From: Phil (plong@e2.empirenet.com)
Date: Fri Sep 22 1995 - 22:30:54 EDT
>Actually this is my very uneducated hypothesis regarding style
>analysis: Is is possible that some N.T. authors, i.e.
>uneducated fishermen, or even a highly educated man concerned that
>every word written would be taken literally, would submit their
>writing to respected friends for comments and/or
>editing before sending them out to the general public.
>It is very common today. Why wouldn't it have been then?
As for the educational level of the writers of the NT, Luke and Paul are
responsible for the majority of the material, both would have been highly
educated. Assuming Traditional Authorship, Matthew as a Tax Collector would
have had a decent education, and Mark wrote for Peter (the fisherman) in the
Gospel of Mark, so using a sectretary for the epistles is probable. The
Author of Hebrews demonstrates a great education (including Philo?) John
would be the only true "fisherman" of the bunch, and by the time he writes
it has been a good 30-50 years since his fishing days. Plenty of time to
learn to communicate well in Greek.
Having said that, I think that it was the common practice to use an
'anamesis' (spelling doubtful....), or sectretary, to write. Paul
frequently did. I read an article a few years back in JBL that stated that
nearly all literature in the ancient world (NT era at least), was Oral
first, the 'writer' would speak his letter to a scribe, who then may have
had some freedom to clean up grammer, etc.
I have always thought that the use of a different scribe might account for
differences in style between the two Peterine epistles, for example.
Phil
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