout this study, are questions of style the only features of the letter that have led scholars to suspect forgery.  The most definitive demonstration of a non-Pauline style comes with Colossians, and even there it was the content of the letter that confirmed that it was not written by Paul.  Moreover, it should be stressed that the person actually writing the letter also repeatedly claims not to be a secretary but to be Paul himself (“I, Paul”).

 

I will continue from there to consider the other uses of secretaries in the ancient world in the next post.