A safer Ontario means more police and prosecutors making sure my car doesn't get stolen. It means building new jails to keep criminals behind bars. And it means there's no need to worry when I play at the park. We're making every corner of Ontario safer to make all of Ontario safer.
That's how we protect Ontario. For all of us. Learn how an Ontario.ca slash safer Ontario paid for by the government of Ontario. This episode is brought to you by Nespresso.
Hear that? That's your next obsession. Every coffee, a new world, every sip, a new taste. This is the new Nespresso.
One touch, endless possibilities. Ice, flavored, long, short. Because some days call for the Nespresso kick. And sometimes a smooth silky latte just wins.
It's exceptional but effortless, like actually effortless. Simply press, brew, and explore. Nespresso, what else? Keep exploring at Nespresso.com.
It's springtime, which means that Princeton University Press is having its annual 50% off spring sale. From May 4th through June 9th, you can get 50% off nearly every single print, e-book and audio book from Princeton University Press. Just go to press.prinstin.edu to get 50% off incredible books like Disneyland and the Rise of Automation. And beyond belief, how evident shows what really works.
There are so many fantastic books you can get an incredible deal on. Go to press.prinstin.edu and use the code spring50. That's sp, r-i-n-g-fifty at press.prinstin.edu. This sale only lasts for a month.
So go and get some books. Welcome to the new books network. Hello everybody and welcome back to new books and biblical studies, a podcast channel on the new books network. I'm Jonathan Lickety, the host of the channel.
Today we'll be talking to Peter Arts-Grabner about his new book, Letters and Letter Writing, published by Brill in 2023. Peter, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. I'm pretty excited.
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.
So I studied theology first in Salt's working at Rome and only later on, I picked up classics as well. I wanted to do something in addition. And so, classics, especially ancient week, was in my interest. And the funny thing about that is that during my entire studies of classics, I heard about this papari, but only about literary papari.
So about all the evidence of break-roam and literature, but nothing about papari as evidence of everyday life of enticreties. But before I dove more into papari, I did a dissertation on a linguistic topic. So very theoretical, very try, but it was fun for me because, sorry, these are my dogs. I'm living here with two dogs.
It's perfect. It's perfect. Yeah. So they are introducing themselves writing.
That's a wonderful thing to have them on the show too. 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, papari got 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 I was at the Department of People 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 borrow, we could do a class, not only a New Testament text, because there was been quite boring to us.
You see reading 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 papari's letters.
So private letters preserved on papari. So that's basically how I ended up in popularity. At the end of that semester of the class, we went to the Vienna collection, which is the second largest prize collection in the world. So they are housing 180,000 artifacts, not only papari, but also ostracas, and parchment, and also early Arabic papers, etc.
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. So and since then I have become much more about the world, and I also tell a lot of the new estimates scholars I have to say. Well, it sounds like a great example of how teaching and research can really overlap and lead into one another.
So that's a fascinating story. And thank you very much for that. As you mentioned, you've written a lot about papari and particularly papyrus letters from papyrus letters to early Christian letters included in the New Testament and on to many other letters in between. What led you to begin?
Well, I suppose you've 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? Yeah, I started to study the letters of Paul quite early, because my dissertation was on letters of Paul. I also had a tennis over seminars during my my graduate study 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 papyrus, they are the best source to tell me what my own life would have been like. And I really got fascinated in it. So I said, boy, of course, I was dreaming about when I had lived in ancient times.
I could have been Alexander Great. Maybe not so much Julius Caesar because the way how he ended, maybe Augustus or some sister or whoever see one of the great philosophers or emperors or whatever. But that's far from reality. See, I grew up as the son of a working man who was working as a nurse in the hospital.
My father, my mother was dating at home, raising us kids and later on working in the bakery. So just think about my own life. And then looking 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, etc, etc. And especially the papyrus letters, they are such a vivid source.
We have so many papyrus 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 tax receipts 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. They let us, it seems to me they cover most intensively the life as it was. Every day life is 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 2000 years, so the time from the time from which we have behaved 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 a wife over the other way around, you see. And so you, I mean, 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, 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, etc.
And internet is a marvelous tool for papiology with so many, 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 a really at the BTU. Number 423, it's a letter of a soldier. So of course, with a number of papyrus originating from the second century CE from a soldier who was of Egyptian origin. But after traveling over the Mediterranean, finally arrived in Viscenum.
So in the port or next to Rome, of the Imperial Navy. So he joined the Navy there. And after this arrival, he wrote a letter and sent it back with 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 Diesmann.
So this is a very important pioneer of the field that I'm studying now. Adolf Diesmann, who was among the earliest raprologist who got interested in comparing his documentary papyrus also papyrus letters with the text of the New Testament. So letters with New Testament letters, and in this letter of this Egyptian soldier, so 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 Mecinum in Italy. And Diesmann 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 it and I realized, oh no, that's not the same. Because when we look at Paul, we have this greeting at the beginning of important letter. And when there's a Thanksgiving following the opening greeting, it's very formalized.
Paul expresses his Thanksgiving to God for the good situation, so the faith of the community of the Christ group, they are helping each other, their life among each other, etc. And here we don't have a Thanksgiving Appion'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 is 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, ennipol and copper with each other, and I found there are parallels, but not the one that Diesman 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 greeting, and they are all related to an individual situation, which means a Thanksgiving in 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, I'm thanking the gods, after receiving your letter, because you're healthy, because you're doing well. And so I checked with Paul, it's their similarity in Paul's letters, and I found out, yes, they 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, 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 the Corinthians, for example, to Phalimon, 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 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 the community, that Paul already knew in person.
We can't be pretty sure that Paul did not receive a letter from Roman Christ groups 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 the Thanksgiving, do a God, or receiving good news about the recipients.
In the entire cosmos, it is heard that you have 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 that I wrote. As you know, this topic never left me.
I'm still excited about that. And so in this new series, preparing 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 presents several papyrus letters. It's a wonderful book that does collect so much of what you've studied throughout your career.
I think that that answer exhibits just the value of studying papyrus 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 into 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 scholars?
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 is landlords in Italy own thousands of slaves, and so when there was an uprising they just got thousands, one thousand or hundreds of the slaves executed things like that. When we look into the papyrus, we see what was going on in average life.
So not only in the elite, we learn a lot about their leaders as well because of course the elite was part of the civilization, of human beings who were well trained and educated and who know best how to read and write. 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 papyrus regarding this example of slavery, all of a sudden we realize, oh, a great Egyptian or Roman Egyptian household, so household including all the slaves and people working in the fields, etc. So they had as average only one or two slaves.
So the highest number of household slaves that we find evidence in the in the papyrus is 11, 11 slaves. So not 100, not 1000, not 5,000, 11, but as per far the highest number, the average is one or two. So not just imagine if you're only one slave that's 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 have to, you need the money to buy not a slave and we're really fine, for instance, in in the testaments that the the the stator regulates, for instance, after my death, the slaves, women, so and so should be free together with the children because he has served me well all the time and and I had a very close relationship with her or we find that there's a whole correspondence friends between the slave and his master was a landlord in Egypt and we find out due to these letters between both people that the slave whose name was Epagatos, he had a very high responsibility. So he gave orders to slaves who were subordinates to him. He received the letters with the orders from his master and then he was responsible to manage several of the states of his landlord. Only one of several of the letters he is ordered to pay craftspeople to pay taxes, things like that, all together in amount of much more than 100 fragments.
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 he 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 in the 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 as this letter carrier handed over to me the exact amount of money. There's not an amount of money mentioned in letter to Epagatos 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. You have I have ordered you to send me two picks 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 this two picks died on the way.
So not all of 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 at 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. The formula was a perfect way of telling with only a few words. Your address C 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 I already mentioned you can say it's just a formula.
There's not much of a content in it. You don't learn much through 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 think the gods yeah maybe even to the temple every day what once a week or once a month whatever doing his prayer thank him the gods and uttering his wishes whatever. So what to learn from a Thanksgiving clause regarding contents.
Maybe not so much but we learn a lot about how communication worked because when you started letter by telling your address C I thanked my god after receiving after hearing that you were doing well again that you are healthy again that's one of the ways to tell through a formula through a epistolary convention to tell your address C our way of communicating our relationship is intact. There are other ways when we realize there's also an opposite to that because we have many letters we're at the same spot of the letter the letter writer is blaming his address C 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 hear about telling me anything about your situation I am worried something like that that's a completely different situation so this formula they should really be not neglected because they tell us a lot about how communication worked and if you're just taking the account that in ancient times people didn't know about paragraphs they didn't know about the titles or subtitles they didn't know about in the punctuation about commerce etc they just wrote the text line by line without word breaks you see so the entire structure of a text I also of a letter was done by formulae by special words by hinting at this one that so you didn't catch the attention of the reader or the recipient of a letter by structuring your letter and paragraphs etc 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 in it you should know I want you to know there's no content in that but from that we made a see oh that was something important really wanted 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 the T1 case audience to listen very carefully that's really really helpful and a really rich I think discovery 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 interact with but but by defining ourselves or exposing ourselves to to these papyrus that's really a rich thing I wonder if 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 once someone finished writing it that's that's also very a very exciting topic so the general situation I want to say general maybe you already hear that there is a special situation a particular strange whatever situation as well the general situation was his fault there was the so-called Christmas public goose so that was the postal system of the state of the empire introduced by Augustus but there was only for the military and for the administration not for private letters but apart from this general situation of course we we have examples where soldiers, generals, used we might even say misused the closest public goose 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 Lubia so far away from Alexandria far away from karanis where his mother was living and he was writing a little bit 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 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 if you see to make a turn to karanis visit his mother and submit his own letter to the mother or visitor 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 work 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 the many slaves used the 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 so 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 the the system of letter carrying worked of course you could also pay a letter carrier you could pay in each of for instance a skipper who was who was going by boat up or down in our aisle taking goods with him you could go to the to the captain and ask him could you please submit this letter to this berycine at the port of that city sometimes we have addresses on the back of these papyrus letters we are informed that sometimes these letters we are not not submitted to the adwc himself but maybe to the landlord or to the owner of the house or the neighbor things like that so in pause case we can well in some cases we have mentioned letter carriers in pause letters and similar to pause letters that doesn't happen very often so letter carriers are not very often mentioned by names but sometimes they are like in port 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 pause 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 send away again with another letter which might take several weeks you start writing and you go on and another thought becomes to your mind and the letter might get quite long of course the usual of the parislet they are not very long the usual ones but with Paul that could be part of the picture why pause letters are that long it's really really fascinating to think about how waiting on a letter carrier might might contribute to the length of a letter as well there are also dongers also dangerous 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 friends 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 no 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 second Corinthians because regarding compilation theories ask 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 in your collection both and long letter always got damaged at the beginning because that was the outer part or the most most outside part of his throat of long letter so that part got damaged so in case this what we what we now have in second Corinthians 10 to 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 the application 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 momentarily preserved and make one out of the two so that in some way also related to letter carrying to what happened after receiving a letter yeah reading the letter archiving it so we know about family archives that they 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 this is everything of that is quite well attested by a papyrus letters it's really yeah it really is fascinating to think how just ordinary circumstances influenced we're certainly part of Paul's life but perhaps influenced the reception or the maintenance of the letters after they were sent 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 it's 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 yeah right now I'm about finishing the proof reading of the forthcoming volume in the other series so the PK and T series but we should comment on it's an ongoing testament but a lot of the commentary is on the New Testament which is the volume on Galatians and if anyone is familiar with its theories so far we have published only volumes in German and all these volumes have the same structure so an introduction and excourous and then verse by verse and word by word commentary and selecting all the by watch evidence on every term on every phrase on every topic covered in the in the particular book the volume on Galatians will be the first English volume which is not so new regarding the series because there 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 orders 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 in the per diary so maybe different from Paul or maybe that you find out like I was 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 if the answer is yes it makes sense maybe even better sense than earlier interpretations that that's always the exciting part of these typological commentaries but there's these terms that are that are attested more than a thousand times and always with the same meaning that's the tough part you have to work through it as very time consuming so that's why we opened up the format so that you also have also the opportunity to either continue the old format whether wants to do that more than welcome but if not just also select some topics make an ice 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 single order but by several orders who are all very very esteemed popular chiefs and new testament scholars because this volume is based on an international meeting and so the articles are based on the papers presented at that meeting and some additional articles so I myself am quite excited about this forthcoming volumes and 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 the pirate in new testament so the third volume is forthcoming it will be the volume by chon clock and work on associations hopefully it will be published sometime next year that will be volume number three of pnt and the fourth volume will be on crafts people on slaves and on soldiers so slavery you already realized that's another of my favorite topics crafts people of course prominently also covering postcraft as a tent maker or viva 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 yeah and of course I'm still attending conferences and contributing to one or the other fairs truth to writing articles for chunels things like that so enough to do enough to you it sounds like 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 from the various series that you edit and and of course your 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 thank you so much well thank you yeah thank you for talking about letters and letter writing uh 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