PAUL: TENT MAKER AND LETTER WRITER

PAUL: TENTMAKER AND LETTER WRITER

            “Letter from Paul! Letter from Paul!” Imagine the joy and excitement gripping the Christian communities in Rome or Ephesus or Galatia or Thessalonica, etc., on receiving a letter from the Apostles of the Gentiles, delivered to the house of a Christian elder. The shrill of elation must have spread like a wild forest fire. “Our beloved Paul has written! How we miss seeing him in the flesh.” A letter would be the next best thing.

            Now we are talking about something that happened two thousand years ago. It was not the era of computers, typewriters, dot pens, dictaphones, and A4 size paper. It was the era of papyrus and goose quills. It is hard to imagine the physical labour involved in the writing of a letter, especially for dear old Paul after a hard day of preaching and making/mending tents. Apart from the mental effort of shaping one’s thoughts on such difficult concepts of Christology and salvation, and then shaping the Greek alphabets on the papyrus, it must have been a harrowing exercise. Bearing in mind that Paul was an artisan, a working man who never imposed himself on the local Christians for his daily needs, he could devote only the evening or night to letter writing, if the spiritual hungry devotees did not demand an evening session of catechesis. Imagine our dear missionary hunkered down holding the paper in one hand and writing with the other. The whole enterprise was a painful exercise running into several weeks – for one epistle!

            Investigations into the writing techniques of ancient authors reveal that it took approximately one hour to write 70 to 75 words on one sheet of paper. If we take into account that Paul’s letter to the Romans contains 1470 Greek words, we may safely conclude that he needed 50 sheets of papyrus and roughly 20 hours of writing labour. The shortest, that written to Philemon, with 355 words, required around three sheets and more than four hours of writing time. A close guessimate would, therefore, stretch the writing of the letter to the Romans to more than a month! Today on a word processor the last full stop would be placed within two hours.

            Regular preaching, frequent interruptions due to travel, dragged and beaten, sailing on rough seas, enduring shipwrecks (what happened to his written texts and writing instruments then?), spending time in prayer, and a host of other occupations, could explain the inconsistencies and repetitions in style and the total absence of flowery turns and rhetorical flourishes. The first draft was invariably the finished product also. Today’s theologians sit in AC comfort before their PCs, flanked by banks of books, to write books about the love of God that is free, but for which they charge exorbitant amounts.

           

With cataract shredding his eyes and the tent-making awl shredding his fingers, Paul often dictated his letters to friends and secretaries. And yet he never failed to inscribe the final salutation in his own hand. We can affectionately imagine Paul leaning against his looms and worrying his beard with his fingers as he dictated to Tertius, who squatted on the floor with his writing tablet on his knees and a lantern beside him. In those evenings the greatest things were written about Jesus Christ in the first university of Christian Theology founded by Paul of Tarsus.