Fictional or literary letters – our interest here – grew in popularity from approximately 100 BCE – 250 CE, a period marked by the presence of sophists, rhetors, and professional teachers. (NL 138)
Seneca was Nero’s tutor up to the time he became emperor. Seneca also wrote plays and letters. The letters were addressed to a certain Lucilius. Through these letters Seneca taught his principles of Stoic philosophy. It is widely understood today that Lucilius was a fictional figure, a foil that enabled Seneca to teach his philosophy in a manner that appealed to readers: the term used is “soft persuasion” — where the real audience sense they are looking in on correspondence intended for others, and thus feel that they are privy to a personal communication. Result? They listen all the more attentively to what, they believe, was not originally intended for their ears.
Letters allow for all kinds of scenarios to prompt this or that particular teaching. Personal circumstances on the side of either the sender or the receiver can be raised in a casual or direct manner with the ability to happily allow for the introduction of a new teaching on this or that.
The education undertaken prepared the literate class in a way that made them skilled at creating characters that enabled them to introduce advice that fortuitously happened to fit the right occasion. Always those to whom the letters were addressed were in some kind of cordial or friendly relationship with the author of the letters, or if they had strayed from the ideals on which the relationship had been established, were at least still amenable to being brought back to the correct path.
So when we read in the Corinthian or Thessalonian correspondence of persons who had fallen into various kinds of misbehaviour (sexual, ritual) or erroneous beliefs (the second coming), we may well be reading an author’s skilled construction of a circumstance that opened a way to introduce another particular teaching.
But not all letters managed to sustain the occasional and personal nature that many deployed. Some became more like lengthy treatises. The skills and patience of the various authors varied — as did Seneca’s style as readers can see by perusing the different letters in the collection “to Lucilius” that he arranged for publication.
I don’t recall if I earlier used the term “anxiety of fiction”, but that is the expression used by a number of scholars to characterize tell-tale indicators that the author is making an extra effort to make his or her composition look real. One obvious example is where Paul appears to have written something “in his own hand”. Of course we may assume that such details are indicators of a genuinely artless author, but we need to keep in mind that such devices were all part of the educational curricula designed to effect verisimilitude.
What makes Paul’s letters read as works “so real” to us are the same devices that were explicitly taught to the well off members of society. Again, recall my earlier post on Patricia Rosenmeyer’s book — and NL does regularly cite this work also.
There is something about “listening in” on a conversation we were not meant to hear that makes us all the more attentive to what is said. We are especially partial to an author who writes of his trials, and even of his high status, if those words were not directed specifically to us.
The New Testament letters of Paul are not necessarily what they seem. With awareness of the nature of Seneca’s letters that were crafted to teach Stoic philosophy more generally, but to do so were cleverly crafted to a certain “Lucilius”, we have a right to be cautious before assuming they are what a naive reading would suggest.
In the next chapter we look at chapter 4 (the final chapter, though followed by an Epilogue and an Appendix) where NL zeroes in on the case for Paul’s letters being products of the second century.
Livesey, Nina E. The Letters of Paul in Their Roman Literary Context: Reassessing Apostolic Authorship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024.
Neil Godfrey
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